Maelor Targaryen

Maelor was born in 127 AC, the second son and third child of the then-prince Aegon and his sister Helaena. Like his siblings, he received a dragon's egg at birth, the mark reserved for children of Valyrian blood.

Two years later, in the third moon of 129 AC, Maelor went with his mother and older siblings to visit King Viserys I at the Red Keep. While the king told the older children a story about Jaehaerys I, he slipped a pearl ring from his own finger and gave it to Maelor to play with.

When the Dance of the Dragons began after the death of Lucerys Velaryon, Prince Daemon Targaryen swore blood for blood, "an eye for an eye, a son for a son." Two men remembered as Blood and Cheese slipped into Queen Alicent Hightower's chambers in the Tower of the Hand, where Helaena had left her three children before putting them to bed.

The two men demanded that the queen choose which of her children should die. On her knees, weeping, she named Maelor, her youngest, barely two years old. Cheese turned to the older boy instead and said, "You heard her, boy. Your mother wants you dead." It was he, not Maelor, whom Blood beheaded with a single stroke: Prince Jaehaerys.

When Rhaenyra's dragons appeared over King's Landing, Lord Larys Strong smuggled Maelor out of the city along with his father Aegon II and his sister Jaehaera, through a secret passage in Maegor's Holdfast that only he knew. Ser Rickard Thorne was charged with taking the boy on to Lord Hightower, in Oldtown.

On the road they stopped at Bitterbridge, at the Boar's Head Inn, and there someone found among the prince's belongings the dragon's egg he had carried since birth. Word spread and a mob gathered; Ser Rickard died trying to get Maelor away, and a washerwoman named Willow Rivers took the boy in, going so far as to present him as her own son.

What happened next is disputed. Maester Munkun says the mob killed the prince; the fool Mushroom claims it was Willow's desperate embrace that broke his back; Septon Eustace says a village butcher hacked him into six pieces to share among those fighting over him. Lady Caswell sent Ser Rickard's body, wrapped in his white cloak, back to King's Landing along with the prince's head, and sent the dragon's egg to Lord Ormund Hightower at Honeyholt, hoping to appease him. When the Hightower host reached Bitterbridge, she asked only for mercy for her own children before hanging herself.