A dragonseed of uncertain birth, born on Driftmark in 113 AC and raised homeless in the streets of Spicetown and Hull. Mushroom names her mother a dockside whore; Septon Eustace records that her nose was slit for thieving. She was small and skinny and brown-skinned, black-haired and brown-eyed, with crooked teeth and that scarred nose, and Archmaester Gyldayn allows plainly that she could not be called pretty. She was also foul-mouthed, filthy, and fearless. When Prince Jacaerys Velaryon called for dragonseeds to come forward in 129 AC, the other seekers went to the wild dragons with ropes and whips and songs of their own blood. Nettles, sixteen years old, went with a freshly slaughtered sheep, and brought another every morning after, until Sheepstealer grew accustomed to the girl who fed him and let her mount. She was the first rider that dragon ever took, and likely the last.
She flew for Queen Rhaenyra at the Battle of the Gullet in 130 AC and wept afterward while Hugh Hammer and Ulf White drank to their victory, for Jacaerys was dead and Spicetown burned and its people butchered. Later she and Prince Daemon Targaryen hunted Aemond and Vhagar along the Trident together out of Maidenpool, two dragons being needed to face the greatest dragon in the world. What passed between them is disputed. Mushroom says Daemon took her to his bed, and Gyldayn thinks that tale likelier than most Mushroom tells; Maester Norren's Chronicles of Maidenpool has them in adjoining bedchambers and at table together each morning and night, with the prince doting on her as a man dotes upon a daughter, teaching her courtesies and giving her an ivory hairbrush, a silvered glass, a velvet and satin cloak, and boots of good leather. After the Two Betrayers turned their coats at Tumbleton, Lady Mysaria fed the queen's fear of every dragonseed, and Rhaenyra declared that the brown girl had bound both a dragon and a husband by spells and sent Lord Manfryd Mooton her head-warrant. Mooton's council chose to pretend the letter had never come, and Norren carried the warning to Daemon, who thanked him for it and saw Nettles saddled at dawn. She killed a black ram, fed it to her dragon, and flew weeping into the mists over the Bay of Crabs, and Caraxes screamed as she went until every window in Jonquil's Tower shattered. Daemon rode for Harrenhal that same day and died above the Gods Eye. Nettles was seen once more, in 134 AC, when Ser Robert Rowan's men found her ragged in a cave in the Mountains of the Moon and lost sixteen dead and threescore wounded for the discovery. The mountain clans still speak of a fire witch in a hidden valley, whose flames their boys had to face and come back burned before they could be counted men.