Helaena Targaryen

Helaena was born in King's Landing in 109 AC, the only daughter of Viserys I Targaryen and the king's second wife, Alicent Hightower. She had an elder brother, Aegon, and two younger brothers, Aemond and Daeron. Before her marriage she came to ride Dreamfyre, becoming the second person ever to do so; those who knew her said flying over the city was what made her happiest.

In 122 AC, at thirteen, she married Aegon, the brother she had grown up with. A year later she gave birth to her first children, the twins Jaehaerys and Jaehaera.

In 127 AC King Viserys held a feast to celebrate his recovered health. According to the fool Mushroom, that same night his nephew Jacaerys Velaryon asked Helaena to dance, and her husband Aegon took it as an insult. That same year her youngest child, Maelor, was born.

Two years later, in the spring of 129, Helaena brought her three children to her father's chambers. Viserys, who would die that same night, spent his last hours telling them of the deeds of King Jaehaerys I.

On Viserys I's death, her husband Aegon was crowned king at the Dragonpit, even though the late king had named his elder daughter, Rhaenyra, his heir rather than his son. The decision sparked the civil war that would become known as the Dance of the Dragons. During the ceremony, Alicent set the crown on Helaena's head and named her «my queen».

When Grand Maester Orwyle proposed going to Dragonstone to make Rhaenyra give up her claim, Helaena backed her mother in supporting the plan, and Aegon reluctantly agreed to send the maester under a peace banner.

After Prince Aemond caused the death of Rhaenyra's son Lucerys Velaryon, Rhaenyra's own husband, Daemon Targaryen, hired two killers to murder one of Aegon and Helaena's children. The killers knew Helaena's habit of bringing her little ones to her mother's rooms every night before bed, and waited for her there: they bound Alicent, killed her maid, and, when Helaena arrived, cut down her guards and barred the door.

With the queen and her three children as hostages, the two men, later known as Blood and Cheese, forced her to choose which child would die. She offered to die in her children's place, but they refused; they threatened to have Blood force himself on Jaehaera and kill all three if she would not choose, and Helaena, in tears, named young Maelor, believing him too young to understand what was happening. The men killed Jaehaerys with a single stroke instead and fled with his head while Helaena screamed.

Jaehaerys's death sank Helaena into a grief she never came back from. She barely ate, would not bathe, and would not leave her rooms, and she could not bear to look at Maelor, knowing she was the one who had named him to be saved. She and Aegon began sleeping apart, and when Aegon was badly wounded at the Battle of Rook's Rest, Helaena did not even go to see him.

As a dragonrider she became unreliable, no longer able to fly Dreamfyre into battle. When the city fell to Rhaenyra, Helaena was taken prisoner.

When Maelor, her youngest child, died, his head was carried to the capital and shown to Rhaenyra. The fool Mushroom says Rhaenyra wept when she saw it; the septon Eustace says instead that she smiled and had it burned in the Targaryen custom of giving the dead to the fire. A false rumour also spread through the city that Rhaenyra had sent the head back to Helaena herself inside a chamber pot.

A few days after the fighting over the Gods Eye, Helaena threw herself from the window of her chamber in Maegor's Holdfast and died falling onto the spikes ringing the moat, her throat pierced, at only twenty-one. At the moment of her death, it is said, Dreamfyre snapped two of her chains and roared loud enough to shake the Dragonpit. When word reached Alicent, the dowager queen tore her mourning clothes and cursed Rhaenyra's name.

Why she took her own life after half a year of captivity is something the sources disagree on. Mushroom claims she had fallen pregnant after being sold as a whore, a story Archmaester Gyldayn flatly dismisses. Grand Maester Munkun points to the horror of watching two of her jailers hanged that same day, though there is no evidence she witnessed it. Eustace, for his part, believes Lady Mysaria chose that night to tell her how Maelor had died.

By evening, rumours were already spreading that Helaena had been murdered: some pointed to Ser Luthor Largent, acting on Rhaenyra's orders; others, according to Munkun, traced back to accusations made by the Shepherd; others still blamed it -so Mushroom claims- on an invention of Lord Larys Strong, who had never left the capital. That night the city erupted in riots, with common folk demanding justice for the queen and her dead children.