Summerhall

The dragons' pleasure palace in the Dornish Marches, lightly walled and full of music — Prince Maekar's seat, and the home Egg slipped away from. Its sad fire is still fifty years away.

The fuller tale

Summerhall is the dragons’ holiday house — a lightly walled palace in the Dornish Marches built for music and warm evenings rather than defense, the sort of seat a family builds only once it has stopped expecting to need walls at all. In this era it belongs to Prince Maekar Targaryen, third son of Daeron the Good, a hard and joyless man who nonetheless keeps his household in a palace built for gaiety — and it is from Summerhall’s stables and side doors that his fourth son, a bald boy with no patience for princely tedium, slips away disguised as nobody in particular to squire for a hedge knight he has only just met.

That runaway prince is, of course, Egg, and Summerhall’s significance to the tale is entirely retrospective: a comfortable palace that a future king once found so stifling he ran from it in a servant’s castoffs. The castle’s own famous catastrophe — the fire that will one day gut it on the night a grandson is born beneath a bad omen — is still decades off in this telling, a shadow the story is careful not to let readers see falling yet, though it is already there to be noticed if one knows to look.

In the first season

Prince Maekar's seat in the marches, where a bald little princeling decided he would rather squire in secret than be one of the Drunken's whipping boys.

Born here

Souls the story brings here

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

No death the chronicle records has come to this ground — or none the maesters have set down.