Spoilers below.
By the end of House of the Dragon’s second season, the King Aegon Targaryen is no longer bedridden, but he is being smuggled out of Westeros.
One of the final shots of the “The Queen Who Ever Was” shows the usurper king in a carriage headed out of King’s Landing, slumped among chicken cages with his unlikely ally Larys Strong. Following their conversation earlier in the episode, the two are now stealing away to Braavos to avoid getting killed by Aegon’s power-hungry younger brother, Aemond Targaryen. Though Aegon doesn’t want to literally run away from the throne, Larys promises that one day they will return and Aegon can reclaim his glory—and the crown.
There’s just one problem: Aegon’s mother, Alicent Hightower, has just agreed to sacrifice his life to bring this war to a swift end. Alicent went on a secret quest of her own, surprising Queen Rhaenyra at Dragonstone to offer her a shortcut to the Iron Throne: When Aemond flies to Harrenhal, Rhaenyra can storm King’s Landing and Alicent will order the guards to stand down. But that’s not enough for Rhaenyra; she needs to kill the opposition—a.k.a. Aegon—to make her victory final. It’s a lot to ask of Alicent, a fiercely protective mother, but she agrees in the end to sacrifice her son. The rest is now up to Rhaenyra. So if she does seek out Aegon’s head in season 3, she’ll be shocked to learn that he’s nowhere to be found. With a peaceful path to victory no longer guaranteed, she’ll have to resort to the original plan: violence and all-out war (which, honestly, we’ve been expecting all this time).
In George R. R. Martin’s book Fire & Blood, on which House of the Dragon is based, Aegon pulls a similar stunt. To escape trouble in King’s Landing, he disguises in a fisherman’s cloak, hides in a fishing skiff, and secretly sails to Dragonstone with a knight who has family on the island. It’s a clever plan—no one would think to find him on his rival half-sister’s own stomping grounds. Only Larys has knowledge of this plan, but he doesn’t join Aegon like he does in the show. In the onscreen adaptation, Larys becomes more of a mentor to Aegon. He pushes him to regain his physical strength after his gnarly fall and teaches him that he can still have power while living with a disability (Larys is harshly nicknamed “the Clubfoot”). He’ll take care of Aegon financially as well; as the Lord of Harrenhal, Larys has relocated his gold to the Iron Bank in Braavos, which he says is enough to sustain him and the king while they’re in hiding.
But don’t be fooled by his generosity; Larys, the scheming Master of Whisperers, is known to align himself with whomever will benefit him most. “Of course there’s personal gain in it for Larys, because it’s Larys and he’s a social climber. He’s a very very smart man and knows where to be on the chess board at any point,” actor Tom Glynn-Carney, who plays Aegon, told The Wrap.
He’s playing the long game here, but he better play it carefully. If Aemond happened to learn that Larys was spying on him and relaying the information back to Aegon, Glynn-Carney says, “it would be hell to pay for Larys.” Whether or not he gets caught—and how Aemond chooses to respond—is a question for next season.
