Prince Jaehaerys Targaryen

Prince Jaehaerys Targaryen was the six-year-old twin of Jaehaera Targaryen and the firstborn son and heir of Aegon II and Helaena Targaryen. His short life is recorded through a contrast between the quiet domestic scenes of his childhood and the sudden violence that ended it. His murder deprived the king of his heir and left his mother unable to bear the sight of the surviving child she had named under threat.

Family and Position

Jaehaerys was one of three children of Aegon II and Helaena, alongside his twin sister Jaehaera and their younger brother Maelor. As Aegon II’s firstborn son, he stood next in line to the Iron Throne. That position made him more than a child within the royal household: his place in the succession gave his safety a political weight that the attack on his family would turn into a source of grief and fury.

A Childhood Visit

On the third day of the third moon of 129 AC, Helaena brought the children to visit their grandfather, King Viserys Targaryen, in his chambers. Jaehaerys and Jaehaera were six, while Maelor was two. The dying king gave the youngest boy a pearl ring to play with, then told the twins a familiar story about their namesake, Jaehaerys Targaryen, flying north to the Wall to defeat wildlings, giants, and wargs. The children had heard it many times, but listened attentively. Viserys soon sent them away, pleading weariness and pain in his chest; he died without waking. This last recorded visit places Jaehaerys in an ordinary family moment just before the realm’s political crisis became open conflict.

Murder in the Red Keep

Later, Cheese and Blood used a hidden passage to enter the apartments where Queen Alicent was staying. They bound and gagged the Dowager Queen and waited for Helaena, who customarily brought her children to see their grandmother. At dusk, Helaena arrived with all three children. The intruders blocked the door, seized Maelor, and demanded that Helaena choose which son would die. She pleaded that they kill her instead, but they insisted that she name a boy. Under threat, she named Maelor, perhaps because he was too young to understand, or because Jaehaerys was the king’s heir. The assailants then killed Jaehaerys and fled with his head.

Two days later, Blood was captured at the Gate of the Gods while attempting to leave King’s Landing with Jaehaerys’s head hidden in a saddle sack. Under torture, he said he had been taking it to Harrenhal to collect a reward from Prince Daemon. He also described a woman he claimed had hired the pair, known to other women in the city as Misery. Cheese and the woman were never found.

Consequences and Narrative Significance

Jaehaerys’s murder brought personal loss and public retaliation into the same scene. Aegon II, grieving and furious, ordered the city’s ratcatchers hanged; Ser Otto Hightower brought a hundred cats into the Red Keep to replace them. Helaena survived the attack physically, but afterward she would not eat, bathe, or leave her chambers, and could no longer bear to look at Maelor because she had named him. Aegon II took the boy from her and gave him to Alicent to raise, and the king and queen slept apart thereafter. The murder’s consequences thus extended beyond the loss of the heir: it broke the surviving family’s daily life and deepened Helaena’s decline into madness.