Chapter Text
In the dream he’s alone until he’s not.
A thumb grazes Dunk’s pulse, equally inviting and encroaching, as if to assuage his unease. Lithe fingers encircle his wrist, and the burn, the scald of that contact radiates inside and out, settling somewhere in his chest so Dunk can scarcely breathe. There’s breath enough against his neck though, an airy laugh, too easy, too familiar, but the waver betrays the other man’s own nerves. A murmur of something that Dunk can’t hear above the roaring of blood in his ears, the frantic thump thump thump that’s less a heartbeat and more the footfalls of a warhorse. And the other man is whispering so closely that Dunk can feel the trace of his lips against his earlobe, and he thinks I could be executed for this, I won’t survive this.
But whatever the other man says is persuasive, or more likely the press of his hips is persuasive as Dunk is still uncertain as to what has been said; for how could he possibly listen when what little space between them has been closed? A leg nudges between Dunk’s and the world is alight with fire as still-purring lips flutter against his own, and Dunk weaves his fingers through honey-gold curls.
And in the dream it’s fluid and seamless; there’s no causality or order of events, just a blurred tangle of limbs and grasping hands, a whisper of yes and more from noble lips, an arch of a back, rocking hips to a chorus of please please please. And Dunk is lost in eyes the colour of dew, steeped in morning fog, and they see through him to every vulnerable part he’s cloaked beneath knightly honour and chivalric foolery.
And if he wakes breathless, heat and embarrassment pooling in his belly, he can creep away from whatever ramshackle campsite he and Egg built the previous evenfall, bathe in the nearby stream by the moonlight and cool his affections while uttering a silent apology to whatever god could possibly have him.
*
The Boneway stretches ahead of them, twisting precariously about the mountainside.
“Have you never seen Summerhall before, ser?” Egg asks, astride Chestnut.
“Never had the honour,” he replies.
“The stables are very fine. The horses will be satisfied.”
Dunk nods, patting Thunder. “They’ve earned the rest after this terrain, it’s worse even than when I travelled through the Mountains of the Moon, though we didn’t hap to traverse too deep –”
Egg continues unflaggingly, “My lord father will be pleased we’re attending the festivities for Daella’s name day. When we arrive at Wyl I’ll send a raven home —”
“Hm,” Dunk grunts.
“— and tell them to have rooms prepared, and perhaps they will enlist the theatre troupe in Blackhaven for the revels if they haven’t already travelled afar—”
“Hm,” again.
“— for sometimes the troupe journeys north to King’s Landing for a spell and — ”
“Hm,” again.
Egg considers him, “Does something trouble you, ser?”
Dunk frowns, “I don’t fancy your family will welcome me, is all,” a pause, then, “considering Ashford.”
The truth is that his hesitation is in part due to the circumstances of their exit from the tourney at Ashford Meadow, yes, but it’s an incomplete explanation, wanting for context. The full reason for his misgivings rings low and quiet but all-bearing; that final conversation with Daeron beneath the elm moments before his departure, the feel of the prince’s slim fingers around his wrist and how the touch of him was like an oven, like a forge, something akin to how dragonfire must have seared its victims, Dunk imagines. Daeron’s eyes burnished as if he was elsewhere, and his voice, soft as a bed of clover, I can see your dreams, too.
Dunk fears he cannot withstand another meeting.
“As I’ve said, father’s been persuaded to the idea of my squiring for you. Daeron’s last letter —” Egg insists.
Dunk grunts again, disregarding the immediate flare in his chest at that cursed name.
Seven hells. Why did I consent to this damnable detour?
“I treasure visiting with Daella and Rhae.”
Well, truly, that’s why.
They had been in Dorne over twelve moons as it was, and the lad had never been so long from home and kin. When Daeron’s raven somehow found them in Planky Town, Egg had waved it around like a green boy with a tourney prize and Dunk relented.
“It’s a pity Aemon is at the Citadel, you’d like him.”
“Hm.”
“And Rhae will want to hear about the Braavosi ship and those pirates.”
“Hm.”
“And Daeron —”
“Enough, Egg,” he raises his voice louder than intended. Quieter now, “I’ve agreed, haven’t I?”
Egg squints at him, whether due to the midday sun overhead or in contemplation, Dunk’s unsure. Then, “What was that about the Mountains of the Moon?”
“It was an age ago.”
*
When Dunk was seventeen, Ser Arlan came into the service of Lord Redfort of the Vale. Several of the warrior clans of the mountains had united under a strong chief called Calor, and as the lord’s farming villages became increasingly threatened, as more groups of travellers were robbed on their journeys south and poorly escorted young lordlings were hanged from the bedrock cliffs that overlook the high road, the lord assembled a retinue that ultimately recruited Ser Arlan.
Dunk trailed the company with the other squires, tending to the horses on the craggy ground, sleeping under golden-leafed aspens, and keeping watch for the shadowcats that the squires of the Vale insisted could disembowel a man with only a single paw, all the while shuddering against the unseasonably cold wind that howled between the jutting precipices.
And if his eyes found they wandered again to the young Lord Elesham, Dunk dismissed it. The road was endless and barren, bouldered rock after bouldered rock, and there was very little else to do but stare at the back of Lord Alden Elesham as he rode ahead of Dunk, his locks midnight black against the delicate curve of his pale neck. Delicate. He did appear so, slight and graceful as if perpetually mid-dance at some courtier’s ball, but there was nothing delicate about how the young squire fought when the two sparred in the evenings upon camp. Alden was much smaller than Dunk although they were the same age, smaller than all of the other boy squires who had formed a sort of pack during the expedition, but he was expertly trained by his lord knight, fast and daring in his attacks, and he disarmed Dunk with few cuts and thrusts.
“Have heart, Dunk, you’re bound to best me in the course of time.” Eyes as dark as his hair glinted in the light of the company’s campfires, a smile that Dunk couldn’t decipher played upon his lordly lips, and Dunk felt flushed even in the chill.
Under the cover of the aspens that night Dunk slept wrapped in his travelling cloak. The cool night air of the Vale enveloped him, seeping beneath the sewn patches of his worn attire, and somewhere in his dream there was an agile body half atop him, their legs intertwined. Dunk wanted nothing more than to huddle close to him, for comfort in the cold that managed to invade even his dream, aye, but for more too, desires Dunk could scarcely find the right words for. A nimble hand, calloused from swordplay, traced beneath the hem of Dunk’s tunic, and a murmur of can you best me now? from a voice he’d only known for a few days but recognized immediately.
The morrow dawned as cold as the night before it but Dunk was hot all over, guilt painted across his face in scarlet ink.
He rode forward with Ser Arlan forthwith and left the idle musings of nighttime behind him with Lord Elesham.
*
Egg sends a raven to Summerhall, and while they sup under a sandbeggar on the coast of the Sea of Dorne, Dunk does his best not to think of who is on the receiving side of that raven.
“You bid them notice of our attendance?” he asks.
Egg nods, picking apart an orange, a decided perk of their time in the south. “Ser,” the lad begins, “I am content to write the letters as needed, but if you wished it, Daeron could teach you to read when we sojourn. He taught me.”
Seven save me, must this continue?
“The little princelings wanted for a maester in their great castle?” Dunk poses.
“No,” Egg smirks, “but he was slow and old and insisted we read only Septon Barth or Eustace, or some other dull history of the great houses.” Dunk tears another orange open with rather more force than necessary. “When we’d visit King’s Landing, Daeron would sneak me up to the White Sword Tower where the White Book is kept and read to me the heroic deeds of past white cloaks. We could while away hours there.”
Dunk swallows a segment of his orange and refuses to imagine Daeron’s dexterous fingers leafing through fragile pages.
“The library at Summerhall is wanting for amusement, Daeron always said. It’s dry, chiefly histories and philosophies, but it has Fire Upon the Grass, one of Daeron’s favourites; it’s much better than the sentimental Dornish poetry he pored over. And it never took much persuasion to bid him read me the interesting bits of the Jade Compendium.”
“Hm.”
“It’s all legends from the east. There’s demons that haunt the Smoking Sea and men with eagle’s wings and magical swords and —”
“Hm.”
“And Daeron would do the voices if I asked nicely enough. He’d be the giant when we’d read The Life of the Triarch of Belicho, but I think you’d prefer —”
Dunk sinks back against the sandbeggar, eyes closed.
“Ten Thousand Ships, it’s an adventure tale of Nymeria of Dorne. In the letter I should have told Daeron to collect it from the shelves, you and he could —”
The idea of it, of being bent over some ancient tome with Daeron next to him, forearms touching, the brush of a hand as a page is turned, no.
He clears his throat, “I’ve managed this long without the words of maesters, I wager I can continue on,” Dunk says.
Egg silences himself, but then adds, “It will be nice to have a bed.”
“Hot pot and a cot, the old man used to say,” Dunk adds.
*
Ser Arlan would oft bid that they stop at an inn off the roseroad. They were a two day’s ride out of Oldtown with plans to sleep rough until they near Highgarden, but the old man was fond of the place and so they detoured off the path. The Fern and Feather Inn; tavern below, rooms above, hearth ever-lit, stews at the ready. They’d thrice stayed by Dunk’s count; any occasion that drove them south in the Reach was occasion enough for Sir Arlan to insist that a hot pot and cot were warranted.
It was by virtue of the innkeeper, of course, not the food, though it was hearty, nor the bed, though it was warm. On river banks or under oaks, Ser Arlan wove stories of this battle or that escapade, a tourney or romance, while Dunk sewed patches through ripped tunics, but never was the tale of Estrella of the Fern and Feather told. Aged like the old man but quite certainly a great beauty some decades before, she’d owned the hall since her widowhood, Dunk believed. Whatever they were to one another, however long they had carried on, remained unknown as Dunk sat at a quiet table by himself, Ser Arlan long departed upstairs followed moments later by the telling tap tap tap of heels along the same staircase.
Dunk ate his stew in solitude and finished his ale, then contemplated retiring to the stables for evenfall, allowing Ser Arlan privacy for his would-be pilgrimage, but the doorway out to the stables was presently occupied by a young man conversing with one of the tavern girls. He nodded to her, she said something in return, and then he hauled an empty wine barrel out the door before returning for another. Tall and broad — not next to Dunk to be sure, but a trifling few were — a village labourer of some sort, with sun-touched skin and a muss of brown hair. The man returned empty-handed, said something that made the tavern girl laugh, then collected a coin, and that should have been it, nothing more, but he glanced up briefly, spying Dunk across the room. His smile was immediate; it was cocksure and catching, reaching his eyes in the manner that the bards described in the songs that Dunk sometimes entertained between jousts at a tourney. It was resplendent, another bard’s word, and Dunk had had little cause to think that word before now, but it was the only one he could conjure in the light of this stranger’s aspect. He returned the gesture, the smile, for how could he not?
The tilt of the man’s head was so imperceptible that Dunk would have missed it had his gaze not been so completely fixed. Subtle, suggestive, and wholly for Dunk, as if to say come with me?
Dare he?
Dunk was not wholly unfledged. He knew what this signaled, could uncover it in the crook of the stranger’s expression, and it was like some sort of farseeing magic that both men could recognize this want in one another without certitude or reason, Dunk judged.
He dared not, and turned his attention to his empty cup.
But that night in the stable hay, he dreamed, and it was the same sort of dream that Dunk had shamefully come to anticipate. Work-toughened ghostly hands, a phantom mouth against his own, a flick of a tongue, and the curve of an inviting smile.
He woke winded as if he’d been training with the longsword, gulping like he’d been pinned down by someone in full armour. The ache between his legs was inescapable, precarious, but he wouldn’t see to it. Dunk knew that ill thoughts provoke ill deeds, and that was not his course.
*
“We’re a day’s ride out,” Dunk tells Egg, and while Egg fails to restrain himself from bouncing up and down on Chestnut like an excited hare, Dunk pushes away the sensation that he’s constructing his own funeral pyre.
*
He’s not simple; he may not be a poet or maester, his mouth may not possess the words, but his eyes perceive as well as any other.
Men of honour do not lie with other men, of this Dunk is confident. He remembers the brothel boys in Flea Bottom skirting around the alleyways in the early hours of the morn, seeking a few moments of quietude before the business of evenfall resumed. They were scorned, derided by even the drunks at the gambling dens, by the lowly residents of Gin Alley at the bottommost part of the hill where the runoff was thick and the gutters ever-overflowing, and it was evident to Dunk, even as a child, that they must have been violating nature, upending the established order of things that all of Westeros adhered to, smallfolk in Flea Bottom and royalty in the Red Keep alike.
So too afterwards, with Ser Arlan. Chivalry. Knightly honour. The maids in the songs and poems. The highborn ladies the other squires aspired to. Ser Arlan’s many paramours. The path of true knighthood was as well-marked as the Kingsroad, and Dunk would follow it without doubt. Train with Ser Arlan, serve him well, raise to the dignity of knighthood through merit and valour, serve a great lord someday, earn respect by doing one’s duty.
That duty did not allow for dalliances with labourers, knights, lesser lordings, and certainly not princes.
Not princes with loose locks of sunlit hair craving to be stroked, tucked behind an elegant ear. Not princes with bewitching half-smiles, lips luxuriating in furtive confidences. Not princes with preternatural eyes, diluted like a drop of pigment in a cup of water.
Seven hells.
A quiet, cloudless night only a few turns of the moon since Ser Arlan had first taken him in, and they camped with a small company of other knights travelling to the tourney at Riverrun. It was a band of hedge knights and some landed knights, alongside their squires, and tents were pitched in a clearing some ways off the road, bonfires lit and weasels hunted to supplement the rations. And after the horses were rubbed down and the chores finished, Dunk sat with another youth, a squire to a landed knight out of Seagard called Osric. At the edge of their own campfire, they discussed the upcoming tourney, and suddenly Dunk was very mindful of his fingers resting on the log beside him mere inches away from Osric’s hands. Who grazed whose hand first? Dunk couldn’t say, but he jerked back as if burned and retreated to the larger bonfire with Ser Arlan.
Like Dunk, the old man had few words but saw all, and those incisive eyes were sad when Dunk slumped down next to him. It was such a look of pity that Dunk wanted to hide his face, slink away into the night by himself, dig a hole in the mud like some accursed lizard-lion and never reemerge.
“You’re a good lad,” the old man had said unprompted, lips downturned with unsaid words that Dunk could only guess the meaning of.
*
“We’ll have cause to dismount before supper,” he says to Egg. They’ve made better time than he was anticipating. Egg is going on about something but Dunk can’t hear it for the disquiet, the resonance in his chest that feels like the howling of the wind in a great storm, thrashing dragon wings stirring a cacophony.
“ – don’t fill up on the apple cakes. They’re fine enough but it’s the honey cakes and the custard tarts and the jellies that are worth waiting for, and don’t be persuaded by the poached pears — ”
“I may skip supper altogether,” Dunk manages.
Egg is sullen, “Are they so vexing for only a few nights’ time?” he asks. “It’s not as if Aerion is present, he’s not even on the continent.”
I’d rather sup with Aerion. Seven save me, they sent the wrong of Egg’s brothers across the Narrow Sea.
“Don’t take offence, lad, I’m just tired. I plan to retire before moonrise.”
*
Dunk found him patting Thunder under the elm on the outskirts of Ashford. “He’s quite the warhorse,” Daeron had said without looking up at Dunk approaching.
“Didn’t take you for an equestrian,” Dunk snapped.
The Targaryen smiled. “Oh I like horses just fine. It’s the bit where you ride them toward one another brandishing pointy sticks that I don’t care for.”
“In truth, I’m not certain I care for it any longer,” Dunk admitted.
Daeron turned to him and gestured widely to the tourney ground beyond the river, that damnable site. “Indeed,” he agreed.
“Why have you come?” Dunk asked. “I spoke with Prince Maekar about Egg –”
“I’m aware.”
“Has the prince shifted ground? He seemed steadfast when we spoke.”
Daeron shrugged. “Father holds his tongue. And frowns. And paces. A fair amount of frowning and pacing and tongue holding,” he said. “The caravan is preparing to depart. We’ll make for Summerhall posthaste.”
“Then why have you come?” Dunk asked again.
A sigh and Daeron momentarily averted his eyes. “Assuming father holds firm, I expect I shan’t see you once more.” He met Dunk’s eyes again. “Farewell, I suppose. And I rather owe you another apology.” He cocked his head to the side, did a vague courtesying motion with his arms but his voice jested not. “I’m sorry.” Daeron straightened up, patted Thunder again, and approached Dunk in earnest. “If I’d come to the tourney instead of abandoning what little honour I possess at that inn, perhaps I may have averted these offenses entirely. All of it.” Dunk watched Daeron watching him, saw his eyes roaming over the bruises and abrasions, his grossly swollen eye. “It makes me glad to see you didn’t lose your eye, Ser Duncan. Or your life.”
Dunk gestured at Daeron’s stitched cheek. “One gallant charge and then you hit the mud, as it were?”
“Then my horse stepped on me,” he said with a half smile, and Dunk exhaled to hide a laugh. “No, it’s amusing,” Daeron affirmed.
They stood in silence for a moment. If this visit was solely in the interest of an apology, Daeron appeared unfinished, biting his lip and staring at the ground before looking back up at Dunk, and in that moment Dunk truly observed his eyes for the first time since their meeting. What he’d taken as a drunken film before, the clouded look that he can recall from the wretches in Gin Alley and occasionally from the old man himself after he’d bethought of his nephew over too many tankards, now seemed to be the gaze of a man elsewhere, departed, eyes looking beyond to something unseen, or perhaps only seen by him, eyes that had seen too much.
Dunk felt a pang of something otherworldly, ancient and uncanny that he didn’t have the words for, and he almost wanted to reach out and run his thumb over the other man’s eyelid and —
No.
These are roads unworthy of travel.
Least of all with Prince Daeron Targaryen.
And as if he could sense Dunk’s musings, Daeron said, “The dreams have been worse of late. The tourney had ill omens, but it seems that in venturing to avoid them, I evoked them outright.”
“M’lord, I mean, my prince, uhhh your grace —” Dunk stumbled.
“You’re free to call me Daeron.”
“D —” It was too discourteous somehow, even for this man who admittedly left his honour at an inn down the road, too intimate. “My prince,” he settled on, “I grant you your apology, and I’m sorry for your uncle —”
“Ser Duncan,” he interjected, and Daeron stepped once again towards him, and he was marginally too close now, a breath away from too private a connection for two men fighting on opposing sides of combat so lately, even with apologies between them. His voice was cloaked, a secret meant only for Dunk, and his eyes flickered something unreadable. “I can see your dreams, too,” he near whispered.
Dunk said nothing but felt a rush of ice in his veins.
“On occasion I can sense the dreams of others, not often. I think some people’s reveries float to the surface like bubbles in a hot bath, or maybe,” he bobbed his head from side to side, searching for the words. “Or maybe like dandelions in a field in spring, and if I so much as walk through the field, the seeds just come loose by cause of my boot alone, and there’s no stopping them, they fly freely.” Daeron looked a world away again, and if Dunk hadn’t been so terrified of what this harkened, he may have reached out to Daeron and his lost eyes.
Another breath and then, “After you passed out at the tourney and were brought back to the Baratheon pavilion, I wandered through in search of some wine. Our cache was running dry and Lyonel is a reliable lush.” Dunk couldn’t meet Daeron’s eyes, afraid of what would ensue. “It rather took me down, struck me harder than that blasted lance, when I passed by you sleeping. It was like your —” he chased the right words again, then finally, “undersense, your whole, your being was screaming in loneliness, and I could feel all of it.”
“I don’t rightly know what —”
But Daeron continued unabated, voice gentle as a breeze through grass. “You’re an odd one, Ser Duncan. Sure enough to engage an entire dynasty over some puppet girl, sure enough to call into question the honour of your noble betters, sure enough to ask for a trial by combat with several princes of the realm and their Kingsguard. But still cowardly —”
“I’m no coward.” Dunk clenched his fists to the sides of his tunic, palms suddenly damp.
Daeron smiled sympathetically, a jape already on his lips before the words followed. “I fear we’re both cowards. I cower in inns to avoid being stuck by pointy sticks at jousts, and you cower from pretty men to avoid being stuck by their pointy sti —”
Something bitter and frigid overtook him and it was as if Alester had the knife to Rafe’s throat, as if Aerion was breaking Tanselle’s fingers; the injustice of these superior sots and how they tormented the smallfolk beneath them, and here was another of them, bent now on his ruination. “Hold your tongue,” Dunk raged, unsheathing his knife from his pocket while pushing Daeron back against the elm tree, hard. His left forearm pinned Daeron’s neck to the trunk while his right hand pressed the knife to his belly, scrapping across dragon-emblazoned gold buttons worth more than Dunk had handled in the last year.
How? How could he know? How could he see?
The end of his knighthood, tenuous as it may be, the death of his honour and dignity certainly. Daeron Targaryen marked the wreckage of the little respect he had eked out for himself.
The prince didn't struggle. “If it’s not abundantly clear,” Daeron gasped, the same small smile still playing at the corner of his wicked mouth despite Dunk’s hold and the blade beginning to rip the seams of his doublet, “I also enjoy being stuck by pointy sticks, not the jousting kind obviously.” Dunk’s hold faltered for a moment but he kept Daeron locked to the tree, pressing with greater force against his princely fucking neck. What is his intent? What sort of trickery is this?
Daeron’s expression stiffened at the increased pressure on his throat, and he looked so intently at Dunk that Dunk wished he could blind the man so as to not feel the invasion of those haunted, glassy eyes. “This is no accusation, Ser Duncan,” he wheezed.
“Then what is it?”
“An intervention, perhaps? Commiseration?” Daeron offered, rasping. “No one should feel the sort of shame that you beacon. It’s repugnant. I had to drown myself in a bottle to get the feel of it off me, didn’t want it to catch.”
And Dunk thought that a smarter man than he would have killed him there regardless of his pretty words, rammed him through with the steel of his knife and dropped him in the river, then absconded away with at least the appearance of honour intact. Let this secret die with Daeron.
But he was stupid and dull and foolish and thick and dense and doltish and and and —
Dunk released him with a shove, shaking, and Daeron slumped against the elm, breathless, adjusting the collar of his travelling cloak and pushing back the hair that clung to his forehead as he doubled over coughing.
“I’m sure that’s the only reason you needed a bottle,” Dunk said, hearing the unsteadiness of his own voice as if from a great distance away, as if he was the one who had been presently throttled. His hands would not cease shaking, and he tossed the knife aside.
Daeron smoothed his doublet, still hunting for air in stilted wheezes. He tilted his head to the side, too casual for a man choking for breath after being strangled against a tree by some lowly hedge knight with nothing to lose. “Allow me some nuance,” he managed between heaves. “I have many reasons to drink,” and looking into Daeron’s white-washed eyes, Dunk didn’t question it.
It was a slow movement, deliberate and cautious, like a rider soothing a spooked and feral horse, and Daeron reached out and took Dunk by one of his shaking hands, his thumb pressing against a racing pulse, elegant fingers wreathing his wrist. And at first it burned like Daeron was made of fire, wildfire, dragonfire, and it should blister and swell and smoke and char, he should be incinerated, cremated alive, but no, Daeron’s touch was a warm blanket on a chilled night, a hearth to bask beside, and Dunk hadn’t realized how cold he’d been until that moment, and if he didn’t pull away then, didn’t end this — whatever this was — he feared he’d grow accustomed to the warmth and then be left to freeze without it when the fire was inevitably doused.
“You’re not alone, ser,” Daeron breathed.
Dunk retracted his hand; Daeron didn’t pursue.
Instead, “Take care, Ser Duncan,” and he left Dunk under the elm.
*
Dunk and Egg departed Ashford Meadow.
They made south and caught sight of the Red Mountains on the horizon and he told himself not to contemplate Daeron’s eyes seeing straight through him to his most shameful parts. And yet the man hadn’t been repulsed.
They crossed the Prince’s Pass, and he told himself not to contemplate Daeron’s words, somehow pitying, threatening and affectionate in concert together.
They walked the horses along the brick path that led to the Threefold Gate of Sunspear, and he told himself not to contemplate Daeron’s fingers encircling his wrist, and not to wonder what would have come if Dunk had threaded their fingers together instead.
And at evenfall, so many evenfalls, he told himself that tonight there would be no dreams; no solid weight of a body against his, no honeyed curls falling across his shoulder as a fine-featured frustration too fair for his own good pressed into him, face in the crook of his neck. Surely tonight Dunk won’t take that face in his hands, run a finger along the cleft of his chin, down his royal neck, kiss the eyelids sheltering those tortured eyes that Dunk couldn’t unsee, couldn’t forget as much as he entreated.
No appeal of may I? or like this? or please? No lissome thighs resting atop Dunk’s larger ones. No tell-tale sound of skin against skin. No intimacies that Dunk had never experienced anywhere outside of reveries, and his own voice, broken, Daeron, Daeron, Daeron. No formalities, no titles and stations, no pretext.
Not tonight, surely not tonight. There must be reprieve from such a haunting.
Dunk dreamed and he dreamed and he dreamed, and he dreaded the day he’d escort Egg back to Summerhall, home to the only person capable of seeing through Dunk’s illusions.
*
The castle’s domed white spires impress upon the landscape as Dunk turns the final bend of the Red Mountains. The structure looks like something carved from a single block of pale stone; the exterior is all rounded slopes and soft bends, like the builders had gently chiseled rather than cut. The walls are not flat planes but subtly bowed expanses of fitted stone, each block smooth-faced and tightly joined, their faint seams catching threads of gold from the sunset overhead.
Around the base of every dome, a procession of round windows follow the curve of the structure itself, their frames set recessed so that the glass appears to float within carved halos of stone. As the sun dips lower beneath the peaks of the Red Mountains, those windows burn amber and rose from within, as if the sky had been captured and poured into them, and it seems to Dunk that the whole castle is momentarily ablaze against the verdant gardens that surround it.
Egg rides ahead, Dunk keeping Thunder at a relaxed pace past beds of blooming dragon’s breath and evening star. Manicured rose gardens of all colours surround large, swooping trellises of moonbloom and assorted ivy, and well-tended fruit trees dot the path that spirals about the various regions of the garden. Lavender phlox and creeping thyme flourish between the stone pathways underfoot, and Dunk hears the chirp of crickets amidst the first calls of evenfall’s owls.
Dunk had voyaged far afield with Ser Arlan, and had witnessed many of the great castles, if only from a distance, but Summerhall is unparagoned, he wagers.
Forward, off the landscaped path of the garden and under an arcade overgrown with clematis, Egg has dismounted Chestnut and is hopping about, arms waving animatedly in wild gestures as he no doubt relates some escapade. And beside him, looking past the lad and squarely at Dunk, is Daeron.
“Ser Duncan,” he greets, his lips reticent as if uncertain of what would come to pass, unknowable eyes fixed on Dunk in silent assessment, the smallest of frown lines between his brows. Dunk considers the prudence of retreat.
“M’lord,” Dunk says finally, then, “uh, my prince,” he corrects as he dismounts Thunder.
“I once told you you’re free to call me Daeron. That still holds true,” he says.
Dunk can feel the heat spreading up his cheeks, across his nose, betraying what his composure would not. Too intimate a herald, too evocative of the cries of restless dreams where names are sighed as the bards do.
Daeron’s lips curve up into a wayward smile at the sight of the blush, and Dunk feels as if he’s transparent as the still water of a pond at daybreak.
“Egg was recounting your travels along the Boneway. What a perilous path you chose,” Daeron remarks.
“It was important to the lad that he arrive in time for his sister’s festivities.”
“Of course, but you must be weary after the journey.” Daeron’s eyes are only for Dunk. “And Egg tells me you wish to retire forthwith; that’s understandable after such riding.” Dunk swallows, and thinks that this is how a snared hare must feel just before the trap closes firm about its neck. “Egg, why don’t you lead the horses to the stables, and I can escort Ser Duncan to his chambers so he can repose.”
Egg is already taking Thunder’s reins from Dunk’s still hands, and he skips off down the path to a cry of “Til the morrow, ser,” Thunder and Chestnut in tow.
Dunk looks over at the same pair of eyes he’s spent the past twelve moons not thinking of, and he should say something, anything, but he doesn’t know the words, right or wrong, clever or stupid. He’s not even certain what precisely he wants to say to his man, this exhausting and terrifying and beautiful man who’s consumed him from within. But he must say something. The weight of the silence is like a thunderstorm waiting to break, air heavy, clouds gathered, tension on the threshold of a violent eruption.
“Daeron,” he says.
“Duncan.”