Summerhall

The Targaryens' summer palace, destroyed in a night of fire and grief the realm still whispers about.

The fuller tale

Summerhall was the Targaryens' argument that the dragon could rest ÔÇö not a fortress but a pleasure palace, lightly walled and full of music, raised in the Dornish Marches to celebrate the peace that finally brought Dorne into the realm. For three generations it was the family's soft place: summers away from the capital's stink, harpists and weddings, the court of a king who preferred it to his throne. That the Targaryens built exactly one castle for joy, and that it is the one that burned, is the kind of symmetry the family's history deals in.

What happened on the night it died is the saga's most carefully kept secret. A king was there ÔÇö the old hero of Ashford Meadow, grown grey chasing the prophecy of the dragon reborn ÔÇö with eggs, wildfire, or hope, depending on which whispered account you trust; the fragments the books allow are burned pages and grief. King Aegon the Fifth died in the fire with his dearest, the realm lost the best of its Kingsguard trying to save them, and on that same night, amid the smoke and lamentation, Rhaegar Targaryen was born ÔÇö a prince conceived in a palace of summer and delivered from its pyre, who grew up haunted by the place, riding out with his harp to sleep in its ruins and returning with songs that made maidens weep. Whatever prophecy died at Summerhall, Rhaegar clearly believed he had inherited it, and the tale's whole tragedy ÔÇö Harrenhal, Lyanna, the Trident ÔÇö runs downhill from that belief.

The ruin keeps a second, smaller history: it was among these blackened stones that Robert Baratheon won three battles in a single day at his rebellion's start, the storm lord announcing himself on the Targaryens' field of grief. And far to the north, an old blind maester at the Wall carries the palace in his name and never speaks of it ÔÇö Aemon of House Targaryen, who refused the crown that went to the brother who burned. Summerhall is the tale's quietest ruin: no ghosts anyone will swear to, only the certainty that the family that dreamed of dragons finally called one up, and it was fire, and it was grief.

The fallen of this place ÔÇö if any, they are named here. Spoilers.

No death the chronicle records has come to this ground ÔÇö or none the maesters have set down.