After a season that all but rewrote Fire & Blood, “The Treasons at Tumbleton” swings House of the Dragon back toward the page. Mostly.
Here’s the twist almost no one saw coming after seven weeks of the show tearing up the chronicle. The finale is one of the more faithful hours of Season 3. The First Battle of Tumbleton — the dragonseed betrayal that turns the war — lands remarkably close to how George R.R. Martin wrote it, right down to which characters live and die.
“The Treasons at Tumbleton” frames that faithful battle between two of the season’s boldest inventions. Rhaenyra abandons her merciful-populist path entirely, and the innocent heart of the whole story dies. So let’s sort the page from the screen one last time this season, starting with the battle the show mostly got right.
(WARNING: Major spoilers for “Fire & Blood” and potential spoilers for the rest of “House of the Dragon” ahead. You can read our spoiler-free review of the episode here.)
The Betrayal at Tumbleton is (mostly) faithful.
The actual betrayal in “The Treasons at Tumbleton” plays out close to the book. Ulf, drunk and denied dignity by both sides, turns his dragon Silverwing against Rhaenyra’s forces. Ormund Hightower and Roddy the Ruin die in the carnage. And yes, the major casualties at the battle itself match Fire & Blood. Even the beloved book texture survives with the Winter Wolves’ glory-charge and Black Aly Blackwood getting an unhinged line.
One show flourish, though, is a sharpening of Ulf’s motive. Rather than simply defect, this Ulf decides to burn both armies. Mostly because the Hightowers and Blacks have each spurned and humiliated him. It’s the payoff to the season-long invention of Ulf’s wounded pride, and it lands. One faithful book detail the show has kept ironic: “Ulf the White” has dark hair instead of white like in the book. (Recall his friends mocked the nickname in Season 2). So the white feather in his ridiculous helmet just underscores how false his claim to Targaryen blood might be.
As for Hugh, the episode sets him up quite differently. In the book, he’s a bit of an ambitious jerk and not that different from Ulf. During the battle, he rides Vermithor alongside Ulf and Silverwing, and both dragons turn upon the Black defenders of Tumbleton. Their simultaneous defection is why history remembers them collectively as the Two Betrayers.
Of course, only Ulf actually commits the Treason of Tumbleton in the show. Hugh is on the ground the whole time and instead finds Kat dead after Ulf helped reduce the town to ruins. That leaves Hugh poised to defect for an entirely different reason in Season 4. It’s possible the show has effectively postponed Hugh’s half of the famous betrayal, or positioned it as accidental.
The invented pieces around the battle.
The show’s changes in “The Treasons at Tumbleton” are all in the framing, not really the fighting. In the book, it’s Rhaenyra’s forces holding the town and the Hightowers attacking. The child-hostage dilemma that forces Daemon to burn children at the gates is invented, as is Corlys being present at all (he was captured by Ormund two episodes ago, another show-only subplot). Gwayne isn’t even alive at this point in the book, and Daemon is nowhere near this battle.
Daemon’s presence, though, appears to be a reflection of his ongoing arc in the series. He’s the man who spent three seasons preaching conquest, but in the battle he restrains himself, burns as few children as he can, and watches mothers carry scorched kids with dawning horror. It’s a moral turn the chronicle never gives him.
Corlys, meanwhile, is doing the season’s cleverest bit of book-repair. The show has sidelined the Sea Snake all season (in Fire & Blood he’s an active, formidable Hand of the Queen). So it finally lets him play the book-Corlys role where he’s the grown-up in the room, brokering a compromise where Daeron rules the Reach from Oldtown so the realm can have peace. It’s the diplomacy book-Corlys is known for, transplanted into an invented Tumbleton standoff to give the character his due at last.
A few more Tumbleton nitpicks.
Book-Daeron is an active combatant in the First Battle of Tumbleton. Tessarion appears over the battlefield and joins the destruction once Hugh and Ulf betray the Blacks. Garibald Grey is specifically burned by Tessarion, and Daeron is therefore one of the three dragonriders whose presence converts the battle into something resembling a miniature Field of Fire.
He does receive the name “Daeron the Daring” in “The Treasons at Tumbleton,” but in the book he more clearly deserves it. In the show, Daeron prepares to ride Tessarion, Gwayne attempts to stop him, and the chaos overtakes them before Daeron gets his book moment. His whereabouts become a cliffhanger instead, perhaps set up for a payoff in Season 4.
Additionally, the way Roddy takes down Ormund isn’t exactly faithful to the books. In Fire & Blood, he leads his Winter Wolves against overwhelming odds, reaches Ormund, and kills both Ormund and his cousin Bryndon Hightower before dying from his wounds. In fact, Ormund is already dead before Hugh and Ulf begin burning Tumbleton. So the show turns that brief historical account into an extended duel. Roddy and Ormund maim each other, and Ulf/Silverwing ultimately incinerate them together.
Rhaenyra murders the High Septon.
This is a major invention, and it completes the season’s reversal of Rhaenyra. Denied the High Septon’s anointing once again, she simply has him killed. And, in a beat that will surprise even close readers, it’s Alyn of Hull who does the deed. Rhaenyra then dons armor and a crown and proclaims herself the prince that was promised, leaning into the very Valyrian-supremacy, chosen-one prophecy the Hightowers have been using against her.
None of this is in the book, and it inverts the whole arc the show built for her. The queen who fed the poor and begged the Faith for legitimacy now murders the pope and rants about prophecy to a crowd that visibly doesn’t buy it. The episode pointedly withholds any cheer, staging her coronation speech as something close to a Monty Python bit of a madwoman in chainmail. It’s the show’s thesis about power made literal. The merciful path failed, so Rhaenyra grasps every symbol of legitimacy left and becomes the brutal dragonlord Daemon always wanted her to be just as Daemon himself starts to doubt that dream.
It’s also worth pointing out that in Fire & Blood, the High Septon is so old and infirm that he doesn’t even come to King’s Landing to crown Aegon. He remains associated with Oldtown, and Septon Eustace performs Aegon’s anointing instead. This story takes place generations before the High Septon becomes a main fixture of the capitol, as the Sept of Baelor hasn’t even been built yet.
Aegon and Aemond don’t confront each other.
Aegon flying the resurrected Sunfyre to Harrenhal to confront Aemond — the brother who burned and betrayed him — is an invention in “The Treasons at Tumbleton.” And so is its resolution. The season began with Aegon vowing to murder Aemond. Here, both broken boys, in the broken castle, with the half-rotted dragon outside, choose not to kill each other.
It’s a beautifully performed family reckoning (Glynn-Carney and Mitchell are extraordinary) that serves as one of the bigger departures from the source. It’s the kind of intimate scene Fire & Blood structurally can’t contain, since no maester was in the room to record it.
The dramatic function is pure show, too. Rhaenyra’s nightmare is her treasonous half-brothers uniting instead of destroying each other, and the finale hands her exactly that. It also leaves two mysteries dangling into Season 4 — where Vhagar has gone (the show strongly implies Alys is behind the dragon’s disappearance), and whether Daeron survived the battle, which the episode conspicuously refuses to confirm. Even Aegon’s whereabouts and confirmed survival/rumored resurrection aren’t a function in the book at this point. He’s still laying low, only to emerge much later.
Helaena dies, and the “toxic butterflies” come home.
The season’s emotional gut-punch is also its most loaded change. In Fire & Blood, Helaena has barely any personality. She’s described as plump and content, fond of her dragon, and then she mysteriously dies. For three seasons, she was the show’s purest soul. The bug-loving dreamer who wanted nothing but chickens and her children, a true prophet in the Daenys mold. So when she takes her own life from a window — the manner roughly tracks the book — it devastates in a way the chronicle’s blank account never could.
But the context is totally different. The book suggests the major trigger for Helaena’s tragic demise is the death of Maelor, who’s already born but horribly killed at Bitterbridge. They send his head back to King’s Landing, and Mushroom says Rhaenyra weeps when she sees it. Eustace gives a less sympathetic version, and rumors circulate that Rhaenyra had the head shown to Helaena. Helaena subsequently leaps from Maegor’s Holdfast.
The show’s Helaena dies having been imprisoned, exploited for her visions, and — in the episode’s most disturbing beat — force-fed by Rhaenyra. This doesn’t happen in the book, but at this point, book-Rhaenyra has done similarly cruel things to other people. And as Helaena dies, Alicent sees butterflies. The season-long motif snaps shut. Helaena, who kept muttering about caterpillars that eat nightshade and hatch into toxic butterflies, is finally free, transformed, gone.
It’s hard not to read it as the show answering Martin directly. His 2024 “toxic butterflies” blog post attacked precisely these changes to Helaena and her children. And one last book change is that the timing for this appears to be much early in the causal change of a major book event still to come.
The tapestry and Rhaenyra’s omen.
A smaller invented flourish worth its own note is that Helaena leaves behind an embroidered tapestry that unspools from her window like a trail of prophecy. It depicts her own death alongside Rhaenyra enthroned with demonic hands, dragons and fire rising, and blood pouring down.
That last image — Rhaenyra bleeding on the throne — draws straight from Fire & Blood. It’s a real book detail about her reign, folded here into a show-original object. The season closes on Rhaenyra shutting that window on herself, sealing herself off from freedom. It’s an invented visual coda that turns a book omen into the finale’s final, foreboding gesture.
Not only that, but Helaena’s embroidery has effectively become the show’s opening title tapestry itself. Which seems like the show retroactively suggesting that the visual history we ourselves have been watching between the credits is Helaena’s version of history. That’s fascinating in a series adapted from a deliberately unreliable history book. The one where Martin gives us Gyldayn, Mushroom and Eustace arguing about what happened. While the show effectively introduces another historian: Helaena the Dreamer.
Lastly, one Fire & Blood‘s accounts implicates Mysaria in Helaena’s final despair. Mushroom claims she deliberately tells Helaena about Maelor’s death before Helaena kills herself. Now the show obviously can’t reproduce that because unborn Maelor dies with Helaena. So instead, Mysaria contributes to Helaena’s despair through the terrifying prospect that her unborn child will become Rhaenyra’s permanent hostage.
What the finale sets up for Season 4.
For all its faithfulness, “The Treasons at Tumbleton” plants some serious show-specific seeds. Rhaenyra’s cold dismissal of Mysaria — sending her away without a word after their encounter last episode — sets up a scorned Mysaria as a future antagonist. Likely to be woven into the book’s coming smallfolk uprising. The show has been quietly positioning Mysaria and the sex worker Sylvi for a role the chronicle gives to other agitators.
The murder of the High Septon lights a fuse under the Faith, as well. And the aftermath the book fans are set to cherish — the paranoid fallout from the betrayal, Rhaenyra turning on her remaining dragonseeds, the second reckoning at Tumbleton — is still to come.
That’s the paradox of “The Treasons at Tumbleton.” After a season so far off-book that even its trackers stopped keeping count, the finale steadies itself against the source for the battle that matters most. Then frames it with two devastating inventions. A murdered Septon and a dead innocent. Next season, we find out whether all the show can survive the aftermath the book has waiting for it.
House of the Dragon Season 3 is available to stream now on HBO and HBO Max.
Images courtesy of Warner Bros. Discovery.
Jon is one of the co-founders of InBetweenDrafts. He hosts the podcasts Thank God for Movies, Mad Men Men, Rookie Pirate Radio, and Fantasy Writing for Barbarians. He doesn’t sleep, essentially.
