‘House of the Dragon’ Season 2 Power Rankings: Regent
The greens and the blacks recuperate from the battle at Rook’s Rest. Here are the power rankings after ‘House of the Dragon’ Episode 5.
House of the Dragon is back, and the Dance of the Dragons is underway. The Targaryen war of succession will come down to control—who can control their impulses, their sycophants, and, yes, their dragons. With each passing episode, The Ringer will examine how Westeros’s key players are aligning their pieces on the board. As the saying goes, chaos can be a ladder. Welcome to the House of the Dragon power rankings.
1. Rats
What do rats like? I’m not totally sure, but the wholesale abolition of ratcatchers has got to be near the top of the list. Turns out Aegon’s edict that every last one of King’s Landing’s professional rat exterminators be executed in the wake of Blood and Cheese’s murder of his son was not a great long-term strategy. Disease is spreading across King’s Landing, doubtlessly fueled by the unchecked growth of the local vermin population—a population that is surely also not helping with the food shortages hitting the city. Fed up with scrounging for rotting fruit, the people are growing so desperate that they’re fleeing to the countryside—at least until Aemond, Aegon’s newly crowned (ahem) regent, orders the closure of the city gates and seals both people and rats inside.
You might think that having exterminators dedicated exclusively to eliminating rats—no roaches, no bedbugs, no termites, and certainly no mice—is excessively specific. Perhaps, but there’s another option: That the rat problem at King’s Landing was already so severe that the city needed to have a full-time army of rat hunters just to keep things running. If that’s the case, we can’t be far from a Willard scenario.
2. Aemond Targaryen
Aemond returned to King’s Landing having been the linchpin of the greens’ victory at Rook’s Rest. Better yet—for Aemond, anyway—Vhagar’s treacherous attack on Aegon and Sunfyre has left the dragon and king incapacitated for the foreseeable future. Being the king’s regent is not as good as simply being king, sure—but Aemond was able to get Jason Lannister, Larys Strong, and even Ser Criston Cole to back him, trouncing his mother’s bid for the regency. Aemond is now the acting king of Westeros, and in possession of the fiercest dragon in the world (even if, as Rhaenyra’s advisors suggest, she is temporarily depleted from her battle with Meleys). Things are looking good—and now he’s got his very own fidget spinner in the form of Aegon’s Valyrian steel dagger.
Still, the greens made a serious miscalculation by parading Meleys’s severed head through the streets of King’s Landing. Far from being awed by the proof of the blacks’ defeat, the smallfolk are disturbed by the butchery of a dragon—a creature that is the living embodiment of the Targaryens’ divine right to rule. “Mark my words, this is a black omen,” one man murmurs as the Meleys procession passes by. At Dragonstone, Mysaria agrees: She tells Rhaenyra that the display will be taken as an “ill omen,” particularly because the conditions at King’s Landing are getting bleaker by the day. Food is scarce as a result of the blacks’ naval blockade, sickness is spreading in the wake of Aegon’s decision to slaughter every one of the city’s ratcatchers, and the smallfolk are fleeing the capital in droves.
That’s not entirely Aemond’s fault, of course: Aegon was king as things worsened in the capital and Westeros barrelled toward war, and he was also the one to hand down the ratcatcher orders. And it was Cole, as leader of the greens’ army, who decided to display Meleys’s remains when his troops returned to the city. But it’s Aemond who ordered the closure of the city gates to stymie the widespread exodus from the capital, effectively imprisoning the smallfolk in a metropolis where conditions are sure to worsen further. Aemond also knocked the greens’ fighting-age dragon force down to just two members for now: Vhagar and Helaena’s Dreamfyre, assuming Helaena could ever be convinced to join the fight. The greens’ hold on King’s Landing is weakening fast, with dissent growing by the day. As regent, it’s now Aemond’s throne to lose.
3. Jacaerys Velaryon
Well, well, well, look who has big feelings. Jace has had it with Rhaenyra’s orders that he stay put at Dragonstone—to “play the coddled princeling,” in his words—and starts to leave on an unsanctioned mission to Harrenhal. “I must be seen to act for her claim—and mine,” he says with just a little too much emphasis on the last clause.
Fortunately, he runs into Baela first, who gets him to slow down long enough to think things through—and decides to scrap the Harrenhal plan in favor of visiting the Freys instead. The Freys rule over the pivotal crossing at the Twins, which could offer a shortcut into the Riverlands for Cregan Stark’s forces on their march south from Winterfell.
Ultimately, Jace offers the Freys Harrenhal—sorry, Ser Simon Strong!—in exchange for free passage and bending the knee to Rhaenyra. It’s quite the gamble to make without the queen’s sign-off, and when he returns to Dragonstone, she can’t help but interpret it as yet another man blowing her off. Still, she acknowledges that Jace has done the blacks “a great service.”
But that’s not all. As Rhaenyra laments that she needs more dragons if their side is going to prevail, Jace points out that Dragonstone has plenty—notably the riderless Vermithor and Silverwing (not to mention Seasmoke). Then Jace makes a suggestion that could change the calculus of the entire Dance: What if Rhaenyra were to reach out to more distant members of the Targaryen family tree and see if they might want to roll the dice with the fire breathers? “There could be scores of them,” he tells his mother. And how!
4. Mysaria
It seems that Rhaenyra has rewarded the White Worm for her clutch warning about Arryk Cargyll’s assassination plot and her help arranging the queen’s clandestine meeting with Alicent. Over the course of the season, the onetime madame of King’s Landing has morphed from refugee to prisoner to just-about-to-be exile to her current role: trusted adviser to the queen. This week, we see Rhaenyra lean on Mysaria for advice about what to do about Daemon and wartime strategy more broadly. “What you cannot do, let others do for you,” Mysaria tells the queen.
And so she does, sending an emissary to King’s Landing, where Mysaria’s name still carries enough weight to convince a gold cloak to sneak her agent past the capital’s closed gates, launching some yet-to-be-revealed scheme. In the same way that Varys, through his whispers and connections, was often one of the most powerful people at King’s Landing in Game of Thrones, Mysaria seems well on her way at Dragonstone—and beyond, if Rhaenyra comes out on top.
5. Rhaenyra Targaryen
Rhaenyra is having a crisis of faith. She’s reeling from the death of Rhaenys, long her greatest ally and, with her dragon, Meleys, a critical fighter. The blacks have lost significant territory to Cole’s forces in Westeros and have yet to amass an army on the continent. Daemon is still incommunicado at Harrenhal, which feels more and more like an indication of an unbridgeable rift with Rhaenyra. And the queen is finding that many of her own advisers don’t seem to respect her as they would a male sovereign.
Rhaenyra is alternately bullied and ignored by the men on her Small Council—and with Rhaenys gone, it is only men, other than her. It’s clear that it has shaken her confidence: “He did not prepare me to fight,” she says to Mysaria of her father. “If I had been a son, a sword thrust into my hand the moment I could walk. … Instead, I was given my father’s cup, taught the name of every lord and castle between Storm’s End and the Twins, but not the difference between hilt and foible. And they know it. And Daemon as well.” For all of Viserys’s progressiveness in naming Rhaenyra his heir and sticking to it even after having three sons with Alicent, Rhaenyra is all too aware that she was trained from childhood to be a wife and mother, not a warrior. Recall that back in Season 1, Rhaenyra was rebuked by her mother, Aemma, when Rhaenyra told her that she wanted to “serve as a knight and ride to battle and glory.” “This discomfort is how we serve the realm,” Aemma told her daughter of pregnancy. “The child bed is our battlefield.”
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Rhaenyra feels the clash between Westeros’s traditional gender roles and her position as a wartime monarch most starkly with her husband—and she doesn’t yet know that he’s now graduated from private sedition to open rebellion in his own quest to become king. “For too long I have looked to him for strength,” she says of Daemon. “If I must be supplicant to my own husband, what does that make me?”
A woman who needs better advisers, for one. Mysaria fits the bill, giving the queen a girl-power pep talk and telling her, “There is more than one way to fight a war.” Rhaenyra is convinced and allows Mysaria to wield her dark arts and web of loyal smallfolk on her behalf. Separately, she offers Corlys the position of hand of the queen, which will get her some much-needed support on the Small Council—and presumably some less sexist advice, given Corlys’s support of the late Queen Who Never Was.
“I do not know my own part, Mysaria,” Rhaenyra said this week to the White Worm. “The path I walk has never been trod.” She expresses the second part as a lament—but expressed differently, it might just work as a rallying cry.
6. Ser Criston Cole
We didn’t leave the hand of the king in a good place last week. While Rook’s Rest ultimately fell to the greens and resulted in the death of Rhaenys and Meleys, the secret battle plan Cole dreamed up with Aemond resulted in Aegon’s (and Sunfyre’s) horrific injury after the prince went rogue and tried to kill his brother—to say nothing of the 900 green soldiers who fell in battle.
Cole is back at King’s Landing now, and Alicent wants answers. Yet Cole can scarcely meet his lady love’s eyes when he chooses not to tell the dowager queen that it was Aemond, not Rhaenys, who injured Aegon. He doubles down with another betrayal when he backs Aemond over Alicent as regent at the Small Council, humiliating his secret lover in favor of her son. Afterward, Cole finally tries to level with her about the carnage he saw at Rook’s Rest—only for Alicent to snap back, “I did not give you leave to speak my name.” Alicent, meanwhile, still hasn’t told Cole that she terminated her pregnancy while he was away and likely never told him she was pregnant in the first place. There are breakups—and then there are breakups.
But those are mostly personal affairs. Cole remains hand and leader of the greens’ military forces. With Aegon weakened and unlikely to recover anytime soon, Aemond has seized control. Cole had a high standing in Aegon’s court, but he may have an even higher standing in Aemond’s—after all, the action at Rook’s Rest only happened because Cole and Aemond had been covertly making battle plans under Aegon’s nose. If Aemond resents or mistrusts Cole because the knight caught the prince just as he moved in to kill his brother in “The Red Dragon and the Gold”—or, indeed, because Cole knows that Aemond held Vhagar back and then directed her to attack Aegon instead of Rhaenys—he hasn’t shown it. Perhaps Aemond trusted that Cole would make the choice that he did and hide the truth: “I cannot say,” Cole tells Alicent when she asks what role Aemond had in the king’s injuries. If so, it was a significant gamble by Aemond. But it paid off, and the knight’s choice to obfuscate Aemond’s guilt has tied him to the prince—and vice versa.
Still, Cole seems as uncomprehending as Aemond of the brewing unrest in King’s Landing. “Don’t they realize we won the battle?” Cole asked Gwayne Hightower as they marched in ahead of Meleys’s head, failing to realize that the smallfolk would see his wartime trophy only as a harbinger of darkness. If the greens want to hang on to King’s Landing, someone will have to take stock of the state of the capital and get to work fixing things soon.
7. Corlys Velaryon
The vibes are not good chez Sea Snake. Corlys had already lost his daughter (to complications of childbirth) and his son (to complications of Rhaenyra’s desire to bang her uncle) and had one of his two granddaughters, Rhaena, sent away to the Eyrie (due to complications of not being cool enough to hatch a dragon of her own). Now, he’s lost his beloved wife, Rhaenys—though, given last week’s revelations about Corlys’s past promiscuity around Dragonstone and his apparent parentage of multiple bastards, I think we can attach an asterisk to his devotion. Still, though, he’s down in the dumps. “My castle is a tomb,” he gripes to Baela.
So, how about a promotion? Rhaenyra has seen fit to name the mighty seafaring lord her hand. Sure, the aged Corlys has been around the block and is perhaps more liable to have an odd bad night than he used to be. But he’s still a savvy pick for an ally. With Daemon away, the post will easily render Corlys one of the most powerful people in Dragonstone—arguably second only to Rhaenyra herself.
One thing remains unsettled, however: Corlys still doesn’t have an heir to inherit Driftmark after his death. Baela turns him down when asked—he needs someone of “salt and sea,” not “fire and blood,” like her, she says—and it’s not like anyone in Westeros is very interested in experimenting with nonfamilial transfers of power. Where did you say those dockyard bastards went?
8. Lady Jeyne Arryn
Rhaena is now at the Eyrie with Rhaenyra’s youngest children—but the resident Arryn doesn’t think the queen has lived up to her promise. While the Maiden of the Vale was promised a dragon to protect the Eyrie in exchange for 15,000 men, the two that were sent with the Targaryens are babies, many years away from being able to mount a defense of the castle. “I have hunting hounds that are more fearsome,” Arryn tells Rhaena. Something tells me we’ll be seeing more of her.
9. Baela Targaryen
Baela is a voice of reason at Dragonstone. She manages to talk Jace—her husband-to-be—out of flying to Harrenhal to face down Daemon directly; his negotiation with the Freys was much more successful than anything that might have come of his original plan. She tells hard truths to Corlys, who’s been moping around Driftmark, and convinces him to take the job as Rhaenyra’s hand—and her rejection of the Driftmark inheritance is, frankly, metal as hell.
Corlys isn’t the only one trying to cozy up to Baela: So is the queen. Rhaenyra is clearly fond of her future daughter-in-law. “With her gone, I must rely on you, I think,” the queen tells her of Rhaenys. “I do not wish to stand alone.” That’s just about the nicest thing Rhaenyra has ever said to anyone.
10. Daemon Targaryen
Look, man, if your witch friend’s freaky potions make you hallucinate to the point of having a sex dream about your own mother in the middle of dinner, it might be time to call it quits. Alys Rivers might have some good advice on the subject of war crimes—namely, maybe don’t do them—but on balance, I think Daemon would be better off not pursuing this relationship any further.
Daemon has now openly broken with Rhaenyra. He instructs Ser Simon Strong to address him as “my king.” When Strong counters that he’s a prince, not a king, Daemon snidely asks him what the husband of a queen would be. “A king,” Strong starts, before adding “consort.” “That last bit seems unnecessary, don’t you think?” Daemon replies. Later, he tells Alys, “When I take King’s Landing, Rhaenyra is welcome to join me there and take her place by my side. King and queen. Ruling together.” What’s a little treason between friends?
Daemon did try it Rhaenyra’s way—kind of. In his quest to get the Brackens to bend the knee to her and pledge men for an army, Daemon mounted Caraxes and offered a choice between capitulation and dragonfire, drawling, “The hour is late, and my dragon is hungry.” Unfortunately for Daemon, this negotiation master class fails, and he ends up doing an admirable Ben Affleck impression afterward. “I did not think they would be so eager to die,” he says, genuinely mystified.
He then resorts to uglier tactics. Though Daemon had (at least in public) professed innocence about the orders to execute Jaehaerys in his cradle at King’s Landing, he’s now fully on board with wartime atrocities. He issues orders for an attack on the Brackens that would deliberately target women and children. “There are things the crown itself must not be seen to do. Show them your worst,” he says—somehow mind-melding with Rhaenyra this episode, though with a different takeaway. Later in the episode, they both find themselves staring into a fire, pondering their next steps. The further they drift apart, the closer they seem to be.
Daemon’s new, brutal strategy succeeds: House Bracken pledges its support, which would have left Daemon much higher up in the rankings if that was all that happened. But the victory is short-lived. A group of incensed river lords turns up at Harrenhal and demands to see Daemon in the middle of the night, condemning his forces for everything from “works of barbarity” to the destruction of “sacred septs.” One sharply calls Daemon an “interloper”: “Dragon or no, we shall not raise our banners for a tyrant,” she snaps at him before the river lords storm off en masse. So much for House Bracken—or any of the Riverlands. It remains to be seen whether their pledge is meant for Rhaenyra or just Daemon alone, though it’s hard to imagine they’d embrace the queen while she remains married to Daemon. Either way, it’s a dreadful start for the self-appointed king.
11. Helaena Targaryen
Normally, seeing one’s brother, husband, or brother-husband carried home on a stretcher, incapacitated with wounds so severe that it’s not immediately clear whether he’ll survive, would likely (maybe less likely in the case of the latter) prompt something in the region of sadness, fear, horror, etc. Not so for Queen Helaena, who looks on placidly as Aegon is carried into the Red Keep after the battle at Rook’s Rest—in stark contrast to Alicent, who follows the king into his chambers and looks as though she might burst into tears. Aegon has never been a good husband to his poor sister-wife, and it’s difficult to imagine that she’d shed many, or any, tears over the fact that her bedchamber is just hers for the foreseeable future.
Later, Helaena catches Aemond staring lustily at the Iron Throne in the dark. “Was it worth the price?” she asks him—suggesting her supernatural intuition remains intact.
12. Alys Rivers
Alys—who continues to say weird witchy things, including that she gets her local news from sounds “in the wind”—seems to understand that Daemon is now acting without Rhaenyra’s blessing. She tries to convince him to cool it on the whole slaughtering women and children thing: “This is not war,” she tells him. “These are crimes against the innocent.” Unfortunately for Alys, Daemon does not have a strong record of heeding thoughtful counsel.
13. Ser Alfred Broome
At the Dragonstone Small Council, Broome openly breaks with Rhaenyra, mocking her fallout with Daemon as a “marital spat.” Then he continues with a truly wild thing to say to a woman fighting a war largely on the belief that women—or, at any rate, this woman—should, in fact, be allowed to rule. “I could never doubt your capability or your quickness of mind,” he tells the queen. “It is merely that the gentler sex heretofore has not been much privy to the strategies of battle. Or their execution.”
“You’ve seen no more battles than I have,” Rhaenyra fires back; later she gripes to Mysaria that “they speak around me, not to me.” Somehow, I doubt Broome is long for the Small Council and/or world.
Indeed, Rhaenyra later dispatches him to Harrenhal to investigate Daemon’s “state of mind and intentions”—namely, whether he’s still loyal to her. Though the queen denies it, Broome suspects the mission is a way to remove him from her Small Council. I must say, I’m not sure Rhaenyra’s strategy of putting her side’s two most disloyal members together is the crack plan she thinks it is.
14. Ser Simon Strong
Ser Strong just wants one thing: to fix his leaky roof. And melted walls. And crumbled towers. And broken windows. And blasted floors.
Improbably, Strong convinces Daemon to sign off on the reconstruction of Harrenhal. Still more improbably, he gets Daemon to pledge to pay for it himself. Daemon even pitches in to help with construction as repairs get underway.
Getting some much-needed repairs to his melted ancestral estate is a huge win for Strong—except that it might not be his estate for much longer. Unbeknownst to Strong, Jace has pledged Harrenhal to the Freys. How nice for them that they won’t have to deal with reno dust.
15. Hugh Hammer
The brawny, bearded dragonseed—his do indicates Valyrian heritage—of King’s Landing is still something of a mystery. But things are most decidedly not going well: He’s got a sick kid, and he and his wife were barred from taking her out of the capital to seek help when Aemond closed the city gates. Will Hugh get involved in the Dance—and if so, how? His Valyrian ancestry means he has dragonrider potential, but unlike Dragonstone, King’s Landing has no riderless dragons bopping around. Maybe Hugh will find a way to get his family out of the city, but Dragonstone feels like an unlikely choice of destination; Hugh’s wife suggests they stay with her brother in Tumbelton, a market town south of the capital. Or maybe Hugh knows details about his parentage—specifically, his royal father. Given his age, the most obvious candidates are Viserys and Daemon, either of which would be a spicy twist. With his desperation over his daughter mounting, could we see him appeal to the royals at the Red Keep?
16. Alicent Hightower
Woof. Let’s see … first, Alicent watches in horror as the grand maester begins to treat Aegon’s grisly injuries. Then, her boy toy, Criston Cole, lies to her about Aemond’s culpability, which she knows because Aemond is a violent creep and has stolen Aegon’s dagger (and also because Cole might be the least subtle liar in Westeros’s history). Next, she asks the Small Council to name her Aegon’s regent, given her experience serving as just that during Viserys’s later years—only to have most of the council, including Cole and her frequent confidante Larys Strong, back Aemond instead—which is to say she was stabbed in the back by her son, her boyfriend, and her resident foot fetishist (atypically for someone in the Targaryen sphere, all different people). Indeed, Alicent faces many of the same problems at the King’s Landing Small Council that Rhaenyra does at her own: Jason Lannister heavily implies that the regency should go to Aemond because having a woman rule would project weakness.
Eventually, Alicent confronts Cole. “So you cast me aside?” she demands.
“Have I not spared you?” he counters. “What we must do now is terrible. Will you preside over it?” Cole’s not wrong, exactly; with the Dance underway, things will only get uglier. But that’s a choice Alicent should be able to make herself. Her relationship with Cole seemed to be one of the only things in her life that she did just for herself. Those days certainly seem to be over now.
17. Aegon Targaryen
It looks like the Lord of the Seven Kingdoms will pull through, but that’s about it in the positives column for the king this week. He has yet to regain full consciousness, and the scope of his wounds—severe burns across his body where Vhagar’s dragonfire melted his armor into his skin and a compound fracture in one of his legs, for starters—suggests that his recovery will be long and brutal. His dragon might not be so lucky, if you can call it that: “Sunfyre was long in the dying,” reports Cole, meaning the king might lack that ultimate Targaryen status symbol once he does recover. Aegon’s brother might not have succeeded in killing him in “The Red Dragon and the Gold,” but Aemond—having convinced the Small Council to install him as regent—might as well have for the time being.
18. The Smallfolk
At its heart, the Dance of the Dragons is a family squabble over a chair, and we’re sure to see more dragons—and dragonriders—fall as the war continues. But it would always be the smallfolk who suffered most. To wit: Battles have broken out across Westeros, some from Criston Cole’s conquests and others not, leaving scores of people—principally of the non-noble variety—dead. Warfare has reverberations far beyond a battlefield, too: 700 dead at Rook’s Rest means hundreds of widows and children left without a father and perhaps breadwinner. In King’s Landing and in Dragonstone, the rulers have redirected spending toward building up their armies; the people of King’s Landing, who are now trapped in their city, are facing a looming famine and a rat-fueled wave of illness. As Alys Rivers put it to Daemon, “Once again in the name of power, it’s the weak and the women who must endure.”
