CHAPTER I: The Princess and the Bastard

The Red Keep was never a kind place for children, though it teemed with them—noble-born and baseborn, sons of lords and sons of whores, all caught in the web of courtly intrigue and silent, watchful eyes. Princess Daenerys Targaryen, daughter of King Aegon IV and Queen Naerys, was no exception. Even as a girl of ten, she walked the shadowed halls with the quiet poise of a septa, pale and watchful, with hair like silver floss and a voice soft as spring rain.

The court called her dutiful, and they meant it kindly, though always with a hint of pity. She spent her mornings in the sept with her mother, bent over prayers and needlework, and her afternoons in the library with Maester Alfrid, who said she read better than most lords. But even the most pious of daughters have hearts, and Daenerys had learned young that love in the Red Keep was rare and fleeting, as brittle as the bones of summer sparrows.

It was Daemon Waters who made her laugh.

He was a bastard—though none dared call him so within earshot of the king. Aegon had seen to that, raising the boy bold as a lioncub beneath the very nose of his queen, and knighting him at twelve before all the court. Born of Lady Daena Targaryen—who had once been locked in the Maidenvault to preserve her virtue and emerged with a son instead—Daemon was wild where Daeron was solemn, fearless where Daenerys was careful, and beautiful in the way that troubled septas whispered about behind closed doors.

They were both ten when they met in earnest.

He had knocked her over in the godswood. She had been sketching a sparrow in the shade of the heart tree, her feet tucked beneath her in a way her mother said was unseemly. Daemon came careening through the foliage with a wooden sword in hand, chased by two other squires. He tripped on a root, fell headlong into the moss, and landed in her lap.

"You'll crush me," Daenerys said with a startled squeak.

He grinned up at her with leaves in his hair. "Then you'd be the first thing in the castle I've conquered."

After that, they were seldom apart.

While the king ignored them both and the queen withdrew deeper into her books and prayers, Daenerys and Daemon found each other in stolen corners of the castle. They raced along the ramparts like errant knights, played at swordfighting with sticks, and invented their own heraldry. She chose a silver doe for her sigil, "gentle and swift," and he chose a black dragon, winged and crowned.

Daemon called her "my silver doe." She called him "foolish knight."

When Queen Naerys fell ill with a coughing fever in the winter of their eleventh year, Daenerys refused to leave her side, even as the maesters warned that she might take sick herself. It was Daemon who brought her bread and books, sneaking them into the queen's chambers with a conspirator's grin. "Even knights must feed their ladies," he'd say. "And even ladies must keep from fading."

Her mother recovered, but Daenerys never forgot.

The Red Keep aged them quickly. Gossip followed them like a shadow. There were murmurs among the ladies of the court, snide comments whispered over embroidery—the bastard with the prince's pride, and the princess who smiles only for him. Lord Butterwell once remarked in the king's hearing that Daemon and Daenerys looked well together.

Aegon had laughed. "A princess for a bastard? What next, a lion for a goat?"

But Aegon did not forbid them from seeing one another. Perhaps he thought it harmless, or perhaps he saw something else in Daemon—something of himself, something dangerous.

One evening, in the royal gardens as the sun dipped crimson over Blackwater Bay, Daenerys told Daemon she wished to see Oldtown, and the Citadel, and even Dorne, where the sun never seemed to set.

He looked at her long then, his dark eyes solemn. "I will take you, one day," he promised. "I will take you anywhere."

And for a moment, the world seemed to hold its breath.

But time moves swift in the halls of kings, and vows made in youth seldom survive the chill of winter. Daemon would be knighted before his twelfth name day. Daenerys would be promised in marriage before her fifteenth. And love—true love, whispered love, impossible love—would be the first and deepest wound they carried.