2024-07-09 05:40:03
Rest in peace, Rhaenys Targaryen, the Queen Who Never Was. I’m still not sure why exactly you flew back toward Vhagar’s open jaws … I’m sure you had a good reason. Except for that slipup, you were one of this show’s wisest and most dignified characters, and your presence will be missed.
At any rate, let’s break down “The Red Dragon and the Gold,” Episode 4 of Season 2 of House of the Dragon.
The showrunners had been setting up a rift between Aemond and Aegon since last season, and the payoff was fantastic. This week, Aemond betrayed Aegon, first by waiting to join him in battle, then by recklessly hitting him with a blast of Vhagar’s dragonfire. Aemond has just enough plausible deniability to say he was trying to take out Rhaenys—but it was pretty clear that he wouldn’t mind his older brother becoming a tragic casualty in this conflict. Heck, when the battle was over and he was standing near Aegon, he even had his sword out … for some reason.
This isn’t quite how the Battle of Rook’s Rest takes form in Fire & Blood. In the book, Aegon and Aemond arrive at the keep together—Criston Cole’s trap involves both brothers, not just the younger one. And in the tangle of wings, teeth, and claws, there is no mention of Vhagar attacking the king. Here’s the relevant passage:
Princess Rhaenys made no attempt to flee. With a glad cry and a crack of her whip, she turned Meleys toward the foe. Against Vhagar alone she might have had some chance, but against Vhagar and Sunfyre together, doom was certain. The dragons met violently a thousand feet above the field of battle, as balls of fire burst and blossomed, so bright that men swore later that the sky was full of suns. The crimson jaws of Meleys closed round Sunfyre’s golden neck for a moment, till Vhagar fell upon them from above. All three beasts went spinning toward the ground. They struck the ground so hard that stones fell from the battlements of Rook’s Rest half a league away.
Those closest to the dragons did not live to tell the tale. Those farther off could not see for the flame and smoke. It was hours before the fires guttered out. But from those ashes, only Vhagar rose unharmed. Meleys was dead, broken by the fall and ripped to pieces upon the ground. And Sunfyre, that splendid golden beast, had one wing half torn from his body.
But the way it takes place in the show isn’t so much a change from the book as it is a reinterpretation. Since Fire & Blood is written as an in-universe historical account of the Targaryen dynasty penned some 150 years after the Dance of the Dragons, it is awash in ambiguity. Some details have gotten lost over the decades, and some were never known. Aegon’s rash arrival at Rook’s Rest without a plan is something those who chronicled the Dance of the Dragons may have wanted to obscure. Aemond attacking his brother amid the chaos is something they never may have known about.
This is a book-to-show adjustment that has added texture and complexity to the story. Rewind the clock, and it’s clear that Ryan Condal and the showrunners have been laying the groundwork for this moment for quite some time by, for instance, depicting how Aegon torments Aemond. Remember the Pink Dread?
Or recall how, in Episode 9 of Season 1, Aemond coveted Aegon’s position as heir. As Aemond and Criston hunted for the former’s deadbeat brother, Aemond complained: “Here I am, trawling the city, ever the good soldier, in search of a wastrel who’s never taken half an interest in his birthright. ’Tis I, the younger brother, who studies history and philosophy. It is I who trains with the sword, who rides the largest dragon in the world. It is I who should be—”
He continued: “I’m next in line to the throne. Should they come looking for me, I intend to be found.”
Then, in this episode, we see not only Criston and Aemond bypassing the king by working directly together, but also Aemond showing off his High Valyrian. The prince knows how to say “sobriquet” in his family’s mother tongue, while Aegon can’t even conjugate his verbs. Embarrassing!
Aemond’s betrayal also ties into a broader theme in this episode, which is how much a monarch trusts their council—and how much their council trusts them. Daemon—always Aemond’s mirror image, so much so that Matt Smith briefly dons an eyepatch in this episode—hasn’t hit Rhaenyra with a blast of dragonfire, but there is a similar rift between him and his queen.
Alys Rivers calls Daemon out on that: “So you come here after quarreling with your wife? You arrive here alone to claim the castle, and yet send no ravens.” She continues: “Do you now plan to make your own claim?” And then, to drive it all home: “It’s a hard thing, I imagine, to give obeisance to one who replaced you as heir. And a woman, too, a girl child you bounced on your knee. Does it please you that her legitimacy is contested?”
Funny enough, I don’t think even Daemon knows the answers to these questions. As we can see from the dreams and/or visions he’s experiencing at Harrenhal, he’s plagued by guilt and self-doubt. Did he want his brother’s love, or just his crown, or both? (Related: Are we going to get Paddy Considine back on-screen this season?)
On paper, Aemond should be Aegon’s closest ally. Aegon calls him “my closest blood” in the first episode of this season, and the two have been by each other’s side since they were children. Similarly, Daemon should be Rhaenyra’s closest ally. He’s her husband and thus the king consort—and he’s known her since she was a child (yuck). Yet Rhaenyra essentially had to send Daemon away after he engineered the Blood and Cheese debacle, and Aegon was just violently betrayed by his brother. Both Aemond and Daemon have clearly dreamed of themselves on the Iron Throne—can either be trusted?
It’s not like Aegon or Rhaenyra have too many other trusted voices to fall back on. Aegon’s council doesn’t listen to him. His mother has taken to almost mocking him. Rhaenyra at least had Rhaenys to help her steer her rudderless, bloodthirsty lords. Now she’s without the Queen Who Never Was and will likely need to lean more heavily on Corlys (who may partially blame her for Rhaenys’s death) and Jacaerys, whom she also needs to raise as a son. You’re not exactly in a great spot when Mysaria, who was about to be banished two episodes ago, is one of your most trusted advisers.
Aemond’s betrayal and Daemon’s sulking have added another dimension to this conflict and this show. As a civil war, the Dance of the Dragons is inherently about Targaryen infighting. But now there is infighting on each side of the conflict as well. These are civil wars within a civil war.
Last week, Aegon mentioned that he was wearing the Valyrian steel armor of Aegon the Conqueror. This week, we see him ride to battle in it. The symbolism of Aegon being a bit too small for the armor of his namesake is just too perfect:
All images via HBO
Valyrian steel armor is a mostly new addition to the Thrones canon. Aegon the Conqueror’s Valyrian steel sword and crown are well documented in the lore, but his armor is never mentioned. In fact, only one suit of Valyrian steel armor is detailed in the books, and it’s from a chapter of The Winds of Winter—yeah, a book that has not been published. In 2016, George R.R. Martin read a chapter of his forthcoming (?) book at Balticon. The passage is from the perspective of Aeron Greyjoy and describes his brother Euron, who claims to have visited Old Valyria:
Euron Crow’s Eye stood upon the deck of Silence, clad in a suit of black scale armor like nothing Aeron had ever seen before. Dark as smoke it was, but Euron wore it as easily as if it was the thinnest silk. The scales were edged in red gold, and gleamed and shimmered when they moved. Patterns could be seen within the metal, whorls and glyphs and arcane symbols folded into the steel.
Valyrian steel, the Damphair knew. His armor is Valyrian steel. In all the Seven Kingdoms, no man owned a suit of Valyrian steel. Such things had been known 400 years ago, in the days before the Doom, but even then, they would’ve cost a kingdom.
Now, Aeron is not the most reliable narrator, and Euron (who is a very different character in the books) is full of dramatic boasts that may or may not be true. So we can’t say for sure that Euron’s smoky black armor is made of Valyrian steel. What is for sure: Enough Valyrian steel for a full set of plate armor would indeed cost a kingdom, if not more.
In the Season 4 premiere of Thrones, Tywin Lannister has the ancient Valyrian steel blade of House Stark, Ice, melted down and made into two swords of his house (Oathkeeper, which goes to Jaime, and Widow’s Wail, which goes to Joffrey). This is a big moment not just because it represents Tywin’s domination over the Starks, but also because House Lannister gets not one, but two Valyrian steel weapons out of it.
An archmaester once counted 227 Valyrian steel weapons in Westeros, but some of those “have since been lost or have disappeared from the annals of history,” per A World of Ice and Fire. One that was lost was Brightroar, the ancient sword of House Lannister. Brightroar went missing when a Lannister king of old—Tommen II—sailed with it to Old Valyria after the Doom to attempt to plunder the city and never returned. (Tywin’s younger brother Gerion once went to Old Valyria to look for the sword; he also never returned.) Despite Tywin’s attempt to buy such blades from lesser houses, House Lannister was without Valyrian steel until it claimed the Starks’.
In Tywin’s day, House Lannister was the wealthiest house in all of Westeros. Yet all that gold couldn’t buy him even one of these special swords. Valyrian steel weapons are the NFL teams of Westeros—they’re almost never for sale. So Aegon’s set of Valyrian steel armor may have cost even more than a kingdom: It may be literally priceless.
And of course, his first time wearing it, he immediately gets bested in battle and burned by dragonfire. Regardless of whether Aegon himself survived, let’s hope his armor did. It’s too precious to lose.
The black-haired woman who told Daemon last week that he’d die at Harrenhal gets a name this week: Alys Rivers. She’s a bastard of the Riverlands and not a barn owl … at least, I’m pretty sure she’s not actually a barn owl. It’s hard to say anything about Alys for sure.
Daemon calls her a witch, and with all the potion brewing she’s doing, it’s likely she’s what many in Westeros would call a woods witch. Most woods witches can prepare some simple medicines and work as midwives. They’re a go-to for young maidens who find themselves in need of moon tea. But the word “witch” oversells it—these women aren’t practicing magic.
Well, most woods witches aren’t practicing magic. Some seem to. One story tells of an ancient hero—Clarence Crabb—who would take the heads of the enemies he’d slain back to his wife, a woods witch. The wife would kiss the heads on the lips and bring them back to life, and the heads would give him counsel. Another legend says that two ancient lords and brothers in the Reach—Harlon the Hunter and Herndon of the Horn—both married a woods witch and shared “her favors for a hundred years (for the brothers did not age so long as they embraced her whenever the moon was full).”
Much later, Daenerys learns in A Dance With Dragons that her father, Aerys, and mother, Rhaella, were married because a woods witch prophesied that the Prince That Was Promised would be born from their line. In that same book, a wildling woods witch leads a host of freefolk to Hardhome, where she says she’s foreseen them boarding ships and sailing south to escape the wights. Jon Snow sends ships to bring the wildlings south … but the sea is too dangerous for the ships to travel back.
And of course, there is Maggy the Frog from Thrones, who gave Cersei a prophecy that haunted her entire life. Whether that prophecy—which held that Cersei would marry the king, that she’d have three children, that her children would wear golden crowns and golden shrouds, that a younger and more beautiful queen would cast her down, and that ultimately “the valonqar shall wrap his hands about your pale white throat and choke the life from you”—came true or not is a point of rigorous debate in the fandom. It’s Thrones—prophecies are never straightforward.
At any rate, Alys fits somewhere into this tradition. She may be able to see the future. Or she may just have access to Westeros’s finest magic mushrooms. We’ll have to wait to find out.
Speaking of bastards, we get confirmation of Alyn and Addam Hull’s lineage this week. Rhaenys all but says it: They’re Corlys’s children. She adds to Alyn, “Your mother must have been very beautiful.”
It doesn’t seem likely that we’ll meet Alyn and Addam’s mother on House of the Dragon (there was no casting news for her), but Fire & Blood goes into some detail about her. Marilda of Hull was the daughter of a shipwright and became known as “Mouse” because she was “small, quick, and always underfoot.” Her two sons—who in the book have the classic silver hair and purple eyes of Valyrians—quickly proved themselves as capable sailors. And when Marilda’s father died, Marilda sold his shipyards and used the proceeds to build herself a trading vessel she named Mouse. By the time of the outbreak of the war, Marilda had seven trading ships that her sons helped her man.
In the book, Marilda says that her boys are the offspring of Laenor Velaryon. But Laenor’s fondness for men and disinterest in women make this difficult to believe. And in House of the Dragon, Alyn and Addam have been aged up enough that it seems virtually impossible for Laenor to have been their father. Instead, the much more likely theory that Corlys is their father is essentially confirmed in this episode.
What’s next for Alyn and Addam? Rhaenys says that Alyn—who saved Corlys from drowning off-screen—should be “raised in honor not hidden beneath the tides.” We’ll have to see if that’s the course Corlys takes after Rhaenys’s death. The Sea Snake is quickly running out of family.
When Rhaenyra tells Jacaerys about the Song of Ice and Fire, there is a dragon skull behind her:
We often hear about the dragon skulls in King’s Landing; a few scenes take place in front of the skull of Balerion, for instance. But on Dragonstone? I don’t know of a skull that resides there.
After some digging, it’s clear that there are a decent number of dragon skulls lying about. By the time of Tyrion, for example, there are 19 of them in King’s Landing—and some date back to long before Aegon’s Conquest. Here’s how Tyrion describes the skulls in A Game of Thrones:
There were nineteen skulls. The oldest was more than three thousand years old; the youngest a mere century and a half. The most recent were also the smallest; a matched pair no bigger than mastiff’s skulls, and oddly misshapen, all that remained of the last two hatchlings born on Dragonstone. They were the last of the Targaryen dragons, perhaps the last dragons anywhere, and they had not lived very long.
From there the skulls ranged upward in size to the three great monsters of song and story, the dragons that Aegon Targaryen and his sisters had unleashed on the Seven Kingdoms of old. The singers had given them the names of gods: Balerion, Meraxes, Vhaghar. Tyrion had stood between their gaping jaws, wordless and awed. You could have ridden a horse down Vhaghar’s gullet, although you would not have ridden it out again. Meraxes was even bigger. And the greatest of them, Balerion, the Black Dread, could have swallowed an aurochs whole, or even one of the hairy mammoths said to roam the cold wastes beyond the Port of Ibben.
If it’s true that Targaryens have been collecting such skulls for 3,000 years, the one behind Rhaenyra could belong to just about any dragon. But if I had to guess, I’d say it’s the skull of Meraxes—the dragon ridden by Rhaenys Targaryen (Aegon the Conqueror’s sister, and our Rhaenys’s namesake) during the Conquest. Take a closer look, and you can see that the eye hole is disfigured and damaged. That’s the sign that this is a dragon we know.
At the time of the Conquest, Meraxes was likely around the size of Vhagar—which is to say she was enormous. She helped Aegon and his sister-wives, Rhaenys and Visenya, subdue the Crownlands, Stormlands, and Riverlands and was present when Torrhen Stark bent the knee and surrendered the North to the Targaryen king.
Then the Targaryens turned south, looking to add Dorne to the Conquest. There, warfare didn’t prove so easy. Unlike the kings in Westeros who helpfully lined up their armies so that they could be burned by Balerion, Vhagar, and Merases, the Dornish engaged in guerrilla warfare. Aegon and his lords would lead their troops through treacherous mountain passes where Dornishmen would ambush them, then disappear as soon as a dragon took flight. Many Targaryen soldiers died in Dornish attacks. More died from the desert heat. And often when the Targaryens arrived at Dornish castles, they found them abandoned. The Targaryens would declare victory and leave, only to see the Dornish return like Fremen emerging from the sand to kill whatever Targaryen warden had been put in charge and take back their land. This went on for years.
Finally, Aegon had had enough and unleashed the full might of his dragons on Dorne. The Conqueror descended on the Boneway with Balerion and burned watchtowers and keeps. Visenya and Vhagar burned Sunspear, Lemonwood, Ghost Hill, and the Tor. And Rhaenys and Meraxes turned to Hellholt. This is where the Dornish finally landed a major victory, as one of their scorpion bolts hit Meraxes directly through her right eye. The dragon came crashing to the ground, and both beast and rider were killed—though it’s unclear whether Rhaenys was captured and tortured first or died from the fall. Meraxes was the first dragon to die in Westeros—the first major blow to Targaryen power.
But what happened to the dragon’s skull? A few years later, Prince Nymor Martell sent it to King’s Landing as part of a peace delegation that formally ended the First Dornish War. And that’s where it seems to have stayed, at least based on the fact that Tyrion saw it there in A Game of Thrones. It’s not impossible that Meraxes’s skull found its way to Dragonstone and then back to King’s Landing over the centuries. Alternatively, this could just be a show change to add a little flourish to an important scene. The symbolism is juicy. Dragons are sometimes thought to be nearly invincible, but Meraxes’s skull is a reminder that they are not. They can be killed—even by something other than another dragon. That we see this skull as another Rhaenys—our Rhaenys—is sent to her doom is fitting.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention one small hole in my theory, which is that Fire & Blood is clear that Meraxes gets hit in the right eye. The skull we see in the show has damage to its left eye. Yet there’s already precedent for this switch-up: In the books, Aemond loses his right eye; in the show, it’s his left. Changing both eyes makes me think this is intentional—that the show is telling us that it’s a reflection of the books, not an exact image.
Remember this Blackwood boy from Season 1, who asks for Rhaenyra’s hand in marriage and settles for stabbing a Bracken?
It turns out his name is Willem Blackwood, and he returns this week:
What a glow-up!
There is no Willem Blackwood in any of the books, or any character whose story resembles the one we see unfolding on-screen with Willem here. In Fire & Blood, Samwell Blackwood competes in a duel for Rhaenyra’s hand and then dies in the Battle of the Burning Mill. He’s succeeded as the head of his house by his son Benjicot Blackwood. In this episode, Willem says he’s ruling as regent until Benjicot comes of age. So Willem is a pure show creation.
This week we meet Oscar Tully, the grandson of Grover Tully and heir to the Riverlands. Oscar’s place as heir means the show has made a change from the books, in which both Oscar’s father, Elmo, and older brother, Kermit, stand ahead of him in the Tully line of succession. It’s prudent for a TV show to merge a bunch of characters into one to speed things along, but it also means we won’t get the names Grover, Oscar, Elmo, and Kermit all said aloud in one scene. A big loss for the overlapping House of the Dragon and Sesame Street fan bases.
With Rosby, Duskendale, and Rook’s Rest falling to the greens, the blacks are all but cut off from the mainland. It’s now even more crucial for Daemon to raise a host in the Riverlands. Here’s the map after Episode 4:
Dragons have finally danced. War is no longer just inevitable—it has begun. And next week, the focus will be on the theater in the Riverlands, where Daemon is still having a grand old time:
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