Blood and Cheese

Blood and Cheese are the names by which a former City Watch serjeant and a Red Keep ratcatcher are remembered for carrying out Daemon Targaryen’s revenge against the royal family. Their knowledge of the city’s hidden networks and the castle’s forgotten passages enabled them to enter the Tower of the Hand and wait for Queen Helaena and her children. Their attack killed Prince Jaehaerys, the eldest son and heir of Aegon II Targaryen, and made the war’s claims of retaliation brutally immediate within the royal household.

Identities and Recruitment

The pair’s true names were lost to history. The account identifies one as a large, brutal former serjeant in the City Watch, dismissed after killing a prostitute while drunk. The other, Cheese, worked as a ratcatcher in the Red Keep. Their contrasting familiarity with the city and the castle made them useful to a plot that depended on moving unseen: one brought experience as a violent man, the other intimate knowledge of the royal residence.

They were recruited in Flea Bottom by a go-between acting for Daemon. In his youth, Daemon had been known as the Prince of the City, familiar to people living at the margins of King’s Landing, and he retained both low-town connections and followers among the gold cloaks. The account also says he had allies at court, even on the green council, and a trusted intermediary able to move through the city’s poorer quarters. Blood and Cheese were therefore not acting on their own initiative: they were the instruments of a revenge operation assembled through Daemon’s concealed network.

The intermediary’s identity is not stated outright in the account. After his capture, Blood described a pale, older foreign woman who had supposedly hired the pair, and said that other women called her Misery. The narrative later notes that the White Worm was never found, linking the search for the mysterious intermediary to Daemon’s clandestine circle without establishing every detail of her role. The uncertainty surrounding the go-between contrasts with the clarity of the pair’s task and the consequences of carrying it out.

Entry into the Red Keep

The attack followed the death of Lucerys Velaryon. Queen Rhaenyra collapsed on hearing the news, and Daemon sent word from Harrenhal that Lucerys would be avenged. Blood and Cheese’s assignment thus emerged from the war’s cycle of loss and reprisal, but its target was not a battlefield opponent. It reached into the household of Aegon II and Queen Helaena, where the royal children were exposed to the consequences of that cycle.

The pair first considered the king, but that proved impractical. Aegon was accompanied by Kingsguard, and access to Maegor’s Holdfast was limited by its drawbridge and the defenses around it. Cheese knew the castle’s hidden doors and tunnels, including a forgotten passage through which the two men could avoid the guards. They instead made their way into the Tower of the Hand, bypassing the spearmen at its entrance. Ser Otto Hightower’s rooms were not their objective; they entered the chambers of his daughter, Alicent Hightower, who had taken up residence there after Viserys I’s death.

Blood and Cheese restrained Alicent and killed her bedmaid, then waited for Queen Helaena’s customary evening visit with her children. The choice of location and timing made their knowledge of court routine as important as Cheese’s knowledge of the passageways. Their plan depended on anticipating where the queen would go and when, turning an ordinary family visit into the moment of confrontation.

The Attack and Its Immediate Outcome

Helaena arrived with Jaehaerys and Jaehaera, both six, and Maelor, who was two. The intruders blocked the door, killed the guardsman, and took Maelor. They demanded that Helaena choose which son would die, threatening the safety of the children if she did not comply. She pleaded that they kill her instead, but the demand was for a boy. Faced with an impossible choice, she named Maelor, perhaps because she thought he was too young to understand, or because Jaehaerys was Aegon’s firstborn son and heir.

Blood and Cheese killed Jaehaerys rather than Maelor. The decision turned Helaena’s attempt to save one child into the means by which the attackers selected another, and the loss of the heir gave the attack political as well as familial force. The account says that the pair did not otherwise harm Helaena or the surviving children. They fled with the prince’s head, using the same hidden routes that had allowed them to enter.

Capture, Search, and Aftermath

Two days later, Blood was seized at the Gate of the Gods while trying to leave King’s Landing with the head concealed in a saddlebag. Under torture, he confessed that he had been taking it to Harrenhal to claim his reward from Daemon. He also gave the description of the woman he said had hired them. Blood was eventually allowed to die after thirteen days of torment; his capture exposed the claimed connection to Daemon, but the other agent and the suspected intermediary escaped the search.

Queen Alicent ordered Larys Strong to discover Blood’s true name, intending that his wife and children be punished in reprisal. The account does not establish whether that threat was carried out. Ser Luthor Largent and the gold cloaks searched the Street of Silk and questioned its women, but found no trace of Cheese or the White Worm. The failure to locate the other participants left the operation’s broader network unresolved even after Blood’s confession.

Aegon II responded by ordering the city’s ratcatchers hanged, and the order was carried out. Ser Otto Hightower brought one hundred cats into the Red Keep to replace them. The measure made Cheese’s occupation itself a source of suspicion and punishment, extending the consequences of the attack beyond its intended victims to an entire group of workers. Blood and Cheese remain inseparable in the account from this expanding aftermath: their identities are obscure, but the murder they carried out, the confession that implicated Daemon, and the reprisals that followed are not.