House of the Dragon Season 3, Episode 4 Recap: And Now We Begin

Spoilers below.

Episode 4 of House of the Dragon’s third season opens low to the ground, in tall grass, where a brown rabbit lifts on its hind legs before the camera rises to take in a river, then a town: Tumbleton. Soldiers of the Green move through its streets, banging on doors to inform families their homes now belong to someone else. “Be glad you’ve only got three,” one soldier tells a man as he pushes past him—and his family—into his own house. Fifteen thousand men have arrived, and if the townsfolk object, they’re welcome to complain to their new lord and see what good it does.

That lord is already luxuriating in someone else’s bathtub. Lord Ormund Hightower, the Green commander who marched his army up the Mander, has requisitioned the home of Lord and Lady Footly, stewards of a market town. “You are sleeping in our bedchamber,” Lady Footly points out. Ormund asks whether she once bent the knee to Rhaenyra Targaryen. She did. “Then mayhaps I should remind you the wage of treason is death,” he replies, not bothering to rise. When she won’t back down—“We swore to her because she is the queen”—he finally stands. “Is she?” he asks. “Or is she a bitch with a dragon?” His purpose, he explains, is simply to restore the rightful line to the Iron Throne. His men will behave, provided the Footlys remember whose house this is now.

That comfort doesn’t last. If Vhagar doesn’t come to Tumbleton, the Greens’ defenses may not hold, Ormund is informed. In Ormund’s presence, we officially meet his ward, the real Daeron Targaryen, not the imposter we met in episode 3. As some fans predicted thanks to a brief glimpse in the premiere episode, Daeron (Benjamin Evan Ainsworth) is revealed to have the dark hair of his mother, Alicent Hightower, not the blond locks of his Targaryen brethren. Ormund reassures Alicent and Viserys’s youngest child that his brother will come, but it’s as much a promise for himself as for the young dragonrider.

At King’s Landing, Rhaenyra Targaryen, the newly enthroned queen, studies Tumbleton on the map and can’t make sense of Ormund seizing a market town with no strategic value. “Hightower may as well paint a rondel on his chest,” she says. Burn a town that raised her own banners and the realm would call her “Maegor Returned”; the same gods who lifted her up would just as readily cast her down, she insists. Grand Maester Orwyle offers a cleaner fix: Redirect Daemon’s river host, already marching toward the capital, to Tumbleton instead. Mysaria, Rhaenyra’s Mistress of Whisperers, calls it bloody work, but kinder than dragonfire. Rhaenyra gives the order, keeps Orwyle on her council, and names Ser Torrhen Manderly as her new Master of Coin, letting the crown’s dwindling supply of gold become his problem.

Alicent Hightower, the dowager queen, is summoned next so Rhaenyra might learn whatever she knows of her cousin, Ormund: a scholar by his own estimation, a collector of tapestries, with real contempt for the uncouth. Asked whether it pained her to send Daeron away as a baby, Alicent says it was her own choice: She had given Viserys three Targaryen sons already and wanted her last to be raised as a Hightower. “Perhaps sending Daeron away was the truest act of motherhood, though I do not know now what fate my choice has consigned him to,” she admits. Rhaenyra tells her she would have spared him. As the queen turns to go, Alicent adds one small detail that will likely be useful later: Ormund has a very strong sensitivity to odors. It’s close to the only weapon Alicent has left to give.

Corlys Velaryon, the Sea Snake and Rhaenyra’s Hand, declines his own summons that same day. “I’m her Hand, not her mouth,” he tells his son Alyn of Hull—a distinction that lets him keep serving the crown without quite facing the queen. He sends Alyn to court in his place while he rides out himself to hunt Triarchy raiders.

When Alyn does appear before the queen, she is sorting through Viserys’s old belongings, and his eye catches on her father’s model of Old Valyria (a reminder that “even great dynasties fall,” Rhaenyra explains). “Fathers have a maddening capacity to at once inspire and incense, don’t you think?” she adds. Then she notices the rats, incessant since Aegon hanged the city’s rat catchers. “On board ship, we kept cats,” Alyn offers. Alyn of Hull, a useful adviser already!

The episode’s quietest devastation belongs to Aegon II, the deposed, presumed-dead king, and Larys Strong, the schemer keeping them both alive. They emerge from the trees to find Sunfyre seemingly dead in a clearing, though Aegon protests his dragon is still alive. Aegon limps over, rests a hand against the creature’s flank. “I’m here,” he whispers, as though the dragon might still answer. A local charges a penny just to touch the corpse; Larys pays double to learn the way to Rook’s Rest instead. Aegon insists Sunfyre is only resting, but Larys corrects him: Sunfyre is dead, and Aegon must choose whether to rot beside him or get up and live.

At the blackened ruin of Harrenhal, Ser Criston Cole, Aegon’s hardline general, and Ser Gwayne Hightower, Alicent’s brother, ride in with what’s left of their garrison. Alys Rivers, the woods-dwelling midwife, tells them the castellan is dead: Aemond seized Harrenhal after Daemon abandoned it, then fled once he learned Rhaenyra had taken King’s Landing. (We don’t actually know if this is the truth, given what happened between Aemond and Alys last episode.) Regardless, the soldiers hadn’t known of Rhaenyra’s victory.

Gwayne lays out what’s left before them: the capital fallen, Aegon supposedly dead, no dragon overhead. He wants to send word to Ormund and combine forces; Criston refuses. He is a steward’s son himself, whose father died of sorrow when a lord’s favor failed. “There is no home for one like me, not while Rhaenyra sits on the throne,” he says flatly. He’d rather harass Rhaenyra’s river host and buy Ormund time. “We must cling to our honor, lest we become beasts ourselves,” he says, though I’m afraid it’s too late for Criston himself.

Aegon and Larys press on toward Rook’s Rest, where the men, Larys warns, bow to no one but themselves. Inside, Aegon spots the corpse of Meleys draped across a wall. The man who runs the camp takes Larys’s coin, then asks for more. Aegon, indignant, insists he can read just as well as Larys. He’s handed a nickname instead, Mangleface, and sent to the latrines to collect waste as flies circle.

In occupied Tumbleton, a Green soldier attempts to force himself on a woman, and that woman just so happens to be Kat, the wife of Hugh Hammer. At King’s Landing, Hugh himself, one of the newly risen dragonriders, asks to take the watch over the town on Vermithor in Ulf White’s place. Rhaenyra sees through it at once: Hugh’s wife is in Tumbleton, and “Ser Ulf has no stake in the matter.”

“Send me, because I do,” Hugh answers. “I will not tire of watching when one I love is below.” She orders them both to take it in turns—watching the town, and each other. On a wall in the capital, someone has already scrawled a verdict on the new regime: Queen of Bastards.

In Tumbleton, Ormund and Daeron are brought before Lady Footly and a beaten soldier: Garrick of Whitegrove, the man we watched assault Hugh’s wife. Hugh’s wife, it turns out, was also the smith’s sister, and Garrick now stands accused of the attempted rape and of breaking the arm of the smith’s wife. Ormund doesn’t hesitate. “You will be gelded, and you will have your own arm broken,” he tells Garrick. “Trespass again, and you will hang.” It’s brutal and, within the show’s logic, fair—exactly what makes Ormund so slippery to read. “Lawlessness and disorder claw at our gates,” he tells Daeron afterward, as if cruelty and mercy were two faces of the same discipline.

Rhaenyra, meanwhile, learns the High Septon has refused to anoint her, and she asks Orwyle whether she might simply remove him. He doesn’t recommend this tactic, as it would make her an enemy of the Faith, “unless you were considering a more permanent removal,” he says. Rhaenyra is surprised but, admittedly, impressed; she hadn’t pegged her Grand Maester as so bloodthirsty. Before he goes, she sets him a smaller task: gather every letter exchanged between the Red Keep and Ormund since Viserys’s death. The Septon, the graffiti, Ormund’s silence—it’s all part of one narrative, of a realm that has accepted the reality of Rhaenyra’s rule without yet accepting her right to it.

Daemon Targaryen, Rhaenyra’s husband and uncle, arrives at the Eyrie to press Lady Jeyne Arryn on an old promise. She isn’t moved, and when he admits he’s really here for gold, she savors the image. “Prince Daemon Targaryen…a beggar with a tin cup. I never thought I’d see such a sight,” she says. She pays anyway, if only to be rid of him.

But Daemon doesn’t fly home. Caraxes disobeys him and veers off course, landing both dragon and rider before a cave mouth. What Daemon finds inside is the episode’s biggest secret. A dragon rumbles in the dark. A hooded figure walks toward him, lit orange by its breath: Rhaena Targaryen, Daemon’s daughter, her hair shorn and Sheepstealer looming behind her. The usually smug Daemon, so accustomed to holding the upper hand, is shocked—and devastated. “How?” Daemon asks, meaning how could she possibly have tamed the wild beast instrumental to Jace’s death. “I fed him sheep,” Rhaena answers, as if it could really be that simple.

“Rhaenyra believes this dragon and his rider are the reason Jace is dead,” Daemon tells her.

Rhaena already knows this; it’s why she’s in self-exile. “I wanted only to help,” Rhaena claims. Daemon still can’t wrap his head around what he’s seen—Rhaena was meant to be escorting his sons, Aegon and Viserys, to Pentos! “I would be of no use there, just as I was of no use here,” she says, some old resentment finally surfacing. “Can you yourself say you ever gave more than a passing thought?” she asks. “Rhaena, the unfortunate. Rhaena, the last among your children.” It’s the accusation this show has circled for two seasons, finally spoken aloud: that being overlooked can curdle into something as dangerous as being wronged.

Daemon, for all his faults, clearly cares for his daughter. His face betrays that much. He offers her an exit, though it would mean keeping the truth from his wife: leave the dragon behind, let Rhaenyra never know. But Rhaena won’t take this out. Sheepstealer is hers now, a part of her, and exile is the penance she’s chosen. She asks him for the one thing she has never asked before: his silence.

“You ask me to deceive her. That is betrayal,” Daemon says.

“I have asked you nothing, father, in all my life,” Rhaena replies. “I ask this one thing of you now.” She turns back into the dark. Sheepstealer answers his call instead, driving Daemon back before taking to the sky.

What Daemon carries home is a lie: a blackened skull he claims belonged to Sheepstealer’s rider, plus 10,000 gold dragons from Jeyne. Rhaenyra asks after the identity of the rider. “I desired the very same answers, but a dragon is not a precise instrument,” Daemon says, explaining that Sheepstealer fled riderless.

“I wanted to look on the one who killed my son,” Rhaenyra admits. She decides Jeyne’s gold will fund alms for the smallfolk instead. “I suppose I should thank you,” she says, sounding less grateful than resigned. In the hall, Daemon tells Mysaria that when this all falls apart, Rhaenyra will come to her senses. Mysaria only asks whose unrecognizable head now sits on the table, but receives no answer.

Rhaenyra later visits Alicent and Helaena to say Otto’s body will be sent home to Oldtown, and she presses Otto’s old ring into Alicent’s palm. It’s a tender gesture, until Alicent reaches to help Helaena tie her robe and Helaena pulls back. Alicent quietly gazes at her daughter’s belly, eyes widening, then says her daughter’s name—but no explanation comes. Helaena says nothing. Might it be that Helaena is pregnant, and will give birth to Fire & Blood’s Maelor Targaryen after all?

Ulf White comes to Rhaenyra with favors to request on behalf of his tavern friends. Warned that a tavern acquaintance might put a knife in his belly one night, Ulf shrugs: “It’s my belly.”

“No,” Rhaenyra corrects him. “You belong now to the crown.” He’s barred from taverns, confined to the Keep. He mentions the graffiti spreading throughout King’s Landing, and thus unsettled, Rhaenyra orders the Gold Cloaks to find whoever wrote it, chasing a unity she doesn’t yet have.

Later, at Rook’s Rest, Aegon insists he’d be treated differently if these people knew who walked among them. I’m sure he would, but as Larys points out, “even were you to be believed, Rhaenyra sits the throne, and you have no dragon. She did us a favor by declaring you dead.” Aegon is stunned to learn the realm believes his own brother killed him. But his rage does him no favors when he throws a temper tantrum before the camp leaders, behavior that ultimately results in him having to kiss the stranger’s filthy boot.

In Tumbleton, a raven bearing the Hightower seal sends Ormund into a fury before he collects himself: As the message reports, Aemond will not be joining them. At that same hour, Rhaenyra receives her own Hightower news. Orwyle’s search of the Red Keep’s correspondence has turned up nothing, as Otto wrote diligently to Ormund, but Ormund himself never responded. “I suppose only that Lord Ormund ruled Oldtown as a kingdom unto itself,” Orwyle offers as explanation.

That night, beside Daeron’s dragon Tessarion, Ormund finally says what he’s been building toward, calm as a man who has rehearsed it for years. “You are a good boy,” he tells Daeron. “I have raised you in the light of the Seven. But there is a taint in your blood. The Targaryens are a savage race, poor in intellect but rich in cunning. The gods have put you to divine purpose.”

Asked what purpose, he answers. “The brutes raise a woman to the Iron Throne. A desecration! Your brothers are lost, but you remain a Hightower raised in the shadow of the Citadel. Now, you must be king.” Daeron protests that Ormund can’t possibly mean for him to turn against his own Targaryen brothers. But that is, of course, exactly what Ormund intends. “You will restore our ancient order,” Ormund replies. “It is the will of the gods.”

Then a prisoner is dragged in, and it is the smith, whom Ormund claimed to have released but has been holding all along. Daeron is horrified; the man only acted after Garrick assaulted his family! “He laid hands on a Hightower,” replies Ormund, who adds that Garrick, as a soldier, is an extension of Daeron himself, and thus of the crown.

“Is not mercy a kingly virtue?” Daeron asks.

“That sounds like something your father would say,” Ormund snaps, and Daeron apologizes on instinct, the way a boy apologizes to someone whose approval has become a kind of fear. Daeron was not raised by his biological father, Viserys, and his mother, Alicent, has remained distant in King’s Landing all these years; Ormund is the closest thing to a parent he’s had. Ormund hands him his sword. “I have risked much and more to raise you up. Surely you don’t wish to disappoint me.”

The smith begs. Daeron drives the sword through his chest anyway, a shout tearing out of him that sounds less like triumph than release. Then Ormund bows to Daeron, wiping his own blade clean on the dead man’s body first. Tessarion roars just out of frame, her fire lighting Ormund’s face from the side, his hardened expression giving away nothing. “And now we begin,” he says.

Almost everyone in this episode ends up on their knees, literally or figuratively—or chooses to put someone else on their knees. Ormund makes the Footlys kneel to his comfort; Aegon is forced to kneel and kiss a boot; Daemon must betray his wife on his daughter’s behalf; and Daeron puts a sword through a man so that a kingdom might kneel to him someday. The one time Ormund himself bends is the bow he gives Daeron right after handing him a sword to murder with—a moment that isn’t an act of submission so much as an unofficial coronation dressed as courtesy, the last piece of a plan he’s clearly been assembling since before this war began.

Daeron has mostly been a name on the edges of this war, a boy shipped off to Oldtown as a baby and brought back only as leverage. This is the episode that makes him feel like a real person at last, by showing exactly how a good boy gets talked, praised, and frightened into becoming what his family wants him to be. Alicent wanted her youngest to be spared the Targaryen legacy—but it would seem she’s merely traded one cruel lineage for another.