[8/20] ASOIAF power couples → Rhaenys Targaryen × Corlys Velaryon
Rhaenys Targaryen, daughter of the Old King’s eldest son and heir, was a woman as spirited and beautiful and proud as any in the realm, and a dragonrider as well. Her husband, Lord Corlys Velaryon, was the wealthiest man in the Seven Kingdoms, who came to fame for his voyages across the seas. The greatest of those were upon the Sea Snake, by which name he would later be known and upon which he would reach the fabled lands of Yi Ti and Leng, whose wealth doubled that of House Velaryon in a single voyage.
In 92 AC, Rhaenys’s father, Prince Aemon, was slain on Tarth, and when the matter of who would be King Jaehaerys’s heir arose, the king named as Prince of Dragonstone his next-eldest son, Baelon. The clever and capable Rhaenys was the first to raise objection. “You would rob my son of his birthright,” she told the king, for she was pregnant and by passing her over, so too would they be passing over her child. Lord Corlys was so wroth that he gave up his admiralty and his place on the small council and took his wife back to Driftmark. Lady Jocelyn Baratheon, Rhaenys’s mother, was also angered, as was her formidable brother, Boremund, Lord of Storm’s End, and Queen Alysanne herself, who at Rhaenys’s birth had called her “our queen to be.” Yet Baelon remained ensconced as the heir apparent, and so Rhaenys would be dubbed “the Queen Who Never Was.”
When Baelon died nine years later, throwing the succession yet again into question, Lord Corlys began amassing ships and men on Driftmark to “defend the rights” of his son, Laenor. Corlys’s fame, wealth, and reputation did much to support Laenor’s claim, but the tide was against them and it was rumored that the Great Council that assembled at Harrenhal had voted twenty to one in favor of Baelon’s son, Prince Viserys.
Many years later, the pair lent their support to Viserys’s daughter, Rhaenyra, against her half-brother, Aegon, and both sat on her council. Lord Corlys had grown old by then but said, “Mayhaps the Seven have preserved me for this one last fight.” Princess Rhaenys had grown older as well, yet was as fierce and fearless at five-and-fifty as she had been at two-and-twenty. In 129 AC, Lord Staunton, who was among Rhaenyra’s supporters, dispatched a raven from Rook’s Rest to Dragonstone, begging for aid against the greens’ attacks. That aid arrived in the form of Rhaenys and her dragon, Meleys, the Red Queen. But Ser Criston Cole had brought dragons, too — Aegon II himself arrived on the field upon Sunfyre, and his brother Aemond One-Eye rode Vhagar. It is recounted that Rhaenys did not shrink from her foe. With a glad cry and a crack of her whip, she sent Meleys flying up to face them. It is in this battle that Rhaenys ultimately perished, though not all her foes emerged unscathed either: the clash left Aegon severely burned and broken, while Sunfyre took half a year to recover.
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