Contains spoilers for “House of the Dragon” Season 2 Episode 2 — “The Burning Mill”
Now that the Targaryen civil war, known as the Dance of the Dragons, is really starting to heat up (pun very much intended) on “House of the Dragon,” Team Green and Team Black are sending some of their younger and more vulnerable parties out of the action and towards safety. This is exactly what happens with Rhaena Targaryen (Phoebe Campbell), the daughter of Daemon Targaryen and the late Lady Laena Velaryon (Matt Smith and Nanna Blondell), who is sent to the Vale with the two youngest sons of Queen Rhaenyra Targaryen (Emma D’Arcy), Aegon and Viserys. Rhaena doesn’t go empty-handed, though — she goes with four immensely valuable dragon eggs, contained carefully in a metal box, and Rhaenyra tells the young girl in no uncertain terms that those eggs are the key to her legacy if things go badly for Team Black during the war. (The party of children are also flying with younger dragons Tyraxes and Stormcloud, for protection).
One egg hatches into a dragon during the timeline of the Dance of the Dragons, but what about the other three? They do look familiar — one is dark red, one is gold, and one is green — which match the colors of Drogon, Viserion, and Rhaegal, the three dragons that belong to Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke) in the original series. As episode director Geeta Patel told Mashable, this is deliberate. “Those are Daenerys’ eggs,” Patel revealed. “All of us who work on this show are big Game of Thrones fans, so it was very exciting to shoot that scene.”
Without getting too much into spoiler territory regarding the rest of “House of the Dragon,” anyone half-decent at math probably just realized that there’s an extra egg included in Rhaena Targaryen’s valuable haul. That dragon egg ends up going to Rhaena herself later in the narrative after she embeds herself in the Vale with Lady Jeyne Arryn, who hasn’t yet been seen on-screen; as Team Black makes gains in the war, the Vale reveals that they have an enormous retinue of men and a new dragon.
As George R.R. Martin writes in “Fire & Blood,” the encyclopedic novella about the Dance of the Dragons that serves as the source material for the HBO series, Rhaena ends up possessing one of those dragon eggs, which surprises everyone by hatching. “With them would come a dragon,” Martin says of the armed forces in the Vale. “Lady Rhaena of House Targaryen, brave Baela’s twin, had brought a dragon’s egg with her to the Vale…an egg that had proved fertile, bringing forth a pale pink hatchling with black horns and crest. Rhaena named her Morning.”
So now that we know these eggs do produce the three sole dragons in “Game of Thrones” and that one of the eggs belongs to Rhaena, how do they make their way to Daenerys years after the Targaryen civil war?
There’s another character named Rhaena Targaryen who pops up later in “Dance of the Dragons” — yes, this is confusing — but this one is a princess, and she falls in love with a sailor named Elissa Fairman. When Elissa tells Rhaena that she wants to return to the sea, the royal (now bearing the moniker of “queen,” but that’s contested and a whole different issue) Rhaena bids her farewell, presumably breaking Elissa’s heart … at which point she disappears and steals the eggs.
“Three dragon eggs were missing, and days of searching had not turned them up,” George R.R. Martin writes of the aftermath of Elissa’s departure. “After questioning every man who had access to the dragons closely, Ser Merrell [a knight serving Rhaena] was convinced that Lady Elissa had made off with them. If this betrayal by one she had loved wounded Rhaena Targaryen she hid it well, but there was no hiding her fury.”
“Fire & Blood” indicates that Elissa changed her name and traveled to Pentos and then Braavos, eventually selling the eggs for a tidy sum and buying a ship of her very own. It’s not entirely known how the eggs then get to Essos, where they’re gifted to Daenerys, but Martin also writes that most people thought the eggs were duds that would never hatch. As a Grand Maester says in the book, “They may not hatch. Not away from Dragonstone. The heat…it is known, some dragon eggs simply turn to stone.” Daenerys’ peers thought the same thing … until she was reborn from the flames with three hatchlings.
Source: Static Media, Shutterstock, Theo Whitman, HBO
