Meleys

Scarlet, fast, and famously the swiftest dragon in the world.

The beast itself

Meleys was scarlet ÔÇö a deep, saturated red quite unlike Caraxes' wet arterial colour ÔÇö with copper along her crest and horns and a pink flush through the wing membranes that showed when she flew between an observer and the sun. She was big, and getting on in years by the Dance, and none of that slowed her: everyone who wrote about her agreed she was the fastest thing in the sky, and the agreement is unusual enough to be worth something. She did not so much beat her wings as fold and drive with them, and she could out-turn beasts a third her age.

Her temper was regal in the least flattering sense. She was fat by the end and unashamed of it, difficult to rouse, and inclined to answer a handler's request with a look. But she had none of Syrax's soft-handed uselessness underneath; roused, she went from lying in the sun to a full climbing turn in the time it took a man to shout, and her cry on the way up was a hard bright thing that carried further than her size suggested it should. The chroniclers who called her lazy and the ones who called her the deadliest dragon in the realm were describing the same animal on different days.

Her first rider: Alyssa Targaryen

Before she was the Red Queen she belonged to a princess who flew for the sheer pleasure of it. Alyssa Targaryen, daughter of the Old King and wife to Prince Baelon, was a boisterous, sharp-tongued woman with no patience for the ceremonial side of her rank, and she took Meleys up hard and often ÔÇö racing her brothers' dragons over Blackwater Bay, riding out in weather the keepers advised against. It is largely down to Alyssa that Meleys learned to fly the way she flew. A dragon that spends its youth being asked to go faster does not forget how.

Her second rider: Rhaenys Targaryen

Rhaenys claimed her mother's dragon and kept her for the rest of a long life spent being passed over. The realm had twice declined to seat her on a throne she had the better claim to, and she had absorbed the lesson with a dryness that people found unnerving; she was the Queen Who Never Was, and she was perfectly capable of saying so herself.

The two of them were the best-matched pair in the war and possibly the best-matched pair in this whole collection. Both were older than the people around them, both had been underestimated for decades, and both turned out to be considerably more dangerous than the estimate. In the war's first months Rhaenys and Meleys were what the blacks reached for when something needed doing properly ÔÇö the blockade of the Gullet, the sudden appearances over the narrow sea, the standing threat that kept the greens' shipping honest.

Watching from below, men noted that Rhaenys never used the dragon for display. She had spent her whole life being looked at and had evidently had enough of it. When Meleys went up, it was because something was about to happen.

What became of it ÔÇö if an ending is written, it is here. Spoilers.

Meleys died at Rook's Rest, ambushed in the air by Vhagar and Sunfyre together ÔÇö the first time both sides learned that dragons could be baited and killed by other dragons. Rhaenys died with her, and the war stopped being a dispute and became a slaughter.