Viserys Targaryen

Viserys was born in King's Landing in the year 276, the fifth son of Aerys II and his sister-wife, Queen Rhaella. Months earlier his father had done public penance before the High Septon and sworn to be faithful only to the queen; the boy was born healthy and, so the court said, more handsome than any newborn the city had seen. The devotion did not last in changing the king, who grew only more suspicious, going so far as to post Kingsguard by the cradle so no one could touch the prince without his leave.

Viserys was still a child when his brother Rhaegar fell to Robert Baratheon at the Trident. The defeat made him his father's heir overnight, ahead of Rhaegar's infant son Aegon. As King's Landing was taken and sacked, Viserys and his mother, pregnant again, were spirited out of the city to Dragonstone. There, with no crown left to defend on the mainland, Rhaella had him proclaimed king.

With Rhaella dead soon after the flight, Ser Willem Darry took the two siblings left to him, Viserys and the infant Daenerys, to Braavos, to a house with a red door that Viserys would later remember as the only real home he ever had. Darry secretly arranged with Oberyn Martell a pact promising Viserys the hand of Arianne Martell and Dorne's support for a future reconquest, but never told Viserys himself — his impatient temper made him too unreliable to trust with the secret.

When Darry died, the servants who remained stripped them of what little they had and vanished. Viserys and Daenerys spent the following years as guests of powerful households across the Free Cities, until those doors closed too and they were forced to sell off what was left of their house's possessions. When Viserys sold his mother's crown, the name Beggar King began to follow him from the Free Cities all the way to Westeros. An attempt to win over the Golden Company with a feast earned him only his commanders' laughter.

His bond with Daenerys started close and soured over the years: he came to blame her for killing their mother in childbirth and treated her harshly, though he was also the one who taught her everything he knew of Westeros and the lineage they shared. He warned her, again and again, half threat and half caution, not to wake the dragon.

They had been guests of Magister Illyrio Mopatis in Pentos for half a year when he finally offered Viserys the deal he had been waiting for: backing for his claim to the Iron Throne in exchange for future rewards, sealed by arranging Daenerys's marriage to Khal Drogo, a Dothraki warlord who promised Viserys ten thousand riders for the conquest.

The marriage suited Viserys, and still he couldn't stand losing his sister; the night before the ceremony he tried to force his way into her room to take her maidenhood himself, but Illyrio had foreseen it and posted guards who stopped him.

At the wedding feast, Viserys met Ser Jorah Mormont, an exiled knight who swore him fealty, and gave Daenerys three handmaidens as a wedding gift. It galled him to sit below his sister and eat only what the khal and khaleesi had already turned down. Before the newlyweds withdrew, he warned Daenerys to please Drogo or she would see "the dragon wake as it has never before".

The khalasar then set out for Vaes Dothrak to present the new khaleesi to the dosh khaleen, and Viserys insisted on riding with them, convinced Drogo was deliberately stalling on his promise. He believed he had sold his sister and that the khal still owed him payment; Illyrio and Jorah tried, without success, to explain that the Dothraki neither buy nor sell — only give gifts that are returned in time.

When Daenerys asked to ride out alone across the Dothraki Sea, she ordered Viserys and the rest of her retinue left behind. The order, coming from her, set him off: he struck at her with words and hands, and one of her bloodriders, Jhogo, lashed his neck with a whip in her defense. Daenerys asked for no further punishment than taking his horse, and Viserys had to walk the rest of the way.

Among the Dothraki, a man who does not ride is no man at all, and the name stuck to him: Khal Rhae Mhar, the Sorefoot King. When Drogo later offered him a place in a cart, Viserys took it for an apology, not knowing that riding in a cart — fit for cripples, the old, and children — was an even greater insult. So he earned a second name, Khal Rhaggat, the Cart King.

Once in Vaes Dothrak, Daenerys tried to mend things with her brother and had new Dothraki-style clothes made for him. Viserys took it as one more humiliation: he struck the handmaid who brought them and rounded on Daenerys, who fought back with the belt of medallions she had meant to give him. He stormed off swearing she would regret it once he had his kingdom back.

On the day of the ceremony for Daenerys's unborn son, Jorah stopped him from stealing her dragon eggs to sell for mercenary gold. Not long after, drunk, he walked armed into Drogo's feast — forbidden in the sacred city — and demanded his promised crown once more, sword in hand, threatening his sister's unborn child. Drogo's bloodriders overpowered him; they melted his gold belt in a cooking pot and poured it over his head. He died crowned, without a drop of his blood spilled on sacred ground.

In time, Daenerys chose to remember him as a brother, not only as the man who had struck her in exile.

She gave his name, Viserion, to one of the three dragons born of fire. Ser Barristan Selmy, who had served both Aerys and, later, Robert, would later say that Viserys, unlike Rhaegar, had truly been his father's son.