HBO‘s A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms has thus far offered a very small, focused story about Ser Duncan The Tall (Peter Claffey), his squire Egg (Dexter Sol Ansell), and their quest to participate in a tournament at Ashford Fields. And while the arrival of several Targaryens last episode indicated the scope of the Westeros-based show was widening a little… Well, get ready for it to widen a lot on Episode 3, “The Squire.” Because just like on The Wire, there’s a reveal towards the end that would absolutely have made a medieval version of Clay Davis (Isiah Whitlock Jr.) say “sheeeeeeeee-it.”
It also amps up the danger for Dunk considerably, and makes the stakes of the tournament pale in comparison. That’s a lot of build-up, right? Right. While the series premiere brought on sweet vibes and “Hard Salt Beef” kept it going, “The Squire” is the turning point, halfway through the season. Will things go all Westerosi-shaped for Dunk and Egg after this?
We’ll certainly see, but first, let’s recap everything that went down on A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms Episode 3, “The Squire.”
Spoilers for A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms Season 1, Episode 3 “The Squire” past this point.
A Horse Is A Horse
The episode opens up on Dunk asleep, with Egg watching him… It’s a little, relatively subtle thing, but to get very much ahead of myself, presages that this episode will be crucial for the smaller member of our duo. So far (i.e., in the first two episodes) the focus has been on Dunk, not Egg, with the latter’s motivations slow-burning in the background. Now, it’s Egg’s time in the frying pan.
He whinnies. The horses answer. We get our title card.
And then we’re over to Egg, in the pre-dawn light taking care of Thunder (I mean, I think it’s Thunder, we’re down a Sweetfoot after she was sold to pay for Dunk’s armor last episode). Egg grabs Dunk’s sword, which is almost as large as him, and leads the horse through a beautifully lit forest. Egg’s goal? To train Thunder for the jousts so that Dunk, who had the wind taken out of sails last episode, hopefully doesn’t die.
“Come on! Just run! Move!” yells Egg at the stubborn horse. “You’re stubborn as old iron! He’s twice the size of your last rider, and the field could be just like this or worse, so you best get your feet under you.” This maybe is a misunderstanding of just how much English a horse can speak, though I am glad George R.R. Martin figured out what horses look like before they filmed this series.
“My father told me I should never talk to a horse,” Egg says. “He said they’re dumber than dogs and only understand the crop. But I don’t think that’s true. I think a horse doesn’t want to be ordered about any more than a man does.”
Okay so listen… The reveal about Egg doesn’t happen until the end of the episode, but I’m going to spoil it here because it’s helpful to understand a lot of the content of this half-hour. Egg is actually — are you ready — Aegon Targaryen, son Prince Maekar Targaryen (Sam Spruell), and eventual ruler of the Seven Kingdoms. So you can see that when Egg is talking to Thunder, he’s not talking about a horse; he’s talking about himself, and why he ran away from the rest of his family.
Okay, back to the scene now that you have context. Egg tries to train the horse, and instead it loudly and graphically poops. For those keeping track, that’s Duncan pooping in the first episode, Ser Arlan of Pennytree (Danny Webb) pissing out his enormous hog in the second episode, and a horse pooping in the third episode. Will it continue to alternate every episode? We’ll find out!
Mad, One-Eyed, Moody
Egg manages to actually get in some real training, only to be approached by a one-eyed man who accuses Egg of stealing the horse. Curiously, Egg doesn’t outright say he’s training for Dunk, and they trade barbs. “What’s wrong with your hair?” asks the man, to which Egg responds, “What’s wrong with your eye?”
Which is when, thanks to a flashback, Egg realizes this is Ser Robyn Rhysling, “the maddest knight in the Seven Kingdoms.”
“We are a vessel for the Warrior,” Robyn answers. “When it is madness bid, it’s madness delivered.”
As for what part Ser Robyn has to play in this whole show? Unclear as of this point, but stay tuned.
Sew What?
Heading back to camp, Dunk is sewing a patch on his clothes… When Egg asks if that’s his job, Dunk shoots back and asks if he knows how to swe. Egg, of course, does not. And Dunk is pretty rude after that, telling him to do his tasks and that “you’ll eat my fist” if he doesn’t do what he’s told.
…But here’s the thing: Dunk talks a good game of clouting ears and whatnot, but he sees himself in Egg. And the tall knight immediately relents, instead teaching Egg how to sew and exclaiming proudly when he gets it right.
They continue to bond as Egg asks Dunk if it’s “odd that I have black hair growing out of my stones,” to which Dunk says, “it’s odd that you’re telling me.” And it’s a laugh-out-loud moment, but it also points once again to the relationship between the two: Egg looks at Dunk as a father figure, but Dunk is really barely an adult himself.
Miss Lucy Had A Blackfyre Rebellion
Okay, so: lore time. Well after House of the Dragon, but not too long before A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms was an event called The Blackfyre Rebellion. Essentially yet another Westeros Civil War, forces were split into those that followed the bastard Daemon Targaryen, and those who followed his brother, Daeron Targaryen. Daemon lost, and died in the Battle of Redgrass Field.
In the Westeros timeline, the Blackfyre Rebellion happened in about 196 AC, while AKotSK takes place in 209 AC. But in the Dunk & Egg novellas this TV show is based on, the specter of the Blackfyre Rebellion still looms over everything, with those who were loyal to Daemon (this is a different Daemon than the one played by Matt Smith on HotD, by the way) ostracized and punished by society.
I explain all this, because while he sits in a tree and whittles a stick, Egg sings a song which is the Westeros equivalent of “Miss Lucy Had A Steamboat.”
Prince Baelor was the first born
Prince Maekar sprang out last
Daemon was the bastard,
so they kicked his bastard
Grass is green in summer,
green grass I adore
But grass is red all over
when you kill a rebel
Horses die in battle
This battle was the front
Blackfyre’s not a trueborn,
he came from the wrong
Country was in peril,
The Anvil was a rock
The Hammer smashes the bastard
with his giant veiny
Host of Dornish spearmen
Got all that? Prince Baelor “Breakspear” Targaryen (Bertie Carvel) and Prince Maekar we’ve met already on the show, and they were called The Hammer and The Anvil, respectively. Daemon and the red grass we just explained. And indeed, Baelor won the day by ramming Daemon’s forces from behind with a host of Dornish spearman, crushing them against Maekar’s forces.
Lore time over!
Joust Cause
Dunk interrupts Egg, ready to enter the lists, but there are a few problems with that. First, Dunk doesn’t have his shield. Second, and probably more of an impediment, Dunk can’t actually joust yet.
“The right of first challenge goes to knights of high birth and renown,” Egg explains. “Are you a knight of high birth and renown, ser?”
So, er whoops. “So why have I been vomiting all morning?” Dunk asks, confused.
“It’s a mystery,” answers Egg.
Reader, I love them.
Dunkin’ Eggs
Dunk heads out to get some goose eggs, and not kill a goose, but really the point of the next scene is so he can continue to flirt awkwardly with Tanselle Too-Tall (Tanzyn Crawford). “Do you… Like goose eggs,” Dunk asks, which if you’re single, please try that at a bar later tonight, you’ll definitely get lucky. But she’s only interested in getting him his shield, and walks on. Which leads to yet another laugh-out-loud funny moment, as Egg (the character, not the goose embryos) walks up, and goes, “Ooh, ooh! Ooh!” in regards to Dunk trying to romance the puppeteer.
But it also leads to another sweet scene of Dunk cooking up some frankly delicious looking goose egg sandwiches featuring thick slices of bacon, giant goose eggs, and delicious looking fresh bread. That’s followed by Dunk and Egg attending the jousts, and it’s all… Really delightful?
Granted it’s juxtaposed with scenes of brutal jousting, but these two are wonderful together, more like brothers than anything else. And Egg, as we’ll find out later, has brothers who suck. Yet here, Dunk and Egg pretend to be each other, bicker over whether ale is disgusting or not, lay on a hill and talk about how they could be happy just living life like they are on this day. There’s some bad stuff to come, but Dunk and Egg are great together, and clearly care about each other, even in the short time they’ve spent together.
Egg uses this moment to see if he can stay on after the tournament as Dunk’s squire… But if Dunk loses, “I’ll scarcely be a knight after the tournament.” But what if he wins? Dunk is about to answer, when he gets cut off by the tournament steward Plummer (Tom Vaughan-Lawlor).
The Fix Is In
Plummer brings Duncan to a stream in the woods, and confesses to him that Lord Ashford has “richly overspent” on his daughter’s pageant. While Dunk thinks Plummer wants money which he doesn’t have, instead, Plummer has a proposal… Dunk will take on Sir Androw, Lord Ashford’s youngest, and win. Specifically, Androw is good at jousting. If Dunk, against all odds, beats him, whoever bet on Dunk would make a hefty sum of money.
The problem is, Plummer is asking the wrong man. “I do not want a victory that I have not earned,” Dunk definitively says. And while Plummer is convincing — he’s going to give him Androw’s horse and armor if Dunk wins — Dunk might be the one good man in Westeros. Does he consider the offer? Of course, particularly as he knows deep down he’ll likely lose. Will he take it? That’s what this episode is about, baby.
Aerion Force One
To drive the point home (no pun on jousting), Prince Aerion (Finn Bennett) is up next in the lists. He’s wearing an imposing suit of black armor, with red dragon flame on the crest. And he chooses Ser Humfrey Hardyng (Ross Anderson), who with his unimposing, checkered shield and worn armor seems like he should be no match for the Targaryen.
“Do it!” Egg shouts as they ride at each other. “Kill him!”
While Dunk might think Egg is shouting that to Aerion, Egg is actually shouting that to Ser Humfrey. Again, we’ll point you to the reveal at the end of the episode that Egg is Aegon… Perhaps the reason he ran away has to do with his a-hole older brother?
It’s not to be, though… Aerion, horribly, aims too low — likely on purpose — and impales Ser Humfrey’s horse. The horse falls over, lands on Ser Humfrey, crushing his leg. And if you were wondering where the grim Westeros we know and love from Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon is at: there’s that horse mangling you ordered!
This is followed by the crowd almost rioting, and someone even throwing a rock at Aerion’s head. What’s perhaps most notable about this is that, despite being a Prince of the realm, the Targaryens have clearly fallen far in estimation from their powerful position a century earlier, particularly given they no longer have dragons to back them up.
The crowd breaks through, the Kingsguard and others hold them back, and Aerion, exhibiting the old Targaryen sadism, eats it all up.
While Dunk thinks it was a mishap, Egg knows better. “That was no mishap,” he says, and Dunk decides they’re done for the day.
Alice: Through The Looking Butt
While Egg’s song earlier was historically based, we get another, more apocryphal ditty thanks to Lyonel Baratheon (Daniel Ings) and Ser Manfred Dondarrion (Daniel Monks), who drunkenly recount the tale of Three-Fingered Alice. I won’t transcribe this whole ribald song, but it mostly involves shoving those fingers up a butt.
Egg, having recounted history earlier, asks whether there was a real Alice. “A crippled girl who shoved her hand up men’s arses?” asks Dunk. And while they both think Alice was real, Dunk doesn’t think her real name was Alice… Which Egg finds sad. “That means there was a cripple girl who was so good at pleasuring men in their bums that they saw fit to celebrate her in song, yet they could not bother credit her true name?”
While the conversation that follows is all about honor, underlying the conflict Dunk is dealing with via Plummer, it also gets back to the theme of last week’s episode: how you are remembered, versus how others remember you. It’s something Egg is grappling with thanks his last name being Targaryen yet being happiest as an anonymous squire for the worst knight in the Seven Kingdoms. And it’s something Dunk is grappling with as he tries to honor the name of Ser Arlan, someone nobody really remembers.
“Her name is Hope, ser,” Egg offers up. “Belongs to all who invoke it.”
Fathers And Sons
Leaving the drunken revelry and eating some sausages, Dunk asks Egg whether he knew his father, and while Egg is all like, “uh, not really,” neglecting to mention he’s currently at the Tourney, we do find out more about Dunk’s backstory. He thinks he probably saw his father hanged, and one of the shop-owners in Flea Bottom — which is where Dunk grew up — told him that “my father was some thief. If he was as big as me, he wouldn’t have made a very good one.”
If you’re curious, at least based on the books we have no idea who Duncan’s father was. So perhaps there’s a parentage reveal coming for Dunk; or perhaps he’s merely a large orphan, and that’s all there is to it.
Fortune Favors The Bold
As they continue to wander the marketplace, a fortune teller (Jenna Boyd) approaches the duo, and offers to say their fortune.
“Oh yeah,” Dunk says, laughing. “Go on then.”
“You shall know great success and be richer than a Lannister,” she says, looking at Dunk. He sighs. “Thank you. Do the boy now.”
“You shall be king… And die in hot fire, and worms shall feed upon your ashes. And all who know you shall rejoice in your dying,” says the fortune teller.
“…What?” asks Egg, shocked.
Dunk laughs and tells her it’s very good, but Egg is horrified. Look, I’m not going to get into potential future spoilers here, but suffice to say while she’s likely at least a little off about Dunk, she’s spot on about Egg.
Cider House Rules
Still haunted by the prophecy, Egg and Dunk bump into Raymun Fossoway (Shaun Thomas), a squire for House Fossoway, aka the apple house. While Egg heads off to the puppet show, Dunk joins Raymun for a cup of homemade apple cider.
As they drink, Raymun is not very complimentary of his cousin Steffon (Edward Ashley), who he says will likely challenge whoever is wounded. Dunk, meanwhile, floats the idea of perhaps being equally matched to Ser Androw, and Raymun offers up that Aerion’s horse ended up with the wounded Ser Humfrey.
Dunk scoffs at the idea that Aerion meant to injure Ser Humfrey’s horse, but Raymun has another take: “they’re incestuous aliens, Duncan,” which raises several question about whether he means invaders from another kingdom, or Westeros has a healthy belief in beings from outer space we haven’t known about thus far. “Blood-magickers and tyrants who burned our lands, enslaved our people, dragged us into their wars without a mote of respect for our history or our customs,” Raymun shouts. “Every pale-haired brat they’ve saddled on us has been madder than the last, gods know how.”
I know I mentioned this earlier, but again the estimation of Targaryens is at an all time low. “The only honorable thing a Targaryen can do for this realm is finish on his wife’s tits,” Raymun says. “So aye, I think he meant to kill the fucking horse.”
No Puppet! No Puppet!
Speaking of which, over at the puppet show Tanselle is blatantly performing a show where knights fight a giant dragon puppet, ultimately killing it. One big problem? Aerion enters, and he’s not pleased.
The silent crowd sees him, then Tanselle. And briefly, we’re back with Raymun and Dunk, who are laughing and discussing how “Daeron and the youngest” left Summerhall, and are now missing, with their father Maekar on the search for them. Raymun’s estimation? Daeron is a drunk, Aerion is cruel, the other son they’re going to ship off to become a Maester… That, by the way, would be Aemon Targaryen (Peter Vaughan), who you likely know as Jon Snow’s (Kit Harington) old Night’s Watch friend. And as for the youngest?
…He runs in begging for Dunk’s help. Aerion is wrecking the puppet show, and threatening to kill Tanselle. When Dunk sees Aerion breaking her fingers, he beats the crap out of Aerion, even kicking him in the face, and it takes three guards to hold Dunk back.
“Why did you throw your life away for this whore?” Aerion asks, spitting blood. “She’s scarcely worth it. She’s a traitor. The dragon ought never lose.”
The punishment? Because Dunk loosened one of Aerion’s teeth, they’re going to break all of Dunk’s teeth. Dunk fights back, but they work him down and are about the curb him on the stage… When Egg runs in. Dunk screams at Egg, telling him to “hold your tongue or they’ll hurt you.”
Egg isn’t scared. “Wate, Yorgel, do as I say,” he says, and the guards release Dunk.
“You impudent little rat,” Aerion says. “What’s happened to your hair?”
“I cut it off, brother,” Egg says. “I didn’t want to look like you.”
The music swells as everyone realizes who Egg really is, and Dunk is stunned. Cliffhanger! We’ll see you next week for the further adventures of Dunk and… Aegon Targaryen???
A Knight Of The Seven Kingdoms Premiere Dates And Episode Guide:
New episodes of A Knight Of The Seven Kingdoms premiere Sundays on HBO and HBO Max, at 10pm ET. The season will premiere with one episodes on January 18, followed by one new episode weekly until the season finale.
Here’s what we expect from the full list of episodes in A Knight Of The Seven Kingdoms with premiere dates.
- Sunday, January 18, 2026: A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, Season 1, Episode 1
- Sunday, January 25, 2026: A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, Season 1, Episode 2
- Sunday, February 1, 2026: A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, Season 1, Episode 3
- Sunday, February 8, 2026: A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, Season 1, Episode 4
- Sunday, February 15, 2026: A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, Season 1, Episode 5
- Sunday, February 22, 2026: A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, Season 1, Episode 6 *Season Finale*
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