Daena Targaryen

Daena was born in King's Landing in 145 AC, the third child of Aegon III and Daenaera Velaryon, and the first of their daughters, ahead of Rhaena and Elaena and behind her brothers Daeron and Baelor. As a girl she adored her father to the point of dressing in black like him, and looked up to Daeron with the same devotion one gives a model to follow.

She grew up skilled at ring-tilting and hunting, handling a recurved short bow with ease, though she was never allowed to joust in a royal tourney. She liked to say she had been born to ride a dragon.

In 160 AC, at fifteen, Aegon III married Daena to her own brother Baelor, following the old Valyrian custom of pairing children of dragon blood. The marriage was not a happy one: Baelor's devotion belonged entirely to the Faith of the Seven, and he refused to consummate the union.

Daena answered in her own way: she began wearing only white and gave up every other colour, hoping to shame her husband into acting as one. It didn't work — Baelor liked her better for it, since white made her look even more innocent.

Daeron I died in Dorne in 161 AC, and Baelor inherited the throne. One of his first acts as king was to have the High Septon annul his marriage to Daena on the grounds that it had never been consummated. She was sixteen when she and her sisters were confined to chambers in the Red Keep that would come to be known as the Maidenvault, meant to keep Baelor from any temptation.

During the years of confinement she earned the name Daena the Defiant: of the three sisters she was the least willing to accept her lot, and tried to escape three times disguised as a servant or a bannerwoman. Near the end of Baelor's reign she succeeded, with a cousin's help, and came away from it pregnant. In late 170 AC she gave birth to a son she named Daemon, after her grandfather, and for years refused to say who the father was.

The birth of Daena's son drove Baelor into a penitential fast that lasted forty days; on the forty-first he was found unconscious before the altar of the Mother, and died soon after. Some believed the crown should pass to Daena, the eldest of Aegon III's surviving children, but the memory of the Dance of the Dragons and of the last woman to wear the crown outweighed any claim she had. The precedents set at the Great Council of 101 AC were invoked as well, and the throne passed to her uncle, Viserys II.

Daena raised her son Daemon alone without naming his father, a secret kept until 182 AC, when King Aegon IV gave the boy the sword Blackfyre and acknowledged him as his own. According to semi-canonical sources, Daena was still alive in 172 AC, when Aegor Rivers was born.