Blood and Cheese

After Aemond Targaryen killed Prince Lucerys Velaryon, his stepfather Daemon answered with a vow that spread through the court: an eye for an eye, a son for a son. Weeks later the answer came at night, inside the Tower of the Hand at King's Landing, where two men remembered only by their nicknames — Blood and Cheese — slipped in unseen and waited in the chambers of the dowager queen Alicent Hightower.

Queen Helaena, as she did every evening, brought her three children to bid their grandmother goodnight before bed. Blood shut the door behind them and killed her guard; Cheese seized the youngest of the princes, two-year-old Maelor. They told Helaena they were 'debt collectors' and demanded she choose which of her sons would die that night. She offered herself instead, but the two men refused — it had to be a son — and warned they would turn on her daughter Jaehaera if she took much longer to decide.

Broken by the choice, Helaena finally named Maelor. Cheese told the boy his own mother wanted him dead, then grinned at Blood — who, instead of touching Maelor, beheaded the elder brother, Prince Jaehaerys, with a single stroke. The two men fled with the boy's head, leaving Helaena, Jaehaera and Maelor unharmed, and the queen screaming behind them.

Blood didn't get far: he was caught at the God's Gate with the head hidden in a saddlebag, and before dying under torture admitted he had been heading to Harrenhal to collect his pay from Prince Daemon. Cheese was never found; King Aegon II, beside himself, had every ratcatcher in the city hanged. Helaena stopped eating, bathing or leaving her rooms, sinking slowly into madness; Aegon took to sleeping apart from her and drinking every night. With two princes now dead, neither side of the Dance of the Dragons was willing to show the other any mercy.