Borros Baratheon

Borros Baratheon, Lord of Storm’s End, made the allegiance of the stormlands a crucial prize in the Dance of the Dragons. More volatile and forceful than his father, Boremund, he bargained over royal marriages, rejected Lucerys Velaryon’s appeal, and later helped restore King Aegon II to King’s Landing. His final choice was to lead the king’s army against the riverlords, where he was killed in battle.

Lord of Storm’s End

Borros inherited a house whose support had long been associated with Princess Rhaenys and her children. By the time the succession dispute sharpened, however, his father had died and Borros had become lord. Queen Alicent’s council regarded Storm’s End as the greatest danger among the potential supporters of Rhaenyra: the lesser storm lords were expected to follow wherever Borros led. His allegiance could therefore deliver not just one lord’s force, but the military weight of the stormlands.

Accounts distinguish him from Boremund through contrasting images of steadiness and changeability. Septon Eustace described the father as hard and unmoving, and Borros as changeable as a raging wind. The contrast captures a political actor whose decisions could shift with circumstance, even while he spoke with certainty about the principles he chose to invoke. His confidence and appetite for display would remain evident in both his negotiations and his conduct on campaign.

The marriage bargain

Alicent sent her second son, Aemond Targaryen, to Storm’s End on Vhagar, the oldest and largest dragon in Westeros. His assigned purpose was to win the hand of one of Borros’s four daughters, so that a royal marriage would secure the stormlands for Aegon. Borros received Aemond with feasts, hunts, and jousting, and proved willing to consider the match. The surviving account does not establish which daughter Aemond chose, only that it was not Maris.

Borros framed his political judgment through his own family’s succession. He complained that Rhaenyra had taken House Baratheon’s support for granted and argued that, if he had a son, Storm’s End would pass to that son rather than to his daughters. He used that preference as a reason to question why the Iron Throne should pass to a woman. His claim that he loved his daughters did not prevent him from subordinating their inheritance to the prospect of a male heir; the marriage negotiations made dynastic advantage and gendered succession part of the same calculation.

When Lucerys arrived carrying his mother’s letter, Borros had to choose between the competing envoys in person. His maester read the message to him, and Borros challenged Lucerys to name which daughter he would marry in return for his support. Lucerys said he was already betrothed to his cousin Rhaena and could not accept. Borros then refused Rhaenyra’s appeal, making clear that he would not be summoned to oppose her enemies at her bidding. His answer turned the projected marriage alliance into a public rejection of her cause.

Storm’s End and the widening war

Aemond confronted Lucerys after the refusal and threatened him, but Borros drew a limit at the castle itself: Lucerys had arrived as an envoy, and Borros did not want violence beneath his roof. His guards separated the two princes and escorted Lucerys back to the yard. That restraint did not extend beyond the household’s protection. After Maris taunted Aemond, Borros declined to restrain him once he had left the castle, and Aemond rushed after Lucerys. Borros thus kept the immediate confrontation from becoming a fight inside Storm’s End without preventing its deadly continuation outside.

Later, Borros called his banners and assembled nearly six thousand men, ostensibly intending to march on King’s Landing. Instead, he led them south into the mountains, citing Dornish incursions into the stormlands. The account notes the suspicion that fear of the dragons ahead, rather than the Dornish threat behind him, influenced the change of direction. His military posture was therefore not a simple march toward the capital: the apparent commitment of a large host coexisted with a retreat from the route where dragon power might be encountered.

After Queen Helaena’s death, Borros did march north. He left his newly pregnant wife and four daughters and set out through the Kingswood with six hundred knights and four thousand foot soldiers. His advance brought the crisis around King’s Landing to a head. As the city’s competing claimants faced the approaching stormlanders, Borros’s force was large enough to make negotiation urgent, and his arrival helped end the brief rule of the pretender Trystane Truefyre.

Restoring Aegon II

Borros negotiated with Larys Strong and Dowager Queen Alicent while his men prepared rafts to cross the Blackwater Rush. The agreement joined military support to a series of political bargains. Larys promised that Ser Perkin and his followers would fight to restore Aegon II, in exchange for pardons for those followers, with Trystane excluded. Alicent agreed that Aegon would marry Borros’s eldest daughter, Cassandra, and that another daughter, Floris, would be betrothed to Larys. These arrangements gave Borros’s family a place in the settlement as well as a stake in the restoration.

Borros’s army crossed without incident and found King’s Landing undefended, its streets empty except for corpses. The banners of Trystane were taken down and Aegon II’s raised in their place; Alicent welcomed Borros at the Red Keep. Borros then moved against the other self-proclaimed rulers. His knights routed the followers gathered around five-year-old Gaemon Palehair, who was taken captive and brought to the Red Keep. The next night Borros and Perkin’s men attacked the Shepherd’s much-diminished following at the Dragonpit. The Shepherd, too, was captured alive. Borros’s arrival thus helped replace a fractured city’s rival authorities with the restored king’s force.

The final campaign

The restoration did not secure Aegon II’s rule. As northern, Vale, and riverland armies approached, the riverlords became the immediate threat. Near six thousand had gathered at Riverrun under Ser Kermit Tully after Lord Elmo Tully died on the march. Borros led his stormlanders out to meet them, reinforced by levies from Stokeworth, Rosby, Hayford, and Duskendale, as well as two thousand men and boys from Flea Bottom who had been hastily armed.

The armies met on the kingsroad two days from King’s Landing, after heavy rain had softened the ground. Borros’s scouts had reported that the riverland force was led by boys and women, and he ordered an attack near dusk. He personally led his knights in a wedge down the road. Archers on the adjoining hill brought down many of their horses, while the mud disrupted the charge and the riverlords held their shield wall. When the stormlander foot joined the fighting, the line seemed close to breaking, but more riverlanders emerged from the nearby wood under Benjicot Blackwood and strengthened the opposing force.

Borros sounded his warhorn to bring up his reserve. Instead, the men of Rosby, Stokeworth, and Hayford dropped Aegon’s banners and stood aside; the city recruits scattered, and the knights of Duskendale changed sides and attacked the stormlanders from behind. The king’s last army collapsed into a rout. Borros continued fighting after his horse fell and refused Kermit Tully’s offer to yield. He was killed in the battle, still armed, and died in the mud of the kingsroad.

Political significance

Borros’s trajectory links the intimate bargaining of dynastic marriage to the large-scale military consequences of the succession war. He could refuse Rhaenyra at Storm’s End, place his daughters within Aegon’s political settlement, and help take King’s Landing; yet those gains depended on an army whose local allies ultimately abandoned it. His death in the final battle shows the limits of his influence: he could lead the stormlanders into the field, but could not secure the loyalty of all the forces assembled under the king’s banners.