ConnexionA Knight of the Seven Kingdoms: What We Know So Far About Season 2
Full spoilers ahead for A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, Season 1.
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms has concluded its first season, but that’s not the end of the journey for Dunk and Egg. The towering hedge knight and his young squire will return for a second season — and likely a third — on HBO, but there’s precious little on-the-record information at this point about what’s in store for viewers. Fortunately, showrunner Ira Parker recently chatted with IGN to help shed light on what fans can expect from the next season. Read on for what we learned about A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, Season 2.
What Is A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms Season 2 About?
Like the first season, Season 2 of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms will consist of six half-hour episodes. It will adapt “The Sworn Sword,” the second novella in George R.R. Martin’s Tales of Dunk and Egg series. Set a few years after the events depicted in Season 1, Season 2 brings in a new cast of characters for Dunk and Egg to encounter, most notably Lady Rohanne Webber, aka the Red Widow, and Ser Eustace Osgrey, two rivals locked in a bitter land dispute as a drought devastates the Reach. Lady Rohanne is believed to be an old witch responsible for the deaths of her first four husbands, but she is in fact an attractive young woman with political savvy and ambiguous intentions. Ser Eustace is a proud old knight and veteran of the First Blackfyre Rebellion to whom Dunk swears his sword.
If “Season 1 really is about fathers and sons and what's passed on to the next generation,” then Season 2, as showrunner Ira Parker recently told IGN, will explore the theme of “loyalty and maybe against blind loyalty.”
Peter Claffey and Dexter Sol Ansell will reprise their roles as Dunk and Egg, respectively, although the casting of Lady Rohanne and Ser Eustace has not yet been revealed.
Given how short “The Sworn Sword” is – it runs a little over 100 pages, depending on the layout of the edition you have – should fans expect additional material to be added to the show?
“We're pretty faithful to the book, again," Parker said. "I would say little flourishes here and there, but we did a lot of that in Season 1 as well. It should all feel inherent to the world and to Dunk's POV.”
When Will Season 2 Premiere?
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms was renewed for a second season in November 2025, and Season 2 is expected to premiere sometime in 2027. They're currently filming interiors for these new episodes at Belfast’s Titanic Studios, where the original Game of Thrones was shot, with exteriors in Spain...although there’s been an unforeseen twist.
“We are going to drier pastures in Spain for [the drought scenes],” Parker said. “Except that the location that was meant to be our dry riverbed is now a fully flowing river after getting rain for the first time in ten years at this location, and so now has sent us scrambling and searching for changes at this late date.”
How Many Seasons Will There Be of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms?
Although Game of Thrones creator George R.R. Martin has outlines for 12 additional Dunk and Egg novellas that would follow the duo through the rest of their lives – outlines which he’s since shared with Parker – as of right now, HBO has only expressed interest in three seasons of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms based on the three existing published novellas.
“We're working, I'd say, pretty quickly," Parker said. "I think the plan would be to do one [season] a year, and so then we'll see if the fans keep responding. But this is a very fun world to write in, there's a lot of possibilities.” Parker added that seeing Egg grow up and Dunk evolve is important to the saga. “As you go through someone's whole life, theoretically it allows us to change the location and the tone and nature of the show, just as people's lives change from childhood to young adulthood, to marriage and children and later in life.”
Season 1 of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms was largely fantasy-free, since it takes place after the demise of dragons, but it still managed to work in a dark prophecy about Dunk and Egg’s distant future; it doesn’t sound like Season 2 will expand on all that, however.
“Those moments to me, especially in [Season 1], are so small and minor and unconfirmed as well,” Parker said. “I mean, [I] find a lot of people who have read the books and who think that they know the canon of where these lives go will say, ‘Oh, the fortune teller told a prophecy.’ And I'm just like, ‘Or it's what Dunk thinks it is and it's just a person there who gives one good and one bad, and that's how they make their money, because it's fun and you're at a tournament.’ So maybe, there's a lot that went into the thinking of that moment, and none of it ends up on screen, but it's there in our head. So maybe we revisit at some point, but who knows?”
Will the Targaryens Return for Season 2?
It doesn’t sound like it. A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms Season 1 ends with Egg explaining to Dunk that there are actually nine kingdoms and not seven, with the final title card of “A Knight of the Nine Kingdoms” popping up at the end. Showrunner Ira Parker clarified that they were just having a bit of fun with that and the series is not actually being renamed.
There’s also an end credits scene in the Season 1 finale that reveals Egg did not, in fact, get his father’s permission to become a hedge knight’s squire, as we see Prince Maekar screaming about his missing son’s whereabouts while the Targaryens ride out of Ashford.
Parker said he wrote that scene to be tongue-in-cheek “only for half of the people at HBO to take it quite seriously and probably half of my writing room, too. It was just like, ‘No, what do you mean? We’ve got to answer it now.’” The showrunner added: “We've actually gone through a lot of iterations on how to deal with that. And so far we've landed on my favorite one, which is being addressed with hopefully a light touch and also a little bit of a dark humor as well.”
Have We Really Seen the Last of Ser Arlan of Pennytree?
Parker said Ser Arlan of Pennytree isn’t expected to return for Season 2, as his specter is seen riding away from Dunk and Egg at the end of the first season.
“We're done with Ser Arlan,” Parker said. “Ser Arlan is allowed to go rest. He has done his job with Dunk. Dunk is now a knight and he's heading off to [...] have his own journeys with his own squire.”
“Would Ser Arlan ever come back? I would love that," Parker continued. "First of all, I just love Danny Webb and I think he's a genius and I think he is Ser Arlan and he just did such a brilliant job for us. But we will do flashbacks when they're appropriate for the story. For the moment, I would say we're probably not even doing them as frequently as we did [in] Season 1. They're different, they're changed. They're a reflection of the story that we're in and where Dunk is in his life.”
Inflation and Egg Prices
“The Sworn Sword” is smaller in scale than the first novella, “The Hedge Knight,” which had all those jousting sequences depicted in Season 1. So one could be forgiven for thinking that Season 2 will be less expensive for HBO to produce than Season 1...but Parker explained that’s far from the case.
“Look, it's tricky because the money for Season 2 stayed the same as Season 1," Parker said, "which really with inflation, means you have less. And then we're also a two country shoot now, which, there's a lot of dead money there. We also have, I would say, probably a lot more Egg. And he's actually probably our most expensive asset, because whenever we use him, you can't shoot a full day because of the child hours. And so it's funny, the things that cost you more money, because you're right. When I first thought about ‘The Sworn Sword,’ I thought, ‘Oh, this'll be great. We can actually do a Season 2, very small and contained and for a little amount of money.’ But it's actually been, in a lot of ways, trickier than Season 1, and I never thought I'd be sitting here saying that.”
For more Westeros coverage, read our A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms Season 1 Finale review and our spoiler-free A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms Season 1 review.
