Criston Cole and Rhaenyra Targaryen

Criston Cole and Rhaenyra Targaryen’s relationship begins with the princess’s admiration for a celebrated young knight and ends in a rupture that makes her former protector a bitter enemy. The chronicles do not agree on what passed between them in private, but the change in their public alignment is unmistakable: Cole, once constantly at Rhaenyra’s side, eventually fights under Queen Alicent’s favor and joins the Greens.

A knight at the princess’s side

Cole came to courtly notice at a melee in Maidenpool held for King Viserys’s accession. In the final moments, he knocked Dark Sister from Prince Daemon’s hand with his morningstar. After winning, he gave the victor’s laurel to the seven-year-old Rhaenyra and asked for her favor in the joust. He later defeated Daemon in the lists and unhorsed both of the celebrated Cargyll twins before losing to Lord Lymond Mallister.

His appearance and charm made Cole popular at court, and Rhaenyra was among those drawn to him. She asked her father to appoint Cole as her personal shield and protector. Viserys agreed, and Cole became a constant presence beside the princess at feasts and entertainments, wearing her favor in the lists. The closeness was public and sustained: he was not merely a knight who had once pleased her, but a companion and champion attached to her household.

Conflicting accounts of the rupture

The chronicles offer sharply different explanations for the relationship’s deterioration. Septon Eustace and Mushroom both tell accounts involving Rhaenyra and her uncle, Prince Daemon, but disagree about what happened. Eustace says Daemon seduced Rhaenyra, and that she declared her love for him and asked her father to let them marry. Mushroom instead presents Cole as the man Rhaenyra desired, while describing Daemon as encouraging her to pursue him. These are rival reports, not a single settled account.

The sources also differ over the encounter between Cole and Rhaenyra around the time the king arranged her marriage to Laenor Velaryon. In Eustace’s telling, Cole came to Rhaenyra and confessed his love, proposing that they leave Westeros together. She refused: she saw her royal identity and future as incompatible with life as the wife of a sellsword, and questioned whether a man willing to abandon his Kingsguard vows would honor marriage vows. Mushroom reverses the initiative, saying that Rhaenyra approached Cole and that he refused her because he remained bound by his vows. In that version, she later encountered Harwin Strong. The accounts cannot be combined into a reliable single sequence.

Despite their disagreement over who sought whom, the chroniclers agree on the lasting change: Cole’s former love for Rhaenyra gave way to loathing and disdain. The man who had been her constant companion and champion became one of her bitterest opponents. The evidence records the reversal more firmly than it explains its private cause.

The break becomes public

Rhaenyra married Laenor in 114 AC, after the king compelled her to accept the match. At the wedding tourney, Cole wore Queen Alicent’s favor rather than Rhaenyra’s. He fought with conspicuous fury, defeating Harwin Strong and striking Laenor’s favorite, Ser Joffrey Lonmouth, so severely that Joffrey died six days later. What had been a celebration became an occasion for grief and recrimination. The tournament made Cole’s change of allegiance visible in the same courtly arena where Rhaenyra had first given him her favor.

Viserys was angered by the violence and the misery it brought to the wedding festivities. Alicent, by contrast, soon asked that Cole become her personal protector. The coolness between the queen and the princess was already apparent to observers, including envoys from the Free Cities; Cole’s transfer from Rhaenyra’s circle to Alicent’s made that divide personal as well as political. Afterward he belonged entirely to the queen’s party, the Greens, while Harwin became Rhaenyra’s foremost champion among the Blacks.

Political and narrative significance

Cole and Rhaenyra’s personal estrangement unfolds alongside the dispute over succession and the growing division at court. Their story therefore connects intimate favor to political allegiance: the princess’s champion becomes the queen’s protector, and the change is registered not through a private reconciliation or explanation but through public tokens, appointments, and violence at a royal wedding.

The accounts’ contradictions are central to the relationship’s portrayal. One chronicler makes Cole the lover who offers escape; another makes him the sworn knight who refuses the princess. The uncertainty prevents the private history from being treated as settled fact, while the shared outcome remains clear. Whatever the truth of the disputed encounters, their former closeness ends, and Cole’s place beside Rhaenyra is taken by opposition to her. The available narrative records no reconciliation between them.