Queen of woe (Rhaella Targaryen) part 1

For over two and a half centuries, the Targaryen dynasty had seen its fair share of ladies. Rhaenys and Visenya were celebrated as founding, conquering matriarchs of the royal house, while Jaehaerys' queen Alysanne was universally beloved for her clever goodness. Alongside the good, of course, were those ladies less pleasantly remembered – tyrannical, usurping Rhaenyra, or defiant Daena, whose son caused many decades of grief. Whether they were considered paragons or fiends, however, both sorts of ladies played into the inheritance of the Targaryen female: a well-bred marriage pawn she might have appeared to be, but a dragon princess was still the descendant of warriors, through whose veins ran the exalted blood of mighty Valyria.

Such was the burden placed on the delicate shoulders of the last of these dragon princesses, Rhaella. It was her duty to live up to this inheritance – to be the hope of a dynasty which, by the time of her birth, was already slipping into decline. Yet Rhaella, more than any of her lady predecessors, seems to have incurred the wrath of Fate; her life, at least since the age of 14, was an almost unmitigated, relentless tale of woe. It was hers to watch the collapse of everything she had ever relied on – a stable marriage, a role as royal mother, her very kingdom – and hers to endure the cruelties of marriage to the Mad King. It was hers, most of all, to be given glimmers of hope for the improvement of her lot, and then to watch them be snatched away one by one, until the Stranger finally relieved her of her tragic burden.

Born to Obey?

Of Rhaella's early life, little is known. Born around 245 AC, Rhaella was the only daughter and second child of Prince Jaehaerys and his sister-wife, Shaera. The fraternal relationship between her parents was unique, unseen in Westeros since the marriage of the eventual Aegon IV and Naerys almost a century before; from her earliest childhood, then, Rhaella would have had direct evidence of the potential – and perils – of traditional Valyrian incestuous coupling. Her grandfather, King Aegon V, had engineered pan-realm alliances designed to win the great lords' support for his populist reforms. Her own parents had not been spared, with Jaehaerys betrothed to Lady Celia Tully and Shaera to Luthor Tyrell, the heir to Highgarden. Yet Jaehaerys and Shaera, traditionally minded and in love with one another, instead escaped the Red Keep and wed, consummating the marriage to ensure that Aegon could not undo it.

It may have been a charming, romantic story in the young princess' life, – the prince and princess, in defiance of their father and king, wedding in secret for love. Yet in her youth, Rhaella may not have been aware of, or understood, the heavy political toll her royal grandfather paid for his second son's defiance. Aegon's marriage had been a love match too, of course, but he had been only a minor prince and his bride a noble Riverlands lady. Comparatively, when his own heir, Duncan, chose to wed a commoner rather than his Baratheon fiancée, Aegon had faced a rebellion from Lord Lyonel; only by surrendering his only remaining marriage pawn, Rhaelle, did Aegon pacify the querulous stormlord. Now losing the Tyrells and Tullys both ensured that Aegon would never be able to sway two powerful lords to his reforms – reforms which would, by necessity, remove powers from these lords themselves.

All of this unpleasant history had occurred before Rhaella was born. She may have known her uncle Prince Duncan and his commoner wife, Jenny; though he had waived his right to succeed, Duncan still came at least occasionally to court (as evidenced by the interaction between Jaehaerys and Lady Jenny's friend, the mysterious and oracular woods witch). Rhaella would have cause to rue Jenny later, but for the moment she and her prince were just one of the three royal couples – along with Rhaella's parents and the king and queen – who, in a rare form for Westeros, had all wed for love alone. Aegon had been given his nuptial autonomy, while Duncan and Jaehaerys had had to seize theirs, but the result was the same, and for the moment, all three seemed to enjoy stable, successful marriages.

Thus, Rhaella's childhood had taught her two lessons, mutually exclusive and destined to collide and explode spectacularly in her own future marriage. The marriages of her parents, uncle, and grandfather all stood for the proposition that marriages were fundamentally about love – more important than lands, power, or even crowns. Yet over her head stretched the lesson which Aegon V had attempted but failed to impose on his own children: royal children were expected to obey their parents in deciding where they married – no matter whom they might love instead, no matter what unhappiness lay in the future.

For the moment, however, Rhaella was simply a young princess in the Red Keep. Strangely but beneficially for the princess, the failure of her uncles' and parents' dynastic marriage schemes had actually improved Rhaella's position at court. Without the highborn consorts with whom Aegon had hoped to match his sons, Rhaella stood third amongst the ladies in court precedence; only her mother and grandmother, Queen Betha Blackwood, came before her. From an early age, then, Rhaella would have been on display at court functions. As the only daughter of the new heir to the throne, everyone might have expected Rhaella to make a brilliant match; the hand of the only unmarried Targaryen princess would go a long way toward healing at least one of the rifts Jaehaerys and his brothers had caused with their broken betrothals.

Yet Rhaella would find herself as caught up in love as her father and uncles had been – with much less successful results.

Mindful of Her Duty

As the only maiden Targaryen princess, the young Rhaella would have likely been a darling of the court. If we may take her surviving daughter as any indication, Rhaella was beautiful from a young age, if perhaps small and delicate in her build. As she matured, the question of Rhaella's marriage would have consumed her grandfather's court. Aegon V had already dangled a Targaryen princess above the Tyrells of Highgarden, only to have her brother take her instead. It may have been reasonably expected that the king would use his only dynastically born granddaughter as a bargaining chip to push forward his pro-smallfolk policies; young Tywin Lannister and her own cousin Steffon Baratheon were likely two of the names traded by expectant courtiers guessing at who might win the princess.

Rhaella herself, however, found at a tourney a wholly less noble individual to love. Barristan Selmy, when questioned by Rhaella's daughter on the subject of the princess' love, reported thus:

"The queen your mother was always mindful of her duty." He was handsome in his gold-and-silver armor, his white cloak streaming from his shoulders, but he sounded like a man in pain, as if every word were a stone he had to pass. "As a girl, though … she was once smitten with a young knight from the stormlands who wore her favor at a tourney and named her queen of love and beauty. A brief thing."

"What happened to this knight?"

"He put away his lance the day your lady mother wed your father. Afterward he became most pious, and was heard to say that only the Maiden could replace Queen Rhaella in his heart. His passion was impossible, of course. A landed knight is no fit consort for a princess of royal blood.

That Rhaella should have fallen in love with a knight of superior skill in the tourney is no great surprise. As a highborn southron girl, Rhaella would have been raised on stories and songs praising knighthood and celebrating the deeds of legendary knightly heroes, from Serwyn of the Mirror Shield to Florian the Fool. Indeed, knighthood is so vital a part of Westerosi culture that the Reach and Vale honor as knights figures who existed millennia before the Andals invaded and brought chivalry to Westeros. The princess' own great-great-great-great uncle Aemon the Dragonknight had been one of these greatest Kingsguard knights in history, and a superb jouster as well; his victory as the Knight of Tears to present the tourney crown to his sister-queen would have been a familiar (and, one supposes, well-loved) story told to Princess Rhaella.

Indeed, the crown of a Queen of Love and Beauty is a high sign of favor in Westeros, presented under rules of chivalry yet fundamentally romantic in its purpose. A man neither betrothed nor married has the freedom to gift the crown to whichever woman he wishes (although a strict observance of chivalry would grant the crown to the highest-ranking woman present, especially if she happened to be a member of the royal family). Barristan Selmy, for example, noting that his own choice for the crown at Harrenhal would have been Ashara Dayne, first acknowledged that he would have passed over the then-Queen Rhaella and Crown Princess Elia.(AN: There is a rumor that Ser Barristan had a crush on Ashara) t Still, romance remained a key factor in the crowning of a Queen of Love and Beauty; Aegon IV's mistress had been the intended recipient of the crown Aemon and many others.

So Rhaella must have been surprised – though delightedly so – that at a tourney, she herself would be presented the victor's crown by the dashing, victorious landed knight who had begged her favor.

The identity of her champion was not given out by Barristan Selmy,( AN: yet we as readers know who so honored Rhaella): Ser Bonifer Hasty. Ser Bonifer, however, was only a landed knight; princess and admirer could have been farther apart on the social stratum, but not by much. Of course, a landed knight may be sworn to a paramount house, and indeed some landed knights wax as or more powerful as their lordly neighbors: the Templetons, hereditary Knights of Ninestars, are ancient and influential bannermen to the Arryns of the Vale, and the Swyfts of Cornfield respected bannermen (and occasional brides) of the Lannisters of the Rock. Yet Bonifer Hasty was no Swyft or Templeton, heir to an well-known and respectable line. House Hasty is only known to exist in the person of Bonifer; he was likely only master of a small keep in the stormlands, rather than the head of an ancient line of landed knights. If he were not a hedge knight – as low as a man could be in Westeros without being merely a member of the smallfolk – Ser Bonifer was, as Ser Barristan noted, no fit mate for a princess of the blood royal.

It may be wondered, of course, if Rhaella really thought she could wed Ser Bonifer. To be sure, Rhaella might have simply been innocent in the affair, a young girl flattered by the attentions of an up-and-coming tourney champion but with no real romantic intentions. She must have known her value as the only maiden Targaryen princess; the dynastic marriage schemes of her grandfather Aegon were only a few examples of the roles highborn maidens were expected to play to further their families' political ambitions. Yet it may also be the case that Rhaella truly loved Bonifer, as Barristan asserts. In this love, Rhaella might have taken as her model her uncle Duncan, perhaps planning to forswear her royal state for the knight she loved; Ser Bonifer, as a knight with a keep, was certainly higher-ranking than the simply commoner Jenny. Indeed, as a woman, Rhaella had no claim to the Iron Throne (unless, perhaps, all male lines of the family went extinct); her brother Aerys would need to make a good match, to continue the Targaryen line, but she – like her uncle and parents – would be free to wed as she desired.

What may have seemed rational to Rhaella, though, was anathema to her father, Prince Jaehaerys. He had witnessed the political backlash his father received after he and his siblings (save young Rhaelle) defied their betrothals. Allowing his daughter to wed a mere landed knight would drive the lords of the realm to rage once again, which the crown could ill afford after so many broken contracts.

Yet more than political necessity played into Jaehaerys' refusal to sanction a match between Rhaella and Ser Bonifer. Prince Duncan's commoner bride had brought to court a woman Jenny swore was a child of the forest. Whether or not she was, the dwarfish woman proclaimed that the prince that was promised, the long prophesied hero, would be born of the line of Aerys and Rhaella.

What relationship Jenny's mystic friend shared with the court is unclear, as is why Jaehaerys so firmly believed her. Personally, of course, Jaehaerys was of a more traditional mind than Aegon V; while his father had dismissed Targaryen incestuous marriages, Jaehaerys had revived the tradition. Perhaps hearing the woods witch cite what he had already intended – a similarly incestuous union for his children – as necessary to produce the great hero of Valyrian prophecy, Jaehaerys felt justified in pushing the match. Certainly, Targaryens had relied on prophecy before; indeed, it had been the prophetic dreams of Daenys the Dreamer which had saved the Targaryens alone among the dragonlords from the Doom. To risk denying the world an eschatological hero simply for a politically advantageous match – or, worse, for his daughter's personal happiness – may have touched the Targaryen prophetic nerve in Jaehaerys, one he felt he could not ignore.

Accordingly, the prince forced his son and daughter to wed. His royal father "washed his hands" of the matter, according to Maester Yandel; if Rhaella thought the grandfather who had wed for love would intercede to stop her father forcing this marriage, she was sorely mistaken. Once again, the king allowed his son to have his way, having had too long an experience of willfulness (of children and bannermen alike) to fight. Rhaella, no older than 14, found herself the wife of a brother for whom she likely had never felt any more than sisterly affection, and who had no romantic love for her. It was an inauspicious start to the long tragedy of her marriage.

The Specter of Summerhall

Some time after the princess' marriage, Rhaella's grandfather King Aegon announced a gathering of family and court at the Targaryens' country seat of Summerhall. The gathering, however, was only a cover for what Aegon truly desired. Frustrated at his inability to enforce his pro-smallfolk policies against obstinate lords, Aegon had become convinced that only dragons could give him the authority he craved. Summerhall, the king decided, would be the birthplace of the new generation of Targaryen dragons.

If Rhaella knew about her grandfather Aegon's draconic desire, she made no mention of it later; indeed, it is probable that she had no inkling about what the future held (or what Aegon hoped the future held) at Summerhall. It is not recorded that Rhaella suffered from the prophetic "dragon dreams" which had affected female as well as male Targaryens since before the Doom. Nor did she ever openly display the prevalent desire to revive the dragons from extinction which had so occupied the thoughts of some of her ancestors and relations. The prophetic mysticism of Aerys I and the dragon-centric obsession of Prince Aerion (or, later, her own husband) had not affected this late dragon princess.

Besides, Rhaella had a far more real and pressing interest in the gathering at Summerhall. At least one dragon would be born among king and court in the country seat – not a literal dragon, but her own first child with her new husband. The child's imminent birth was in fact the pretext for the gathering; the prince or princess born to Aerys and Rhaella would be the first legitimate dynast in the royal Targaryen line since Rhaella herself, some 14 years prior (not including her Baratheon first cousin Steffon, who was perhaps a year younger). With such an important state event, witnesses would be crucial; the presence of the Targaryen royals and courtiers could ensure that the child born to Rhaella was a truly born Targaryen (AN:as James II of England ensured in our own world, publishing testimonies from the more than 70 witnesses to the birth of his son).

If the designation of the birthplace as Summerhall meant that fewer courtiers would be able to attend and watch her give birth, the thought was probably small comfort for the princess, among her other worries. The pressure to produce a son was very real; a princess would be a dynastic disappointment (with Targaryen precedent excluding princesses from the Iron Throne), but a prince would both secure the Targaryen line and – perhaps – become the legendary prince that was promised, savior of humanity. More personally, Rhaella might have hoped that a son would bring her and her brother-husband closer together; their marriage had not been made in love, but the quick production of a son would raise her in Aerys' eyes from a mere forced-upon spouse to the mother of his heir. As always, of course, the danger of childbirth was both real and terrifying; Rhaella need only to look to her own ancestress, Princess Daella, to find another Targaryen princess who had died at her first birth. All eyes, Rhaella knew, would be fixed on her and an outcome over which she had no control. It was, to say the least, a stressful situation for the 14-year-old princess.

The gathering, however, was destined to be not simply stressful but overwhelmingly destructive. Indeed, the tragedy at Summerhall would scar its few survivors – including Rhaella – for the rest of their days.

What happened at Summerhall remains largely a mystery. The chaos and fire which reigned unchecked as Aegon V's dreams of dragons went up in smoke left few survivors, and those who did refused to speak of it. Yet the memory must have haunted Rhaella. She had lost at least her grandfather, her uncle, and any number of courtiers, people she had known her entire life; her mother and grandmother may have also perished in the flames. The ordinary stress of delivering a first child was grossly magnified by the hellish conditions in which it happened; her son's birth would forever be connected to fire and loss, pain and terror, death and destruction. The small comfort of having borne a new male-line heir likely did little to alleviate the princess' grief in the wake of the tragedy.

Mother of Dragons, Mother of Death

The tragedy of Summerhall held political implications for Rhaella, of course. With her grandfather (AN:and her uncle Duncan, though he had surrendered his succession rights) dead in the inferno, her father became King Jaehaerys II, and she Princess of Dragonstone.

Yet the new crown princess' short tenure was not destined to be happy. Her brother-husband Aerys distinguished himself on the battlefield during the War of the Ninepenny Kings, earning his spurs from his friend Tywin Lannister, but their marital relationship had grown no warmer. Indeed, the gap between the birth of Rhaegar and the next recorded time Rhaella conceived matches exactly with the period Rhaella served as crown princess. Why Aerys and Rhaella were not sleeping together in this period (if indeed they were not) remains a mystery. It may be that, numb from the tragedy of Summerhall, Rhaella had no desire to relive the nightmare of her first birth; it may be that both were simply too shell-shocked to engage in that kind of closeness with another survivor of the horrific event. Like King Aegon III and his Dance-survivor queen Jaehaera, the two were fellow victims of disaster, but both may have been too burdened by what they had undergone to engage in a deep level of intimacy.

After Aerys' accession, however, the new king and queen could not afford a continued program of abstinence at least from each other. Three-year-old Prince Rhaegar, now heir to the throne, was healthy and precociously intelligent, but even a highborn young boy was not safe from fatal incidents; after all, the precious only son of Alys Arryn and Ser Elys Waynwood died at three from a kick to the head.

With Aerys and Rhaella now representing the only legitimate dynastic line of Targaryen descent, king and queen knew that more heirs were needed. Rhaella would have also recognized the importance of producing at least one daughter, as a bride for her son to marry. The practice of Valyrian incest had quieted over several generations, but with both Jaehaerys and his son taking sisters to wife, Rhaella would likely presume that the tradition had been revived permanently. Her first role as consort was to bear her royal husband children, and it was to this task that Aerys and Rhaella set at the beginning of his reign.

Yet the Mother was not on Rhaella's side in this matter. Over the course of 13 years, Rhaella conceived eight times, but not one of these pregnancies resulted in surviving children. Three of these – in 263, 264, and 271 AC – were miscarriages, while another two were stillbirths. The remaining three children were born alive, but Princes Daeron, Aegon (born two months premature), and Jaehaerys would each die within a few months of their births.

The question is obvious: what made the childbearing history of Queen Rhaella so checkered? In one way, her fate was not altogether surprising (if nonetheless deeply sad). Minisa Whent, for example, bore three sons who died in infancy (and she herself died after the last birth), and even Queen Alysanne saw four children of her large family die in childhood. (AN:In our own world, infant mortality could be high even for royalty. Of the ten pregnancies between Katherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn, only two resulted in surviving issue; of the 17 pregnancies of Queen Anne, only one child lived past infancy (and that son died at the age of 11). Westerosi medicine, hardly as advanced as our modern real-world equivalent, would almost certainly not be able diagnose if Rhaella had some underlying medical condition which impacted her fertility.)

It may also be the case that some of the magic which had gone awry at Summerhall may have negatively affected either of the king's Targaryen grandchildren. Blood magic (almost certainly involved in the attempt to hatch dragons) and the inherently magical wildfire are dangerous elements on their own, and cannot be made less so when combined. Whether Aerys had been rendered partially sterile by the extreme magic heat, or whether Rhaella had been condemned to serial miscarriage and stillbirth in her close proximity to the burning palace, it cannot be determined. Certainly, Aerys was never noted as having bastards, despite enjoying many mistresses during his reign; by comparison, both of the Targaryen kings who had taken mistresses before – Aegon II and Aegon IV – had had openly acknowledged bastard children.

Rhaella, of course, knew nothing of any medical problems or magic fallout causing her troubles. It must have been terribly frustrating, however, to face constant failure in her primary duty as queen. If she failed to provide another son, and some ill befell young Rhaegar, House Targaryen would end with her generation, and she may well have felt the fault belonged with her.

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