In all the realm, no place was as sorely afflicted as King’s Landing was in 59 AC. Amongst the dead were two knights of the Kingsguard, old Ser Sam of Sour Hill and the good-hearted Ser Victor the Valiant, along with three lords of the council, Albin Massey, Qarl Corbray, and Grand Maester Benifer himself. Benifer had served for fifteen years through times both perilous and prosperous, coming to the Red Keep after Maegor the Cruel had decapitated his three immediate predecessors. (“An act of singular courage or singular stupidity,” his sardonic successor would observe. “I would not have lasted three days under Maegor.”)

All the dead would be mourned and missed, but in the immediate aftermath of their passing, the loss of Qarl Corbray was felt most grievously. With their commander dead and many of the City Watch stricken and shivering, the streets and alleys of King’s Landing fell prey to lawlessness and license. Shops were looted, women raped, men robbed and killed for no crime but walking down the wrong street at the wrong time. King Jaehaerys sent forth his Kingsguard and his household knights to restore order, but they were too few, and he soon had no choice but to call them back.

Amidst the chaos, His Grace would lose another of his lords, not to the Shivers but to ignorance and hate. Rego Draz had never taken up residence in the Red Keep, though there was ample room for him there, and the king had made the offer many times. The Pentoshi preferred his own manse on the Street of Silk, with the Dragonpit looming above him atop the Hill of Rhaenys. There he could entertain his concubines without suffering the disapproval of the court. After ten years in service to the Iron Throne, Lord Rego had grown quite stout, and no longer chose to ride. Instead he moved from manse to castle and back again in an ornate gilded palanquin. Unwisely, his route took him through the reeking heart of Flea Bottom, the foulest and most lawless district of the city.

On that dire day, a dozen of Flea Bottom’s less savory denizens were chasing a piglet down an alley when they chanced to come upon Lord Rego moving through the streets. Some were drunk and all were hungry—the piglet had escaped them—and the sight of the Pentoshi enraged them, for to a man they held the master of coin to blame for the high cost of bread. One wore a sword. Three had knives. The rest snatched up stones and sticks and swarmed the palanquin, driving off Lord Rego’s bearers and spilling his lordship onto the ground. Onlookers said he screamed for help in words none of them could understand.

When his lordship raised his hands to ward off the blows raining down on him, gold and gemstones glittered on every finger, and the attack grew more frenzied still. A woman shouted, “He’s Pentoshi. Them’s the bastards brung the Shivers here.” One of the men pried a stone up from the king’s newly cobbled street and brought it down upon Lord Rego’s head again and again, until only a red mash of blood and bone and brains remained. Thus died the Lord of Air, his skull crushed by one of the very cobblestones he had helped the king lay down. Even then, his assailants were not done with him. Before they ran, they ripped off his fine clothes and cut off all his fingers to lay claim to his rings.

When word reached the Red Keep, Jaehaerys Targaryen himself rode forth to claim the body, surrounded by his Kingsguard. So wroth was His Grace at what he saw that Ser Joffrey Doggett would say afterward, “When I looked upon his face, for a moment it was as if I were looking at his uncle.” The street was full of the curious, come out to see their king or gaze upon the bloody corpse of the Pentoshi moneychanger. Jaehaerys wheeled his horse about and shouted at them. “I would have the name of the men who did this. Speak now, and you will be well rewarded. Hold your tongues, and you will lose them.” Many of the watchers slunk away, but one barefoot girl came forward, squeaking out a name.

The king thanked her, and commanded her to show his knights where this man might be found. She led the Kingsguard to a wine sink where the villain was discovered with a whore in his lap and three of Lord Rego’s rings on his fingers. Under torture, he soon gave up the names of the other attackers, and they were taken one and all. One of their number claimed to have been a Poor Fellow, and cried out that he wished to take the black. “No,” Jaehaerys told him. “The Night’s Watch are men of honor, and you are lower than rats.” Such men as these were unworthy of a clean death by sword or axe, he ruled. Instead they were hung from the walls of the Red Keep, disemboweled, and left to twist until they died, their entrails swinging loose down to their knees.

The girl who had led the king to the killers had a kinder fate. Taken in hand by Queen Alysanne, she was plunged into a tub of hot water for a scrubbing. Her clothes were burned, her head was shaved, and she was fed hot bread and bacon. “There is a place for you in the castle, if you want it,” Alysanne told her when her belly was full. “In the kitchens or the stables, as you wish. Do you have a father?” The girl gave a shy nod and admitted that she did. “He was one o’ them bellies you cut open. The poxy one, wi’ the stye.” Then she told Her Grace that she wanted to work in the kitchens. “That’s where they keeps the bread.”

The old year ended and a new year began, but there were few celebrations anywhere in Westeros to mark the coming of the 60th year since Aegon’s Conquest. A year before great bonfires had been lit in public squares and men and women had danced around them, drinking and laughing, whilst bells rang in the new year. One year later the fires were consuming corpses, and the bells were tolling out the dead. The streets of King’s Landing were empty, especially by night, the alleyways were deep in snow, and icicles hung down from the rooftops, long as spears.

Atop Aegon’s High Hill, King Jaehaerys ordered the gates of the Red Keep closed and barred, and doubled the watch on the castle walls. He and his queen and their children attended sunset services at the castle sept, repaired to Maegor’s Holdfast for a modest meal, and then retired to bed.

It was the hour of the owl when Queen Alysanne was awoken by her daughter shaking her gently by the arm. “Mother,” Princess Daenerys said, “I’m cold.”

There is no need to dwell on all that followed. Daenerys Targaryen was the darling of the realm, and all that could be done for any man was done for her. There were prayers and poultices, hot soups and scalding baths, blankets and furs and hot stones, nettle tea. The princess was six, and years past being weaned, but a wet nurse was summoned, for there were some who believed that mother’s milk could cure the Shivers. Maesters came and went, septons and septas prayed, the king commanded that a hundred new ratcatchers be hired at once, and offered a silver stag for every dead rat, grey or black. Daenerys wanted her kitten, and her kitten was brought to her, though as her shivering grew more violent it squirmed from her grasp and scratched her hand. Near dawn, Jaehaerys bolted to his feet shouting that a dragon was needed, that his daughter must have a dragon, and ravens took wing for Dragonstone, instructing the Dragonkeepers there to bring a hatchling to the Red Keep at once.

None of it mattered. A day and a half after she had woken her mother from sleep complaining of feeling cold, the little princess was dead. The queen collapsed in the king’s arms, shaking so violently that some feared she had the Shivers too. Jaehaerys had her taken back to her own chambers and given milk of the poppy to help her sleep. Though near exhaustion, he went next to the yard and loosed Vermithor, then flew to Dragonstone to tell them there was no need for the hatchling after all. On his return to King’s Landing, he drank a cup of dreamwine and sent for Septon Barth. “How could this happen?” he demanded. “What sin did she commit? Why would the gods take her? How could this happen?” But even Barth, that wise man, had no answers for him.

The king and queen were not the only parents to lose a child to the Shivers; thousands of others, highborn and low, knew the same pain that winter. For Jaehaerys and Alysanne, however, the death of their beloved daughter must have seemed especially cruel, for it struck at the very heart of the Doctrine of Exceptionalism. Princess Daenerys had been Targaryen on both sides, with the blood of Old Valyria running pure through her veins, and those of Valyrian descent were not like other men. Targaryens had purple eyes and hair of gold and silver, they ruled the sky on dragons, the doctrines of the Faith and the prohibitions against incest did not apply to them…and they did not get sick.

Since Aenar the Exile first staked his claim to Dragonstone, that had been known. Targaryens did not die of pox or the bloody flux, they were not afflicted with redspots or brownleg or the shaking sickness, they would not succumb to wormbone or clotted lung or sourgut or any of the myriad pestilences and contagions that the gods, for reasons of their own, see fit to loose on mortal men and women. There was fire in the blood of the dragon, it was reasoned, a purifying fire that burned out all such plagues. It was unthinkable that a pureborn princess should die shivering, as if she were some common child.

And yet she had.