Aegon V Targaryen

Aegon was born in King's Landing in the year 200, the fourth son and fifth child of the then-prince Maekar Targaryen and Dyanna Dayne. Ahead of him in line to the throne stood his brothers Daeron, Aerion, and Aemon; behind him came Daella and Rhae. No one at court imagined then that this boy would ever wear a crown.

As a boy he served as a page and sometimes sat in on meetings of the Small Council. A dragon egg streaked with green had been left in his cradle, and Aegon kept it for years at Summerhall, hoping — a hope he shared with his brother Aemon — that it would one day hatch. With painted figures set out on Maester Melaquin's table, the two brothers re-fought the Battle of Redgrass Field again and again.

He feared Aerion as much as he hated him: he had seen him throw a kitten down a well, and one night his brother came into his room with a knife and a threat that was no joke. He was betrothed to Daella, which stirred Rhae's jealousy, though marriage held no appeal for Aegon — what he dreamed of was one day wearing the white cloak of the Kingsguard.

He was meant to squire for his brother Daeron at the tourney at Ashford Meadows, but Daeron had no taste for jousting and chose instead to drink himself senseless at an inn. So that Maekar's men wouldn't recognize his silver hair, Daeron shaved Aegon's head. Bald and nameless, he was mistaken for a stableboy by a hedge knight named Duncan; the boy called himself Egg and let Duncan believe Dunk was simply short for Duncan. Impressed by the humble knight, he offered to serve him through the tourney.

Duncan was arrested for attacking Aerion and staked his life on a Trial of Seven. Egg talked Ser Lyonel Baratheon into fighting for his knight, and Aegon's own uncle, Prince Baelor, died in that fight at the hands of Maekar, who fought for Aerion. Maekar wanted his son trained as a knight, but Aegon would only agree if Duncan did the training; the hedge knight took him on the condition that Egg live in the same hardship he did.

The years that followed were spent riding the realm in Duncan's shadow, his father's signet hidden in his boot. They crossed Dorne to Vaith, went down the Greenblood to Ferry Town, and sailed on to Oldtown, where his brother Aemon sent him a mule. Nearly two years later they served Ser Eustace Osgrey in his dispute with Rohanne Webber, and at Coldmoat it was Egg, since Dunk couldn't read, who confirmed that an old royal grant favored the Webbers over that stream. Duncan killed a rival knight in trial by combat, and Aegon nursed him through his wounds afterward.

By 212, at the tourney at Whitewalls, Egg came to blows with Ser Mallor's squire over a slight against his father, and he suffered watching Duncan lose his joust — and with it his sword, armor, and horse — to Ser Uthor Underleaf.

That was when the Second Blackfyre Rebellion broke out. Aegon revealed his signet to the castle's maester and was placed in the care of Lords Butterwell and Frey; when he claimed his father was marching on Whitewalls with an army, Butterwell fled with him to the castle sept while Frey rode back to the Twins. Duncan killed a knight who tried to take him hostage and told him to run if he could, but by morning the rebels had surrendered to Lord Brynden Rivers's royal host, with Aegon already safe among its ranks. It was the boy himself who asked Bloodraven to lend Duncan the gold to redeem what little he owned.

In 219 he fought alongside his father and Aerion in another Blackfyre uprising, and a year later he married for love, taking Betha Blackwood as his wife — a match no one minded at the time, since Aegon stood nowhere near the succession. They had five children; he named the first Duncan.

In 221 King Aerys I died childless, and the throne passed to his brother Maekar, Aegon's father. According to one source of disputed reliability, Aegon also fought in the Peake Uprising with Tion Lannister as his squire, and there knighted Tion's twin brother Tywald as he lay dying of his wounds. That same uprising cost Maekar his life, and with two of Aegon's elder brothers already dead, the succession was left uncertain: Daeron had left only a simple-minded daughter, and Aerion a small son.

A Great Council was called. Many lords distrusted Aegon for having grown up among smallfolk, so they first sounded out his elder brother, Maester Aemon, who turned down the crown and asked that it go to Aegon instead. At thirty-three, the boy who had once been a squire became king.

Duncan, the friend he had roamed the realm with, joined the Kingsguard as soon as the reign began and rose to become its Lord Commander. The new king opened his rule by arresting his own Hand, Brynden Rivers, who had promised safe passage to a Blackfyre pretender only to kill him; Aegon sentenced him to death, then let him take the black at the Wall, where his brother Aemon also went, so as never to be used as a weapon against him.

The reign also began under a three-year winter and famine in the North, which Aegon answered by shipping vast stores of grain north. Spring brought the Fourth Blackfyre Rebellion: Daemon III Blackfyre landed with the Golden Company, found little support, and was killed in single combat by Duncan, while Aegor Rivers escaped with the remnants of his army across the narrow sea.

The rest of the reign was one long tug-of-war with the lords. The Iron Throne had to step into the Westerlands three times over Lord Tytos Lannister's poor rule, but the deeper cause lay elsewhere: every law Aegon passed to protect common folk — something he'd learned to value during his years as a poor squire — met resistance from nobles watching their grip on the peasantry slip. He was known to say that dragons would make the lords defy him less, and over the years he convinced himself they were the only way to bring the realm the peace he had in mind.

In 237, convinced that marrying kin to kin had harmed his house, Aegon betrothed four of his children to the realm's great houses: Duncan to a daughter of Storm's End, Jaehaerys to Celia Tully of Riverrun, Daeron to Olenna Redwyne of the Arbor, and Shaera to Luthor Tyrell, heir to Highgarden. His children, though, had inherited his own stubbornness.

Duncan broke the plan first: in 239 he secretly married a woman named Jenny, of Oldstones, and neither the High Septon nor the Small Council could get him to set the marriage aside. He gave up the throne and the title Prince of Dragonstone in favor of Jaehaerys. Lord Lyonel Baratheon, whose daughter had been spurned, rose in a short but bloody revolt that ended in trial by combat, won by Duncan the Tall; Aegon pardoned the rebel lord and, to seal the peace, betrothed his daughter Rhaelle to Storm's End's heir, whom she married in 245.

Jaehaerys, the new heir, had loved his sister Shaera since childhood, and when their parents tried to keep them apart, in 240 the two slipped past their guards and married in secret. By the time the king and queen learned of it, there was nothing left to undo. Daeron followed the same path in 246, breaking his betrothal to Olenna Redwyne; he never married, and died in battle in 251 alongside the knight whose company he preferred to anyone else's.

In 258, nine outlaws and sluggish mercenaries with ambitions of their own crowns banded together in the Disputed Lands; among them was Maelys Blackfyre, last of his rebellious line. Aegon paid them little mind: by then his thoughts were elsewhere, convinced that only dragons could let him force through the reforms he had spent years defending against his own lords.

That conviction led him, in 259, to try to hatch dragon eggs at Summerhall. He died there, along with his son Duncan, his friend and Lord Commander Ser Duncan the Tall, and other members of the royal court. His second son, Jaehaerys II, succeeded him.

Much of the law he had passed to protect the common people didn't outlive him for long: his grandson Aerys II, advised by his Hand, Tywin Lannister, would go on to undo it.