The Forty-First Year after Aegon’s Conquest was marked by grief, suspicion, and whispers. Yet in the years that followed, the reign of Jaehaerys would become known as the great reconciliation of a broken realm. Few in the Seven Kingdoms would ever have guessed that such peace might be born out of a union so fraught with controversy, and yet so bound by the King’s own desire.

Princess {{user}}, the firstborn child of Prince Aegon and Princess Rhaena, had been the jewel of House Targaryen from the hour of her birth. Maegor the Cruel, black-hearted and heavy-handed, had declared her his heir, though it was less from affection than from his need to bind her mother, his queen, more tightly to him. Even then, courtiers and lords alike whispered that no truer beauty had ever been born to dragonlords. The name of the girl, only three years old when Maegor raised her upon his lap in the Red Keep’s throne room, spread as far as the Stepstones, and from thence to Lys and Braavos.

To Jaehaerys, her uncle, she was never merely a tale or a name to charm the songs. He had known her since her swaddling years. He remembered her toddling steps within the halls of Dragonstone, her bright eyes and unyielding laughter, even when her mother’s household was steeped in gloom. Jaehaerys was but seven years older, yet as he passed into manhood, his gaze fell more often upon his niece, no longer a babe, but a maiden flowering before his eyes.

When Maegor’s cruelty ended in blood and the Iron Throne was claimed by Jaehaerys’s own right, the new King did not at once declare his intention to wed. Alyssa Velaryon, his mother, whispered that his sister Alysanne was the match the realm expected, and many at court assumed so. A marriage of brother and sister would keep the blood of old Valyria strong, as had ever been the custom. But Jaehaerys, even in those early days of rule, harbored another wish. His heart, as he oft reminded himself, had already been given.

No one could gainsay him, once he spoke the truth. He was King, the Iron Throne beneath him, the realm weary of strife. Who among the lords would dare to deny him? Thus it was, in the Forty-Seventh Year after Aegon’s Conquest, that the banns were read: King Jaehaerys would wed Princess {{user}}, daughter of Rhaena, granddaughter of Aegon the Conqueror himself.

She was but sixteen when the day of the wedding dawned. Sixteen, and fair beyond telling. The singers did not lie. Her hair, pale as silver-thread, fell down her back in rivers; her eyes, cool and bright, were the pale lilac of a spring dawn over Dragonstone. She moved as if she had been born to wear a crown, and when she smiled, as she did upon her uncle when he took her hand, the Red Keep seemed almost to brighten after the long shadows of Maegor’s reign.

Jaehaerys was three-and-twenty then, hardened by struggle, yet his composure was tested sorely that day. For though he had been crowned already, though he sat the Iron Throne by right and custom, he felt himself trembling like a boy again in the presence of this maiden he had long admired, long desired, and now at last could claim.

The wedding feast was held in the Great Hall. The minstrels sang of Aegon and Visenya, of Rhaenys the gentle, but soon they turned their voices to {{user}} the Beautiful. She shone at Jaehaerys’s side. And when the guests had eaten their fill, Jaehaerys led his wife to the center of the hall, where a dancing floor had been laid out.

“My queen,” he murmured, holding out his hand to her. “Might I claim the first dance, before you are beset by other partners?”