Rodrik Arryn

At only ten years old, Rodrik inherited the lordship of the Eyrie without warning: his father and his uncle, Lord Darnold Arryn, had been killed chasing a band of wildling raiders through the Mountains of the Moon. The boy was left in charge of the Vale before his time.

Young as he was, his rule proved firm and generous. Smallfolk loved him, and so did the lords who owed him fealty; he was remembered as a just man, mild-mannered and good-humored.

In 58 AC he traveled to King's Landing to attend a tourney marking the tenth anniversary of Jaehaerys I Targaryen's coronation. It was his first notable brush with the royal court.

Two years later the king summoned him back to the capital, this time to stay: Rodrik replaced Lord Albin Massey as Chief Justice and Master of Laws. On the Small Council he earned a name as a loyal man, and in time became a close friend of the monarchs.

During those years in King's Landing he married and had four children: Elys, Amanda and two sons. He was widowed before his twenty years of service on the council came to an end.

In 80 AC, after two decades of service, Lord Rodrik found himself among the three candidates proposed to marry Princess Daella Targaryen, fourth daughter of King Jaehaerys and Queen Alysanne. He was thirty-six and already a father of four; bald, portly and thick around the middle, he was hardly the suitor a princess might have dreamed of.

It was Queen Alysanne who picked him out, for the kindness and gentleness the king himself had asked for his daughter. Princess Daella herself settled on him in the end: he struck her as a good and sensible man, and the thought of raising his four children appealed to her too.

The wedding took place that same year, in a small ceremony in the sept of Dragonstone, with only close friends and family present; crowds unsettled the princess. At her request, there was no bedding either.

In 81 AC, Lord Rodrik resigned his seat on the council and returned to the Vale with his new wife: his children, he said, needed to know their new mother. He trusted that the slower, quieter life of the Eyrie would suit the princess, and promised the king he would keep her safe and happy.

He kept that promise: he was an attentive husband, forever fussing over and protecting Daella, whom he called 'my sweet princess'.

A year and a half into the marriage, Daella fell pregnant and, frightened, sent for her mother. When Queen Alysanne arrived at the Eyrie, Rodrik told her his wife wept at the smallest thing, sometimes at nothing at all. Daella gave birth to a daughter, Aemma, and died soon after of childbed fever; Rodrik asked to bury her in the Vale, but the queen refused him.

Rodrik died in or before 97 AC, the year Lady Jeyne Arryn took over rule of the Eyrie in his place.

His daughter Aemma married young to her cousin, Prince Viserys Targaryen, and became his queen consort when he took the throne in 103 AC. Through his granddaughter, Queen Rhaenyra, every later Targaryen traces their line back to Lord Rodrik.