Prince's Pass was a gateway through the Red Mountains into Dorne and a route used by both Rhaenys Targaryen and Aegon Targaryen during the conquest and the First Dornish War. Its history in the account turns on a contrast: dragons could pass above its defenses, but armies moving through the mountains remained vulnerable to the terrain, shortages, and Dornish resistance.

Geography and Defenses

A host of Dornish spearmen guarded the pass, which the narrative identifies as the gateway through the Red Mountains. Its approaches were also watched by towers that could be abandoned or disabled before an invading army arrived. The pass was therefore more than a line on a route south: it formed part of a defensive landscape in which the defenders could deny the invaders supplies and movement without offering a conventional battle.

Rhaenys's Flight and Aegon's March

Rhaenys Targaryen did not engage the spearmen guarding the pass. Riding Meraxes, she flew above it and continued over the red and white sands to Vaith, which she found empty. Her passage demonstrates the distinction between the route's value to armies and its limited power against a dragon in flight: the defenders could guard the gateway, but not prevent her from bypassing it from the air.

Later, Aegon Targaryen led an army of thirty thousand through Prince's Pass, with nearly two thousand mounted knights and three hundred lords and bannermen. The Dornish withdrew rather than meet this force in open battle. They burned crops, poisoned wells, and left the watchtowers in the Red Mountains slighted and abandoned. In the high passes, Aegon's vanguard encountered a barrier made of shorn, rotting sheep carcasses. By the time the army emerged from the pass into the Dornish sands, it was already short of food and fodder.

Role in the Dornish Campaign

The crossing did not decide the campaign by a single battle; it carried Aegon's army into a landscape where its numbers were difficult to turn into a decisive advantage. After emerging from the pass, Aegon divided his forces, sending Lord Harlan Tyrell south against Uthor Uller at Hellholt while he himself marched east toward Skyreach. The invaders' difficulties continued beyond the mountain route: as Tyrell advanced through extreme heat, poisoned waterholes and oases killed horses and riders, and he eventually reached an abandoned Hellholt after losing a quarter of his men and almost all his horses.

Prince's Pass thus marks the transition from the apparent strength of the invading host to the logistical vulnerability of the campaign. The Dornish defense did not depend on holding the gateway in a pitched engagement. Withdrawal, poisoned water, destroyed provisions, and the difficult passage through the mountains made the route a threshold into an attritional war.