Aegor Rivers

Aegor was born in 172 AC in King's Landing, son of King Aegon IV and Lady Barba of House Bracken, his fifth mistress. He came into the world two weeks before his aunt, Queen Naerys, gave birth to twins and nearly died in the birthing bed. Aegor's grandfather, then Hand of the King, urged Aegon to make Barba his queen if Naerys did not survive. Naerys recovered, and Princes Daeron and Aemon saw to it that mother and child were sent from court to Stone Hedge.

Aegor grew up there until his father came looking for company again and fell for another Bracken woman, Bethany, his own aunt. The king brought her to court, and the boy went with them. When Bethany's affair with a Kingsguard knight came to light, Aegor paid no price for it, but he had already learned what his blood was worth there.

The resentment that stayed with him his whole life had two names: his half-brother Brynden Rivers, called Bloodraven, and Brynden's mother, Melissa Blackwood, who held the place at court denied to Aegor's own mother. When his half-sister Shiera Seastar, the woman both wanted, chose Brynden, Aegor's hatred for his brother hardened for good. That, they say, is when men started calling him Bittersteel, for his sword-hand and the venom in his tongue.

At some point he married his own niece, Calha Blackfyre, daughter of his half-brother Daemon; the least reliable sources say they had no children. It was Aegor who pushed hardest for Daemon to claim the Iron Throne, since Daemon carried the sword Blackfyre, given to him by King Aegon IV himself.

In 196 AC Aegor joined his half-brother Daemon's rebellion against King Daeron II, commanding the right flank at the Battle of Redgrass Field. When Bloodraven killed Daemon in the fighting, the rebel army began to come apart.

Aegor took the sword Blackfyre from his brother's body, gathered what men he could, and charged the Raven's Teeth, Bloodraven's archers. The two half-brothers fought in single combat, and Aegor put out one of Bloodraven's eyes, but the royal army already had them boxed in from two sides. He still got away with the sword, crossed the narrow sea with Daemon's widow, Rohanne, and her surviving children, and settled in Tyrosh.

In Tyrosh, Aegor left his young relatives somewhere safe and signed on with the Second Sons to make a living, like so many other exiles loyal to the Black Dragon. A year later he decided the cause needed something sturdier before it lost the last of its scattered supporters, and he left the company to found one of his own: the Golden Company.

The Golden Company's name spread fast. Its motto, 'Our word is as good as gold,' and its war cry, 'Under gold, bitter steel,' became famous, along with its reputation for never breaking a contract; when Qohor tried to break its own, the company answered by sacking the city.

Aegor's loyalty to the Blackfyre cause had its limits. When his nephew Daemon the Younger and Lord Gormon Peake planned a second uprising, Bittersteel wanted no part of it and would not even lend him the sword Blackfyre. Bloodraven, by then Hand of the King, crushed the plot before it began. Nobody ever settled why Aegor withheld his support — whether he distrusted the plan, doubted his nephew's mettle, or had some other reason entirely.

At forty-seven, Aegor took the field again as general to his nephew Haegon, whom he crowned himself. He faced Bloodraven once more, but the rebellion ended the way the others had: Haegon was murdered by treachery, and Aegor was taken prisoner to the Red Keep.

Bloodraven and Prince Aerion argued for his immediate execution, but King Aerys I spared him and sent him to the Wall instead. It was a mistake: the Blackfyres still had ears at court, and before the ship carrying Aegor reached Eastwatch-by-the-Sea, it was boarded and he was freed along with twelve other prisoners. By the end of that year he was back in Tyrosh, and had crowned Haegon's eldest son as Daemon III Blackfyre.

In 236 AC, sixty-four years old and with a hard winter just behind him, Aegor led a fourth rebellion under the new king, Aegon V. He lost again, this time at the Battle of Wendwater Bridge, where Ser Duncan the Tall killed Daemon III. Aegor crossed the narrow sea once more to gather what remained of the Golden Company in Tyrosh.

At some point afterward, Aegor swore a blood pact with Torwyn Greyjoy, who later betrayed him to his enemies. A few years after the defeat of the fourth rebellion, he turned up fighting as a mercenary again, this time in a skirmish between Tyrosh and Myr.

He was mortally wounded there and died at sixty-nine, sword still in hand. On his deathbed he asked that the flesh be boiled off his skull, the bone gilded, and the skull carried at the front when the Golden Company crossed the narrow sea again for Westeros. His successors have kept that order ever since.

Long after his death, Bittersteel's name still carried weight in Westerosi politics. To a doubting Ser Arys Oakheart, Princess Arianne Martell describes the Golden Company as the army of exiles still dreaming of the homecoming Aegor once promised them.

As Tyrion Lannister nears Volantis on his way to Meereen, he learns the Golden Company is waiting there for the queen who means to cross the narrow sea and take Westeros: the exiles hope she can give them what Bittersteel never could. In the company's camp, Jon Connington studies the gilded skulls of its former captains-general, Aegor's among them, and cannot work out why it seems to be smiling.

Thinking on his queen's love affairs, Ser Barristan Selmy himself recalls the one that bound Bittersteel and Bloodraven to Shiera Seastar, and the blood it once cost the Seven Kingdoms.