The Stranger had other plans. For surely it was his dread hand behind the ill chance that brought the two princelings together at Storm’s End, when the dragon Arrax raced before a gathering storm to deliver Lucerys Velaryon to the safety of the castle yard, only to find Aemond Targaryen there before him.
Borros Baratheon was a man of much different character than his father. “Lord Boremund was stone, hard and strong and unmoving,” Septon Eustace tells us. “Lord Borros was the wind that rages and howls and blows this way and that.” Prince Aemond had been uncertain what sort of welcome he would receive when he set out, but Storm’s End welcomed him with feasts and hunts and jousting.
Lord Borros proved more than willing to entertain his suit. “I have four daughters,” he told the prince. “Choose any one you like. Cass is oldest, she’ll be first to flower, but Floris is prettier. And if it’s a clever wife you want, there’s Maris.”
Rhaenyra had taken House Baratheon for granted for too long, his lordship told Aemond. “Aye, Princess Rhaenys is kin to me and mine, some great-aunt I never knew was married to her father, but the both of them are dead, and Rhaenyra…she’s not Rhaenys, is she?” He had nothing against women, Lord Borros went on to say; he loved his girls, a daughter is a precious thing…but a son, ahhh…should the gods ever grant him a son of his own blood, Storm’s End would pass to him, not to his sisters. “Why should the Iron Throne be any different?” And with a royal marriage in the offing…Rhaenyra’s cause was lost, she would see that when she learned that she had lost Storm’s End, he would tell her so himself…bow down to your brother, aye, it’s for the best, his girls would fight with each other sometimes, the way girls do, but he saw to it they always made peace afterward…
We have no record of which daughter Prince Aemond finally decided on (though Mushroom tells us that he kissed all four, to “taste the nectar of their lips”), save that it was not Maris. Munkun writes that the prince and Lord Borros were haggling over dates and dowries on the morning Lucerys Velaryon appeared. Vhagar sensed his coming first. Guardsmen walking the battlements of the castle’s mighty curtain walls clutched their spears in sudden terror when she woke with a roar that shook the very foundations of Durran’s Defiance. Even Arrax quailed before that sound, we are told, and Luke plied his whip freely as he forced him down.
Mushroom would have us believe that the lightning was flashing to the east and a heavy rain falling as Lucerys leapt off his dragon, his mother’s message clutched in his hand. He must surely have known what Vhagar’s presence meant, so it would have come as no surprise when Aemond Targaryen confronted him in the Round Hall, before the eyes of Lord Borros, his four daughters, septon, and maester, and twoscore knights, guards, and servants. (Amongst those who witnessed the meeting was Ser Byron Swann, second son of Lord of Stonehelm in the Dornish Marches, who would have his own small part to play later in the Dance.) So here for once we need not rely entirely on Grand Maester Munkun, Mushroom, and Septon Eustace. None of them were present at Storm’s End, but many others were, so we have no shortage of firsthand accounts.
“Look at this sad creature, my lord,” Prince Aemond called out. “Little Luke Strong, the bastard.” To Luke he said, “You are wet, bastard. Is it raining or did you piss youself in fear?”
Lucerys Velaryon addressed himself only to Lord Baratheon. “Lord Borros, I have brought you a message from my mother, the queen.”
“The whore of Dragonstone, he means.” Prince Aemond strode forward and made to snatch the letter from Lucerys’s hand, but Lord Borros roared a command and his knights intervened, pulling the princelings apart. One brought Rhaenyra’s letter to the dais, where his lordship sat upon the throne of the storm kings of old.
No man can truly know what Borros Baratheon was feeling at that moment. The accounts of those who were there differ markedly one from the other. Some say his lordship was red-faced and abashed, as a man might be if his lawful wife found him abed with another woman. Others declare that Borros appeared to be relishing the moment, for it pleased his vanity to have both king and queen seeking his support. Mushroom (who was not there) says he was drunk. Septon Eustace (who was not there) says he was fearful.
Yet all the witnesses agree on what Lord Borros said and did. Never a man of letters, he handed the queen’s letter to his maester, who cracked the seal and whispered the message into his lordship’s ear. A frown stole across Lord Borros’s face. He stroked his beard, scowled at Lucerys Velaryon, and said, “And if I do as your mother bids, which one of my daughters will you marry, boy?” He gestured at the four girls. “Pick one.”
Prince Lucerys could only blush. “My lord, I am not free to marry,” he replied. “I am betrothed to my cousin Rhaena.”
“I thought as much,” Lord Borros said. “Go home, pup, and tell the bitch your mother that the Lord of Storm’s End is not a dog that she can whistle up at need to set against her foes.” And Prince Lucerys turned to take his leave of the Round Hall.
But Prince Aemond drew his sword and said, “Hold, Strong. First pay the debt you owe me.” Then he tore off his eye patch and flung it to the floor, to show the sapphire beneath. “You have a knife, just as you did then. Put out your eye, and I will let you leave. One will serve. I would not blind you.”
Prince Lucerys recalled his promise to his mother. “I will not fight you. I came here as an envoy, not a knight.”
“You came here as a craven and a traitor,” Prince Aemond answered. “I will have your eye or your life, Strong.”
At that Lord Borros grew uneasy. “Not here,” he grumbled. “He came as an envoy. I want no blood shed beneath my roof.” So his guards put themselves between the princelings and escorted Lucerys Velaryon from the Round Hall, back to the castle yard where his dragon, Arrax, was hunched down in the rain, awaiting his return.
And there it might have ended, but for the girl Maris. The secondborn daughter of Lord Borros, less comely than her sisters, she was angry with Aemond for preferring them to her. “Was it one of your eyes he took, or one of your balls?” Maris asked the prince, in tones sweet as honey. “I am so glad you chose my sister. I want a husband with all his parts.”
Aemond Targaryen’s mouth twisted in rage, and he turned once more to Lord Borros, asking for his leave. The Lord of Storm’s End shrugged and answered, “It is not for me to tell you what to do when you are not beneath my roof.” And his knights moved aside as Prince Aemond rushed to the doors.
Outside the storm was raging. Thunder rolled across the castle, the rain fell in blinding sheets, and from time to time great bolts of blue-white lightning lit the world as bright as day. It was bad weather for flying, even for a dragon, and Arrax was struggling to stay aloft when Prince Aemond mounted Vhagar and went after him. Had the sky been calm, Prince Lucerys might have been able to outfly his pursuer, for Arrax was younger and swifter…but the day was “as black as Prince Aemond’s heart,” says Mushroom, and so it came to pass that the dragons met above Shipbreaker Bay. Watchers on the castle walls saw distant blasts of flame, and heard a shriek cut the thunder. Then the two beasts were locked together, lightning crackling around them. Vhagar was five times the size of her foe, the hardened survivor of a hundred battles. If there was a fight, it could not have lasted long.
Arrax fell, broken, to be swallowed by the storm-lashed waters of the bay. His head and neck washed up beneath the cliffs below Storm’s End three days later, to make a feast for crabs and seagulls. Mushroom claims that Prince Lucerys’s corpse washed up as well, and tells us that Prince Aemond cut out his eyes and presented them to Lady Maris on a bed of seaweed, but this seems excessive. Some say Vhagar snatched Lucerys off his dragon’s back and swallowed him whole. It has even been claimed that the prince survived his fall, swam to safety, but lost all memory of who he was, spending the rest of his days as a simpleminded fisherman.
