The Rogue Prince, or, A King's Brother by George R. R. Martin
INTRODUCTION
This all new Game of Thrones story appears in Rogues, an anthology edited by George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois, released on June 17, 2014 by Bantam Books.
As one might suspect from the title, The Rogue Prince is a companion piece to Martin’s The Princess and The Queen, or, The Blacks and The Greens, (from the Dangerous Women anthology). Once again, the story is framed as a formal history set forth by Archmaester Gyldayn of the Citadel of Oldtown, whose dedication to the sober and serious task of recording the dynastic struggles of the Targaryen clan can’t entirely stifle the rich strain of scandalous rumor and gossip woven throughout the official record.
The Rogue Prince fills in much of the backstory leading up to the extremely bloody events of “The Princess and The Queen,” in which competing branches of the ruling house waged a violent war of succession which brought the Targaryens and their dragons to the brink of extinction, almost two hundred years before the events of A Game of Thrones. Chronicling the familial tensions and personal hostilities that eventually grew into the full-scale bloodletting known as the Dance of the Dragons, this new story is “a consideration of the early life, adventures, misdeeds, and marriages of Prince Daemon Targaryen,” the who never became a King, but wreaked all kinds of swashbuckling havoc during the reign of his mild-mannered brother, King Viserys I.