Prince Maekar Targaryen

The king's fourth son, Prince of Summerhall: hard, proud, and forever in his brother Baelor's shadow. He commanded the second line at Redgrass Field; the realm gave Baelor the glory. His sons are his pride and his grief in equal measure.

The fuller tale

Daeron the Good’s fourth son inherits none of the easy prestige that follows his eldest brother everywhere — Maekar earns his standing the hard way, through discipline, stubbornness, and a temper he never entirely learns to govern. At Redgrass Field he commanded the second line while Baelor rode into the charge that made the legends; history handed his brother the glory and Maekar the considerably less romantic satisfaction of having done his job competently while somebody else got remembered for it.

That imbalance shapes nearly everything about him. He is proud to the point of prickliness, quick to read insult where none may have been intended, and utterly, fiercely protective of his own four sons — a protectiveness that curdles, more than once, into something closer to blind loyalty than sound judgment, particularly where his cruel second son Aerion is concerned. At Ashford Meadow that instinct puts him on a collision course with a hedge knight who has just struck a prince of the blood: Maekar’s response to Dunk daring to lay hands on Aerion is a blow of his own, delivered with a mailed fist hard enough to cost the young knight part of his hearing for the rest of his life — discipline and cruelty administered in the same gesture, which is more or less Maekar’s whole character in miniature.

The trial of seven that follows forces him into a position no father should have to occupy: fighting, as one of the accused prince’s champions, in a melee where his own brother Baelor stands on the opposing side. It is Maekar’s own mace that catches Baelor across the helm in the crush of combat — an accident, by every account the tale gives, but one that Maekar has to live with for the rest of his life regardless of intent, knowing that his hand ended the career of the one Targaryen everyone, including Maekar, agreed was better suited to the crown than he was.

What follows, in the years the later tales only gesture toward, is a family increasingly defined by disappointment: Aerion curdling from cruel into something closer to mad, Daeron drowning his ambivalence in wine, Aemon choosing a maester’s chain over a prince’s crown, and only the youngest, least likely son — a bald stableboy calling himself Egg — showing any of the qualities Maekar might once have hoped to see in an heir. Watching his family narrow itself down to its least expected option is, in its way, Maekar’s longest and most private trial.

Circumstance eventually makes him king in truth as well as in temperament — the throne passing to him once his elder brothers’ lines have been exhausted by plague, madness, and indifference in turn. He rules, by most accounts, with the same hard, unglamorous competence he brought to the second line at Redgrass Field: a king better suited to enduring a difficult inheritance than to enjoying one.

The page and the screen

Sam Spruell’s Maekar is one of the first season’s more quietly unsettling performances — a man whose love for his sons is never in doubt and whose capacity for damage is inseparable from it, which the show renders mostly through restraint rather than volume. The blow that costs Dunk his hearing lands in the adaptation much as it does on the page: sudden, almost incidental to Maekar, and devastating in its casualness. Reviewers noted Spruell’s performance as one of the ensemble’s standouts precisely because it resists making Maekar simply a villain — the tale, and the show, both need him to be recognizably a father first.

In the show, season by season

Season One. In Ashford Meadow — The king's fourth son, hard and proud, with a missing son of his own. In The Lists — Finds his missing son at last — squiring for the man who beat his other one. In A Trial of Seven — Stands with his sons against his son's squire's knight. Blood before justice. In The Judgment of the Gods — His mace, his brother's helm — a blow no one saw land clean. In A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms — Carries his brother's death in his hand for the rest of his days.

In the books

The Hedge Knight. In The Trial of Seven — His mace, his brother's helm, his life's long shadow.

Where they stand, season by season

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

The chronicle records no death for this soul — they are living when the tale leaves them, or their ending is a page the maesters have yet to turn.