House of the Dragon Season 3 Episode 4 ends with a couple of ruthless murders that might have some fans of the HBO show scratching their heads…

**Spoilers for House of the Dragon Season 3 Episode 4, now streaming on HBO Max**

This week’s House of the Dragon ends with Ormund Hightower (James Norton) forcing his ward, the red-haired Daeron Targaryen (Benjamin Evan Ainsworth), to murder Kat’s (Ellora Torchia) brother Leo (Abhin Galeya) for the having the audacity to stand up to a grotesque Hightower soldier. It’s a dark moment, as it not only represents the teenager’s first kill, but it shows us that Ormund wants to transform the boy into a cold-hearted potential king.

Elsewhere, Daemon Targaryen (Matt Smith) returns from the Vale with gold and a charred skull. He tells Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy) that he killed the rider of Sheepstealer, but Mysaria (Sonoya Mizuno) immediately intuits that this is a lie. While it’s true that Daemon discovered Sheepstealer’s rider in the Vale, he was horrified to discover his own daughter Rhaena (Phoebe Campbell) was the person who tamed the wild dragon. So did he kill his own daughter?

Whether you still don’t know what’s going on with Daeron and Ormund in Tumbleton or you didn’t catch who Daemon killed in the Vale, here’s everything you need to know about the end of House of the Dragon Season 3 Episode 4…

House of the Dragon Season 3 Episode 4 Ending Explained: Why Does Daeron Kill Hugh the Hammer’s Brother-in-Law Leo?

Ormund Hightower makes Daeron kill Leo as a sort of twisted coming-of-age ritual. Ormund knows that a ferocious battle is on its way and Daeron is going to have to have the stomach to kill to survive. More importantly, Ormund is training Daeron to think like him.

When DECIDER spoke with House of the Dragon actor Freddie Fox last month, he teased that Ormund has a “Machiavellian intelligence.” Fox also mentioned that there’s “a new character coming into this season, who both Ormund and Gwayne feel like they can influence and exert their influence over, and they both have very different world views on how that person should be influenced. And it’s a source of great pride and importance to them both.”

So Ormund is influencing Daeron here.

But what did Leo do that was so bad that the Hightowers had to kill him? When Ormund Hightower took the small market town of Tumbleton, he forced the locals to take soldiers into their home. When one of these lecherous losers takes a shine to Hugh the Hammer’s (Kieran Bew) wife, Kat, things quickly get sloppy. First, she’s sexually assaulted and then her sister-in-law gets her arm broken for trying to intervene. Leo quickly comes to his wife’s defense. However, this gets everyone in trouble.

Ormund initially rules in favor of Kat and Leo, ordering the soldier to be gelded and maimed for his crimes. He notes to Daeron that they have to maintain order in the city. Nevertheless, he’s still pissed at Leo for daring to attack one of his soldiers. Leo is killed partly because of this and partly to break Daeron. It’s meant to push Daeron to shed his own youthful innocence.

Oh, and Tessarion gets to roast and kill poor Leo at the very end!

Whose Head Does Daemon Give Rhaenrya in House of the Dragon Season 3 Episode 4? Does Daemon Kill Rhaena?

No, Daemon didn’t kill his daughter. Rather, he killed that poor random shepherd and burned him badly to hide his identity.

Let’s break it down. When Daemon realizes that his daughter has been living with a feral dragon, he is stunned and devastated. Daemon pleads with his daughter to abandon the reckless dragon, but she refuses and asks her father to lie to Rhaenyra on her behalf. After she and Sheepstealer fly away, Daemon notices a shepherd in a valley below and gets an idea.

House of the Dragon has given Rhaena the storyline ascribed to Nettles, a lowborn, dark-skinned teenaged girl who tames the wild dragon Sheepstealer by giving him sheep to eat, in the book Fire & Blood. In George R.R. Martin’s version of events, Daemon and Nettles team up to hunt down Aemond (Ewan Mitchell). When Rhaenyra becomes crippled with paranoia, she orders Daemon to kill Nettles, but he refuses and helps her escape. It’s unclear if there will be more to this story in House of the Dragon or if this is supposed to the culmination of this arc.

Daemon’s ruse also has precedent in the original Game of Thrones shows and books. When Theon Greyjoy (Alfie Allen) sacks Winterfell, but can’t find Bran (Isaac Hempstead-Wright) and Rickon (Art Parkinson), he kills two other boys and burns the corpses so he can claim he killed the true heirs to Winterfell.