Elaena Targaryen

Elaena was born in 150 AC, the youngest of the five children of Aegon III Targaryen and Daenaera Velaryon. Her siblings were Daeron, Baelor, Daena, and Rhaena. Her most treasured possession was a dragon egg whose stone shell shared the same colors as her own hair.

Her eyes were a soft lilac, and her hair was platinum white streaked with gold down the center, an unusual color even among Targaryens; she wore it long and braided until she cut it in defiance of Baelor. As a child she liked to dress in black, simply because her elder sister Daena did, and even then she was thought more headstrong than Daena.

In 161 AC King Daeron I died in Dorne and his brother Baelor took the Iron Throne. Baelor had the High Septon annul his marriage to Daena, claiming it had never been consummated, then locked his three sisters away in chambers of the Red Keep that would come to be known as the Maidenvault, to keep them from tempting him.

At eleven, Elaena was the youngest of the three and the most rebellious, if not the fairest. She is said to have cut off her long braid and sent it to Baelor, begging for her freedom on the grounds that without it she would no longer be pretty enough to tempt any man. The plea changed nothing.

When King Baelor died, some among the smallfolk and the great lords argued the crown should pass to Daena, the eldest of Aegon III's surviving children. But the precedents set by the Great Council of 101 AC and the civil war before it were invoked to set aside any claim to succession by Daena, Elaena, or Rhaena.

The Iron Throne passed instead to their uncle, Viserys II Targaryen, and Elaena was left outside a succession to which, by birth, she also had some claim.

Freed at last from the Maidenvault, Elaena led a turbulent life. Like Daena before her, she bore bastard twins, Jon and Jeyne Mares, by her uncle Alyn Velaryon. She is said to have hoped to marry him, but a year after Alyn vanished at sea she gave up hope and agreed to marry another man instead.

In 176 AC she married Lord Ossifer Plumm, a very rich but already elderly man; he is said to have died while consummating the marriage, though Elaena conceived their son Viserys that same night. Ugly rumors later claimed Plumm had died at the sight of his naked new bride, and that the boy she conceived was actually her cousin Aegon's.

Her second marriage was arranged by King Daeron II Targaryen himself, who wed her to his Master of Coin, Ronnel Penrose. They had four children, Robin, Laena, Jocelyn, and Joy. Penrose was a good and noble lord but poor with figures, and everyone knew it was Elaena who truly kept his accounts.

Her sharp head for finances won her, in time, the trust of Daeron II himself.

Her third marriage was the only one she chose herself. She fell in love with Michael Manwoody, a witty and cultured Dornishman who had come to the capital in Princess Myriah Martell's retinue and had won a place as a loyal servant to Daeron II. They married, apparently with the king's blessing, not long after Ronnel Penrose's death.

In her later years Elaena said she had fallen in love not with Michael's cleverness but with his music: he liked to play the harp for her. When he died, she had his funeral effigy carved holding a harp instead of the sword and spurs of a knight.

She lived to at least seventy. In time, men said Elaena had been more beautiful at seventy than she had been at seventeen.

Ben Plumm claims descent from Princess Elaena through her son Viserys Plumm. Elaena's bastard son Jon Mares, meanwhile, had a son who changed his name to Longwaters to claim he himself had been born legitimate; his descendants still live in the Crownlands today.

One of them, Rennifer Longwaters, is the chief gaoler of the Red Keep, and likes to tell people he descends from a Targaryen princess — though few take him seriously.