[8/20] ASOIAF Power Couples Rhaenys Targaryen Corlys Velaryon

[8/20] ASOIAF power couples → Rhaenys Targaryen × Corlys Velaryon

Rhaenys Targaryen, daughter of the Old King’s eldest son and heir, was a woman as spirited and beautiful and proud as any in the realm, and a dragonrider as well. Her husband, Lord Corlys Velaryon, was the wealthiest man in the Seven Kingdoms, who came to fame for his voyages across the seas. The greatest of those were upon the Sea Snake, by which name he would later be known and upon which he would reach the fabled lands of Yi Ti and Leng, whose wealth doubled that of House Velaryon in a single voyage.

In 92 AC, Rhaenys’s father, Prince Aemon, was slain on Tarth, and when the matter of who would be King Jaehaerys’s heir arose, the king named as Prince of Dragonstone his next-eldest son, Baelon. The clever and capable Rhaenys was the first to raise objection. “You would rob my son of his birthright,” she told the king, for she was pregnant and by passing her over, so too would they be passing over her child. Lord Corlys was so wroth that he gave up his admiralty and his place on the small council and took his wife back to Driftmark. Lady Jocelyn Baratheon, Rhaenys’s mother, was also angered, as was her formidable brother, Boremund, Lord of Storm’s End, and Queen Alysanne herself, who at Rhaenys’s birth had called her “our queen to be.” Yet Baelon remained ensconced as the heir apparent, and so Rhaenys would be dubbed “the Queen Who Never Was.”

When Baelon died nine years later, throwing the succession yet again into question, Lord Corlys began amassing ships and men on Driftmark to “defend the rights” of his son, Laenor. Corlys’s fame, wealth, and reputation did much to support Laenor’s claim, but the tide was against them and it was rumored that the Great Council that assembled at Harrenhal had voted twenty to one in favor of Baelon’s son, Prince Viserys.

Many years later, the pair lent their support to Viserys’s daughter, Rhaenyra, against her half-brother, Aegon, and both sat on her council. Lord Corlys had grown old by then but said, “Mayhaps the Seven have preserved me for this one last fight.” Princess Rhaenys had grown older as well, yet was as fierce and fearless at five-and-fifty as she had been at two-and-twenty. In 129 AC, Lord Staunton, who was among Rhaenyra’s supporters, dispatched a raven from Rook’s Rest to Dragonstone, begging for aid against the greens’ attacks. That aid arrived in the form of Rhaenys and her dragon, Meleys, the Red Queen. But Ser Criston Cole had brought dragons, too — Aegon II himself arrived on the field upon Sunfyre, and his brother Aemond One-Eye rode Vhagar. It is recounted that Rhaenys did not shrink from her foe. With a glad cry and a crack of her whip, she sent Meleys flying up to face them. It is in this battle that Rhaenys ultimately perished, though not all her foes emerged unscathed either: the clash left Aegon severely burned and broken, while Sunfyre took half a year to recover.

the dance of the dragons week: day 1 → the blacks or the greens

When it came, the fall of Dragonstone took less than an hour. […] Only in one respect did the plan go awry. As Tom Tangletongue and his ruffians smashed down the door of Lady Baela’s bedchamber to take her prisoner, the girl slipped out her window, scrambling across rooftops and down walls until she reached the yard. The king’s men had taken care to send guards to secure the stable where the castle dragons had been kept, but Baela had grown up in Dragonstone, and knew ways in and out that they did not. By the time her pursuers caught up with her, she had already loosed Moondancer’s chains and strapped a saddle onto her. So it came to pass that when King Aegon II flew Sunfyre over Dragonmont’s smoking peak and made his descent, expecting to make a triumphant entrance into a castle safely in the hands of his own men, with the queen’s loyalists slain or captured, up to meet him rose Baela Targaryen, Prince Daemon’s daughter by the Lady Laena, as fearless as her father. — Fire & Blood

Baela Targaryen and Moondancer, by Doug Wheatley, for Fire & Blood (paperback edition) by George R.R. Martin

“Her blood is on your hands,” she raged at him. “Her blood is on your cock. May you die screaming.”

Rhaena Targaryen reached out and grabbed his beard and pulled his face to hers.

“Hear this, my lord. Do not think to wed again. Take care of the whelps my mother gave you, my half-brother and half-sister. See that they want for nothing. Do that, and I will let you be. If I should hear even a whisper of your taking some other poor maid to wife, I will make another Harrenhal of Storm’s End, with you and her inside it.”

While Rogar dismissed Rhaena’s threats in front of his brothers, he never wed again.

A FEAST FOR CROWS POVS + PLOTS

[9/20] ASOIAF power couples → Rhaenyra Targaryen × Daemon Targaryen

As a child, Rhaenyra’s father, King Viserys I, doted upon her and took her everywhere with him — even to the council chamber, where he encouraged her to watch and listen intently. In 105 AC, heartily sick of being hectored over the succession, Viserys disregarded the precedents of 92 AC and the Great Council of 101 AC, officially declaring that Rhaenyra was Princess of Dragonstone and his heir. A grand ceremony was arranged in which hundreds of lords knelt to do homage to the princess while she sat at her father’s feet.

[…]

Despite Viserys’s unwavering preference for Rhaenyra, Prince Aegon was convinced to take up his father’s crown shortly after Viserys died. When Princess Rhaenyra learned of it while under confinement with her third child to Prince Daemon, she fell into a rage. But the child, a stillborn girl, proved malformed. “She was my only daughter, and they killed her,” she said when announcing the girl’s name, Visenya. “They stole my crown and murdered my daughter, and they shall answer for it.” And so the Dance began, as the princess called a council of her own.

[…]

At Storm’s End, Aemond One-Eye, upon Vhagar, caused the death of Rhaenyra’s son Lucerys, upon Arrax, in revenge for Lucerys costing him his eye nine years earlier. Rhaenyra collapsed at the news … but not so for Lucerys’s stepfather. Prince Daemon was all that his late brother was not: lean and hard, a renowned warrior, dashing, daring, more than a little dangerous. Indeed, the words he sent to Dragonstone following Lucerys’s death were, “An eye for an eye, a son for a son. Lucerys shall be avenged.”

[…]

Contemptuous of his half-sister Rhaenyra, Aemond saw a greater threat in his uncle, Prince Daemon, and the great host he had gathered at Harrenhal. Summoning his bannermen and council, the prince announced his intent to bring the battle to his uncle and chastise the rebellious riverlords. But Daemon Targaryen was too old and seasoned a battler to sit idly by, and through the friends he still had at King’s Landing, word of his nephew’s plans had reached him even before Aemond had set out. And so Daemon hastened south while Rhaenyra took flight from Dragonstone, and the queen and her prince consort came together at King’s Landing, circling over Aegon’s High Hill. The gold cloaks — many of whom still considered themselves loyal to Daemon — betrayed the officers Aegon had put in charge and surrendered the city with little bloodshed.