Blackfyre & the Hedge Knight's Road

The long century after the dragons died, when Targaryen bastards raised a black dragon on a red field and rebelled against their trueborn kin again and again ÔÇö and, through the same fading years, a hedge knight of low birth and a hidden prince walked the kingsroad into the tail end of an age.

The Great Bastards and Blackfyre

A hundred years after the Dance sat Aegon the Fourth ÔÇö remembered by his own realm as the Unworthy, which took some doing. He spent his reign fathering bastards on any woman who caught his eye, and then, on his deathbed, legitimised the whole brood at once, scattering pretenders across the century to come like seeds. Chief among them was his favourite natural son, Daemon, to whom Aegon gave the Conqueror's own Valyrian sword, Blackfyre ÔÇö the blade every Targaryen king had worn. Daemon took the sword's name for his house.

A sword nobody had ever seen on anyone but a king, worn by a magnificent young bastard warrior, was as good as a claim, and half the lords of the realm drew the conclusion they had been invited to draw. The First Blackfyre Rebellion ended on the Redgrass Field, one of the bloodiest battles the realm has known, where Daemon Blackfyre and his eldest sons were shot down at the height of the fighting by the arrows of his own half-brother, the pale sorcerer-archer Brynden Rivers, called Bloodraven. Another half-brother, Bittersteel, carried the sword into exile across the sea and founded the Golden Company on the promise that it would come home one day.

Dunk and Egg

Through these same restless years walked two men whose road is told in its own tale, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. One was Ser Duncan the Tall ÔÇö Dunk ÔÇö a hedge knight sprung from the gutters of Flea Bottom, enormous, plain, and possessed of a stubborn, unfashionable decency in an age that had little use for it. The other was his squire, a small bald boy who called himself Egg, and who was in truth Prince Aegon Targaryen, a younger son of the royal house travelling in disguise to see the realm his family ruled.

Their road ran through the great Tourney at Ashford Meadow, where a trial of seven very nearly cost Dunk his life and his hand, and on through the small wars, droughts and injustices of a kingdom drifting between crises. It is a quieter history than the wars of dragons ÔÇö a story of one large, honest man doing the right thing at cost to himself, again and again ÔÇö but the boy at his side would one day be king, and would remember what he learned walking the kingsroad in a hedge knight's shadow.

The last risings and Summerhall

The Blackfyre cause would not die quietly. Four more rebellions and conspiracies flickered up over the following generations, each smaller and stranger than the last, kept alive in exile by the Golden Company and the long memory of Bittersteel's line, until at last the male Blackfyres were said to be spent. The realm limped from crisis to crisis under a run of unremarkable kings.

That squire Egg did become king in the end, against all likelihood, as Aegon the Fifth ÔÇö the Unlikely ÔÇö and he tried to use the crown for the smallfolk against the will of his own great lords, who resented every reform. Haunted, some say, by prophecies and by the memory of dragons, Aegon V gathered his family and their friends at the summer palace of Summerhall to attempt something no one had managed in a century and a half: to wake dragons from stone. It ended in fire. The tragedy of Summerhall closes this age and opens the next ÔÇö for on that same night of flame, a prince was born who would be named Rhaegar.