Rhea Royce

Lady of Runestone in her own right, heir to ancient Royce bronze — wed young to Daemon Targaryen, who calls her his 'bronze bitch' and visits the Vale as rarely as honor allows.

The fuller tale

Lady of Runestone in her own right and heir to the ancient Royce bronze armor and lands, Rhea is wed young to Daemon Targaryen in a match arranged for its political value and conducted, from the start, with almost none of the affection such matches sometimes eventually develop.

Daemon calls her, with a cruelty he apparently considers affectionate, his 'bronze bitch,' and visits Runestone as rarely as honor technically requires — leaving Rhea to govern her own lands competently and largely alone for years at a stretch, a marriage in name considerably more than in practice.

The page and the screen

Both tellings treat Rhea's death as suspicious without quite committing to calling it murder outright, though the show stages Daemon's involvement with somewhat more visual suggestion than the book's careful hedging allows.

Where they stand, season by season

Mentioned in the chronicle

• Daemon calls on his wife at Runestone. Lady Rhea Royce falls from her horse; the stone that ends her is in her husband's hand. (S1·E5)

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

The show: A fall from her horse — and a stone (S1·E5)

The books: A fall while hawking, nine days after her husband's visit (F&B, ch. 1)

The Lady of Runestone rode out hawking and met her husband on the high road — years after he'd left her, hours before she died. Her horse threw her; the fall broke her; the stone that finished it was in Daemon's hand. The Vale ruled it a riding accident, in the way of rulings no one believes.

In the show, Rhea is thrown from her horse while riding in the mountains near Runestone, and the fall is finished, ambiguously but suggestively, by a stone in Daemon's own hand — the Vale's official ruling calls it a riding accident, in the specific tone of a ruling nobody involved actually believes.

Fire & Blood records her death as a fall while hawking, her skull cracked on a stone, lingering nine days before she dies. The histories note, pointedly, that her husband paid his first visit to Runestone in years just before the accident and moved to claim her lands just after — the Vale's lords refused him both the visit's innocence and the inheritance.