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.
A soul of House Targaryen, born at King's Landing, sworn to The Greens ÔÇö the King's Party.
The fuller tale
Season Two
In A Son for a Son ÔÇö Asked by killers to choose which son. She pays for the war's madness first. Unable to find Aemond, they take the head of Helaena's boy Jaehaerys while his mother watches: the green court's grief now matches the black's.
How it ends for them
On the page. 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.
Their chapters, book by book
Fire & Blood ÔÇö The Dance of the Dragons 2 chapters that name them
Where the page and the screen part
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 ÔÇö 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.
Their journey
Where the two tellings send them to the same place the road runs whole; where they part, the screen keeps the left and the books the right.