would-be rescuers were taken and hanged.
The two knights died at dawn, kicking and writhing against the walls of the Red Keep as the nooses tightened round their necks. That very day, not long after sunset, another horror visited the queen’s court. Helaena Targaryen, sister, wife, and queen to King Aegon II and mother of his children, threw herself from her window in Maegor’s Holdfast to die impaled upon the iron spikes that lined the dry moat below. She was but one-and-twenty.
After half a year of captivity, why should Aegon’s queen choose this night to end her life? Mushroom asserts that Helaena was with child after her days and nights of being sold for a common whore, but this explanation is only as creditable as his tale of the Brothel Queens, which is to say, not creditable at all. Grand Maester Munkun believes the horror of seeing Ser Thoron and Ser Denys die drove her to the act, but if the young queen knew the two men it could only have been as gaolers, and there is no evidence that she was a witness to their hanging. Septon Eustace suggests that Lady Mysaria, the White Worm, chose this night to tell Helaena of the death of her son Maelor, and the grisly manner of his passing, though what motive she would have had for doing so, beyond simple malice, is hard to fathom.
Maesters may argue about the truth of such assertions…but on that fateful night, a darker tale was being told in the streets and alleys of King’s Landing, in inns and brothels and pot shops, even holy septs. Queen Helaena had been murdered, the whispers went, as her sons had been before her. Prince Daeron and his dragons would soon be at the gates, and with them the end of Rhaenyra’s reign. The old queen was determined that her young half-sister should not live to revel in her downfall, so she had sent Ser Luthor Largent to seize Helaena with his huge rough hands and fling her from the window onto the spikes below.
Whence came this poisonous calumny, one might ask (for a calumny it most certainly is)? Grand Maester Munkun places it at the door of the Shepherd, for thousands heard him decry both crime and queen. But did he originate the lie, or was he merely giving echo to words heard from other lips? The latter, Mushroom would have us believe. A slander so vile could only have been the work of Larys Strong, the dwarf asserts…for the Clubfoot had never left King’s Landing (as would soon be revealed), but only slipped into its shadows, from whence he continued to plot and whisper.
Could Helaena’s death have been murder? Possibly…but it seems unlikely Queen Rhaenyra was behind it. Helaena Targaryen was a broken creature who posed no threat to Her Grace. Nor do our sources speak of any special enmity between them. If Rhaenyra were intent on murder, surely it would have been the Dowager Queen Alicent flung down onto the spikes. Moreover, at the time of Queen Helaena’s death, we have abundant proof that Ser Luthor Largent, the purported killer, was eating with three hundred of his gold cloaks at the barracks by the Gate of the Gods.
All the same, the rumor of Queen Helaena’s “murder” was soon on the lips of half King’s Landing. That it was so quickly believed shows how utterly the city had turned against their once-beloved queen. Rhaenyra was hated; Helaena had been loved. Nor had the common folk of the city forgotten the cruel murder of Prince Jaehaerys by Blood and Cheese, and the terrible death of Prince Maelor at Bitterbridge. Helaena’s end had been mercifully swift; one of the spikes took her through the throat and she died without a sound. At the moment of her death, across the city atop the Hill of Rhaenys, her dragon, Dreamfyre, rose suddenly with a roar that shook the Dragonpit, snapping two of the chains that bound her. When Dowager Queen Alicent was informed of her daughter’s passing, she rent her garments and pronounced a dire curse upon her rival.
That night King’s Landing rose in bloody riot.
The rioting began amidst the alleys and wynds of Flea Bottom, as men and women poured from the wine sinks, rat pits, and pot shops by the hundreds, angry, drunken, and afraid. From there the rioters spread throughout the city, shouting for justice for the dead princes and their murdered mother. Carts and wagons were overturned,