The Myrish Fleet’s Invasion of Tarth and Destruction

The Myrish Fleet’s Invasion of Tarth and Destruction began as the desperate expansion of a faction driven from Myr and the Stepstones, but became a royal campaign and a personal catastrophe for House Targaryen. The invaders seized the eastern side of Tarth; the response brought the Velaryon fleet, Lord Boremund’s stormlanders, and Prince Aemon with Caraxes against them. A hidden mountain camp did not protect Aemon from a Myrish scout, and his death transformed a military expedition into a campaign of vengeance.

From Myr to Tarth

The invasion followed the Myrish Bloodbath of 91–92 AC, a struggle between rival factions marked by assassinations, riots, poisonings, torture, and fighting at sea. The defeated faction first tried to establish itself on the Stepstones. It was forced out when the Archon of Tyrosh allied with a league of pirate kings, and the Myrmen then turned to Tarth. Their landing caught the Evenstar by surprise, and they soon occupied the entire eastern side of the island.

By the time they reached Tarth, the Myrish had become little more than a ragged band of pirates. The king and his council expected that they could be driven back into the sea without great difficulty. Yet their foothold on the island required a coordinated response: the Myrish retained enough strength at sea that the royal forces planned to bring the Velaryon fleet south before stormlanders crossed to Tarth. The objective was to unite Lord Boremund’s men with the Evenstar’s levies and retake the island together.

The Royal Expedition

The Sea Snake and the Velaryon fleet sailed from Driftmark on the ninth day of the third moon of 92 AC. Prince Aemon followed a few hours later, after taking leave of Lady Jocelyn and their daughter, Rhaenys. Rhaenys had just learned she was expecting; otherwise, she would have gone with her father on Meleys. Aemon joked about her having her own battle to fight, anticipating that Corlys would want a son and that he himself hoped for a grandson. They were his final words to his daughter.

Caraxes quickly outpaced the fleet and carried Aemon to Tarth. The Evenstar, Lord Cameron, had withdrawn into the central mountain spine and set up camp in a hidden valley, from which he could watch the Myrish movements below. Aemon joined him there, and the two planned their response while Caraxes fed on goats. The plan relied on joining the dragon prince and the island lord’s local knowledge to the larger force approaching by sea and land. But the camp’s concealment failed: smoke from the dragon’s fires revealed its position to two Myrish scouts moving through the heights.

Aemon’s Death

At dusk, one scout recognized Lord Cameron walking through the camp with Aemon. The Myrish fighter used a crossbow, a weapon associated in the account with the faction’s preference for poisoned bolts. From behind rocks, a hundred yards away, he aimed at the Evenstar. Dusk and distance spoiled his aim: the bolt missed Cameron and struck Aemon, who stood beside him.

The iron bolt passed through Aemon’s throat. He fell to his knees and died at thirty-seven, unable to speak. The contrast between the expedition’s preparations and this sudden, unintended loss defines the turning point of the campaign: the Myrish had not overcome the royal forces in a pitched battle, but a scout’s shot killed the prince at the very moment he was conferring with Tarth’s ruler. The attack also left the island’s defenders to face the consequences of a royal response now charged with grief as well as military purpose.

Retaliation and Aftermath

The news brought grief to King Jaehaerys and Queen Alysanne, to Lady Jocelyn, and to Rhaenys, who was carrying the child Aemon would never meet. Prince Baelon answered his brother’s death by descending on Tarth on Vhagar and seeking vengeance. The Myrish ships were burned, as Prince Morion’s ships had been nine years earlier. When Lord Boremund and the Evenstar came down from the mountains, the Myrish had no route of escape; thousands were killed, and the survivors’ resistance ended in defeat.

Baelon fought in the slaughter with Dark Sister. When he returned to King’s Landing with Aemon’s corpse, the smallfolk hailed him as a hero. Yet his victory could not undo the loss: he told his mother that killing a thousand enemies would not bring his brother back, and she comforted him. The episode thus closes on two incompatible measures of the campaign—public acclaim for retaliation and private knowledge that vengeance had not restored what the crossbow bolt took.

Significance

The action demonstrates how the island’s geography and the expedition’s coordination shaped the conflict. The Myrish held territory on Tarth, while the royal plan depended on the Velaryon fleet bringing stormlanders across to join the Evenstar’s levies. Aemon’s rapid arrival by dragon enabled him to meet Lord Cameron before the larger forces converged, but the smoke from Caraxes’s feeding exposed the supposedly hidden camp. The tactical circumstance that revealed the camp also enabled the fatal shot.

The invasion’s destruction was therefore not simply the result of an uncomplicated effort to expel pirates. The campaign achieved its military end through the burning of the ships and the defeat of the Myrish on the island, but its decisive personal consequence was Aemon’s death. Baelon’s reprisal made the invaders pay, while the grief of his family and the king’s later declaration that it was always winter showed that the cost endured beyond the battlefield.