‘House of the Dragon’: Is Aemond the Real Father of Helaena’s Unborn Child?

With the latest episode of House of the Dragon season 3 having made a star of Ormund Hightower, one might expect the fandom to be focused on him. Yet it is a more subdued matter that has everyone talking: the fact that Helaena Targaryen is with child.

To those in the know, particularly George R.R. Martin devotees, a third pregnancy for the king and his sister-wife comes as no great surprise. The record in Fire & Blood is clear on the three offspring of Aegon II and Helaena. But after the kind of narrative liberties HBO has been wont to take, there is plenty of conjecture as to whether showrunner Ryan Condal is following the text with Maelor Targaryen or if he has something else in mind.

One could make the case that, in light of Martin’s own public disquiet over how Aegon’s line has been treated, the writers are simply doing what they should and bringing Maelor into the story. Then again, an altogether more explosive theory is making the rounds on social media.

The question on many lips is who the father of this third child really is. The prevailing idea is not Aegon, but his volatile younger brother, Prince Aemond.

Fire & Blood does little to explore the relationship between the two, but the series has been building an unorthodox rapport of its own. Where Aegon has been distant with his sister, a point Helaena was open about at Viserys’ last supper, Aemond has displayed a sort of quiet fascination with her prophecies. One only has to recall the season 2 finale, when it was Helaena who put a pall on Aemond’s future by predicting his end at the Gods Eye from the Red Keep balcony. He is one of the few who seems to get her.

To put the theory to the test, fans have been poring over the show’s timeline. There is the matter of Aegon, who has been out of the picture for weeks after being badly burned at Rook’s Rest and taken from King’s Landing under cover. With him gone, Aemond has made himself the de facto head of the Greens in his capacity as Prince Regent. One has to wonder about the logistics: could the child have been sired in the Red Keep while Aemond held court during Aegon’s protracted convalescence? The programme’s timeline is open enough to a conventional reading, but it also leaves ample scope for scandal.

Should Condal go down this road, it would be a major break from the source material. In the book, the child is just another piece in the bloody game of succession. Make Aemond the father and you have upended the Green camp; the One-Eyed Prince becomes the biological author of the Green line, besting his elder brother in more than just political clout.

Most likely, however, the show is merely putting its own spin on Maelor’s fate from the pages of the book. The series has a way of reworking Martin’s history, but in the end, a pregnancy can be just that.