Eldest daughter and second-born child of King Jaehaerys I Targaryen and Queen Alysanne, born in the seventh moon of 53 AC at the Red Keep — strong and healthy from the cradle, talking before her first name-day and walking before her second, mud-spattered and grass-stained where any other princess would have been silk-clad, and reckoned by the realm the darling of the realm and a great beauty even at her age. She was crowned queen of love and beauty by Ser Simon Dondarrion at the tourney at Maidenpool when she was two years old; her favourite toy by her fourth year was a broomstick dragon upon which she flew everywhere through the keep, and she delighted in giving orders to her brothers Aemon and Baelon as if she were already their queen. Queen Alysanne believed in her heart that this first daughter should inherit her father's throne over the brother born after her, and quarrelled the king on it; King Jaehaerys would say only that Daenerys would be queen when she came of age to wed Aemon and to sit beside him. She came in early 60 AC weeping to her mother's bedside in the night complaining she was cold, and all the poultices and scalding baths and nettle teas and hot stones the maesters and the queen could put to her did nothing; near dawn the king sent ravens to Dragonstone to have a hatchling brought to her by morning but the Shivers took her before the ravens could come back, a day and a half after she had first complained of the cold. Within two moons the queen was pregnant again of Princess Alyssa, who looked so like her dead elder sister that her mother wept to look upon her until time wore the resemblance away.
