Larys Strong who hid Aegon II

Larys Strong who hid Aegon II chose Marston Waters to help hide the king during Rhaenyra’s ascendancy, preferring a knight with useful local ties to a hundred better-qualified men. That choice placed Waters on a path to great power, though his later conduct in the secret siege of the king’s holdfast revealed the constraints of the vows and honor he believed himself bound to uphold.

The Choice on Dragonstone

Waters’s appointment rested not on superior martial reputation but on kinship: he was related to fishermen on Dragonstone. That connection brought him to Larys’s attention, and Larys selected him from among a hundred better knights to hide Aegon II when Rhaenyra’s ascendancy made the king’s safety precarious. The episode presents Larys as a chooser of practical agents, willing to value access and local connections over rank or renown.

From Concealment to Power

The consequences of Larys’s choice became clear in Waters’s later career. Though bastard-born, Waters had already secured knighthood and a modest place in Aegon II’s retinue; his service in hiding the king helped carry him much further. In time he became Lord Commander of the Kingsguard, surpassing knights of better birth and greater fame, and then Hand of the King, the most powerful man in the realm until Aegon III came of age.

The Appointment’s Later Irony

During the secret siege of the holdfast, Waters had ample men to storm it, yet continued trying to end the confrontation through words rather than assault. The account attributes his hesitation to his vows and his sense of a bastard’s honor: he would not order an attack on the king he had sworn to protect. Larys’s earlier selection had helped elevate Waters into a position of immense authority, but the same loyalty that made him a useful protector also limited the force he was willing to use. The narrative thus links Larys’s consequential act of recruitment to a later crisis without suggesting that he could have foreseen Waters’s hesitation.