Barba Bracken was a noblewoman of House Bracken of Stone Hedge, daughter of the Lord Bracken who would serve as Hand of the King, and the fifth of the nine mistresses of King Aegon IV. Buxom and dark-haired, vivacious and not very modest, she was reckoned a great beauty in her day, though the Blackwoods and Maester Yandel alike held that Melissa Blackwood, who came after her, was the fairer. She came to court during the reign of King Baelor I, sent like other maidens to keep company in the Red Keep's Maidenvault with the king's confined sisters, that her family might win his favor. When King Viserys II freed the princesses in 171 AC, Barba, then sixteen, met Prince Aegon Targaryen, who was at once entranced by her.
When Aegon took the throne as Aegon IV in 172 AC, he named Barba's father his Hand and openly took Barba as his mistress. She bore him a bastard son, Aegor Rivers, the boy who would grow to be called Bittersteel, only a fortnight before Queen Naerys nearly died in childbirth. With the queen lingering near death, Barba and her father began to speak openly of a Bracken marriage, and the talk so alarmed Prince Aemon the Dragonknight and Prince Daeron that they forced the king to send both Barba and her son away to Stone Hedge, where she raised Aegor. Replaced in the king's bed by the younger, prettier, more modest Melissa Blackwood, Barba and her father groomed her younger sister Bethany to supplant their rival; the scheme bore fruit in 177 AC when Bethany caught Aegon's eye, but the next year Bethany was found abed with the Kingsguard knight Ser Terrence Toyne, and both she and Lord Bracken were put to death. The feud outlived them all in the hills near Stone Hedge that Aegon, mocking Barba's full figure, had named Barba's Teats, and later, to spite her, renamed Missy's Teats for Melissa; the Brackens call them the one name to this day and the Blackwoods the other.