Aemond Targaryen
The second of Alicent's sons: dragonless as a boy and mocked for it, until at ten he claimed Vhagar — the greatest living dragon — and paid an eye for her. 'One eye for a kingdom,' he calls it. He studies; he waits.
The fuller tale
Aemond spends his childhood being the family's specific embarrassment — Alicent's second son, dragonless in a household where dragons are the only currency that matters, mocked by his own Velaryon cousins for riding nothing while they each claim a hatchling. He answers the insult with a solution nobody else would have attempted: at ten years old, hours after her previous rider's funeral, he claims Vhagar — the oldest and largest living dragon in the world — for himself, arriving dragonless at dawn and leaving, by nightfall, the most dangerously mounted child in Westeros.
The claiming costs him an eye, taken in the brawl that follows when his Velaryon cousins catch up to him and Lucerys, cornered and outmatched on the ground, slashes at him with a dagger. Aemond turns the wound into his signature rather than his shame, wearing a sapphire in the socket where his eye used to be and framing the whole exchange, with the particular coldness that defines him, as a fair trade: an eye for a dragon, and a debt he intends to see repaid in full at some point of his own choosing.
He grows into the greens' most disciplined and most dangerous asset — better read than Aegon, less impulsive than Criston Cole, and carrying a grudge with the patience of a man who has done the arithmetic and knows exactly how much interest it has accrued. Where his brother drinks and his mother negotiates, Aemond trains, studies, and waits, and the court that once laughed at the one-eyed prince learns, over the course of the war, to be considerably more careful around him.
The moment that defines the entire conflict's turn from politics to open butchery belongs to him: chasing Lucerys into a storm over Shipbreaker Bay, whether meaning murder or simply meaning to frighten his young cousin, Aemond and Vhagar close on Arrax and take dragon and rider together in a single strike. Whether it was command or accident — whether Vhagar, ancient and barely controlled even by an experienced rider, simply stopped listening — is a question the sources argue and Aemond himself, by most accounts, never bothers to answer either way.
His command of Harrenhal, after Daemon abandons it, is the strangest posting the war offers any of its principals — the one-eyed prince alone in the cursed castle with the bastard herb-witch Alys Rivers, who is said to read storms and know things a normal court would call witchcraft. What exactly passes between them, and what exactly Aemond becomes in that isolation, is left disputed by the histories, which agree only that whoever rides out from Harrenhal at the war's climax is not quite the same prince who rode in.
By the war's final act, Aemond has effectively assumed command of the greens' war effort in his incapacitated brother's name, running the conflict with a single-mindedness that makes him, by most tallies, the single most competent commander either side fields — and also its most feared, a reputation earned honestly, one burned town at a time.
The page and the screen
The show gives Aemond considerably more screen presence and psychological shading in its aired seasons than Fire & Blood's terse chronicling ever affords him — his rivalry with Aegon, his isolation, his particular cruelty are all dramatized directly, where the book relays his actions mostly through their consequences and the testimony of people who feared or hated him. The Harrenhal chapter with Alys Rivers is one place both tellings agree to stay genuinely mysterious, letting Aemond's private motives remain essentially unknowable in either version.
In the show, season by season
Season One. In Driftmark — Traded an eye for the greatest dragon in the world, and counts it a bargain. Says so. In The Green Council — Hunts his brother through the gutters and would rather keep what he finds. In The Black Queen — Wanted to frighten the boy, not kill him. Vhagar had her own opinion. 'One eye for a kingdom.'
Season Two. In The Red Dragon and the Gold — Burns the enemy and the brother in one pass, and walks away regent in all but name. In Regent — Prince regent — the realm in the hand that burned its king. In Smallfolk — A regent who answers arithmetic with fire. In The Red Sowing — For the first time since Rook's Rest — outnumbered in the sky. In The Queen Who Ever Was — Regent of a city his enemies feed and his allies flee.
In the books
Fire & Blood — The Dance of the Dragons. In The Dance Begins — Regent, kinslayer-in-waiting, and the realm's most dangerous man. In The Fall of the Dragons — Burned the rivers to lure one man. It worked.
Where they stand, season by season
Mentioned in the chronicle
- Rhaenyra combs the shores of Shipbreaker Bay until she finds a wing of Arrax — and speaks her first words in an episode of grief: 'I want Aemond Targaryen.' (S2·E1)
Their fate — if death has found them, it is written here. Open at your peril.
The books: Dark Sister through the eye, above the Gods Eye (F&B, ch. 6)
Above the Gods Eye, Daemon leapt from Caraxes onto Vhagar's back and drove Dark Sister through his nephew's sapphire eye as the dragons fell locked together. Aemond's bones were found years later, chained to Vhagar's saddle, the sword still in his skull.
The series has not yet flown Aemond to his final battle; his fate remains ahead of the current seasons.
Above the Gods Eye, in the single combat the whole war has been building toward, Aemond on Vhagar meets Daemon on Caraxes — and loses, in the end, to a maneuver almost too reckless to plan for. Daemon leaps from his own dragon's back onto Vhagar's and drives Dark Sister through Aemond's remaining eye as the two dragons fall from the sky still locked together. His remains, the book notes with a certain grim precision, are found years afterward still chained to Vhagar's saddle, sword buried in the skull — the last and most literal payment of the debt he swore, as a boy, an eye had bought him.