Gerardys

Gerardys, the Grand Maester in Rhaenyra Targaryen’s service, is a measured counselor whose defense of the dragonseeds and long loyalty to the queen cannot protect him once suspicion takes hold. His story traces a grim reversal: first dismissed for urging caution, then found at the heart of Dragonstone’s capture, and finally executed by the king whose return made the queen’s fears fatal to those around her.

Counsel on the black council

When the black council debated whether Ser Addam Velaryon and Nettles might follow Ulf White and Hugh Hammer in betraying Rhaenyra, Gerardys argued that there was no evidence against them. His advice was to seek proof before passing judgment. Lord Corlys Velaryon defended the dragonseeds more forcefully, but Gerardys supplied the restrained case for withholding punishment until the facts were known. The council’s other voices pressed for immediate action, warning that the two dragonriders might take their dragons to the enemy.

Rhaenyra did not accept this counsel. After Mysaria accused Nettles of sharing Prince Daemon’s bed, the queen ordered Ser Luthor Largent to arrest Addam and sent a secret command for Lord Mooton to kill Nettles. Addam escaped before the gold cloaks could seize him. When Ser Luthor returned to the Red Keep and accused Corlys of treachery, the old lord was bound, beaten, and imprisoned. Gerardys, whose public defense of the dragonseeds linked him in the queen’s mind to Corlys, denied involvement in the betrayal. Rhaenyra acknowledged that she did not think he would lie to her, but said she could not keep men around her whom she did not trust implicitly. She dismissed him from her council and sent him back to Dragonstone, recalling his defense of Nettles as the reason for her distrust.

The failed return from Duskendale

After fleeing King’s Landing, Rhaenyra reached Duskendale and ordered Lady Darklyn’s maester to send three ravens to Gerardys on Dragonstone, asking for a ship to take her home. No ship came, and no reply arrived. The silence renewed the queen’s suspicions of her Grand Maester, although the account gives no explanation for his failure to answer. The absence mattered practically as well as emotionally: Rhaenyra had no gold or ships of her own, and, after sending Corlys to the dungeons, she had lost the fleet that might have brought her safely back.

At this point Gerardys’s absence from the narrative becomes part of Rhaenyra’s isolation. She had dismissed him after questioning his loyalty; now, when she needed passage home, she received neither the ship nor the reassurance she had sought. The later account reveals that Dragonstone had fallen before her return. Thus the unanswered ravens do not establish that Gerardys betrayed her: the evidence instead shows that the castle had been taken and that he was captured there. By the time Rhaenyra finally came ashore, she was already returning to a stronghold held by her enemies.

Capture during the fall of Dragonstone

Dragonstone’s fall took less than an hour. Ser Alfred Broome, an experienced member of the garrison who had turned against Rhaenyra, helped the king’s men exploit the castle’s weaknesses. During the hour of ghosts, men he had won over opened a postern gate. One group seized the armory while another took loyal guardsmen and the master-at-arms into custody. Ser Marston Waters surprised Gerardys in the rookery, preventing him from sending word of the attack by raven.

The attack exposed how completely the castle’s defenses had been compromised: the rookery, a channel by which the news might have escaped, was taken along with the gates and armory. Gerardys was among those captured, while Broome led the assault on Ser Robert Quince’s chambers. When Rhaenyra later arrived, Quince’s charred body hung from the gatehouse battlements alongside those of other members of the castle’s household. Gerardys’s head and upper torso hung there too; his body had been mutilated, with everything below his ribs gone. The sight confronted Rhaenyra and her son Aegon before the king’s men attacked her escort. The narrative identifies Gerardys as one of the victims of the castle’s fall, not as an accomplice in it.

Execution and the reversed chain

Aegon II ordered Gerardys’s execution after taking Dragonstone. The king’s men used the chain Rhaenyra had taken from Grand Maester Orwyle and given to Gerardys to hang him. The object that marked Gerardys’s office and his place in Rhaenyra’s household thus became the means of his punishment under her rival’s rule. His death was deliberately prolonged: he was strangled, lowered when near death to draw breath, and raised again; this was repeated three times. He was then disemboweled and displayed before Sunfyre, who fed on his legs and entrails. Aegon ordered that enough of Gerardys be left for the dragon to greet Rhaenyra when she returned.

That command tied Gerardys’s execution to the trap awaiting the queen. While Aegon lay in the Stone Drum with his broken legs bound and splinted, he learned from a raven that Rhaenyra would be coming back from Duskendale aboard the Violande and ordered Broome to prepare a welcome. Gerardys’s body was therefore not only evidence of Dragonstone’s capture but part of the message Aegon intended Rhaenyra to encounter. His career ends in the same atmosphere of betrayed loyalty that had first surrounded the council’s suspicions: his cautious counsel was treated as grounds for exclusion, while the later conquest turned his office and his body into instruments of the struggle for the island.