King Daeron II Targaryen
Daeron the Good: the king who joined Dorne to the realm with marriages instead of armies, and paid for it with the Blackfyre Rebellion. Bookish, mild, and stronger than his enemies ever understood ÔÇö the peace of the age is his making.
A soul of House Targaryen, born at King's Landing.
The fuller tale
Season One
In The Hedge Knight ÔÇö The Good: bookish, peaceable, and better at ruling than any warrior king. Aerion recants. The trial is won ÔÇö but across the field Prince Maekar's mace has found his brother Baelor's helm, and the Hand of the King is swaying in the saddle. In A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms ÔÇö Buries his best son and keeps his peace. The peace is all he has left. The blow that seemed nothing was everything: Baelor Breakspear, Prince of Dragonstone, Hand of the King, dies of a broken skull ÔÇö killed by his brother's mace in a hedge knight's quarrel.
Where they stand. King's Landing.
How it ends for them
On the page. Taken by the Great Spring Sickness (TSS, ch. 1)
Daeron the Good died in the Great Spring Sickness of 209, with tens of thousands of his people ÔÇö the gentle king who gave the realm Dorne and peace, gone in a season of dying that spared neither crowns nor cradles.
Daeron the Good dies in the Great Spring Sickness of 209 AC, a plague that sweeps the Seven Kingdoms indifferent to crowns, carrying off tens of thousands of his subjects in the same season it takes him. It is a death with no drama in it at all ÔÇö no battle, no betrayal, just a fever that does not care whom it kills ÔÇö and its timing could hardly be crueler: it follows within the same year as his heir BaelorÔÇÖs death at Ashford Meadow, so that the peace Daeron spent a reign assembling loses both its architect and its intended successor within months of each other.
Their chapters, book by book
Where the page and the screen part
Daeron II remains offstage through the events of The Hedge Knight itself, mentioned as the distant royal authority whose peace is being tested rather than a character who appears in scenes, and the showÔÇÖs first season follows the novellaÔÇÖs lead in keeping him a name rather than a face. Whatever screen time he eventually gets will most likely arrive if a later season adapts material set earlier ÔÇö the Blackfyre Rebellion itself lies outside any of the three published novellas, told instead in the historical volume Fire & Blood, which the show has drawn on more directly for its earlier prequel.
Their journey
Where the two tellings send them to the same place the road runs whole; where they part, the screen keeps the left and the books the right.