Your Grace, the dragonseed riders have not been compensated. Your Grace, somebody removed every coin in the treasury…somewhere we can’t find. Your Grace, the granaries are dry and your subjects, the people of King’s Landing, starve. Your Grace! (No tallow for Red Keep candles) Your Grace! (No designated Queensguard) Your Grace! (No end to claims against the royal tipple). A fidgety, frustrated Rhaenyra looks down at a rat burrowing beside the Iron Throne. He’s probably getting ready to ask Her Grace for something, too.
But no, he’s just one of many rats scurrying in the Red Keep. For one thing, Aegon II hanged all the ratcatchers, so they must hire new ones. (Your Grace!) But for another, the rats are a reminder of months of deadly scurrying across half of Westeros. Team Black has taken King’s Landing, and Rhaenyra is finally queen, but she’s still contested on all sides. She knows peace neither in the streets nor in her own castle. The business of being queen sucks enough that Rhaenyra, seeking advice, visits the Keep’s house arrest wing.
“You may not rule and remain yourself,” Alicent says. “There is a door within you that must shut.” It’s a conversation between two people at the center of power, threaded with years of their shared experience in these very walls. And Alicent is the only one who can tell Rhaenyra that she is being naive. Her notion to rule as Viserys I would have wished ignores how Ol’ V, Rhaenyra’s father and Alicent’s husband, self-insulated from the realm’s realest problems.
Would Rhaenyra choose the harsher, more Imperial path urged by Daemon? The Rogue Prince has secured fealty from Lord Ormund Hightower and his vast Greens host — Ormund even turned over a silver-haired boy, Alicent’s youngest son with Viserys, who was warded out to his Oldtown cousins while still a toddler. Daemon urges Rhaenyra to slay this Daeron Targaryen immediately as a claimant to the throne. It would further secure her position. “You’ve come so far, yet you still don’t know who you are.” With more dragons than even Aegon the Conqueror ever had, Daemon tells her, “You have an empire unassailable.”
Rhaenyra, still unaware of Rhaena Targaryen’s role in the Battle of the Gullet, will send Daemon to find Sheepstealer “and its rider” in the Vale. He is also to collect tribute in coin from Lady Jeyne Arryn. (That should all be very interesting!) And in King’s Landing, Rhaenyra holds a banquet. Gathered are wealthy merchants, lesser noble families — and a garrulous Ser Torrhen Manderly (Dan Fogler) — but they are served rancid rats and horsehair beans. For this is what the Smallfolk ate during the blockade, when the richies hoarded all of KL’s resources for themselves. “What the crown demands of you” — she tells them the new news — “is not plunder but a duty.” The queen then scores points with the locals during a public redistribution of ripe produce and fresh loaves.
Rhaenyra admits these are small measures in service of her larger remit to rule the realm, but what she will not admit is just how in her head she has truly gotten. Rhaenyra has fallen on black days. She sees the slain Jacaerys Velaryon walking through Red Keep corridors. She cannot sleep in the royal bed chamber; too many ghosts in the room. And when Lord Corlys asks his queen to bless Alyn and Addam as his issue — “Let them now be Velaryons” — she balks. Rhaenyra has grown obsessed with proving the legitimacy of her rule, but it’s registering as paranoia. Corlys calls this out; like Alicent, he has earned the right. “You’re ashamed!” the Sea Snake declares. His sons, a mix of noble and common blood, are bastards unworthy of title? Well, Rhaenyra’s sons — the two dead ones plus little Joffrey Valaryon, now her declared heir — are bastards, too.
The queen is wanted at the gates. A bloodied dragontender has appeared. He is a survivor of a furious attack on Tumbleton, a merchant city in the nearby Reach. Wait, what army attacked? And with what dragon? And in real time, Rhaenyra learns the scant peace her victory secured was itself bullshit. Ormund Hightower’s surrender was a lie. His host sacked Tumbleton and the city is now Greens-occupied. Worse, Ormund’s surrender of “Daeron Targaryen” was also a lie. The silver-haired boy currently in Team Black custody is an imposter forced into the role, while the real Daeron is apparently still fighting for Team Green on Tessarion, his blue-winged dragon. Your Grace! What will you do now?
Hot D’s for House of the Dragon Season 3 Episode 3:
- To Daemon, the very dawn could be theirs to rule. Check out the geographic reach and George RR Martin lore of his imperialism. Using their dragons, Team Black would conquer Essos and the Free Cities. Take Yi Ti, thousands of miles away, and its riches. “They say there is a city at the edge of the world where men have wings.” Daemon would have these legends also serve Rhaenyra’s rule.
- In her consultation with Alicent, Rhaenyra accepted her advice. Declare Aegon dead. It’s easier than locating the scarred, near-unrecognizable usurper, and if he does resurface, she can claim him an imposter.
- Rhaenyra’s subordinate dragonriders are also officially knighted. Ulf the White, Hugh Hammer, and Addam of Hull. (not Velaryon, natch.) But some of those guys still haven’t been paid, and they’ve got gripes.
- And another dude not on board with Rhaenyra’s rule is the high septon, Balman (Simon Chandler). His refusal to anoint her within the faith is an indictment of how she got there, her entire ruling project. “My gods do not deal in dragons. They are a profane magic created in darkness and pride and lust for power, for impunity. They destroy, but they do not create. There is no good that can come of them.”
Johnny Loftus (@johnnyloftus.bsky.social) is a Chicago-based writer. A veteran of the alternative weekly trenches, his work has also appeared in Entertainment Weekly, Pitchfork, The All Music Guide, and The Village Voice.