Third of his name by his own reckoning though he never sat the Iron Throne, born at King's Landing in 276 AC to King Aerys II and Queen Rhaella as their first living child after seventeen years of stillbirths and miscarriages following the birth of his elder brother Rhaegar. The mad king's fear for the babe ran beyond reason: the Kingsguard stood over his cradle day and night, his mother was not permitted to be alone with him, the king's own food-taster suckled the wet-nurse's nipples to test for poison, and the gifts the lords of the realm sent to honour his birth were burned in heaps in the yard for fear they had been cursed. He was five years old at the rising of Robert Baratheon and named his father's heir over Rhaegar's infant son when his brother fell to a warhammer at the Trident, and was sent with his pregnant mother to the safety of Dragonstone before the city was sacked. There the queen perished in childbed bringing his sister Daenerys into a storm that broke the Targaryen fleet upon the rocks, and as the garrison made ready to yield the children to Stannis Baratheon's coming siege, Ser Willem Darry and four loyal men spirited the boy and the newborn princess across the narrow sea to Braavos.
There the two grew up under Ser Willem's keeping in a house with a red door and a lemon-tree in the yard, until Ser Willem sickened and died and the servants stripped what was left and put them out. They wandered then from Braavos to Myr to Tyrosh to Qohor to Volantis to Lys, never welcome long, selling off the last of his mother's jewels until in Pentos he had to sell her crown as well; what joy had been left him went out of him then, and a thing of pure rage took its place. The Free Cities called him the Beggar King and the Golden Company laughed at his table when he offered them his cause for a meal. He had grown up convinced his sister would be his queen by ancient Targaryen right, and beat her freely between teaching her the history of their house, warning her never to wake the dragon in him, until at Magister Illyrio Mopatis's manse in Pentos he traded her in marriage to the Dothraki khal Drogo for the promise of forty thousand horse to win him back his throne. The promised crown came not by his sister's belly bearing him an army but by Drogo's own hand at Vaes Dothrak: gold of his belt and rings, melted in a cookpot and poured steaming over his head before the khalasar, the only crown the last son of Aerys II would ever wear.