Jaehaera Targaryen

Jaehaera was born in 123 AC, barely a year after her parents' wedding. At Viserys I's court, the faction known as the Greens celebrated that Prince Aegon now had children of his own. Like her brother Jaehaerys, she was given a dragon's egg beside her cradle; hers hatched early, and Morghul was born from it.

That same year two of the twins' baseborn half-siblings came into the world — a boy whose mother worked in the Street of Silk, and a girl whose mother served the household of Queen Alicent Hightower, the prince's grandmother. In 127 AC came Jaehaera's younger brother, Prince Maelor.

Two years later, Jaehaera went with her mother and brothers to visit King Viserys I. That same night, after telling Jaehaerys a tale about their ancestor Jaehaerys I Targaryen flying beyond the Wall, the old king died in his sleep.

When Viserys I died, the Greens crowned Aegon II king in King's Landing, while Dragonstone proclaimed his older half-sister Rhaenyra — Viserys's named heir — queen. The realm split in two, and the war later known as the Dance of the Dragons began. With his father now king, young Jaehaerys became heir to the throne.

Early in the fighting, Prince Aemond killed Prince Lucerys Velaryon, Rhaenyra's son. Her husband, Prince Daemon, swore to answer in kind, writing 'an eye for an eye, a son for a son.' The revenge came at night: two men remembered as Blood and Cheese slipped into the chambers of the dowager queen Alicent, in the Tower of the Hand, just as Helaena had brought her three children for their usual evening visit.

One intruder seized Maelor while the other barred the door and killed the guard. They demanded Helaena choose which of her children would die; she offered herself instead, but the men insisted it had to be a boy, warning her to decide before Jaehaera came to harm. In tears, Helaena named Maelor, the youngest. The men told the boy his mother wanted him dead, and killed Jaehaerys instead with a single stroke, fleeing afterward with his head.

The deaths of Lucerys and Jaehaerys only deepened the war: both sides now demanded vengeance, and neither was willing to show mercy.

In 130 AC, as Rhaenyra's dragons appeared over the capital and the city fell, Lord Larys Strong led Jaehaera out of King's Landing along with her father, King Aegon II, and her younger brother Maelor, through a secret passage beneath Maegor's Holdfast that only he knew. Ser Willis Fell of the Kingsguard took charge of the girl and swore to bring her safely to Storm's End, while another guard, Rickard Thorne, escorted Maelor toward Oldtown.

Rhaenyra offered great rewards for any word on the king's whereabouts, the children, and those helping them, and when nothing came of it she sent bands of Inquisitor Knights to hunt the fugitives and punish anyone who had sheltered them.

After Aegon II's death, Ser Willis Fell brought her back to the capital for the crowning of her cousin, the new king Aegon III. With the war over, the peace settlement included her marriage to the young king: she was only eight, and he eleven, so the marriage was never consummated.

Two years after the wedding, Jaehaera threw herself from her window in Maegor's Holdfast and fell onto the spikes of the dry moat below. She lingered in agony for half an hour before dying. With her ended the line joining Viserys I to his second wife, Alicent Hightower.

Her death was officially ruled a suicide, as her mother Helaena's had been. Yet many suspected Lord Unwin Peake, the Hand of the King and a regent for Aegon III, of having ordered it, wanting his own daughter to marry the young king instead. Suspicion fell variously on Ser Mervyn Flowers, Peake's half-brother and the guard posted at her door that night, or on the sellsword Tessario the Tiger, in Peake's service, as the one who might have carried it out.