Aerys I Targaryen

The king's second son: bookish beyond even his father, more interested in dusty prophecies than in ruling or fathering heirs. The age will ask more of him than he ever wanted to give.

The fuller tale

The second of Daeron the Good’s sons grows up in the considerable shadow of the first, and seems, for most of his early life, entirely content to stay there. Where Baelor collects martial glory and political capital in equal measure, Aerys collects books — old prophecies, obscure histories, the kind of dusty scholarship that wins a prince very little standing at court and very much peace to be left alone with his own interests.

At Ashford Meadow he is present without being central, a royal prince attending his family’s business without any particular appetite for the tournament, the politics, or the trial that consumes his brother’s summer. It is a posture that serves him well for most of his life — the throne, as far as Aerys is concerned, belongs to people with more enthusiasm for it than he has ever managed to feel.

Circumstances he never sought conspire, within a few years of the tourney, to hand him the crown anyway: his father dead of plague, his elder brother already dead of a trial’s violence, his nephew and grand-nephews swept away in the same sickness that took the king. Aerys becomes king less by ambition than by attrition, the last man standing in a line the realm had assumed was secure several deaths ago.

His reign, by the reckoning of most histories, is neither disastrous nor especially distinguished — a scholar-king ruling a peace he did nothing to build and showing little interest in expanding it, more comfortable with his books than his bannermen, and leaving behind, at his own death, no heir of his body to carry the succession any further along the branch that should, by rights, have been the dynasty’s main line.

The page and the screen

Aerys appears in the first season chiefly as one of the royal party at Ashford Meadow, a minor presence beside his more dramatically central brothers Baelor and Maekar — the novella gives him little to do at this stage of his life, and the show follows suit rather than inventing business for a character whose significance to Targaryen history mostly postdates the events The Hedge Knight actually dramatizes.

Their fate — if death has found them, it is written here. Open at your peril.

The chronicle records no death for this soul — they are living when the tale leaves them, or their ending is a page the maesters have yet to turn.