I'VE GOT BACKSTROKE FOR DAYS

Against that we have The Testimony of Mushroom…and in this case, the Chronicles of Maidenpool as set down by Lord Mooton’s maester. Maester Norren writes that “the prince and his bastard girl” supped together every night, broke their fast together every morning, slept in adjoining bedchambers, that the prince “doted upon the brown girl as a man might dote upon his daughter,” instructing her in “common courtesies” and how to dress and sit and brush her hair, that he made gifts to her of “an ivory-handled hairbrush, a silvered looking glass, a cloak of rich brown velvet bordered in satin, a pair of riding boots of leather soft as butter.” The prince taught the girl to wash, Norren says, and the maidservants who fetched their bath water said he oft shared a tub with her, “soaping her back or washing the dragon stink from her hair, both of them as naked as their namedays.”

None of this constitutes proof that Daemon Targaryen had carnal knowledge of the bastard girl, but in light of what followed we must surely judge that more likely than most of Mushroom’s tales.