King's Landing

Aegon's city on Blackwater Bay, where good King Daeron keeps a court of maesters and septons — and where Bloodraven's thousand eyes see everything, and one.

The fuller tale

King’s Landing in the reign of Daeron II the Good is a capital finally permitted to be dull, in the specific and valuable sense that a kingdom recovering from civil war finds dullness a luxury. Daeron ended the First Blackfyre Rebellion and then spent his remaining years doing the unglamorous work of keeping it ended — patient government, a Dornish peace bought with two royal marriages instead of another war, and a court that runs on maesters and septons rather than swords, at least on the surface. The Red Keep under his rule is a working palace rather than a battleground, which is precisely the condition that lets the realm’s deeper fractures fester quietly instead of erupting.

By the time of Whitewalls those fractures belong to a different reign: Daeron is gone, his heir Baelor Breakspear died on Ashford Meadow, and the throne has passed first to the frail, bookish Aerys I and, behind him, to the small council’s most formidable member — Brynden Rivers, called Bloodraven, Aerys’s Hand and master of whisperers, who runs the intelligence of an entire kingdom out of the Red Keep’s chambers with a thoroughness that makes the Second Blackfyre Rebellion’s failure look, in hindsight, almost inevitable. The city itself barely appears on the page in these tales, and that absence is its own kind of presence — every road Dunk and Egg travel, every plot they stumble into, ultimately answers to decisions made within these walls, whether the boy squire realizes yet how close he one day sits to making them himself.

In the first season

Good King Daeron keeps his peace from here — a peace bought at Redgrass Field twelve years past, and dearer to him than any son.

Born here

Souls the story brings here

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

• King Daeron II Targaryen — Taken by the Great Spring Sickness (the books' telling)
• Valarr Targaryen — Taken by the Great Spring Sickness (the books' telling)