His lordship would not have long to wait to know his fate. The regency was almost at an end. With the former Hand and Queen Regent both wounded and silent, Lord Daemon Velaryon and the remaining members of the queen’s council ruled the realm as best they could, “saying little and doing less” in the words of Grand Maester Benifer.
On the twentieth day of the ninth moon of 50 AC, Jaehaerys Targaryen reached his sixteenth nameday and became a man grown. By the laws of the Seven Kingdoms, he was now old enough to rule in his own right, with no further need of a regent. All across the Seven Kingdoms, lords and smallfolk alike waited to see what kind of king he would be.
A Time of Testing
The Realm Remade
King Jaehaerys I Targaryen returned to King’s Landing alone, on the wings of his dragon, Vermithor. Five knights of his Kingsguard had come before him, arriving three days earlier to ascertain that all was in readiness for the king’s arrival. Queen Alysanne did not accompany him. Given the uncertainty that surrounded their marriage and the fraught nature of the king’s relationship with his mother, Queen Alyssa, and the lords of the council, it was thought prudent that she remain on Dragonstone for a time, with her Wise Women and the rest of the Kingsguard.
The day was not an auspicious one, Grand Maester Benifer tells us. The skies were grey, and a persistent drizzle had fallen half the morning. Benifer and the rest of the council awaited the king’s coming in the inner yard of the Red Keep, cloaked and hooded against the rain. Elsewhere about the castle, knights and squires and stableboys and washerwomen and scores of other functionaries went about their daily chores, pausing from time to time to glance up at the sky. And when at last the sound of wings was heard, and a guardsman on the eastern walls caught sight of Vermithor’s bronze scales in the distance, there came a cheer that grew and grew and grew, rolling past the Red Keep’s walls, down Aegon’s High Hill, across the city, and well out into the countryside.
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