Who Is Rhaenyra Up Against in House of the Dragon Season 4?

Aegon II Targaryen (Tom Glynn-Carney) survived, got Sunfyre back, and by the end of the season is thinking about winning rather than about revenge, which is new for him. He and Aemond Targaryen (Ewan Mitchell) agree on what to do next: find Vhagar, get Daeron back, and take King's Landing.

That is the straightforward military threat. What makes it worse for Rhaenyra is that the news has travelled. Word of Aegon's return spread across Westeros, the smallfolk started calling it a resurrection, and her own loyal subjects began wavering and going to the sept to ask the Faith whose side the gods were on.

Aegon is now dangerous to her without doing anything at all. He simply has to keep breathing.

The complication is Aemond. Alys Rivers (Gayle Rankin) saved his life and has offered him a future at Harrenhal that has very little to do with his brother's war. He is still Rhaenyra's enemy. Whether he is still Aegon's brother in any useful sense is a different question.

Mysaria (Sonoya Mizuno) is the one to watch, because she is the only enemy who has already seen it all from the inside.

She came up from nothing to sit on the queen's council as Mistress of Whisperers, and she got there on information rather than birth or soldiers. She is also the reason the blame for an empty treasury landed on the master of coin instead of on Rhaenyra. She helped Rhaenyra orchestrate blockade of king’s landing sea trade routes which led to the people’s starvation and lack of resources.

Then she went after Daemon Targaryen (Matt Smith), and that is where it went wrong for her. When Daemon threw a head on the council table and claimed it belonged to Sheepstealer's rider, Mysaria did not believe him, and said so. Nobody saw the face, she told Rhaenyra. He is lying to you. She kept saying it.

She was right. Daemon was lying, to cover for Rhaena Targaryen (Phoebe Campbell). But being right about Daemon is not a safe thing to be, because Rhaenyra cannot afford to doubt him. An adviser who is always right about the one person you need becomes a problem instead of an asset.

When she felt her grip going, Mysaria fell back on what she knew before the council and took Rhaenyra to bed. It bought her nothing. She was sent to Pentos with gold, servants and a house, which is a soft landing by the standards of the job, and it still means the queen has an exiled spymaster who knows the money, the council, the weak points, and one thing about Rhaenyra personally that Rhaenyra would rather nobody discussed.

And look at what she managed on the way out. She told Helaena Targaryen (Phia Saban) that Aegon was alive, which made Helaena's unborn child a far more valuable hostage than it had been. Helaena took her own life not long after. Whether Mysaria intended that is an open question. The capability is not in doubt. She has never needed an army.

Ulf is the simple problem. He sold himself to the Greens for the promise of a castle, and Tumbleton burned for it.

He is a fool with an enormous dragon and no loyalty to anyone, and the honest question is not what he does next but whether he gets the chance to do anything. Rhaenyra now has a proven traitor and a very public reason to make an example of him. Whether he is executed early or slips away, he is not somebody either side can build a plan around.

Hugh is the hard one, and unlike Ulf, nothing he has done is treason.

He has Vermithor, the second largest dragon alive, and only two other dragons can trouble it. He also has a dead wife and a grief that has not landed anywhere.

He could blame Ulf, whose dragon did the burning. He could blame the Greens for bringing the war to Tumbleton. He could blame Rhaenyra, whose army was attacking the town his wife was sheltering in. He could blame himself for going. The show has deliberately not said. The most powerful piece nobody controls is a grieving man who has not picked a target.

The High Septon refused to anoint her, and told her why: Aegon and his dragon had come back, and there could be no clearer sign of who the gods had chosen. Rhaenyra told him she had six dragons. He told her he had a seven-faced god.

Then she called him a traitor and ordered Alyn of Hull (Abubakar Salim) to kill him. Alyn hesitated. The Septon's last warning was explicit, that to harm him was to declare war on the Starry Sept, and Alyn did it anyway.

So this is not a maybe. The Faith has been told, on the record, that it is at war with the crown, and the woman who started it has one fewer holy man to negotiate with. If she installs a septon who will crown her, she has an obvious puppet. If she does not, she stays uncrowned. An army can be beaten. A faith with a martyr does not work like that.

The city is the other half of the same problem, and it had started moving before the sept.

When word of Aegon's return arrived, the smallfolk welcomed it as a resurrection, and even loyal subjects went to the sept looking for guidance about who the gods actually wanted on the throne. That is a population that was already hungry, already frightened, and already unconvinced.

What Rhaenyra gave them in reply was a speech about her father naming her heir, finishing with a claim to be the Prince That Was Promised, delivered partly in High Valyrian to people who neither speak it nor have any reason to care about a prophecy. The city did not need convincing that she was legitimate. It needed feeding.

Nobody in this section has turned on her, which is exactly why it matters.

Baela Targaryen (Bethany Antonia) tells the queen to her face that Corlys was captured because Rhaenyra drove him from court, and gets called insolent for it. She is right, she is family, and she has now learned what happens when she says something true.

Corlys Velaryon (Steve Toussaint) has not gone over to the Greens and probably never will. But he lost his fleet, his standing and nearly his life, he asked her for one thing and she refused, and a man in that position stops offering.

Neither is an enemy. They have simply stopped assuming she deserves the benefit of the doubt, and a queen this short of friends cannot afford many people making that adjustment.

Daemon is the exception and worth saying plainly: he is not drifting anywhere. If anything he is part of the reason she has become the ruler she now is, because he has spent three seasons telling her that power has to be shown rather than argued for, and by the finale she is doing exactly that.

Which is the shape of season four. Not one villain, but a queen with the strongest claim, the most dragons and a shrinking number of people who are glad to be standing next to her.