Rhaenys Targaryen
Rhaegar's little daughter by Elia of Dorne, a small girl who loved her cat, lost in the fall of the Targaryen dynasty.
A soul of House Targaryen, born at King's Landing.
The fuller tale
How it ends for them
Died in the Sack of King's Landing, before the story ÔÇö before this story begins.
Rhaenys died in the Sack of KingÔÇÖs Landing, before either telling begins, when Tywin LannisterÔÇÖs men took the Red Keep in the rebellionÔÇÖs final hours. In the books she hid beneath her fatherÔÇÖs bed, and Ser Amory Lorch found her there: a knight in mail stabbing a screaming three-year-old, half a hundred wounds by the count that reached Dorne. Even Tywin, who ordered the children dead as proof of his new loyalty, is said to have judged the manner of it needlessly savage ÔÇö his complaint, characteristically, was about presentation.
The bodies of Rhaenys and her baby brother were wrapped in crimson cloaks and laid before the Iron Throne as tokens for Robert Baratheon, who saw dragonspawn where Ned Stark saw murdered children ÔÇö the first crack in the rebellionÔÇÖs victory, and the seed of DorneÔÇÖs long grudge. The show keeps all of this as remembered history in OberynÔÇÖs mouth; the books add the detail that no one in Dorne ever doubted RhaenysÔÇÖs death, however much they came to question her brotherÔÇÖs.
Their chapters, book by book
Where the page and the screen part
Neither telling stages her life; both inherit her death as history. The books are more precise about the horror ÔÇö naming Ser Amory Lorch as the killer who dragged her from her hiding place, counting the wounds, and making TywinÔÇÖs cold apportioning of blame part of JaimeÔÇÖs and OberynÔÇÖs memories ÔÇö while the show folds the deaths of both royal children into OberynÔÇÖs accusations against the Mountain and Tywin, sanding off the specifics. The show also never mentions the kitten, which book readers will tell you, correctly, is the whole point of her. One further book-side ripple: the existence of a claimant calling himself her brother Aegon makes book-RhaenysÔÇÖs fate a live political question again, since everyone agrees the girl, at least, truly died.