Chapter 1

All her life, Queen Rhaella Targaryen had worried.

When she was very young, she worried about small things. Like her name, for instance. Rhaella loathed her name. It sounded as if someone had mashed the sound "ray" and the name "Ella" together, creating some lopsided monstrosity. When she first learned her letters, she decided to write her name and present it to her mother as a gift. The maester who taught her hadn't bothered to teach her how Valyrian names were supposed to be spelled, so for her name day that year, Rhaella's mother had gotten a spotted piece of parchment with the word "Rayelleh" written in childish script on it.

Her mother had smiled at her and accepted the ruined parchment graciously, despite the fact that the two serving girls present had to try to repress their laughter. But then her eyes misted over, and she started talking to someone who wasn't there. One of the serving girls ushered the princess out, and Rhaella followed without question. Father had said she wasn't supposed to bother Mother when she got milky, as Rhaella herself referred to it in her mind.

"My daughter gave me the most wonderful gift, Robert," the little princess heard her mother say as she was ushered out of the room.

Once, when she asked her mother about her name, the Queen told her daughter that her sister's name was Rhaelle, and when they were girls they had promised to one another that if they ever had daughters, they would name their first after each other. "That was before they married her off to Lord Baratheon," she said, spitting with disgust.

"What would you have named me if you hadn't made that promise to Aunt Rhaelle?" Rhaella said, scooting closer to her mother.

Her mother silent for a long time. Not in a way that suggested she was trying to think of an answer, but rather that she had once known the answer, but had forgotten it, and was now searching for it. "Oh," she said after a long time, "Daenerys."

Princess Rhaella repeated the name, liking the shape of it on her lips. It is a queenly name, she thought to herself.

As she aged, however, Rhaella began to worry about other, more important things. Fire, death, power...her brother's insanity.

The Targaryen princess was as surprised as anybody when her brother went mad. He did let off certain telltale signs when he was young, but she easily dismissed them as over eagerness. A year older than his sister but a foot smaller, Aerys knew he was to be king, and relished it. Too young to grow a beard on his own, he would cut off a horse's tail and tied the hair around his head with a string. For his crown, he gathered fallen twigs in the Kingswood and twisted them together with even more string. With his crown and his beard, the young heir to the throne would prance around the royal grounds, declaring himself king of Westeros.

"That's stupid," his sister would say. "You're not Father."

Aerys whipped his head around, his eyes narrowed. Then broke out into a smile and shouted with glee, "You're right! I'm not Father! I'm better than him! ALL HAIL KING AERYS THE SECOND!"

Rhaella flung the book she was reading aside and snatched the beard from her brother's chin. "GIVE IT BACK!" he shrieked. Aery's crown fell off as he chased his sister up the stairs of the Red Keep. Reaching a high wall, Princess Rhaella flung the bunch of horse hair into the sea, her brother not far behind her.

"There," she said, turning towards him. "It's gone. It's gone and it will never come back." Her brother sank to his knees and cried. Rhaella resisted the urge to put her arms around him and apologize. Mother told her that princesses never apologize. Ever. Instead, she ran back and fetched his crown from the steps and tossed that into the sea, too. "Kings don't wear twig crowns," she yelled at her weeping brother. "Kings wear golden crowns. You will wear a golden crown, and so will your son, when he succeeds you."

Similar incidents had occurred many times before, Aerys doing something his younger sister thought stupid or weird and Rhaella retaliating by shoving him around a bit. That particular event, however, was the worst she could recall, and from that point on, the young heir to the throne had acquired this air of slight paranoia about him. He stopped playing anywhere near his sister, and no longer wore crowns made of twigs and beards made of horse hair.

But, whether it was about her name or her brother's madness, Rhaella Targaryen had always had this sense of worry, of anxiety about her, like there was a storm coming, a massive one, and it would bring with it something terrible and powerful.