Jacaerys Velaryon

Jacaerys was born late in 114 AC, the eldest son of Ser Laenor Velaryon and Queen Rhaenyra. His father wanted to name him Joffrey, after a dead friend, but Lord Corlys Velaryon forbade it: the boy would carry a name proper to his house. Soon after, his uncle Daeron was born, son of Viserys and Alicent Hightower, and the king ordered the two infants to share a wet nurse while they nursed, hoping shared childhoods would breed closeness. It hardly worked: Alicent's children and Rhaenyra's grew into bitter rivals, and the festivities and shared lessons of youth only fed the resentment.

Two brothers followed, Lucerys in 115 and Joffrey in 117, all three brown-haired and brown-eyed, unlike their parents' Valyrian looks. Whispers soon claimed none of them were truly Laenor's sons, but Ser Harwin Strong's, Rhaenyra's rumored lover. The crown answered in its own way: each boy was given a dragon's egg in the cradle, and those who doubted their blood muttered that the eggs would never hatch. They were wrong. Jacaerys's hatchling was named Vermax.

Septon Eustace wrote that King Viserys once sat Jacaerys on his knee on the Iron Throne and told him the seat would be his one day. In 118, with the king's blessing, Rhaenyra announced her son's betrothal to Baela Targaryen, daughter of Prince Daemon Targaryen and Lady Laena Velaryon.

Ser Laenor, Jacaerys's father, died in 120 AC, when the boy was six. King Viserys, Queen Alicent, and their children traveled to High Tide, on Driftmark, for the funeral. Vhagar, the oldest and largest of all dragons, was there too, left riderless after Laena Velaryon's death months before. Prince Aemond, ten years old, meant to claim her in secret, knowing his parents would never allow it.

Joffrey, Jacaerys's youngest brother, caught him at it, and Aemond slapped the boy and shoved him into a pile of dragon dung before climbing onto Vhagar's back and flying two circles. When he landed, Rhaenyra's three sons were waiting: Joffrey had fetched Jacaerys and Lucerys. They fought with fists and wooden swords until Aemond called his nephews "Strong." Jacaerys, old enough to catch the insult, went at him again; when Aemond got the better of him and began beating him savagely, Lucerys drew a dagger and took his right eye.

Queen Alicent demanded Lucerys lose an eye in payment, while Rhaenyra wanted Aemond questioned until he named who had called her sons bastards, an accusation that, if true, marked her for treason. Aemond eventually blamed his brother Aegon, who answered without flinching that everyone knew, that one only had to look at them. King Viserys ended the argument: no one would lose an eye, but from then on anyone who repeated the taunt would have their tongue torn out. He further ordered Rhaenyra and her children to remain on Dragonstone while Alicent and hers returned to King's Landing.

That same year Rhaenyra married her uncle Daemon Targaryen. Late in 120 their first son, Aegon, was born, and Viserys followed in 122; unlike Jacaerys and his brothers, these two had the Valyrian look of the Targaryens.

In 126, Lord Corlys Velaryon fell ill, and the court debated who would succeed him as Lord of the Tides: his own children, Laenor and Laena, were both dead, and Jacaerys, his eldest grandson, was already destined for the Iron Throne. Rhaenyra proposed her second son, Lucerys, but Ser Vaemond Velaryon, Corlys's nephew, objected, claiming Rhaenyra's sons were Harwin Strong's bastards with no Velaryon blood to inherit. Rhaenyra had Daemon behead him on the spot and fed the body to her dragon.

Vaemond's brothers fled to King's Landing with his widow and children to seek justice. King Viserys heard them out, then ordered their tongues torn out for having been warned. Stepping down from the Iron Throne, he cut his hand on one of the fused swords at its base; the wound festered, and for a time it was feared he would die.

Viserys recovered, and on the first day of 127 a feast was held to mark it. Rhaenyra and Alicent attended with all their children and spent the night feigning an affection neither felt anymore. After the king retired, Prince Aemond raised a toast to his three Velaryon nephews, mockingly praising their brown hair and their strength, calling them "three strong boys." Hours later, Jacaerys asked his aunt Helaena to dance; Aegon took it as an insult, and the two princes nearly came to blows before the Kingsguard stepped in.

King Viserys died in 129, in his sleep, and war for the throne broke out between Rhaenyra and her half-brother Aegon II. At Aegon's first council, Ser Criston Cole pressed the point that Jacaerys was a bastard and that no bastard could sit the Iron Throne.

Jacaerys was fifteen, and Vermax had grown into a large dragon. At his mother's war council, he and Lucerys volunteered to fly as messengers seeking support among the lords of Westeros; Rhaenyra agreed, but first made them swear on a copy of The Seven-Pointed Star that they would take no part in battle. The next day, at his mother's coronation, Jacaerys was named Prince of Dragonstone and heir to the throne. Aegon offered to recognize him as such if Rhaenyra bent the knee; she refused.

Jacaerys drew the longest journey. He flew Vermax to the Eyrie, where Lady Jeyne Arryn asked him for dragonriders rather than armies; from there he visited Sisterton, White Harbor, and finally Winterfell, where Lord Cregan Stark pledged the North in exchange for a future Targaryen bride for his house — the Pact of Ice and Fire. Everywhere he went, his charm and his dragon's menace were enough to win oaths. The jester Mushroom later claimed Vermax laid a clutch of eggs in the crypts of Winterfell, and that Jacaerys secretly married Sara Snow, Cregan's bastard half-sister; Archmaester Gyldayn doubted both claims, and even that the girl existed at all.

His brother Lucerys died on his own mission, killed by Aemond when his dragon failed to outrun Vhagar over Storm's End. Soon after, his grandmother Rhaenys Targaryen died at the Battle of Rook's Rest, and her widower, Lord Corlys, turned away from Rhaenyra, furious that it had been his wife who rode into that battle and not the queen. With two princes and two dragons lost, it was Jacaerys who stepped up to lead the Blacks: he mended things between Corlys and his mother by naming him Hand of the Queen, and took command of the armies across the realm.

It was also his idea, by Mushroom's account, to recruit the Targaryen bastards of Dragonstone — the so-called dragonseeds — to try their luck mounting the six riderless dragons left on the island. He promised lordship to whoever succeeded. Several did, among them Addam of Hull, who claimed to be Laenor Velaryon's bastard son; at the urging of Corlys and Jacaerys, Rhaenyra legitimized him and his brother, and named him heir to Driftmark.

Toward the end of 129, Jacaerys also arranged for his younger half-brothers, nine-year-old Aegon and seven-year-old Viserys, to sail for Pentos, whose prince had agreed to shelter them for the duration of the war.

The two young princes set sail aboard the Gay Abandon for Pentos, but crossing the Gullet, their ship and its escort ran into a Triarchy fleet allied with the Greens. The escort ships were sunk or taken and the Gay Abandon fell into enemy hands; Aegon escaped by flying to Dragonstone on his dragon Stormcloud to raise the alarm.

Jacaerys flew Vermax into the battle that followed, alongside the other dragonseeds, and for a while victory seemed to belong to the Blacks. Then Vermax flew too low — perhaps struck in the eye by a crossbow bolt, perhaps pulled down by a grappling hook — and crashed into a burning galley. Jacaerys freed himself from the saddle and surfaced clinging to the smoking wreckage, but Myrish arrows found him, and he sank beneath the waves. He was fifteen.

Jacaerys's death was a heavy blow to the Blacks, and after the Battle of the Honeywine many lost heart; Rhaenyra, if anything, threw herself with more fury into taking King's Landing. As the war neared its end, Lord Cregan Stark arrived there with an army from the North to keep the promise he had made to Jacaerys.

Baela Targaryen, the prince's betrothed, would go on to marry Lord Alyn Velaryon years later.