Until the flame goes out

She was born in the year Westeros finally split between the Greens and the Blacks. Princess Daenys Targaryen - Queen Alicent's fourth child - came into the world with a dragon egg that turned to stone in her cradle and hair the color of autumn chestnuts instead of Valyrian silver.

Sent away to Oldtown, Daenys grows up far from the poison of the Red Keep, surrounded instead by the libraries of the Citadel, the scent of parchment and sea salt, and the hum of yew bowstrings. There, she finds peace, freedom... and her first forbidden love in the form of Prince Qasim of Dorne.

But daughters of kings are never allowed to belong to themselves.

At sixteen, Daenys is dragged back to King's Landing to be married to her older brother - Prince Aemond One-Eye. Rider of Vhagar, the largest and most terrifying dragon in the world, Aemond is proud, violent, and consumed by the bitterness of old wounds. To him, marriage is not a union but another battlefield where power and fear decide the victor.

Yet Daenys is nothing like the court ladies he expected.

While Aemond brings the smell of sulfur, blood, and dragonfire into their chambers, she answers him with a cold, calculating mind and a dangerous talent for seeing the fractures inside other people. She studied poisons in the Citadel, read of fallen kingdoms and dead kings, and learned one truth above all else:

Even monsters can be broken, if you discover where their souls first cracked.

But when the Dance of the Dragons plunges Westeros into fire and blood, and the life of her child fades in its cradle, Daenys realizes survival will no longer be enough.

To save herself, she will have to outwit the very monster she taught how to remove his armor.

And perhaps become something even worse in the process.

Can the red-haired rose of Oldtown survive the ashes of a dying dynasty, when love, jealousy, and betrayal twist together into one fatal knot?