Rhaella Targaryen

Rhaella Targaryen was the twin daughter of Aegon the Uncrowned and Rhaena Targaryen, and her life was shaped by the danger surrounding her family’s claim to the Iron Throne. Hidden under another identity, raised as a novice of the Faith, and later targeted in a plan to make her a queen, she became a quiet but consequential figure in the succession struggles of Maegor’s reign and its aftermath. Reports that she and her twin Aerea may have exchanged identities leave a lasting uncertainty over which sister bore which name.

Birth and the threat to her family

Rhaella and her sister Aerea were born at Casterly Rock while their father was struggling to claim the throne from his uncle, Maegor. Their birth brought fresh condemnation from the High Septon, who denounced the girls as the children of an unlawful union. Rhaena feared that the twins would be endangered by the dispute and urged Aegon to take the family across the Narrow Sea. She was willing to surrender her own hopes of seeing him king, she said, rather than expose their daughters to harm. Aegon refused to abandon his claim, and Rhaena’s appeal did not change his resolve.

After Aegon’s death, Rhaena faced the possibility that the elder twin, Aerea, might be considered his heir. The girls were still barely a year old, and openly asserting Aerea’s right, Rhaena believed, would put both children in mortal danger. She arranged for them to be separated, their hair dyed and their names changed, and entrusted them to powerful allies who could arrange foster homes without knowing their true identities. Rhaena insisted that even she should not know where they had been sent, so that she could not disclose their whereabouts under pressure. Rhaena herself could not disappear as the girls could: she was inseparable from Dreamfyre, the dragon she had ridden since she was twelve. She took the dragon and Aerea to Fair Isle, where Lord Marq Farman received them at Faircastle.

A novice at the Starry Sept

The twins’ concealment did not last. At Maegor’s wedding, Queen Tyanna brought two silver-haired, purple-eyed girls before Rhaena, making clear that the king’s household had found them. Rhaena submitted to the wedding vows, and afterward Maegor declared Aerea his lawful heir until he had a son. He sent Rhaella to Oldtown to be raised as a septa, while expressly disinheriting Jaehaerys Targaryen. The decision gave the twins different lives and different political meanings: Aerea was named heir, while Rhaella was placed in the religious household of the Starry Sept.

By the time Maegor died, the twins were six. Contemporary accounts described Rhaella as the bolder and more robust sister, already a novice serving at the Starry Sept and promised to the Faith. Aerea, by contrast, was remembered as timid and prone to tears. Their sex and childhood made either girl an uncertain prospect for the throne, and Rhaena ultimately accepted that the crown should pass to her brother Jaehaerys rather than to her daughters. The choice ended neither the girls’ political exposure nor questions about their identities.

After Jaehaerys’s coronation, Rhaella remained at the Starry Sept while Aerea traveled with the king to the Red Keep, where she was to serve as a cupbearer and companion to Princess Alysanne. This separation also placed the sisters in distinct settings: Rhaella among the septas and the practices of the Faith, Aerea within the royal household. The wider court used young people from former enemy families as pages, cupbearers, squires, handmaidens, and companions, in part to bind the realm to the Targaryen court. Rhaella’s religious upbringing set her apart from that courtly path, though it did not remove her from dynastic politics.

The disputed identity of the twins

The accounts of the sisters’ temperaments appear to reverse after Maegor’s fall. Rhaella, once described as bold and difficult for the septas to manage, was later said to have devoted herself to prayer and study and to have become a learned, devout young woman. Aerea, formerly the shy twin, became lively, quick-witted, and adventurous, spending much of her time in kennels, stables, and dragon yards. Because the girls had always been mirror images in appearance, the change prompted widespread speculation that someone had switched them around the time of Jaehaerys’s coronation. Rhaena or Queen Alyssa was suspected, but the deception was never proved.

The possibility mattered because Aerea, or the girl then known by that name, was considered heir to the Iron Throne until Jaehaerys had an heir of his own. It also made the sisters’ different upbringings politically sensitive: a change of identity could alter which girl was understood to be the claimant and which had been committed to the Faith. The historical accounts preserve the suspicion without resolving it. Rhaella’s later reputation as a devout novice therefore belongs both to her own story and to an uncertainty the chronicles leave open.

Rogar Baratheon’s attempt to claim her

Rhaella’s position at the Starry Sept made her vulnerable to a later attempt to turn that uncertainty into a political instrument. Ser Orryn Baratheon arrived at the motherhouse with armed men and a letter bearing Lord Rogar’s seal, demanding that Rhaella be handed over to him. He claimed that Rogar urgently needed the girl at Storm’s End. Septa Karolyn, suspicious of the request, delayed the men while sending word to the High Septon. His steward, Casper Straw, assembled armed septons to confront them; when Orryn drew his sword, Straw warned that Hightower knights were on their way, though that claim was a bluff. The Baratheon men surrendered.

Under questioning, Orryn revealed the plan: he was to take Rhaella to Storm’s End and force her to confess that she was actually Aerea, then present her as queen. The attempt depended on turning the uncertainty about the twins into a claim to the throne. The religious household that had raised Rhaella thus became the place where an attempt to manipulate her identity was stopped. The High Septon forgave Orryn after hearing his confession, while Lord Hightower imprisoned the captured men and sent accounts of the affair to the Red Keep and Dragonstone. Rogar did not call his banners after his brother’s failure, but the episode exposed how readily Rhaella’s name and presumed identity could be used in a contest for power.

Reunion and later appearances

Years later, Rhaena visited Oldtown while searching for Aerea, who had disappeared with Balerion. The visit gave her time with Rhaella, whom the account describes as resembling her twin but differing from her in character. Rhaena expressed regret that she had not been a better mother; Rhaella embraced her and reassured her that she had been given the best mother a child could wish for. The exchange offers a rare direct glimpse of their relationship after years of separation, and of Rhaella’s capacity to comfort the mother who had hidden her for protection.

Alysanne also met Rhaella during her stay in Oldtown. She regarded her niece as learned and devout, while noting her tendency to stammer and blush. At a later royal celebration, the High Septon sent Rhaella, now a septa, in his place. She was still shy but smiling, and her resemblance to Aerea as an older girl moved Alysanne to tears. Rhaella’s surviving appearances remain tied to the contrast between the sisters: resemblance made their identities uncertain, while their separate temperaments and vocations seemed to distinguish them. The account never resolves whether the supposed switch occurred, leaving Rhaella’s life marked by a question that was also a matter of royal succession.