Rhaenys Targaryen

Rhaenys was born on Dragonstone, the third child of Aerion Targaryen and Valaena Velaryon, younger than her sister Visenya and older than Aegon. Among great families of Valyrian blood, custom held that a man should marry his eldest sister, and Aegon did marry Visenya; but he took Rhaenys too, and it was said at court that he had married the first out of duty and the second out of want.

Even before the wedding, Rhaenys was already riding Meraxes, one of the three dragons the siblings had raised from hatchlings. Of the three riders she was the one who spent the most hours in the air, and the one who dreamed of crossing the Sunset Sea to see what lay beyond it — a journey she never made.

When Aegon set his eyes on the Seven Kingdoms, Rhaenys and Visenya stopped being merely his wives and became his queens, and made ready to follow him to war.

The War of Conquest began in the year 2 BC, and Rhaenys flew to it alongside Visenya and Aegon. She and Meraxes rode with Orys Baratheon's army into the Stormlands, where the Storm King, Argilac the Arrogant, fell at the Last Storm.

The three dragons flew together only once in the whole war, at the Field of Fire, where the fire of all three decided the battle. Afterward Aegon marched north to deal with the Starks and sent Rhaenys to bring Dorne to heel.

She found the castles there empty but for the old, the women and the children; the Dornishmen refused open battle, striking and vanishing into the mountains and the sands. Whenever she asked where the men were, the answer was always the same: "far away." Frustrated, she flew to Sunspear to demand the surrender of the aged Meria Martell, Princess of Dorne.

Meria told her she would not fight, but she would not kneel either, for Dorne had no king to answer for it. Rhaenys promised they would return with fire and blood; the princess answered that they could burn Dorne, but never bend it or break it. The Targaryen army withdrew without taking a single castle of note.

By the year 1 AC, with the fighting all but over, Rhaenys, Aegon and Visenya settled at Aegon's Fort. Rhaenys was her brother's favorite wife — he was said to spend ten nights with her for every one he spent with Visenya — and there were whispers that she, in turn, kept company with young men not entirely proper.

In 7 AC she bore Aegon's first child, Aenys, and it was through that line that most of House Targaryen would descend. In those years she helped her brother win over lords and smallfolk alike, and arranged marriages between distant houses, among them the match between Lord Ronnel Arryn and a daughter of Lord Torrhen Stark.

It was also Rhaenys who set down the Rule of Six: a husband could strike an unfaithful wife up to six times with a rod no thicker than his thumb, one blow for each god but the Stranger. The law grew out of one case, a husband who had beaten his wife a hundred times and killed her; Rhaenys ruled the extra ninety-four blows unlawful and let the dead woman's brothers return them in kind. It was Rhaenys, too, who persuaded Aegon to outlaw the ironborn custom of taking salt wives by force.

In 4 AC, Aegon tried Dorne again. Rhaenys struck the first blow of the new war, taking castles as she pressed toward Sunspear, though the Dornishmen resisted as stubbornly as before. By the time she and Aegon reached the city, Princess Meria Martell had already fled, along with nearly everyone else.

They left Lord Rosby as castellan of Sunspear and Lord Harlen Tyrell to put down what remained of the revolt, then returned to King's Landing. No sooner had they arrived than Dorne rose again: Rosby and Tyrell were killed, their armies gone with them.

The Targaryens came back once more with their dragons. In 10 AC, at Hellholt, a scorpion loosed a bolt of iron that brought Meraxes down, and Rhaenys with him. Soon after, Aegon received a letter from the hand of the Dornish prince's daughter and called off the war; it is said he gripped it so hard while reading that his hand bled. Some also say, though none can prove it, that Rhaenys survived the fall and that ending her suffering was the price of that peace. Her body never came back to King's Landing.