Sheepstealer

An ugly, mud-brown wild dragon who preferred mutton to men ÔÇö and took the least likely rider of the war.

The beast itself

Sheepstealer was brown, and everybody who wrote about him made a point of saying how disappointing that was. Not bronze, not copper, not the red-brown of good leather ÔÇö the dull mud-brown of a ditch, dark and unreflective, with none of the metallic sheen that made the other beasts of Dragonstone worth looking at. He was big, having had a century and more to grow, and he was in no way handsome: heavy in the head, blunt in the snout, with an untidy look about him even in the air. The chroniclers call him ugly with a consistency they never managed about anything else.

He was also, by dragon standards, unambitious. Sheepstealer had haunted the Dragonmont for generations and in all that time had never done anything worth a chapter: he took sheep, and occasionally a cow, and had a marked and much-remarked preference for mutton over men. He was wary rather than savage ÔÇö he watched people from a distance, kept his caves high, and put himself in the air the moment anyone came up the slope with intent. Shepherds cursed him and shot at him and lost stock to him and did not, on the whole, fear him. A dragon that steals your livestock and declines to eat you is a nuisance, and a nuisance is what he was for a hundred years.

Those who tried to claim him

When the blacks needed riders, Sheepstealer was on the list of beasts worth attempting ÔÇö old, big, and not the Cannibal. Several dragonseeds went at him and every one of them went at him the same way: up the mountain in company, with ropes and a whip and a great deal of shouting, in the manner the dragonkeepers taught for handling a beast raised in a stall.

It did not work, and it was never going to. Sheepstealer had never been in a stall in his life. He had spent a century learning that men who came up the slope in a group were men to get away from, and the ones who pressed him found out that a wary dragon is not a gentle one. The attempts made the mountain worse rather than better: after them he moved his caves higher and stopped coming down for the flocks.

Her dragon: the girl called Nettles

The one who got him was a brown-skinned, scrawny, foul-mouthed girl of about sixteen who nobody could account for ÔÇö no name worth recording, no household, no evidence of the blood that was supposed to be necessary. She did not bring rope or whip or company. She stole a sheep, cut its throat, dragged it up the mountain, left it where he would find it, and went away.

Then she did it again the next morning, and the morning after that, for weeks, sitting a little closer each time and never once approaching him. It was not sorcery and it was not Valyrian blood. It was the method a shepherd uses on a difficult dog, applied with enormous patience to something that could have swallowed her, and it worked where every proper attempt had failed. By the end she was bloody to the elbows every dawn and the dragon was letting her stand at his shoulder.

The pairing that came out of it was the odd one of the whole war. Nettles flew him without saddle-manners and without ceremony; the two of them raided, scouted and made a considerable nuisance of themselves over the Gullet and the Bay of Crabs, and she smelled of sheep permanently and did not care. Seen from outside, it looked like an arrangement between equals rather than a rider and a mount, which unsettled people at court far more than the fighting did.

The dragon in the songs

Nobody sang about Sheepstealer for a hundred years and then everybody did, which is a fair summary of how the Dance made reputations. The version that survives in the Riverlands has the girl taming him with a kiss or a word of High Valyrian, because a hundredweight of dead mutton is not a thing that scans. The maesters' argument about her is duller and more revealing: they cannot let go of the question of whether she had the blood, since a girl of no particular parentage riding a dragon by kindness and persistence undoes a great deal of what the Targaryens had spent three centuries implying about themselves.

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

Nettles and Sheepstealer flew away east together when Rhaenyra ordered her killed, and were never reliably seen again. Of all the dragon stories of the Dance, theirs is the only one that might have ended well.