Egg

A bald, sharp-tongued little stableboy who attaches himself to the tallest knight he can find — and squires far too well for a stableboy. His head is shaved for an excellent reason: hair like his would name him to every man in Westeros.

The fuller tale

Aegon Targaryen is born the fourth son of a fourth son, a position so far from the Iron Throne that it functions, for most of his childhood, as a kind of accidental freedom. Where his elder cousins and uncles are groomed, watched, and married off for the realm’s convenience, nobody much minds what Maekar’s youngest boy does with his afternoons — and what he does, eventually, is shave his telltale silver-gold hair down to bare scalp, slip away from Summerhall, and attach himself to the largest hedge knight he can find on the road, claiming to be a stableboy named Egg.

The disguise works because he commits to it completely. He grooms horses, sleeps in stables, and squires — rather too competently for a boy who is supposedly untrained — for a man who has no idea, for most of their first adventure together, that his new servant is a prince of the blood. What Egg gets out of the arrangement is the one education no Targaryen before him ever received: the realm as it looks from below, where the knights of the songs turn out to be the same men who ride down beggars at tourneys and the smallfolk’s opinion of the royal family is considerably less flattering than the royal family’s opinion of itself.

Hidden in his boot through the whole of his time with Dunk is his father’s signet ring — a piece of authority worth more than either of them can easily explain, and one Egg is careful never to use lightly. When he finally does spend it, at Whitewalls, it is to buy a fair hearing for a hedge knight the realm’s institutions would otherwise have crushed without a second thought — a decision that tells you almost everything about the king Egg is eventually going to become, years before anyone alive knows to expect it of him.

Across the tales he is by turns useful, insufferable, brave, and hilariously bad at hiding a prince’s instincts under a stableboy’s manners — quick with a retort no servant should risk, oddly well-read for someone who claims never to have opened a book. Dunk’s patience with him, and his own slow absorption of Dunk’s blunt code of conduct, form the emotional center that the plots of all three novellas orbit. He is learning, without ever being told he is being taught, what it might mean to rule people rather than simply command them.

History remembers him by a name that would have startled the barefoot boy holding Dunk’s horse on the road to Ashford: King Aegon the Fifth, called by the smallfolk the Unlikely, the reforming king who spent a reign trying to give the common people of the Seven Kingdoms the protections his own household had shown him were possible. Every law he later signs, every commoner he later champions, has its blueprint in a boy who spent his adolescence learning the realm from a hedge knight’s saddle rather than a prince’s.

The page and the screen

Dexter Sol Ansell’s Egg anchors the show’s first season as the audience’s other set of eyes — precocious, a little insufferable, visibly restraining a prince’s vocabulary behind a stableboy’s manners — and the season leans into the dramatic irony the novella plants early: viewers know what Dunk does not, and get to watch him find out. Reviewers singled out the chemistry between Claffey and Ansell as the thing the whole show is built to sell, which tracks with how the source material works too — Egg’s chapters are almost always really about Dunk’s growing responsibility for him.

The show’s Season 1 covers only The Hedge Knight, which means Egg’s fuller arc — the boot-hidden signet spent at Whitewalls, the slow accumulation of the instincts that make him Aegon V — remains ahead of the production rather than behind it. What has aired matches the novella closely enough that longtime readers have had little to complain about beyond the necessary expansions of a six-episode season built from a hundred-odd pages.

In the show, season by season

Season One. In The Hedge Knight — A stableboy with suspiciously fine manners and no hair at all. In Ashford Meadow — Keeps his hood up. There are two very good reasons on this field. In The Lists — "He was hurting her!" — the hood is off, and the prince is out. In A Trial of Seven — Aegon Targaryen, revealed — and it is his word that makes the trial possible at all. In The Judgment of the Gods — Watches his family fight itself over the knight he chose. In A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms — A prince apprenticed to the realm itself, one muddy road at a time.

In the books

The Hedge Knight. In The Road to Ashford — Minds the horses suspiciously well and dodges every question about home. In The Tourney — "He was hurting her!" — and the secret prince is a secret no more. In The Trial of Seven — His word made the trial possible; his father's grief made his future.

The Sworn Sword. In A Dry Summer — Prince Aegon fetches, carries, and bites his tongue — mostly. In The Red Widow — Offers to fix everything with one boot's worth of signet ring. Refused. In The Chequy Water — Watches his knight nearly drown for a stream and two stubborn old people.

The Mystery Knight. In The Road to the Wedding — Recognizes the guest list for what it is: Redgrass Field's losing side. In The Mystery Knight — A prince among squires, counting traitors. In The Black Dragon and the White — His father's ring, spent exactly the way a prince should spend it.

Their journey

Where they stand, season by season

Mentioned in the chronicle

• The boy calls himself Egg. He is a better squire than any stableboy has a right to be, and he keeps his hood up around highborn men. (S1·E1)
• Egg's hood falls back. The stableboy is Aegon Targaryen, Aerion's own brother — and Dunk is dragged to a cell to wait on the king's justice. (S1·E3)
• Two years on: Dunk and Egg serve old Ser Eustace Osgrey of Standfast as sworn swords through a drought that has burned the Reach brown. Riding home with the brown-shielded Ser Bennis, they find the Chequy Water dammed — the stream stolen by the Red Widow of Coldmoat. (TSS 1)
• Egg's counsel and a night's hard thinking. Before Dunk can settle his service, the horizon settles it for him: Wat's Wood burns in the dark, the drought's tinder gone up at a stroke — and Ser Eustace names the widow arsonist. (TSS 7)
• Dunk wakes at Coldmoat, leeched and alive. Peace is made the old way: Ser Eustace Osgrey weds Lady Rohanne Webber, stream and honor mended in a sept. And the Red Widow pays a hedge knight's fee with a kiss — and keeps a lock of his hair in her book of debts before Dunk and Egg take the road again. (TSS 10)
• Near Stoney Sept, Dunk and Egg pass gibbets heavy with hanged men — Lord Wyl's brigands, taken by the king's men. The realm is uneasy: Bloodraven hunts traitors, and rumor says the black dragon stirs. Dunk turns their road north, meaning to winter at Winterfell. (TMK 1)
• The Snail proves a tradesman of the tilt: he shows Dunk how the fall was made and offers to buy his services. Egg moves among the squires, hearing what boys hear — and Lord Peake watches everything with a hungry eye. (TMK 6)
• Ser Alyn Cockshaw draws Dunk aside to a quiet well — and pays bravos' wages for it. Ser Maynard Plumm proves quicker: Alyn goes down the well, and Plumm shows Dunk that he knows exactly who Egg is, and minds not at all. (TMK 8)
• Egg's boot yields Maekar's signet; Dunk spends its weight to buy Ser Glendon a knight's chance: trial by joust against the black dragon himself, the egg-theft charge to stand or fall with the tilt. (TMK 10)

Their fate — if death has found them, it is written here. Open at your peril.

The chronicle records no death for this soul — they are living when the tale leaves them, or their ending is a page the maesters have yet to turn.