Blackfyre

The blade every Targaryen king carried, given away to a bastard and turned into a claim.

The blade itself

Blackfyre is a bastard sword, hand-and-a-half, long enough to be used from the saddle with one hand and from the ground with two. It is the heavier and broader of the two swords the Targaryens brought out of the east, where Dark Sister is the lighter and finer, and the two are so alike in the character of the steel that maesters have wondered aloud whether they came off the same anvil, made as a pair for the same house before there were any dragons in Westeros at all. Nothing proves it. The suggestion has never quite gone away.

The blade is black ÔÇö genuinely black, not the smoke-grey that passes for it in most Valyrian work ÔÇö and the ripples in it are deep and slow, more like the grain of old wood than like water. In sunlight it does not gleam so much as smoulder. The pommel and guard were reworked more than once over the centuries as fashions changed, which tells you something about how the sword was used: as regalia, mostly, worn at court by men who had a dragon for the serious work.

It is Valyrian steel and therefore cannot be replaced, repaired by any ordinary smith, or dulled. The craft died with the Freehold; the surviving Qohorik masters can only reshape what exists. A sword that cannot be made again and cannot be destroyed by use is unusually well suited to being an emblem of legitimacy, and that is exactly what happened to this one.

The kingÔÇÖs sword

Aegon the Conqueror wore Blackfyre. So did nearly every Targaryen king who followed him, for a century and a half, in a straightforward and slightly boring way: the man on the throne had the sword, the sword meant the man on the throne, and nobody wasted a thought on it. It was worn at coronations and at trials. It hung on the wall in the Red Keep. Its actual use in anger was rare, because the family had a shorter and more decisive argument available to it whenever it liked.

Along the way it acquired the quiet weight that objects get when nobody questions them. To see Blackfyre on a manÔÇÖs hip was to know, without asking, who he was. That is a very useful property in a sword and a catastrophic one in a gift.

The gift

Aegon the Fourth ÔÇö called the Unworthy by his own realm, which took some doing ÔÇö spent his reign fathering bastards, legitimising them on his deathbed, and generally arranging matters so that the century after him would be spent bleeding. Some years before the end he gave Blackfyre to his favourite natural son, Daemon, rather than to his trueborn heir. Whether it was affection, malice, a whim, or a considered piece of sabotage has been argued ever since and there is no way to settle it.

What matters is what the realm heard. A sword nobody had ever seen on anyone but a king went to a bastard, and the bastard took the swordÔÇÖs name as his house name and became Daemon Blackfyre. His half-brother Daeron got the crown and the throne and every legal argument, and looked bookish and quiet next to a magnificent young warrior wearing the emblem of kingship, and half the lords of Westeros drew the conclusion they had been invited to draw. A piece of steel had been turned into a claim, which is a thing swords can do only when everyone has already agreed what they mean.

The rebellions

The first Blackfyre rising ended on the Redgrass Field, and the fighting there was some of the worst the realm has seen ÔÇö a very large battle, decided by archery from a hill at exactly the wrong moment for the men in the middle of it. Four more risings followed over the next two generations, each smaller and stranger than the last, and by the end the name had become less a claim than a habit.

The sword left the country. Aegor Rivers, called Bittersteel ÔÇö another of the UnworthyÔÇÖs bastards, and the most implacably committed man in the whole affair ÔÇö carried Blackfyre across the narrow sea after the first defeat and founded the Golden Company in exile, an army of the dispossessed built around the proposition that the sword would come home one day. The blade went with the pretenders for generations, brought back into Westeros with one rising, taken out again after the next.

Where it is now

That is where the record stops being satisfying. BlackfyreÔÇÖs last confirmed whereabouts are with the exiled line, and the exiled lineÔÇÖs last confirmed male member ran out somewhere in the free cities in circumstances the histories describe with suspicious confidence. Some maesters say the sword is simply lost ÔÇö sold, hidden, dropped in a harbour, hanging unrecognised in a Volantene counting house. Others assume the Golden Company kept it, because a company built on a claim does not mislay the claim.

It is worth noticing what an object like this is for. A sword that everyone in Westeros recognises, that legitimises the man holding it before he has said a word, does not stay lost forever in a story that is running out of thrones. Of the two great missing blades, Blackfyre is the one people are actually looking for.

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

Blackfyre went east across the narrow sea with Bittersteel after the Redgrass Field and stayed with the exiled line for generations. Its current whereabouts are one of the great open questions of the books ÔÇö and a sword that legitimises a claimant is exactly the kind of thing that does not stay lost forever.

Daemon Blackfyre himself fell on the Redgrass Field with his eldest sons, shot down at the height of the battle by an archer on a hill who had once called him brother. That archer was Brynden Rivers, who took Dark Sister up afterwards. The two Valyrian blades of the Conqueror ended that day in the hands of two of his bastard great-grandsons, on opposite sides.