House Strong
Lords of Harrenhal in the Dance's generation: a house of able counselors and strong backs — and of fires that always seem to burn in Larys Clubfoot's favor.
The fuller tale
House Strong holds Harrenhal in this generation more by royal appointment than by ancient right — able administrators rather than old blood, and Lyonel Strong’s service as Hand of the King under Viserys is the kind of quiet, competent loyalty that makes the family briefly indispensable to a crown that has never quite trusted the old riverlands houses around them.
That competence runs in the family unevenly. Harwin, called Breakbones, commands the City Watch with real ability and becomes, almost as a side effect of his closeness to the royal household, the center of the paternity rumor that will eventually poison the succession — the whispered suggestion that Rhaenyra’s sons owe their dark hair to Harrenhal rather than to Laenor Velaryon, a rumor the family can neither confirm nor kill.
Larys, called Clubfoot for a lame leg that keeps him out of every hall’s notice until it suits him not to be, inherits Harrenhal by the ugliest method available — a fire that kills his own father and brother in what is recorded, with visible discomfort, as an accident — and spends the war that follows as Alicent and then Aegon’s master of whisperers, trading secrets to whichever side of the conflict currently needs them most, a man who wins by making sure no one in the room ever quite knows what he already knows.
Alys Rivers, a bastard of the house with a claim on Harrenhal’s blood but none on its name, becomes one of the war’s stranger footnotes — associated in its later stages with Aemond’s occupation of the castle, and with a reputation for knowledge the smallfolk are inclined to call witchcraft rather than anything so ordinary as intelligence.
The page and the screen
Larys Strong’s ultimate fate is treated with more finality on screen than in the chronicle, which loses track of him in the war’s later confusion rather than closing his story outright; the show similarly gives Alys Rivers a more direct, dramatized relationship to Aemond, including implications the book leaves considerably vaguer, consistent with a text more interested in what Harrenhal’s secrets did to the war than in settling every private arrangement that produced them.
