Helaena Targaryen

The gentlest of Alicent's children, rider of Dreamfyre, wed to her brother by the custom of the blood. She speaks in riddles that keep coming true, and no one listens until after.

The fuller tale

Helaena is the gentlest of Alicent and Viserys's children and, by the family's own reckoning, the strangest — a girl who speaks in riddles and half-visions that unsettle everyone who hears them and prove, with uncomfortable regularity, to come true. She is wed to her own brother Aegon by the old Targaryen custom of keeping the blood pure, a match neither of them chose and neither of them particularly resents, and becomes, in her own quiet way, the one steady presence in her husband's chaotic household.

Rider of Dreamfyre, mother to twins Jaehaerys and Jaehaera and a younger son Maelor, Helaena occupies a role at court that is half princess and half oracle nobody quite knows how to listen to — her odd remarks are noted, sometimes laughed off, and only understood, again and again, well after the events they describe have already happened. It is a particular cruelty of her story that being right consistently does nothing to make anyone take her more seriously beforehand.

The war finds her in the one place riddles cannot protect anyone: her own nursery, where Blood and Cheese, come to collect a debt owed for Lucerys Velaryon's death, force her to choose which of her sons dies in front of her. It is the single crudest scene either telling of the Dance offers, and Helaena's response to it — naming her younger son first in a doomed attempt to save someone, only to watch the killers take her elder son regardless — defines the rest of her short life.

What remains of her afterward is a woman visibly, permanently broken by a choice that was never actually hers to control the outcome of, propped up by a court too busy fighting a war to properly attend to her grief. Both tellings treat her subsequent decline with unusual gentleness for a saga this generally unsentimental about its collateral damage.

The page and the screen

The show dramatizes the nursery scene directly and at length, staging Blood and Cheese's intrusion as one of the series' most harrowing sequences and giving Helaena a specific, wrenching moment of impossible choice. Fire & Blood's telling is comparatively terse — Mushroom's account supplies most of the scene's grim detail, including the choice itself, while Eustace's more decorous chronicle elides it almost entirely, leaving Helaena's exact words and state of mind in the moment genuinely disputed between sources.

In the show, season by season

Season Two. In A Son for a Son — Asked by killers to choose which son. She pays for the war's madness first.

Where they stand, season by season

Mentioned in the chronicle

• The city that opened its gates learns what a queen's taxes and a queen's fears cost. Helaena Targaryen falls from Maegor's Holdfast onto the spikes below; the smallfolk name Rhaenyra kinslayer and rise behind the Shepherd. The Dragonpit is stormed by ten thousand hands — five dragons die in it, and Prince Joffrey with them, falling from Syrax's back. Rhaenyra flees a burning city as, above the Gods Eye, the uncles end each other: Daemon leaps from Caraxes onto Vhagar's back and puts Dark Sister through Aemond's remaining eye as both dragons fall. (F&B 6)

Their fate — if death has found them, it is written here. Open at your peril.

The books: Fell from Maegor's Holdfast onto the spikes (F&B, ch. 6)

Broken since Blood and Cheese, the gentlest of the dragons' brood threw herself from Maegor's Holdfast onto the spikes of the dry moat. The city that loved her called it the queen's murder, and the riots that followed helped bring Rhaenyra's rule down.

The series has not yet reached Helaena's final chapter; her fate remains ahead of the current seasons.

Fire & Blood records that grief and the trauma of Blood and Cheese never leave her, and that she eventually throws herself from a window of Maegor's Holdfast onto the iron spikes ringing the dry moat below. The city, which loved Helaena more than it loved almost anyone else in her family, receives the news as murder rather than tragedy regardless of the truth of it, and the riots that follow the rumor help finish the political damage that ultimately brings Rhaenyra's short reign down.