A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms Season 2 Will Feature Less Battling, More Yearning

This article contains details from the novella that A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms season 2 will be based on. There are no spoilers but do not read on if you want a fully unsullied experience.

The first season of HBO’s A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms was pretty perfect. A small-stakes story about a village jousting tournament that’s also a metaphor for what it means to be a true knight, it managed to be both narratively and emotionally satisfying. Even if some of us — cough cough me cough — are going to be mourning Bertie Carvel’s Baelor Targaryen a long time. Thankfully, the show has already been renewed for a second season, so viewers won’t have to say goodbye to Ser Duncan the Tall and his adorable squire, Egg, for long. But the show’s second season is most likely going to look quite a bit different from its first. 

That’s part of the appeal of this slice of George R.R. Martin’s universe, if we’re honest. His “Tales of Dunk and Egg” novellas are simple yarns about a hedge knight and his squire who are just kind of traipsing around the country looking for worthy lords to serve and hoping to make a little cash. It’s not an anthology, in the strictest sense, but each is a fairly self-contained story, set in a different location featuring a different cast of characters. 

As a result, viewers shouldn’t expect much overlap with the events we saw in season 1. Characters like Lyonel Baratheon, Raymun Fossoway, and Maekar Targaryen don’t show up again in these books, and probably won’t onscreen either. (Though the dangling thread about Maekar not knowing where his kid is feels like a thing the show will have to deal with at some point. Surely someone would notice a missing dragon prince. Right?)

Season 2 will be based on the second of Martin’s three novellas, “The Sworn Sword,” which is set roughly two years after the events of “The Hedge Knight” (which is the story season 1 was based on). In it, Dunk and Egg find themselves in service to Ser Eustace Osgrey, a poor knight who chose the wrong side in the first Blackfyre Rebellion. He’s in the middle of a land dispute with his neighbor, a conflict that introduces Dunk to a woman named Lady Rohanne Webber. He’s somewhat taken aback to learn he’s not the old widow he was led to believe, but rather an attractive young woman with whom he has an immediate spark. 

The pair spends a large part of the story flirting and/or looking longingly at one another, all while Dunk attempts to help determine who has the right to the river that bisects their two properties.  He’s repeatedly frustrated by the pettiness of both parties in the midst of a dispute in which the smallfolk, once again, suffer as a result of their alleged betters’ choices. 

There’s some fighting and another trial (not of seven this time) for Dunk, as well as a great deal of flashbacks focused on the Blackfryres and the Battle of the Redgrass Field. Season 1 of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms was loath to get too deep into the politics of the Black Dragon and his supporters, so we’ll have to see if season 2 is more willing to show us that history, or whether it’ll simply embrace the quieter, more romantic elements of this second novella. Either way, we’ve got a lot to look forward to.