Boremund Baratheon, Lord of Storm’s End, had been made aware as well, and was waiting on Cape Wrath to give the Dornishmen a red welcome when they came ashore. He would never have the chance. Jaehaerys Targaryen and his sons Aemon and Baelon had been waiting as well, and as Morion’s fleet beat its way across the Sea of Dorne, the dragons Vermithor, Caraxes, and Vhagar fell on them from out of the clouds. Shouts rang out, and the Dornish filled the air with scorpion bolts, but firing at a dragon is one thing, and killing it quite another. A few bolts glanced off the scales of the dragons, and one punched through Vhagar’s wing, but none of them found any vulnerable spots as the dragons swooped and banked and loosed great blasts of fire. One by one the ships went up in gouts of flame. They were still burning when the sun went down, “like a hundred candles floating on the sea.” Burned bodies would wash up on the shores of Cape Wrath for half a year, but not a single living Dornishman set foot upon the stormlands.

The Fourth Dornish War was fought and won in a single day. The pirates of the Stepstones, the sellsails of Myr, and the corsairs of the Pepper Coast became less troublesome for a time, and Mara Martell became the Princess of Dorne. Back in King’s Landing, King Jaehaerys and his sons received a riotous welcome. Even Aegon the Conqueror had never won a war without losing a man.

Prince Baelon had another cause for celebration as well. His wife, Alyssa, was again with child. This time, he told his brother Aemon, he was praying for a girl.

Princess Alyssa was brought to bed again in 84 AC. After a long and difficult labor, she gave Prince Baelon a third son, a boy they named Aegon, after the Conqueror. “They call me Baelon the Brave,” the prince told his wife at her bedside, “but you are far braver than me. I would sooner fight a dozen battles than do what you’ve just done.” Alyssa laughed at him. “You were made for battles, and I was made for this. Viserys and Daemon and Aegon, that’s three. As soon as I am well, let’s make another. I want to give you twenty sons. An army of your own!”

It was not to be. Alyssa Targaryen had a warrior’s heart in a woman’s body, and her strength failed her. She never fully recovered from Aegon’s birth, and died within the year at only four-and-twenty. Nor did Prince Aegon long survive her. He perished half a year later, still shy of his first nameday. Though shattered by his loss, Baelon took solace in the two strong sons that she had left him, Viserys and Daemon, and never ceased to honor the memory of his sweet lady with the broken nose and mismatched eyes.

And now, I fear, we must turn our attention to one of the most troubling and distasteful chapters in the long reign of King Jaehaerys and Queen Alysanne: the matter of their ninthborn child, the Princess Saera.

Born in 67 AC, three years after Daella, Saera had all the courage that her sister lacked, along with a voracious hunger…for milk, for food, for affection, for praise. As a babe she did not so much cry as scream, and her ear-piercing wails became the terror of every maid in the Red Keep. “She wants what she wants and she wants it now,” Grand Maester Elysar wrote of the princess in 69 AC, when she was only two. “Seven save us all when she is older. The Dragonkeepers had best lock up the dragons.” He had no notion how prophetic those words would be.

Septon Barth was more reflective, as he observed the princess at the age of twelve in 79 AC. “She is the king’s daughter, and well aware of it. Servants see to her every need, though not always as quickly as she might like. Great lords and handsome knights show her every courtesy, the ladies of the court defer to her, girls of her own age vie with one another to be her friends. All of this Saera takes as her due. If she were the king’s firstborn, or better still his only child, she would be well content. Instead she finds herself the ninthborn, with six living siblings who are older than her and even more adored. Aemon is to be king, Baelon most like will be his Hand, Alyssa may be all her mother is and more, Vaegon is more learned than she is, Maegelle is holier, and Daella…when does a day go by when Daella is not in need of comfort? And whilst she is being soothed, Saera is being ignored. Such a fierce little thing she is, they say, she has no need of comfort. They are wrong in that, I fear. All men need comfort.”

Aerea Targaryen had once been thought to be wild and willful, given to acts of disobedience, but Princess Saera’s girlhood made Aerea seem a model of decorum by comparison. The border between innocent pranks, wanton mischief, and acts of malice is not always discerned by one so young, but there can be no doubt that the princess crossed it freely. She was forever sneaking cats into her sister Daella’s bedchamber, knowing that she was frightened of them. Once she filled Daella’s chamberpot with bees. She slipped into White Sword Tower when she was ten, stole all the white cloaks she could find, and dyed them pink. At seven, she learned when and how to steal into the kitchens to make off with cakes and pies and other treats. Before she was eleven, she was stealing wine and ale instead. By twelve, she was like as not to arrive drunk when summoned to the sept for prayer.

The king’s half-witted fool, Tom Turnip, was the victim of many of her japes, and her unwitting catspaw for others. Once, before a great feast where many lords and ladies were to be in attendance, she persuaded Tom that it would be much funnier if he performed naked. It was not well received. Later, far more cruelly, she told him that if he climbed the Iron Throne he could be king, but the fool was clumsy at the best of times and prone to tremors, and the throne sliced his arms and legs to pieces. “She is an evil child,” her septa said of her afterward. Princess Saera had half a dozen septas and as many bedmaids before she turned thirteen.

This is not to say that the princess was without her virtues. Her maesters affirmed that she was very clever, as bright as her brother Vaegon in her own way. She was certainly pretty, taller than her sister Daella and not half so delicate, and as strong and quick and spirited as her sister Alyssa. When she wanted to be charming, it was hard to resist her. Her big brothers Aemon and Baelon never failed to be amused by her mischief (though they never knew the worst of it), and long before she was half-grown, Saera had learned the art of getting anything she wanted from her father: a kitten, a hound, a pony, a hawk, a horse (Jaehaerys did draw a firm line at the elephant). Queen Alysanne was far less gullible, however, and Septon Barth tells us that Saera’s sisters all misliked her to various degrees.

Maidenhood became her, and Saera truly came into her own after her first flowering. After all they had endured with Daella, the king and queen must have been relieved to see how eagerly Saera took to the young men of the court, and they to her. At fourteen, she told the king she meant to marry the Prince of Dorne, or perhaps the King Beyond the Wall, so she could be a queen “like Mother.” That year a trader from the Summer Islands came to court. Far from shrieking at the sight of him, as Daella had, Saera said she might like to marry him too.

By fifteen she had put such idle fantasies aside. Why dream of distant monarchs when she could have as many squires, knights, and likely lords as she desired? Dozens danced attendance on her, but three soon emerged as favorites. Jonah Mooton was the heir to Maidenpool, Red Roy Connington was the fifteen-year-old Lord of Griffin’s Roost, and Braxton Beesbury, called Stinger, was a nineteen-year-old knight, the finest lance in the Reach, and the heir to Honeyholt. The princess had female favorites as well: Perianne Moore and Alys Turnberry, two maids of her own age, became her dearest friends. Saera called them Pretty Peri and Sweetberry. For more than a year, the three maids and the three young lords were inseparable at every feast and ball. They hunted and hawked together too, and once sailed across Blackwater Bay to Dragonstone. When the three lords rode at rings or crossed swords in the yards, the three maids were there to cheer them on.

King Jaehaerys, who was forever entertaining visiting lords or envoys from across the narrow sea, sitting at council, or planning further roads, was well pleased. They would not need to scour the realm to find a match for Saera, when three such promising young men were here at hand. Queen Alysanne was less convinced. “Saera is clever, but not wise,” she told the king. Lady Perianne and Lady Alys were pretty, vapid, empty-headed little fools from what she had seen of them, whilst Connington and Mooton were callow boys. “And I do not like this Stinger. I’ve heard he sired a bastard in the Reach, and another here in King’s Landing.”

Jaehaerys remained unconcerned. “It is not as if Saera were ever alone with any of them. There are always people about, serving men and maids, grooms and men-at-arms. What mischief can they get up to with so many eyes around them?”

He did not like the answer, when it came.