Daella Targaryen

Daella was born in King's Landing in the year 64, the fourth daughter of Queen Alysanne and King Jaehaerys I, one of thirteen siblings and never close to the throne. From early childhood she stood apart from the rest of her family: she was nearly two before she spoke her first word, she read haltingly and without much grasp of what she read, and even dragons of her own blood could not calm her. A kitten once scratched her and she never went near a cat again; a bee nearly stung her in a garden, and after that she feared the flowers she otherwise loved.

By nine, the court had long assumed she would marry her brother Vaegon, a year her elder, though there was no warmth between them — he thought her simple, she thought him unkind. In 73 AC, a lady-in-waiting joked in front of half the court about when the wedding would be, and Vaegon answered that he would never marry a girl who could barely read, that only some lord desperate for slow-witted heirs would want her. Daella fled the hall in tears, and not even the wine her sister Alyssa poured over his head made him take it back.

At thirteen she was taken to Driftmark to meet Corlys Velaryon, grandson of Lord Daemon Velaryon. The crossing of Blackwater Bay left her so seasick that she came home certain the boy cared more for his ships than for her. A year later, kept company by squires her own age, one of them, Simon Staunton, tried to get her drinking more wine than she wanted, and another kissed her without asking; by year's end Daella had decided she hated the lot of them.

At fifteen her mother brought her to Raventree Hall in the Riverlands, where Lord Blackwood's son began courting her properly. The match seemed to be going well until Daella learned the family still worshipped the Old Gods and that she would have to speak her vows before a weirwood; she refused outright, certain that such a wedding would damn her.

On the first day of the year 80, King Jaehaerys told the queen he wanted Daella married before the year was out, joking that he would line up a hundred naked men for her to pick from. Alysanne handled it more gently, offering her a choice among three men: Lord Boremund Baratheon of Storm's End, Ser Tymond Lannister, heir to Casterly Rock, and Lord Rodrik Arryn, Lord of the Eyrie.

To the court's surprise, Daella chose Rodrik — twenty years her senior, already a father of four, bald and stout, but gentle in manner. She said he struck her as a good and sensible man, and liked the thought of mothering his children. They married before the year ended, in a small ceremony at the sept of Dragonstone, with few guests and, at her request, no bedding.

In 81 AC, Rodrik gave up his seat on the council and took Daella to the Eyrie, certain that the slower pace of the Vale would suit her. There he proved a doting husband who called her his precious princess and never stopped fussing over her.

She got on almost at once with Rodrik's three younger children; his youngest, Amanda, often wrote Daella's letters to Queen Alysanne for her. With Elys, the eldest of her stepchildren and three years older than Daella herself, things were tense from the start — Elys made no secret of her contempt for her new stepmother's fragility.

A year and a half into the marriage, Daella fell pregnant, and fear drove her to send for her mother. Alysanne reached the Eyrie three moons before the birth and stayed at her side, reading to her at night and calming her over nothing in particular, while Elys remarked coldly that anyone would think she was the first woman ever to give birth.

Labour came fifteen days early and was long and hard; when her daughter Aemma was laid on her chest, Daella smiled. Childbed fever followed soon after. Her milk never came despite her wanting badly to nurse the girl herself, and once the fever worsened the maester forbade her even to hold the baby. She died the next morning, eighteen years old. Rodrik asked to bury her in the Vale, but the queen refused; she was burned instead, her ashes laid beneath Dragonstone next to her sister Daenerys.

Her death opened a rift between her parents that took a long time to heal, mended only with the help of her sister, the septa Maegelle.

Her only child, Aemma, married young to her own cousin, Prince Viserys Targaryen — Daella's nephew — when he took the throne in 103 AC, becoming his queen consort. Through that line, Daella ended up grandmother to Queen Rhaenyra and, generations on, ancestor to every Targaryen who came after.