House Targaryen

Helaena Targaryen

Life: 109 AC
House: Targaryen

A gentle queen whose family the war tested cruelly — the chronicle keeps what becomes of her veiled for readers not yet there.

Helaena Targaryen was Alicent Hightower's second child and only daughter, wed to her full brother Aegon II in the custom the dynasty had never fully abandoned, and by every account that survives her a gentler and more retiring presence than either her mother's court or her husband's war much rewarded. She rode the dragon Dreamfyre, kept mostly to her own chambers and children, and left behind a scattering of odd, riddling remarks that later readers have combed for portents the Citadel is careful to call retrospective rather than confirmed — a queen remembered, fairly or not, more for a handful of strange sentences than for anything she is recorded to have actually done.

The arc of Helaena Targaryen

This carries the character’s road through the published novels. Read on only if you do not fear to know.

Helaena's ordinary life ends when the hired killers known to history only as Blood and Cheese corner her and her three children in the Red Keep and demand, as payment for a nephew's death her husband's brother had dealt, that she choose which of her own sons will die in his place. She names her youngest, thinking — or hoping — the demand a bluff; the killers murder her eldest instead. What was left of Helaena did not recover from the choice she was forced to make or the son she lost regardless of it, and within the same terrible year she was dead herself, by her own hand according to the account the Citadel finds likeliest, though rumor at the time laid the death at other doors entirely.

Where the books leave Helaena Targaryen: died in 130 AC at twenty-one, falling — by the account most chroniclers favor, though not the only one on record — from a window of Maegor's Holdfast not long after the murder of her young son Jaehaerys

These partings name deaths, endings, and roads not yet ridden in the books. Unveil them only if both roads are known to you — or if you do not fear to know.

Sourcesfire-and-bloodthe-princess-and-the-queen

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Who is Helaena Targaryen?

The daughter of Viserys I and Alicent Hightower, wed to her brother Aegon II, whose life was shattered by the murder of her son during the Dance of the Dragons.

Is Helaena Targaryen alive?

No — the chronicle need only say that the choice the killers called Blood and Cheese forced on her was one she never recovered from; the particulars are treated in her veiled record.