Rhaena Targaryen and Maegor Towers

Rhaena Targaryen and Maegor Towers formed an unlikely friendship at Harrenhal, a ruined castle that became the final home of both. Their connection began not as a political alliance or a family tie, but as the proximity of two bereaved and isolated figures: Rhaena occupied the Widow’s Tower, while Towers kept his household in the Tower of Dread.

Harrenhal as a Place of Retreat

After losing her daughter Aerea, Rhaena refused the choices offered by her brother, King Jaehaerys: Dragonstone, Greenstone, or a place at court. She also rejected the suggestion that she marry again. Harrenhal, then, was less a return to public life than a retreat from it. Though the castle was said to be haunted, Rhaena accepted it on her own terms, distinguishing its ghosts from those that belonged to her past.

Towers had inherited Harrenhal after his father’s death. His older brothers had perished in the wars of the king whose name he bore, leaving him the last of his line. Sickly and impoverished, he lived in the enormous castle with only a cook and three elderly men-at-arms. Jaehaerys offered Rhaena four of Harrenhal’s five colossal towers; she said one would suffice, noting that her household was smaller even than Towers’s. Their separate households thus began within the same vast, depleted seat.

An Unexpected Friendship

The account describes Rhaena and Towers as eventually forming a friendship of sorts. It does not specify how that friendship developed, but its understated description suits the circumstances: they shared a castle marked by loss, while maintaining distinct households and occupying different towers. Rhaena’s residence in the Widow’s Tower and Towers’s in the Tower of Dread gave their lives a quiet parallel, without making them the same. She was a king’s daughter and the wife of two kings; he was a sickly young heir, alone in a castle built to house thousands.

Deaths and Household Legacy

Towers died in 61 AC. Afterward, Rhaena took his servants into her own household and continued to maintain them until her death. This is the clearest lasting consequence of their connection: the friendship was followed by a practical act of care for the people who had belonged to his diminished household.

Rhaena remained at Harrenhal until she died in 73 AC, aged fifty. Her brother ordered her ashes interred there, and the castle passed to Ser Bywin Strong. The account leaves no record of further details about Rhaena and Towers’s friendship, but their shared years at Harrenhal ended in an enduring household bond: after Towers was gone, the people in his service remained under Rhaena’s care.