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Kneeling before the knight in battered armor, Dunk cannot say if the tall dark shadow is Baelor Breakspear or the Stranger.
“I need good men, Ser Duncan,” the prince is saying. His voice is thick and slurred and strangely muted, as though he’s speaking from behind a wall. Through the narrow opening in his helm, his face seems to have a godly handsomeness, twice-broken nose and all. “The realm…needs…”
Someone, Egg or Raymun or Steely Pate, helps Dunk back to sitting. All around him, stone spins and seizes, walls disjointed from the mud, from the sky. Every breath makes pain blaze anew in each wound. Dunk cannot begin to count them, nor to say what part of him hurts or how or why. His body is leaden and his flesh is afire. One moment bleeds into the next. Small thin hands reach for his face. He feels drunk. He feels dead. The only sound is his own heartbeat, a limp and sluggish thud he feels more than hears as his life pulses sticky down his cheek – his hand – his gut—
“Gods be good,” someone says, and there’s a scream that reaches Dunk through the soft cold fog creeping over the agony, and some greying, bloodied pulp falls out of a crumpled black helm. In a dim and darkening haze he sees the prince swaying like a drunk. When he turns, his head makes an odd shape against the sky. A dark fruit with a great bite taken from the back, the meat pale and blueish-pink where the mace-teeth cleaved through scalp and skull.
Dunk hears his squire’s voice, quiet and frightened: No.
The look on Prince Baelor’s face is a dazed one. He reaches back and touches two fingers to the ruin of his head, light as a kiss.
And then he falls.
Dunk remembers, after, the weight in his arms. The sound of his own voice, breaking as he has never known it to break. Get up, ser, he will be told he begs of the body, get up. But he is drunk or dying or dead already. He does not remember speaking. He does not remember that the prince does not rise.
“I’m your man,” he forces out. His tongue is too thick for his mouth, and his mouth is hot and sticky and coppery. “Your man.”
Ser? Can you hear me? Ser Duncan!
The bleeding will kill him before the wounds ever have the time to mortify. He needs a maester.
Prince Baelor—
—is beyond the reach of human healing, and this man is soon to join him unless his injuries are seen to.
It feels like a mercy; like falling asleep after a long day of hard riding; like sitting, at last, after standing so long he loses all feeling in his legs.
Come on, lad. There’s a sweet lamb. Come on. Get up. Gods, you’re a big one. Too big to go down so easily. Only a little further. Maester!
He does not remember closing his eyes. Your man, he thinks, your man. I’ll be your man.
Yes, lamb, yes. My man. My knight.
The blackness embraces him like a mother.
Death is crueler than he dreamed.
Every time he wakes, he is in some new hell. Every part of him is agony. His leg, his belly, his hand, his face, his head, his head, his head. His skull is clogged with wool and ringing like a bell. Pain lances through him when he so much as thinks of moving. There is a torturer tending to him, a chain-collared specter who peels the skin back from his wounds to pour liquid flame into the bared flesh. He feels his nerves like thorned and burning fibers knotted into every bruise and gash and broken bone.
His jaw is forced open. Someone says: Drink, ser.
He remembers swallowing. The taste is queer, mingling with the blood, somehow sweet and sharp and salty all at once, and Dunk goes gladly into nothing.
His mind comes back to him, waxing and waning. His last living moments spill across his eyelids. Prince Baelor’s half skull, a field of diamonds red and dyed, a black warhorse lying still in a pool of golden silk and blood-churned mud. Dunk has seen men die before. Dunk has seen children die before, and women, and innocents too. In the name of the Mother; in the name of the Maiden; at the swords of men sworn and anointed to their protection.
You want a family?
But never for him.
Go out there and—
What is the foot of a Flea Bottom urchin against the life of Baelor Targaryen? A man who was a father. A man who was a knight. A man who would be king. I charge you to be brave. I charge you to be just. I charge you to—
—Get up, ser!
Death is kinder than he dreamed.
In the fleeting moments where he draws near enough to waking to hurt, there is a tenderness urging him back to oblivion. His mind conjures Ser Arlan. His mind conjures his mother, or perhaps the Mother, dark wide-set eyes and the brush of Her sword-calloused hand over the good side of his face. The sweetness washes down the taste of blood and leaves him dull and dazed.
The world is soft and stained with gold. He is not in King’s Landing. He is not at his tree, nor Ashford Castle, nor any of the hundred inns and hedges where he slept as a squire, though his own squire is there. Egg looks well-fed, cheeks ruddy and dragon-eyes so bright and alive it is easy to forget they are the same color as his father’s eyes, his brother’s eyes. Ser Arlan is not there, yet Dunk hears him in the throaty tuneless Dothraki ballad scraping at his ears. Tanselle is there, hand puppets dancing to the foreign words of the old man’s song, fingers slim and straight and so clever that the knights on her strings seem to come to life with the slightest twitch. One wears heavy mail and a surcoat plain of ornament or decoration. The other is daffodil-yellow from his antlers to his spurs, giggling in Tanselle’s musical voice.
You are no knight, sing-songs the golden knight to the steel. You are Florian the Fool!
Tanselle’s fingers snap, and the plain puppet fumbles with his shield. Dunk has never seen such a beautiful shield. It is not the kind of thing a knight often carries into battle, more art than sigil, the star blazing through the elm branches glowing as though the artist worked silver and sunlight into the paint.
All men are fools, my lord, and all men are knights, when the Seven bid them fight.
And Lyonel is there. Dunk does not see him, but he feels him in the rasp of whiskers as the knight turns his face into his breast, the tickle of his curls beneath Dunk’s chin, the brush of his fur against Dunk’s side, the heat of his long strong legs slipping between Dunk’s. The scent of him, skin and musk and spice, bitter like wine and sweet like fruit and sharp and hard as iron. His arched foot traces a fond path up Dunk’s calf. His breath is warm on Dunk’s throat.
If it is death, Dunk decides, it is a heaven. Even his hurts are a hazy memory. He is tired; not dead, not dying, merely sleepy. Was ever a hedge so comfortable? Certainly there is no hedge he ought to dream of sharing with Lyonel Baratheon and his whistling snores and the moles like stars across his naked back and sun-dark shoulders.
Why the gods have chosen Dunk for their heavens, he does not know.
The first time that he wakes and stays awake, he still fears he might be dead. Half a heartbeat passes before he realizes the muddiness in his head is from milk of the poppy. The darkness is a cloth laid over his eyes, heavy with some ointment that smells spiced. Cloves, might be. Like perfume. The numbness fades more with every passing moment. Dunk tests his body. He can feel all his fingers and move them too; his toes as well; his head turns left and right as far as it should, though the movement makes the ache grow fierce; his left eye is swollen near fully shut, but when he closes the right he can still tell light from shadow. He can only hope more of his sight returns with time.
One good eye and half a bad one is more than enough for Dunk to find that he is not at his camp. The room is not a large one, nor a proper room at all, just a drape of yellow cloth over a wooden frame. A flap off a pavilion large enough for a bed, and the bed is large enough for Dunk. He can see fat pale candles drooling wax down the arms of a gilt candelabra. He sees that he is naked, and his thigh and hand and stomach are wrapped in strips of linen that snag at his callouses. A maester’s work, and neatly done. The scent of medicine is bitter on top of the taste of old blood and dreamwine.
Enough sun still passes through the tent for him to make out the branching shadows cast by rack on rack of antlers.
“Slowly there, ser.” A face appears, old and drawn, sleepy dark eyes above a neat white beard. Dunk doesn’t know that face, but it belongs to a man in a long grey robe with a maester’s chain of many metals chiming almost down to his waist. “You have been in and out of the Stranger’s hold for some time. It is good to see you waking at last, but it took some effort and no small stroke of fortune. I would not have you undo it all by working yourself into a fit.”
“Who…”
“I am Maester Yormwell,” says the maester. “In service to Prince Baelor. It was His Grace’s wish that your wounds be tended. No, lad, don’t try to sit. This should ease your pain. Drink.”
Dunk turns his face away from the cup of…whatever it is the maester lifts to his face. “Prince Baelor?” I swore to be his man. “He said he…he said he needed…”
Maester Yormwell is a small man and frail, but Dunk is weak enough that one hand on his chest is enough to keep him laying in the cot. “Drink, and I will tell you all I can. It is the will of the Seven that you lived, ser. I am loathe to let you die because you will not accept a draught.”
Lead a warhorse to water, Dunk thinks, but he opens his mouth and lets the maester tip the potion down his throat. It has a stringent taste, not sweet and milky like the poppy, but it takes away the lingering rust of blood. When it is gone Dunk finds himself thirsty.
“You heal quickly,” Yormwell says. “More quickly than I had expected even in a man of your youth and strength. Prince Aerion’s lance drove the mail into your flesh, but the time where I most fear for wounds to fester is nearly passed, and even your blood is draining clean. Your cuts are clotting well. You’re bruised black from head to toe, but I believe your eye will heal, and I doubt at this point there is danger of bleeding in your brain.” He pauses. “What do you remember of the trial, Ser Duncan?”
Dunk’s mouth feels stuffed with wool to match his skull. His mind goes first to Rafe, for some reason, but Rafe is thirteen years dead. I wasn’t tall enough to fight for her, then. Not brave enough neither. I didn’t even have a sword. Ser Arlan’s sword, with the penny in the hilt – ought to go up on some tree, that, mayhaps Dunk’s own elm. He remembers that somehow Ser Arlan had been there in Ashford Meadow. He remembers…Raymun and his cousin, Raymun’s cousin and the bright prince, Raymun and Lyonel – In the name of the Mother, I charge you to defend the young and the innocent – the taste of bile in his mouth. The taste of blood in his mouth. The ringing of metal in his ears, and a thin high voice.
It returns to him in bursts, like cold raindrops landing on his forehead and startling him awake. There had been a white blaze of pain when Aerion’s flail struck Steely Pate’s helm, and something in Dunk had shifted. How good a knight are you, Ser Duncan the Tall? the Prince of Dragonstone had asked of him. No knight at all, the gods had proved, yet when Ser Duncan was struck down there had been Dunk of Flea Bottom waiting to take his place. Aerion Brightflame trained with the finest knights in the realm, champions of a hundred tourneys and warriors blooded in a hundred battles, yet never with an orphan boy.
Men died, Dunk thinks dully. And beasts too: he remembers seeing Lyonel’s horse, that beautiful black horse, crumpled motionless in its barding. He doesn’t remember seeing Lyonel except in his own poppy-wild dreams.
A prince died. I swore to be his man.
“Egg,” he croaks. It ought to be a relief to find he can still speak, but he feels the wet give of Baelor’s head in his lap and tastes ash. “M’squire. Egg. He was helpin’ me…wi’ m’armor.”
“Prince Aegon? He was the one to bring me to you. He would have remained with you if his father had permitted it. I hear Ashford’s guards caught him trying to sneak out of the castle more than once. I was half prepared to make him a pallet by your side. It has been a little over two days. You spent most of them sleeping.”
“Prince…” Dunk fights for the words. Baelor, Aerion, Egg, Maekar, Daeron. So many princes, half of them wanting my head, or near enough to make no difference. “Is he…dead?” He cannot remember if he killed Aerion, though he remembers he had wanted to. He remembers wanting to make him scream as Tanselle screamed. He remembers wanting to make him cry as Egg had cried. He remembers beating him, again and again and again until the prince’s own shield was battered from the force of it. He remembers being astonished by his own hatred, how black and thick and evil it had felt coiled in his breast and hissing at him to kill him.
Men died. A prince died. It would not have been so wrong if Aerion did as well.
“I am told Prince Aerion is kept asleep so that he might heal, though he wakes from time to time clear-headed but for the pain. Prince Daeron has suffered a mangled ear and a broken foot; apparently his own horse trod on him at some point in the chaos. Prince Maekar is well-bruised but otherwise hale.”
“An’ Breakspear? Prince Baelor?” Dunk knows better than to hope, but a part of him is still swimming in his poppy dreams.
“He passed, ser,” Maester Yormwell says, almost gently. “In your arms. Neither I nor any maester in the realm could have saved his life after such a blow.” He keeps talking afterwards, speaking of how the rest of the champions fared: both the Humfreys dead, Beesbury in the first charge and Hardyng from his wounds, Ser Willum Wylde of the Kingsguard carried from the field insensate, Steffon Fossoway’s cracked ribs, Lyonel’s felled horse and broken leg. It is so much noise until that last name, which Dunk hears clearly even through a fog.
“Lyonel?” Dunk had dreamed of him. I thought we might be dead together. I thought I felt him touch my face.
The maester spreads his hands. “I have heard he insisted on helping you from the trial grounds himself, ser, though walking on that leg of his whilst bearing your weight cannot have been wise. Maester Sowyer and Maester Gregor would know more of his state. I spoke with them only to learn how they chose to begin your treatment.” Dunk’s face must betray something of his thoughts, for Yormwell squints at him. “You are not half-healed yet, Ser Duncan. I must insist you remain abed to rest. What business you have will keep. Your stitches may not if you push yourself too soon.”
He removes Dunk’s bandages. The wounds are all over, and Dunk too large for the old man to move him by himself, so it is a painful effort to sit and shift and stretch until Yormwell can see to all of them. Near the end he’s throbbing head to heel, the open hurts stinging and the closed ones aching, slathered in so many lotions and pastes that he feels more slug than man by the time the maester finishes. Baelor dead, and both the Humfreys, and…
Dunk shuts his eyes.
The pavilion is dark when he opens them again and finds he has the strength to sit. His gut burns if he moves too quickly and his right leg won’t bear his full weight, but he can stand almost upright if he’s cautious about it. Someone – the maester, a servant, any one of the invisible people no one but Dunk seems to notice in these places – left a wooden crutch and a fresh set of clothes for him. Both are made for a smaller man, but they serve well enough. Once he’s dressed and on his feet Dunk feels more like himself than he has since—
Since Egg and Steely Pate helped him into Ser Duncan’s armor. Since Lyonel kissed him farewell before that last disastrous joust between Humfrey Hardyng and the prince. Since he first came to wretched Ashford and the gods-forsaken tourney to begin with. His belongings are nowhere to be found. Dunk hopes someone had the foresight to send them back to his camp, no matter that it’s a bedroll beneath a tree, or else that Lyonel has them laying around somewhere.
In Lyonel Baratheon’s tourney pavilion. For the first time Dunk lets himself marvel at that. He’s spent nearly three days now sleeping on a fine mattress under silk shelter, tended to by maesters, like one of Lyonel’s own men. Lyonel, his…liege? His lover? A man he’s known for a sennight, who made a man of him and fought for him, who might well have died for him had he been less fortunate than Baelor Breakspear. Mother wept.
The pavilion is quiet when he leaves his makeshift sickroom. Two dark-haired men and a golden-haired woman sit around a table in the midst of some kind of card game. The first to notice Dunk’s presence is Davos Storm.
“Tya,” he says, “your lord husband owes you twenty stags. Hedge knight’s awake, and with both legs too. Ho there, man. Steady on your feet. That was some show.”
The second man groans, and the lady, Tya, places her hand of cards face-down. “The maesters said he was going to live,” she tells her husband, then gives Dunk a smile. It reminds him somehow of Lyonel. “You ought to be back in your sickbed, ser.”
“Now that he’s won you the lot, of course.”
“Hush your bitter tongue, Gowen, or put it to better use and tell us what you’ve drawn.”
“Nothing to compete with your hand, woman. Gods know why you haven’t taken us to Oldtown to make a fortune fleecing pirates out of their gold…”
Davos crosses the room. “Lyonel is abed,” he says lowly. “He snapped his leg like a branch when the prince killed his charger, and he kept fighting on it afterwards, half-wit that he is.”
The taste of blood is back. “Maester Yormwell said as much.”
“Aye, the prince’s man.” The bastard’s mouth twists. “It was ill-done, what they did to you. It was ill-done to even go through with that trial, farce that it was, killing three men over that little snake’s bruised pride, but…” He grasps Dunk’s bare forearm for a moment. The look on his face is hard as stone. “You were in the right, ser. I speak for many besides myself when I say that I am glad to see you live.”
Dunk finds his face burning and his eyes stinging. He tries for words, but his throat closes up, and Davos only nods and goes back to his seat. He pauses long enough to jerk his head towards a flap at the back of the pavilion – where Lyonel had taken Dunk, a lifetime ago before the tourney proper started, when the sun still shone and a lord’s favor was a precious, wondrous thing.
Dunk must have aged a decade in the four nights that have passed since then. He wonders idly where Lyonel’s dagger went. Wherever his arms and armor have gone, most like, though it’s the thought of Tanselle’s painted shield and that seven-times-damned dagger that makes his stomach knot with loss. The shield is all broke now, and the knife was never even Lyonel’s, but what else do I have? Not a squire nor a master nor a man to belong to, since he got the one killed and the other half-crushed beneath a horse. Best go on and face it, Lunk. You saw the prince, and it was terrible, and it was your doing. You ought to see this too.
He fumbles for his crutch and limps into Lyonel’s quarters.
Everything is the same as when Dunk last saw it. Nothing is the same as when Dunk last saw it. There are the carpets and the antlers and the candles just where they had been before. There is Lyonel’s armor, dented and battered atop its wooden skeleton, the antlers snapped clean off the helm and the greaves warped in a way that churns the stomach to look at too long. There the sideboard, empty of wine. There the featherbed, stripped of sheets. There, Lyonel, spread across it like a half-skinned hart, still as a carcass, all blood and hair and naked skin. He does not so much as twitch at Dunk’s appearance.
There are two maesters hovering over the featherbed. One has a bundle of burning herbs and a slim glass vial whose contents he tips into Lyonel’s slack mouth. The other is bent over Lyonel’s leg, screwing open a wood-and-metal brace to cut through the bandages beneath and sluice water over the wound.
Lyonel accepts it as though it is routine to him, swallowing the draught he’s given and shutting his eyes. He’s naked under his bandages. The right side of his body is painted black and red from knee to breast. Strips of silk knotted around his hand and thigh and shoulder are already flushing pink. His left hand is blanched at the knuckles, fingers clenching and slackening and clenching around a bundled cloth. Worst of all is the leg: even set and splinted and stitched back into something recognizable as a leg, Dunk can plainly see how violently it was broken, where exactly the jagged edges of bone sliced through muscle and skin to leave that angry, swollen line. The edges are rough as saw-cuts along the midline of his shin and neater where they curve up to knee and down to ankle. The maesters must have sheared away his fur to better tend his injuries, for the whole length of the wound is raised bare skin, pink and puffed like a summer peach.
High on Lyonel’s thigh below the blackness of fresh bruises is a yellowed, faded imprint of Dunk’s own hand.
One of the maesters, the older one with the herbs, looks up. “Ser Hedge? You are awake! And walking, I see.”
The young one grunts. “Send the aurochs back to pasture, Sowyer. I am trying to focus.”
Dunk lets himself be herded back to his sickbed. The old maester checks under his bandages and says worrying things about his healing, but Dunk scarcely hears him. The wounds will fade or they will kill him. Little to be done about that now but wait.
Instead he asks about Lyonel.
“Oh, he will live, of that there is no doubt,” Maester Sowyer tells him. “With some new scars, to be certain, but they will not be his first scars or his worst. It is a cruel paradox of knighthood. He would not be so poorly off had he not kept standing on the leg so long after. He would not be the Laughing Storm had he yielded.”
Dunk is all but certain that the fist-sized divots in Lyonel’s armor would match the head of Maekar’s mace. He says nothing.
The old maester smiles a little sadly. “I have tended my lord’s hurts since he was a little boy scraping his knees climbing the trees in the castle godswood. He is taller than he was then, but no less willing to throw himself headfirst into danger. He will curse me and the gods and the princes. He will curse you, ser, for giving him the chance. In time, he will heal, and his anger will be gone long before then. Baratheons are a mercurial lot, you know. The only creatures I have known to be more stubborn than the men of my lord’s blood are the women.”
“I…see. Beg pardon, maester, but I don’t understand.”
“Hm? Understand what?”
“Why are you telling me this?” Maester Sowyer is silent for so long that Dunk begins to wonder if the man heard him. “Maester?”
At last, the old man says, “It is no matter, ser. I thought… No, no matter. You will take your leave, then?”
In the name of the Crone, Lyonel had intoned as he touched his sword to Raymun’s shoulder, I charge you to let wisdom guide your strength.
“I ought to be back to my horses,” Dunk says. Even now he can feel exhaustion dragging at him, urging him back to the comfortable bed with the flagon of dreamwine within reach. If I take it, I will open my eyes still under a Baratheon shelter, and Lyonel will have woken. “See they haven’t been stolen, or hurt, or lost to the hedges.”
“Of course,” the maester murmurs. He makes no attempt to stop Dunk leaving.
The next sunrise washes warm and golden over Dunk’s face. It is an effort to force his eyes open.
“Ser Arlan?” he croaks without thinking. His throat feels coated with sawdust. His mouth tastes vile, a bitter tang clinging to the inside of his teeth. Ser Arlan’s buried under a tree, he recalls distantly. A tree far from here. You’re not the squire no more. “Egg,” he calls, “if you’ve run off again, boy, I’ll hunt you down. Won’t need dogs. You’re too small to get far.”
The silence yawns long before he remembers. Egg’s tucked up in the castle with all his royal kin, Ser Arlan is sleeping in the earth, and you’re all on your lonesome, Dunk.
It’s a beautiful morning for a funeral. Or a burning, or whatever it is that Targaryens do. He thinks he remembers Maester Yormwell saying something about that: a raven off to the king. His answer will have winged its way back to Ashford by now, and there will be a burning. Dunk ought to show his face and make his apologies to one more prince before he can be done with princes and lords and men of that ilk for good.
The roots of his elm press gnarled against his back. It’s monstrous uncomfortable, not quite a featherbed, but the smell of good earth and green growing things fills Dunk’s nose.
“You,” comes a hoarse shout up the hill, “are some thoughtless cunt, you know that? Mother’s blessed teats, that hurts, oh—”
“You crossed half Ashford Meadow like that?” Dunk rasps as Lyonel limps into sight. He looks like he had a horse fall on him. His face is nicked and crusted in red, the bridge of his nose blue and swollen, eyes ringed all in black like a badger’s. His earring swings wildly as he hobbles up to the elm and eases himself down next to Dunk, close enough to touch.
“Cunt, cunt, fucking – well, don’t you offer to help, you look worse than I do. Cunt, it’s fine, I’m fine. My maesters are terrible. I’ll live.”
His right leg is held rigid from thigh to foot in a splint that looks more like a bear trap, steel braces and leather-padded wooden cross-braces atop fresh bandages. He levers himself to the ground with the help of his crutch. A strange surge of fondness swoops in Dunk’s belly when he sees that its handle is also an antler.
“It’s just a little limp,” Lyonel says when he catches Dunk looking. “No worse than the soreness a maiden might have after her wedding night. It wouldn’t bother me so if I hadn’t woken to find my hedge knight vanished to the wind, like a maiden after her wedding night.”
“Lyonel,” Dunk says, not sure what he can say but the man’s name.
He pulls a flask off his belt and shoves it into Dunk’s face. “You didn’t take any with you. Drink. You need it. You look like death.”
“I’ve had enough of the poppy.”
“We’ve all had enough of the bloody poppy. This is Myrish firewine, and the last thing it will do is make you tired.”
It burns going down like it’s boiling. Dunk nearly spits a mouthful into his lap, but he forces himself to swallow it with watering eyes and sheer will.
“Don’t like the taste?” Lyonel asks innocently, and cackles at the look on Dunk’s face. “Green fucking boy. You drink like you’ve not yet been blooded. Give it here, lamb, you can have another sip after.”
Dunk surrenders the wineskin gladly and doesn’t take it back when it’s offered again.
“Pleasant little spot you’ve found for yourself here,” the knight says after another two slugs of firewine have mellowed him. “Long fucking walk, but—” He waves his hand all around, at the trees and the brook and the sky, shades of green and blue so pure and clear that Dunk can still see them when he closes his eyes. “—a sight to stir the heart, to be sure. You sleep under this tree? You do know they leak?”
“At night you can see the stars,” Dunk says quietly. “You don’t get that in a lit pavilion.”
Lyonel laughs. “No, you don’t. It’s been…oh, years, but I’ve slept in a few hedges myself, you know.”
Dunk hadn’t.
“Mm. And in coils of rope belowdecks with ship’s cats and their fleas, back when I was younger than you and could do such things without my back complaining about it for days afterwards. Slept on hillsides, in ditches, caves. Fields…battlefields, sometimes. Armored and all amidst the mud and shit and bodies.” He tips his head against Dunk’s shoulder. “During the rebellion we kept the corpses in the tents, to protect them from scavengers. I was five-and-twenty during Redgrass. Too old, I thought, to be sharing a cot with my younger brother even if he could snore no longer, so I slept on a hillock in the grass, next to to some dead warhorse in red and black barding. After long enough you stopped seeing the difference between the crown and the rebels. A dragon was a dragon, black or red, and the only dragons that wouldn’t kill you or get you killed were the ones that were dead already. Used to wake to find grubby-fingered orphans pawing at my sword belt. They were always near as shocked to learn that I still lived as I was.”
There had been times when Dunk and Rafe would find a corpse, start to strip it, and discover shortly that the corpse was not a corpse quite yet. Dunk never had the stomach to kill those men even though it would have been a kindness. She used to mock me for that. She used to ask me if I thought I was a knight.
“Have you ever been inside a castle?” Lyonel says suddenly. “A proper fortress, not a shanty made of children’s blocks like this one.”
Dunk breathes in the smell of him, bitter from poultices, and makes no answer.
“They’re cold.” Lyonel’s shoulder is warm through the fabric of his cloak. “Dull and haunted and cold. The stones leech all the heat away. In winter, servants keep fires roaring in every hearth in every chamber from the Round Hall to the rookery. The walls drink that warmth like it was never there and leave you shivering in front of the flames in a great stone cell with ceilings so tall they’re lost to gloom. I would say that only the gods know how the unlucky cunts north of the Neck don’t freeze to death at the first snows, but the gods have no hold there. Mayhaps it’s the gods that make it so cold in Storm’s End. Bitter still that Durran dared to shut them out as he did the sea and the wind.” He snorts. “Hell if I know. Hell if such things are for the likes of us to know.”
Dunk croaks, “The likes of us?”
“Mere mortals.”
Somewhere above Dunk’s head, a songbird trills.
Lyonel says, “You’ll see it for yourself. They call Tarth the Sapphire Isle. At the highest point of the island in the eastern mountains there’s an old castle from the earliest days when the Andals came to Westeros. Morne, it’s named, for magic swords and knights of legend. It’s in ruins now, but if you climb as far as the stones will allow you can see the whole of Tarth beneath you, the mountains and the falls and the meadows and the vales…and the sea in every direction, almost as blue as your eyes on a clear sunny day, and above at night more stars than you would believe the sky can hold. No leaky trees, either, I’m sad to say.”
“Lyonel…”
“And the rainwood in autumn, oh, it’s glorious. A sea in itself, swell after swell of reds and golds like the forest is caught in flame. We can go hunting and hawking and – make merry all across the stormlands. I’ll sharpen that raw iron of yours so you don’t make such a grand fool of yourself in the next tourney.”
“Lyonel—”
“And,” he continues as if Dunk had never spoken, “we’ll go riding into the storms, down the white cliffs to the point where the sea rises up like living vengeance and the rains lash you bloody.” His speaks in the low smooth cadence of a prayer. “I’ll strip you to skin and have you there, just the pair of us and the gods to bear witness. I’ll have you in the godswood where the heart tree can see us. I’ll have you over the battlements on the first light of dawn. And afterwards I’ll feed you up until you’re eight foot instead of seven, and you’ll have some proper-fitting armor and the best horse my man can find for you. Big lad, you’ll need a big horse to ride, faster than your dear old Thunder and with more endurance to carry you in plate. I’ve a mare with some sand steed blood…”
It’s a fine offer. More than a fine offer, truly. A sennight past Dunk would never have believed it; a roof and a hearth and a liege to swear his sword to. A lord’s favor. Lyonel’s favor, no less, and the free and willing offer of his time and his touch, the feather-light sweep of his bandaged hand against Dunk’s thigh.
Dunk swallows. His throat is thick with bile or firewine or old sour blood. “Lyonel,” he says. Dark eyes snap to him, painted darker with the bruising, and breathing feels harder than it ever has. “I…”
The words die behind his teeth.
Lyonel watches him, face solemn. He looks all a lord when he does that. “I would dub you.”
Pain flares in Dunk’s gut as he jerks up. Lyonel pats him on the thigh, where Aerion’s sword sliced deep into muscle, and the pain of that keeps him down and gasping as Lyonel hauls himself up and drags himself over to the bushes.
“More to being a knight than sword and shield,” he says. When he pisses, Dunk sees blood in his water. “Your old man, he taught you that, didn’t he?”
The pain in his stomach is so fierce that for a moment he wonders wildly whether a second lance has struck him.
“Never met a knight – ah, never met a man at all who never told a lie.” The stream of blood chokes off, and Lyonel groans, shifting more of his weight onto his crutch. “Most of them wouldn’t have blinked wrong at that little white rat if it had been their own mother’s fingers he was breaking. Too afraid of dragons.”
Somehow Dunk manages to find his voice. “They’re not all rotten. Baelor fought for me.”
“Fuck that, and fuck Baelor,” Lyonel snaps, whipping around. “Beesbury and Hardyng, they fought for you. That fucking apple boy fought for you. I fought for you, and not against men sworn to do me no harm.” He sweeps his crutch in a vicious arc. “Let me tell you something, Ser Duncan. A little pearl of chivalric wisdom, one knight to another. You weren’t more than a boy when Daemon Blackfyre raised his banners, were you? The days of Aegon’s glory are so much dust and ash now. The dragons gave the Targaryens their throne, and the dragons are dead. King’s Landing is a den of vipers and vultures, each hungrier and more false than the last—”
“He gave his life for me,” Dunk snaps. Anger makes his head throb, though he doesn’t feel the pain. “He was a decent man, prince or no, and a truer knight than me, and it’s my fault he’s dead, gods, so could you speak of him with respect?”
The river fills the quiet with its babbling. All the fury leaves Dunk in a breath, and where it seethed is a nothing so vast it aches. Lyonel is breathing hard. Dunk can’t look at him any longer. He tips his head back and stares at the green ceiling of his elm.
“I can’t be your man, Lyonel. I can’t be no man’s man. Death follows me wherever I go.” I dreamed of you, another princeling had said. A dragon was dying, its wings shadowing the sun, though you were alive. “I can’t…” Again the words fail to come. A proper noble knight would know the courtesies to beg him off, wipe that look off his face like Dunk had struck him, but Dunk is as far from a proper noble knight as Aerion Brightflame from the Black Dread.
There’s the noise of labored footsteps. A tall shadow falls across Dunk’s lap. He stares intently at the leaves, pressing their shape into his memory, the way they shift and whisper on the wind. If you don’t look, you won’t see him come to hate you. If you don’t look…
Something gleams as Lyonel tosses it at him.
“Caravan departs after the roast,” he says, sounding tired more than angry. “Come with me to Storm’s End and I’ll love you better than any other. Or don’t, and I’ll curse you with my final breath.” A pause. Dunk traces the leaf-veins, delicate and green. “Consider it, at least. For my pride if nothing else. A man’s heart is a fickle thing, Duncan, and it grows fragile with age.”
Dunk shuts his eye and listens to the sound of Lyonel hobbling off, cursing under his breath. The knight’s voice blurs into memory. He’s cursing as he drinks, cursing in the rope game, cursing between his gasps as he rolls his body against Dunk’s. His mouth is bloodied, kiss-swollen, eyes first golden in the candle flames and then black as pitch, so dark they drink up all light. His laughter and his anger and the slow, rough drag of his scarred and calloused fingers over Dunk’s bare skin.
There had been a light that came into his face before the trial in that moment where he knew, finally, what Dunk had been so feared to tell him. There had been a weight that settled on him, leaden and lordly, when he drew his longsword from his sheath and touched it to Raymun’s shoulders.
In the name of the Warrior, I charge you to be brave.
In the name of the Father, I charge you to be just.
In the name of the Mother, I charge you to defend the young and the innocent.
In the name of the Maiden, I charge you to protect all women.
In the name of the Smith, I charge you to aid your fellow man.
In the name of the Crone, I charge you to let wisdom guide your strength.
In the name of the Stranger, I charge you to hold to these vows unto your death.
A gentle spring breeze kisses Dunk’s swollen face. Next to the splintered shield, Ser Arlan’s penny winks copper at him from the hilt of the old man’s sword. He reaches to pluck up the trinket Lyonel threw at him. A golden earring shines on the dirty linen wrapped around his palm.