Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Dunk woke to darkness and to the taste of blood.

For a long while he did not know where he was. The world returned to him in tatters: cold stone against his cheek, damp as a grave; the sour reek of mold; the slow, hollow drip of water somewhere beyond the reach of the light—what little light there was.

His ribs protested any breath drawn too deep. A dream, he told himself, clinging to it. Only a dream, and on the morrow they will take my hand and foot.

Yet if it were a dream, why did every inch of him ache? Not one place or two, but all of him together. His back throbbed, and his thighs, and his sides. His hands most of all. The knuckles were swollen near twice their proper size, split open and stiff with drying blood. When he tried to flex them, pain lanced up both arms. One of his eyes had closed to a slit, and Dunk had to move his head as if some dull ox to take in the tower cell by degrees.

It is the same one, he realised. The one he had been kept in before, with the window facing east instead of north. If Dunk shut his eyes, he might almost pretend the trial had never come to pass.

But the gods were rarely merciful and the memory would not be shut out. The lances. The shouting. The song of steel finding steel. The press and crush of bodies, Aerion’s face a breath away, bright with fury and never so beautiful as in the moment Dunk towered over him. Father have mercy, the feel of him under Dunk’s hands once the fight had gone mad. Past chivalry. No singer would ever put to harp the final desperate moments of the struggle; there had been no honor in it at the end, only mud and blood and panic, and the dull, desperate need not to die.

And the bite.

Dunk’s gums throbbed, his mouth filling with saliva as he recalled the taste unbidden.

Aerion’s cry still rang in his ears, when his own rage had not yet cooled and he had beaten the prince down into the dirt until the prince was screaming, I yield, I yield. Dunk had spared him, dragged him up to the stunned crowd to yield to Lord Ashford and stop the madness. There had been hands, after, men dragging him off and a voice booming that it was done, by the Seven, it was done.

And afterward, when the shouting was done, it was not the blows that troubled him most, nor the blood on his hands that frightened him, but the old tales Ser Arlan used to tell. Every stableboy or camp follower in the Seven Kingdoms knew the stories, same as they knew the songs. Garth Greenhand, the salt prince and the river bride, the maid of Raventree. Most folk were only men and women, and came together the common way, best they could. But every so often the gods marked two for one another in some queer fashion, knotting their fates so tight that where one went the other was bound to follow, for love or ruin or both. Blessed or cursed, no man could say. Some lord’s son would love where he ought not, some maid would answer him, and both would be in their graves before the singers were done.

A bite did not just take because teeth found skin, thought Dunk desperately. Man did worse to one another in every tourney melee from the Saltpans to Oldtown. Neither he nor the princeling had been in heat.

It won’t take, he told himself. It sounded less certain the second time.

He tried to ignore the dull ache of his empty stomach and the restlessness stirring in his bones. Every smell seemed to have grown tenfold in intensity. Some nameless beast prowled in his chest, demanding he go searching for something just beyond his reach.

Just as his will caved in and he began, despite himself, to wonder where the princeling was, he heard footsteps and a jangling of iron keys. He uncoiled and rose to his feet as the door opened to reveal two guards, one bearing an oil lamp. They were big men, tall and broad both. A servingman followed with a tray of food. His unusually sensitive nose told him they were betas, but he got a whiff of a stronger scent underneath their common ones.

The men parted to give way to a tall figure with short-cropped hair, dark and peppered with grey where it was visible, with half the head bandaged in linen.

“Your Grace,” Dunk fell to his knees.

“Leave us,” Prince Baelor told the men. The serving man set down the tray and slipped out at once. The guards withdrew more slowly, and no farther than the threshold. They left the heavy wooden door ajar and stationed themselves plain to view beyond it, near enough for Baelor’s voice to carry. Do they think me some ravenous dog that will bite the hand that feeds me?

Dunk was taller than most men in any room he entered, and even in his young age stronger than most grown alphas, and yet in this room it seemed his most feared feature was his teeth.

It is not you I want, the thought came unbidden, and Dunk smoldered it immediately. He wanted no one.

“Sit, Ser Duncan,” commanded Prince Baelor, gesturing to the window seat. The prince himself made for the seat closer to the table, but had barely taken two steps toward it when Egg darted past his uncle’s sleeve and all but slammed at Dunk’s chest.

“Sir Duncan!”

His face lit up as if the sun had come out in the cell. He was breathing hard, as if he had run half the castle stairs to get there.

“You’re alive,” Egg blurted.

Dunk blinked at him, a small smile appearing unbidden. “Seems so.”

Egg gave a bark of laughter at that, the sort that comes too quick and too loud when fear has not quite left a body. Then he took in Dunk proper—the split lip, the swollen eye, the blood dried black upon his hands—and the gladness went out of him all at once.

“Seven hells,” he said. “You look like death.”

“Feel worse,” Dunk muttered.

Egg came closer at once, heedless of the guards unease, and caught at Dunk’s forearm as if he meant to haul him up himself. It would have taken three boys his size to do it, but Dunk let him lay hold all the same.

“Can you stand?”

“I am standing.”

“Barely.”

“It’s better than lying on your back.”

“The boy is right, Ser Duncan,” cut Baelor, a bit impatiently. “You’re badly injured, ser. Please, sit.”

Dunk had no intention of making the prince repeat himself again and so he took his seat without complaint. Egg stayed close beside him, one hand still hovering at his elbow even after Dunk had no more need of it. Once Dunk was seated, the boy looked him over again, frowning harder with every bruise he counted.

“What happened after the…” Dunk hesitated. He did not know what to call it. Aerion had meant to kill him, and he had stubbornly meant not to die. “After he surrendered?” he finished lamely.

Egg’s face changed. The boy glanced toward Prince Baelor, then toward the half-open door where the guards stood within earshot.

“I am not supposed to tell you,” he said.

“No,” said Baelor. “You ought to hear it from me, rather than from gossip.”

He did not need to raise his voice. Egg fell silent at once, though not without a look that said plainly enough he would rather have told it himself.

Prince Baelor sat with one hand upon his knee, the lamplight catching in the white of the bandage about his head. He looked older than Dunk remembered from the morning, though that might only have been the weariness in him.

“The trial is done,” he said. “And dearly bought.”

Dunk said nothing, but guilt gnawed at him stronger than ever.

“Ser Humfrey Beesbury died of his wounds not long after they carried him from the field. Ser Humfrey Hardyng followed him before sunset.”

The names fell into the cell like stones.

Dunk looked down at his hands. They would have taken my hand if I had not fought, Dunk reminded himself. Dunk the lunk, could you not spare one? A hand and foot for the lives of two good men did not seem so cruel a bargain.

“Ser Lyonel Baratheon will live, the maesters say, though he has a broken rib and a broken leg besides. Ser Willem Wylde is much battered, but should recover.”

Egg made a face. “And the woman Aerion had flogged, if she is counted among the day’s honors—”

“Egg,” Baelor interrupted. Egg shut his mouth, sullen. Baelor went on as if he had not spoken.

“There are others bruised, bloodied, or frightened half out of their wits, but those are the gravest hurts done this day.”

Dunk swallowed. His throat felt thick. “I never meant—”

“No,” Baelor said. “But intent does not raise the dead, ser.”

Dunk had nothing to say to that. Baelor was quiet for a moment after that, as if measuring how much truth a man could bear at once.

“My brother wanted it done with at once,” Baelor said.

Dunk looked up sharply. “He’d have me killed for it? After I won my trial before gods and men?”

“He means to silence the scandal,” rebuked Baelor. “You, if need be. You might have won your trial for striking a prince, but it does not give you the right to claim a prince. The woman as well, if he had had his way unchecked. Perhaps others, had they spoken too freely.”

Egg made a face at that. “That would leave half of Ashford flogged before supper.”

Dunk felt his empty belly knotting tighter. “All for a bite?”

Baelor’s gaze rested on him. “Not for a normal bite, no. But your teeth, Ser Duncan, left a different sort of mark.”

Dunk did not meet Prince Baelor’s eyes. The words struck some treacherous place in him and he felt it stir, hot and shameful, and clamped down hard before it could become anything like joy.

“My brother called it maiming,” Baelor went on, “and I cannot fault him for wanting the comfort of a final answer.” He picked at the food before him. Dunk wondered how any man could act so casually while discussing another’s fate. “My own son, Prince Valarr, was for delay. His suggestion that rumor might die if it were given less to feed upon is not without merit.”

Dunk’s hands closed hard upon his knees. The skin across his knuckles felt too tight.

“Am I to choose between the noose or exile, Your Grace?”

Prince Baelor leveled him a look Dunk could not read. “It is more complicated than that. We need a maester, and there may yet be some way to undo what was done in the heat of battle. If we are to believe Daeron’s dreams…”

Egg’s mouth tightened. “Daeron says a maester may know how to dress a wound, but not what to make of this one. If we are to believe my brother’s dreams, we shouldn’t just leave it to chance and hope for the best.”

“Your brother saw fire and blood,” said Baelor. “Our house words, nothing more.”

Egg looked away.

Dunk frowned. “It won’t take,” he said stubbornly. “There was no heat to it. We were fighting, that’s all.”

Baelor studied him with an expression Dunk did not much like.

“For most men,” he said, “that might be true. For most men, these matters come as the smallfolk say they do—through longing, courtship, through time and the urgings of our baser nature.” He paused. “But my house is not as other houses.”

“The blood of old Valyria bound dragons to men, and not always wisely. It bred other arts besides. Bonds may be courted, yes… but they may also be coaxed where they are not freely given. Pressed into being. Drawn out of violence, where, in other men, there would be nothing but wounds and grief.”

There was no pride in the words. Only weariness.

Dunk stared at him.

“That’s folly.”

“No,” said Baelor. “That’s the blood of the dragon.”

The cell seemed smaller all at once. Dunk shook his head. “I never thought— I was trying not to die.”

“A hundred witnesses will swear on your good faith, ser,” Baelor said. “That was plain enough to the rows of men in the viewing stands. Plain enough to Lord Ashford and Lord Tyrell as well.”

“To anyone with eyes,” Egg muttered.

“But intent is not the question before us now,” Baelor said. “The question is what has been set in motion, and whether it may yet be undone.”

The shadows from the window had grown long. If this was to be his last evening, it was a rather sorry one.

“And what did you decide, m’lord?”

“That the matter could not be judged at Ashford,” Baelor said. “Nor by gossiping knights, nor by frightened servants, nor even by my brother and me alone. We sent word to King’s Landing. My lord father must hear it. A maester will be consulted. Others too, if need be.”

Egg gave him a quick look at that, but said nothing.

“And until then,” Baelor continued, “you are to remain in your quarters and you are not to approach Aerion.”

Dunk laughed once, without mirth. “I wasn’t planning to.”

“That may prove harder than you think,” the prince warned.

Egg shifted awkwardly at that, but Dunk did not so much as twitch. He had no wish to seek out Aerion Targaryen. If any part of him bristled at the order, that was between himself and the gods alone.

Baelor went on. “Moon tea has been ordered.”

Dunk blinked. “For him?”

“For both of you.”

That struck him near as hard as any blow that day. Dunk stared. “For me?”

He could not think what use it would serve an alpha drinking moon tea, but did not want to reveal his ignorance. Perhaps they meant to hold off his rut? They need not have bothered. He had gone into rut the day before the trial, and it had passed ill enough, leaving him sharp-tempered, sore, and dissatisfied with himself.

Egg’s ears had gone red, but he lifted his chin all the same. “You’re the one who says it was only a bite. If so, you’ve naught to fear.”

Dunk looked from one prince to the other. “And what if there’s no need? What if it comes to nothing?”

“Then we have been cautious to no cost but pride,” Baelor said. “If we are wrong in the other direction, the cost is far greater.”

Egg folded his arms and, for a moment, sounded exactly like the entitled prince he was. “You are not to go near him. You are not to speak with him alone. And you are especially not to do anything stupid.”

He’s frightened, Dunk realized. The boy had not shown an ounce of self-preservation during the quarrel at the pupeteers’ barracks nor had he cowered during the trial, but he was frightened now. “What does that mean?”

“It means,” said Egg, flushing, “you’re not to— consummate anything.”

The heat rose so quick in Dunk’s face he was glad of the dark. Even hearing the word made his gums throb again, and he tried to make himself small, uncomfortable in his own skin. Prince Baelor’s face remained impassive enough he felt he needed to defend himself.

“I wouldn’t do that. I wouldn’t.”

“No,” said Egg. “You’re not that much of a fool. Only you did bite him, in front of half the realm.”

Shame burned through him so fierce he could do no more than hang his head.

“Beg pardon, ser.” The boy sounded abashed.

Baelor’s voice made him look up again. “On the morrow, we ride for King’s Landing. Until then, caution must rule where certainty fails—not only for your sake, but for Prince Aerion’s as well.”

They’re right, Dunk thought. I did bite a prince, and an unbound omega besides. Until now, he had not spared a thought to what that might mean for the prince. Dunk the lunk, he thought. What have you done?

Dunk swallowed and forced the question out before courage fled him. “Your Grace, and what’s to be done with Aerion?”

Baelor’s expression closed a little.

“He is confined as well. He was not… peaceful, when I last saw him, but alas, the state he is in cannot last forever.”

Egg made a small, vicious noise. “He had a woman flogged because she named the wound for what it was, and—”

For a moment Dunk could only stare. “He had a woman flogged for speaking?”

“For speaking out of place. Your bite went deep. The talk had already begun before you were dragged from the field. By the time Aerion was being stitched, it had reached the tents, and the nursemaid named the wound too plainly for his liking.”

Dunk felt something cold move through him. He had known Aerion was cruel. He had seen that plain enough when he had stricken Tanselle. But this was pettiness of another sort, more poignant and meaner.

“How could she be speaking out of place?” Dunk was obstinate. “She was tending her duty, mending him, unless you meant for the princeling to bleed out for pride.”

Baelor did not look away. His unmatched eyes seemed to see right through him. “His injury is being seen to. So is his temper, so far as any man may tend that. But hear me now, Ser Duncan: whatever you believe of this matter, whatever songs you were told as a boy, you must not test it further.”

Dunk felt bruised and thirsty and more tired than he had ever been in his life.

He ought to let this be the end of the matter. The prince had shown him more grace than he had any right to hope for. But Ser Arlan had not raised him to leave a helpless woman to her fate.

“What of the woman? The nursemaid?”

The very air seemed to go still, the drip of the water loud in the silence. Finally, the prince lifted an eyebrow. “Her family will be provided for.”

Dunk turned on him at once. “With coin?”

“With more than coin,” said Baelor. “They will not want. Her children, if she has children, will be set above need. Her suffering will not be without purpose. That is already seen to.”

“And that’s to stand for justice?”

Baelor did not answer at once.

“It is for the good of the realm,” he said at last.

Egg made a small sound, almost fierce, and Dunk knew what he thought of this answer at once.

He felt his lip curl unbidden. He had fought a prince for one woman’s fingers, and still another had been whipped for telling the truth. Dunk was too angry now to hold his tongue.

“With all due respect, m’lord, that’s a harsh punishment for a few words.”

Baelor’s eyes lifted to him again, angry now. “You tread close to dangerous ground, ser. My patience is not infinite.”

Dunk looked away, breathing hard through his nose. Outside of the door, guards smelled of sweat and worry, and one had a hand on his sword-hilt. I must rein in my temper, else I’m doomed.

Baelor went on, his voice lower now. “Hear me well. I do not defend what Aerion did. But if the matter had been allowed to spread unchecked, the realm would have spilled more blood, not less. My duty is to the lives that might yet be spared, and I cannot choose one woman over them.”

Dunk thought of Tanselle Too-Tall, of her broken fingers, of the blood and mud at Ashford Meadow, of the nursemaid bent over a wounded man only to be whipped for speaking plain.

Baelor Targaryen sat before him in silk and sorrow, with grief in his face and duty on his shoulders like a mailshirt he could never take off.

“Why?” he had asked steely Pate, under the mantle of the night, after the smallfolk had blessed him, cheered for him, prayed for him, hours before his trial. “What am I to them?”

“A knight who remembered his vows,” the smith had said.

“I would see her, m’lord,” he said. “If it pleases Your Grace.”

Prince Baelor met his eyes unblinkingly and they stared each other down.

“The woman,” Dunk said. “I ask m’lord’s leave to see the one who took the lashes for what I did.”

Baelor studied him. “Why?”

Dunk frowned, as if the answer ought to have been plain. “To ask how badly she’s hurt. To tell her I’m sorry. To offer her whatever comfort I may.”

Egg looked as though he had held his tongue long enough. “Your Grace… let him go. You said yourself you cannot choose the gentler course. He can. And if the woman sees she was not forgotten, that may mend more than coin will, and it will cost us nothing.”

Something in the prince’s face shifted then, though only slightly.

At last Baelor said, “You will not go alone.”

Dunk gave a short nod. For a moment he only sat there, too startled to move. The tower did not feel the same, though it was. Prince Baelor’s scent lay heavy in the close air, sharp with command and strain.

Not an hour past, Dunk had thought himself as good as dead. Now he was being given leave to go, even if briefly.

“I will have you escorted to her quarters and back again,” Baelor said. “You will speak with her, and then return here. No wandering. No trying doors that are not opened for you.”

This was all the agreement he needed.

Dunk got to his feet at once, then wished he had not, when pain went bright through his side.

Egg was at his elbow in half a heartbeat. He caught at his arm. “Easy, you great oaf.”

Dunk shook him off, though not ungently. “I’m well enough.”

“No,” said Egg. “You’re held together by bruises and bad ideas.”

But Baelor had already risen. He said a quiet word to the guards at the door. One went at once. The other remained where he was, hand never far from the hilt of his sword.

Baelor looked back at Dunk. “You may go now.”

The guard led him out. His eyes kept straying to Dunk—half wonder, half hope.

Egg came after them as if it had never occurred to him he might be left behind. Dunk did not dare object. He was afraid that if he said a word, Prince Baelor might call them both back and he did not wish to give the prince cause to regret his agreement.

The evening had turned raw. The air hit him all at once—cold, clean, full of smoke and horse and supper smells after the damp close stink of the cell. Campfires were beginning to bloom one by one beyond the pavilions, orange and gold against the deepening blue. Men moved through the half-light in twos and threes, talking low. Some looked up as they passed. Some looked away. Once he heard laughter break off sharp behind him, as if bitten through.

The Ashford servants had been quartered in a row of smaller tents near the wagons. In the dark they loomed the same way they had that other night, black shapes beneath wet trees, wheels sunk in mud. He remembered standing near here with Prince Daeron in the soft rain, listening whilst the princeling spoke of one of his dreams in that queer, frightened way of his.

A great pale beast, Daeron had said. Huge, dacing above the fire beneath it, a blaze so vast it might swallow pavilions, horses, men. And I right in the middle of it, thought Dunk. A bad omen.

A girl with a basin in her hands looked up at them once and went pale enough that Dunk thought she might drop it. Instead she only jerked her chin toward the farthest tent and muttered, “There,” before hurrying off.

The guard stopped at the flap. “I’ll wait without.”

Dunk grunted. For a moment he only stood there, staring at the strip of canvas.

Then he ducked inside, Egg close at his heels.

It was warm and close within. The candlelight was poor, a single flame guttering in a clay dish, throwing long shadows over the canvas walls. The air smelled of herbs, wet linen, and the rusty sweetness of copper. A pallet had been laid out near the back.

The nursemaid lay on her side atop it, her back wrapped in bandages dark in places where the blood had seeped through. Her hair was loose, half stuck to her neck with sweat. She smelt faintly of milk cream and rosemary.

She saw them and went still.

“Have they come to finish it?” she asked. Her voice was flat with tiredness, but there was fear under it all the same.

He had to stoop not to brush the tent roof. In the cramped little room his size felt all wrong, and it made him ill to imagine himself invading this woman’s space. He crouched beside the pallet awkwardly, not knowing where to put his hands. They hung there, heavy and useless between his knees.

“I came to—” He stopped. Started again. “I came to say I’m sorry.”

The nursemaid looked at him a long while, pale in the poor candlelight, her face damp with sweat, her hair stuck to her throat. When she spoke, her voice was thin with pain, but hard all the same.

“For which part?”

Her voice was not loud, but lingered all the same.

Dunk could only stare at her.

“The prince’s neck?” she asked. “My back? Or that you get to walk in here whole while I’m laid open like a side of beef?”

From the corner of his eyes he could see Egg make an aborted movement, eyes wide, but Dunk only shook his head, astounded into silence.

“Sorry,” she repeated the word with contempt. “Aye. I’ll wager you are.”

That stung more than if she had cursed him.

Her eyes went over him then—his bruised face, the split skin of his knuckles, the stiffness in the way he held himself—and her mouth twisted.

“You look right pitiful for a man standing on both feet.”

He and the boy exchanged glances, and he saw Egg had a queer expression he could not name.

“You fought a prince for that puppet girl,” she continued. “Aye, all the camp knows that now. They’ll be singing of it in every winesink from here to King’s Landing. Great lunk of a hedge knight bloodies the dragon prince for a maid.” Her lip curled. “Fine. Brave. Gallant. And whilst they’re singing, I’ll sit my arse on blood-soaked linen for speaking what I saw.”

Dunk felt the words land hard in him.

“I never meant for that,” the words escaped him before he could stop them and rang hollow in the tent’s cramped space.

“You didn’t mean to bind him either, I suppose. You only claimed him before half the realm, like some starving cur in the mud.”

Dunk flinched. He might have protested, but she lay bloodied on the pallet, and he knelt there whole enough to make excuses. So he said exactly how many words he had the right to say, which was none. He prayed the boy had enough sense to do the same.

“You want the truth of it, ser?” she asked. “Here it is. To the puppet girl, you were a knight. To the prince…” Her eyes flicked to his mouth, then away. “Well. I think he would name you something else.”

His face burned. For the first time since he had awoken, he entertained the thought it would have been kinder to kill Aerion than to spare him only to humiliate him with his teeth.

“They’ll not whip you,” she went on. Her eyes narrowed. “They bring you here under guard so you may ease your conscience over me.” Her laugh was a small, ugly thing.

Dunk felt shame rise hot in him.

“I am sorry,” he said again, quieter now. “For all of it.”

“Aye,” she said. “And what use is that to me?”

None, Dunk thought. Less than none.

The tent seemed close and hot around him. Outside, someone passed by laughing, and the sound of it made him want to strike something.

Egg stepped forward then, sullen and serious. “He came because he meant it,” the boy said. “He came because he—”

“Wanted what?” she snapped. “To be the good knight still? To look at what his brave deed bought and say how sorry he is?”

Egg flushed deeper. “That’s not fair.”

Her eyes cut to him. “Fair?” she said. “Look at my back, boy.”

The boy stopped short, his young face contorted.

She looked back to Dunk, and there was nothing soft in her face now, only pain and hard truth.

“If you were only cruel, I could hate you cleanly. Yet I look at your honest face, and I see the Warrior and the savior, and I can see the sort of man songs are made about.” Her fingers twisted in the blanket. “Only songs don’t mind who gets buried underneath them.”

Dunk could not lift his head. Not for a long while. When at last he did, his voice sounded rough to his own ears. “What would you have of me, then?”

She held his eyes.

“Truth,” she said. “You publicly claimed a prince, and still you are the one the crown deals gently with.”

Dunk shut his eyes.

“If there’s aught I can do,” he said at last, though the words sounded feeble even to his own ears, “I’d do it.”

“There isn’t,” she said at once.

Silence stretched between them. The candle guttered again. Dunk found himself looking at the bandages on her back, at the dark places where the cloth clung damp against the lashes. He looked away.

“What did you say to him?” he asked.

She did not answer at once. Perhaps she wasn’t sure he deserved to know. If he was honest, Dunk wasn’t sure either, but he wanted to know all the same.

“He wouldn’t lie still,” she finally said. “Fighting me every moment of it. I could scarce get the needle in for all his thrashing.” That sounded like Aerion well enough, Dunk thought. “So I told him— Easy now, Your Grace. You’ll make the claim wound worse, and it’s ugly enough already. I’ve seen dogs mark each other gentler.”

The words hung in the tent. Dunk felt them settle somewhere deep in him, heavy as stones dropped down a well.

“I shouldn’t have said it,” she went on after a moment. “But someone ought to tell even princes when they’re being fools,” she added.

For a moment there was only the small sound of her breathing and the guttering of the candle.

He pushed himself to his feet. His knees cracked. Everything hurt worse than before. He looked at Egg, pale and quiet and tight about the mouth. “Let’s go, lad.”

At the flap he hesitated.

“If any man troubles you again—”

She gave him a look that stopped him dead.

“They won’t,” she said. “Not now.”

Dunk nodded once and ducked out into the night.

The air was colder than before. The camp had settled some, though not to quiet. There were still voices, still bursts of laughter, still the low murmur of men telling and retelling what they had seen. Somewhere a singer had started up with a harp, though the tune went ragged after only a few notes. The guard awaited him, ready to escort him to his tower cell. They walked in somber silence all the way back.

When he was let inside the chamber, there was no more light at the window and the room seemed smaller without Prince Baelor in it. He wondered if they were keeping Aerion in a similar room, somewhere about the castle.

Before the guard closed his heavy wooden door, Egg looked at him again for the first time since they left the nursemaid’s tent. “Words are wind, ser,” he offered feebly.

The boy meant no harm, so Dunk was kind in his rebuke. “Not those words, Egg”. Egg nodded and Dunk was left alone with his thoughts.

Aerion Targaryen was cruel as a cat with a trapped mouse, vain as any tourney peacock, and mad enough to break a puppet girl’s fingers for a laugh. Dunk knew what sort of man the princeling was. He had known it before Ashford, and knew it better now.

So why did some part of him keep turning back that way? It was no kindness, and no wish for company. More like the way his tongue found a broken tooth, again and again, though it pained him every time. Dunk did not want to think on Aerion, but the thought kept returning all the same: how badly he had bitten him, how the prince had cried out, what sort of hurt he might be in now. He would think of the nursemaid and feel anger and shame rise hot in him, then think of the prince shut up alone with that bite in his neck and feel something else besides.

Dunk had no wish to see Aerion Targaryen again. If he repeated that to himself enough times, he might even believe it.

Chapter Text

Aerion Targaryen lay on his back and watched the canvas breathe.

The Roseroad ran south through the Reach like a pale, overtrodden scar through land too rich by half, its edges swallowed on either side by growth that seemed determined to reclaim it. When the wind worried at the cart’s cover it lifted just enough to offer him broken glimpses of the world beyond—barley nodding heavy-headed in the fields, hedges gone thick and glossy with summer, orchards crouched low beneath fruit not yet ripe and already buzzing with flies. Everything here pressed in on a man. Too green. Too fecund. Too alive. Even the light had weight to it, hanging low and swollen in the afternoon, golden where it struck the dust and brown where it settled, as if the whole of the Reach had been left too long in the sun and had begun to sweat.

His injuries made the wheeled house a necessity, instead of allowing him to ride on horseback as it was his proper place. The wretched thing lurched and pain answered at once. It had made residence in his leg now, deep and stubborn, a hard bright thread that pulled taut whenever the wheels found some rut or hidden stone. His ribs ached beneath their wrappings. His shoulder burned when he shifted even so much as a finger. Every motion reminded him of the meadow—of the ground rising hard to meet him, of mud beneath his back, of weight and breath and blows going on long after a fight should have been done.

That, he could have withstood. It was the rest that made it unbearable. The air lay warm and damp against his skin. Linen clung where it ought not have clung. The blanket rasped at his thigh when the carriage shook, and the seams of his clothes scratched in places they had no business touching. The smell of the road—horse, leather, dung turned sweet and soft in the heat—seemed to coat the back of his tongue no matter how often he swallowed. Even the wine had betrayed him that morning, thin and sour where it should have been rich. Nothing tasted right. Nothing sat right. The world itself seemed to have slipped half a finger’s breadth out of place and left him to endure the rubbing.

Nothing was right in a world a dragon could not endure heat.

He had not slept. Not the night before. Nor the one before that. Nor the one before that, though he had closed his eyes and lain still enough to fool any man watching. He had counted breaths, counted heartbeats, counted the slow drag of hours while the camp sank to silence and rose again with dawn. He had listened to men snore, horses stamp, canvas shift, coals settle. Sleep had circled him like something shy and half-wild and would not come near.

The whole world seemed bent on reminding him of his grievance.

Beside him, Valarr Targaryen shifted on the cushioned bench, the silk at his sleeve whispering as he moved. He had borne the journey with far more dignity than Aerion had, which was rather the point his father must have intended when he ordered his cousin to accompany him. If Aerion must be watched, the old man had at least had the decency to choose a guard dog with breeding. “You might try behaving like a prince,” Valarr said at last, after enough silence had passed to make the remark seem almost thoughtful. “It would spare the rest of us the spectacle.”

Aerion did not move from where he was sprawled. “I have behaved as a proper prince all my life,” he said. “Do not fault me because your notion of princeliness is meek. A prince who cannot compel respect is only a man in better cloth.”

Not so long ago, his family’s claim had been secured on dragonback, not on marriage pacts. He never understood why he alone seemed to grasp how brittle their family’s position was, how the realm had bled for it—rebellions, defiances, lords grown bold enough to weigh a king’s strength like merchants weighing wool. Valarr might play the perfect heir until singers wept to hear him, but someone had to remember that a claim not enforced was only a story men told themselves.

If Aerion had hoped the truth of it might shame his cousin into silence, he was disappointed. “You flogged a servant in front of half the realm.”

Valarr made reproach sound perilously like concern, which was one of his more exasperating gifts.

“She spoke out of turn.” If he did not open his eyes, if he did not move, it was possible, thought not very likely, Valarr might drop the issue, but Valarr had never been much deterred by being wrong.

“And yet, dear cousin, there might be a more reasonable response to insolence than savagery.” The reproach in his voice sat atop something softer, which made it harder to bear and easier to despise. “A prince need not answer every slight with blood.”

Valarr’s tone was mild, but there was something beneath it Aerion disliked more than censure. He had begun to hear it everywhere these past days—that carefulness men put on when they had decided beforehand that one must not be provoked. Aerion opened his eyes then, slow and unwilling. The light through the canvas struck at once, too bright by half. “Is that what this is?” he asked. “A lesson?”

Valarr did not rise to it. His disapproval came dressed in patience, as it always did when Aerion was hurt enough to be impossible. “It is advice. You have spent the last several days paying for your temper at Ashford. I should think pain might have taught you what counsel could not.”

He had certainly learned many things in the last five days. That linen could scratch like mail if it lay wrong. That a cartwheel striking a rut could set his whole body aflame. That a man might go three nights without sleep and yet still be denied peace. That every jolt of the road found his ribs, his shoulder, his leg, as if the gods themselves had taken to prodding bruises for sport. Aerion was no stranger to pain by now.

“Then take my gratitude and be done with it,” Aerion said. “I know very well what my rashness cost me.” His jaw tightened as the cart lurched again. “If you wish me wiser, Valarr, do not goad me whilst every bone I own is ringing.”

That, at least, gave his cousin pause, which suited Aerion well enough, for just then the canvas bellied inward with a passing gust, lifting enough to admit a wash of hotter air. Beneath the rank sweetness of horse and leather and summer dust, another scent found them—faint for any other man, perhaps, but not for him. Sweat, wool, sun-warmed skin, steel gone dull with use.

It was a small mercy the cause of Aerion’s suffering had been made to ride with his wrists bound, shamed and subdued as it suited the lowborn knight, back to a place fit for his station, where he should never have tried to rise above. But not even the walls of his cart or the distance the road imposed them saved him from all the indignities of his designation.

His body answered before pride could master it. Want knotted low and hard in his belly, hot enough to shame him. The bite at his neck throbbed with sudden fury beneath its wrapping, each beat of his pulse seeming to wake it anew. He could feel the place of it as if the knight’s mouth were on him still: the brutal pressure of teeth, the wet heat of breath, the humiliation of being marked like some bitch in a yard.

That ache ran deeper than every other grievance. It licked along his skin from throat to spine and settled heavy between his thighs, insistent as fever. Despite better reason, still his treacherous flesh turned toward the man riding somewhere beyond the canvas as a flower turns toward the sun.

Aerion shut his eyes more tightly and held his breath. The wound in his neck beat like a second heart. Bound, denied, and made ridiculous by a hedge knight who ought to have been left broken in the mud at Ashford.

He must have made some sound of displeasure, for when Valarr spoke again his voice had lost a little of its edge.

“Is it the wound?” he asked. “Or is it him?”

They had managed, until then, the courtesy of not naming it. That Valarr should do it now struck hard enough to make Aerion open his eyes.

“Spare me that much, cousin,” Aerion said, and hated the strain he heard in his own voice. “At least from you.”

Valarr held his gaze a moment longer, then looked away first, which in itself was answer enough. “I am trying to be soothing,” he said. “You make the business difficult.” His hand shifted on the bench between them, not quite reaching, not quite withdrawing. “If this is pain, I can send for more wine. If it is fever, we can stop. If it is…” He did not finish.

If it is the hedge knight, the words hung in the cart all the same. Aerion laughed once, though there was no mirth in it. “And what would you prescribe if it is?”

“Nothing I would care to name.” Valarr’s mouth tightened. “Nothing I had ever thought to see in our house.”

That stung worse than it should have. Not because it was cruel, but because it was fearful, and fear sat poorly on Valarr. He had always worn composure as other men wore mail. To hear even a crack in it was its own offense.

“Do not look at me as if I am already some cautionary tale for singers,” Aerion said.

“You are my blood,” Valarr answered, and now there was edge beneath the calm, faint but unmistakable. “What touches you touches all of us. If the bite takes—if even the whisper of it holds—can you imagine what our enemies would do? If this is seen for what it is—or guessed at closely enough—it will not be you alone they measure by it.”

“I know what my nature has cost us,” Aerion said. “You need not recite it.”

There was the old shame of it, dragged out once more and laid between them. After a moment, Valarr exhaled softly. “I do not say this to wound you.” The hesitation there was slight, but real. “Gods know you seem wounded enough.”

At last he reached across the narrow space between them and set his hand, careful as if approaching some half-tamed thing, against Aerion’s wrist, where his scent glands were. “Only do not force me to fear for you more than I do already.”

Aerion ought to have pulled away. Instead he lay still beneath the touch, rigid with pain and pride and something dangerously near to shame. It made him maddeningly aware of his own body —most of all, the bandage at his neck that would not be ignored no matter how often he commanded it. His hand rose without leave. A breathing creature throbbed beneath the linen, as if the skin itself had learned a new and detestable trick. He pressed it, faint and terrible and alive.

Too warm. He dropped it at once, as though he had touched coal. At least he said, “I have enough discomfort without tending to your fears, cousin.”

Valarr’s unmatched eyes traced his hand’s movement attentively. “You keep touching it,” he sounded almost resentful. “Does it burden you so?”

“I keep being reminded of it.”

“Then stop being reminded.” There it was—that shortening in Valarr’s voice, clipped enough to betray him.

A faint smile touched Aerion’s mouth. This was a familiar dance. It had amused him once to test the limits of that composure, to set his own restlessness against Valarr’s restraint and hear where the fabric tore.

“Sound counsel.” Aerion let his gaze linger on Valarr a moment too long, lazy despite the pain. “If my suffering troubles you so much, you might try distracting me from it.” He allowed his legs to spread open in the small space of the chariot and ignored the way his groin protested at the movement.

He needed never fear honorable, respectable Valarr might not heed his calls, not ever since they were boys, not even on Valarr’s wedding feast, when Valarr had bent him over his own nuptial bed mere hours before saying his vows.

He felt the familiar thrill then when Valarr’s eyes lingered on his body, hungry and wanting. His familiar alpha scent filled the chariot and its acrid taste stuck at Aerion’s tongue, unexpectedly stifling. Valarr’s hand moved to the inside of his wrist and rested there for a heartbeat, massaging his scent gland.

“I might worsen your injury.” he cautioned, all the while leaning forward to drag his nose down Aerion’s throat column. Aerion let out a strangled sound when Valarr’s lips found the base of his neck, suckling at the skin there. If he held his breath, he might not even notice Valarr’s ash and ochre heavy undernotes.

“I am injured, not insensible. Must you hover when you might be kissing me?”

Valarr found the exact point where his pulse beat on his throat and gave an open mouthed kiss. All he could do was moan, arching his neck to grant him better access. Valarr’s fingers unbuttoned his tunic’s front with practiced ease.

His hands rose to grab at his cousin’s hair as Valarr licked his collarbone, his hand caressing his torso until it found a raised nipple to pinch.

He moaned, fingers spreading on his back, wanting to mark him with his nails. He loved when he scratched hard enough to draw blood, wondering what account Valarr would have to render to his bride later.

Valarr panted against his chest, staring at him with half-lidded eyes. “Must you always look so pleased to be wanted?”

Blush rose in him, from chest to cheek. Valarr’s lips coaxed the color brighter, nibbling on his nipples, on his jaw, on his lips. “Cousin,” he whined encouragingly.

“Gods, Aerion, curse you calling me cousin as if your blood doesn’t quicken just for saying it.” Valarr breathed against his mouth, capturing his lips and forcing his tongue against Aerion’s.

Aerion broke for breath and found ash waiting in it. He could not remember an instance it had been half so unwelcome or irritating. He bit Valarr’s lip with enough force to fill his mouth with the taste of copper.

He allowed the man to draw back. “You wileful thing.” Valarr derided, exasperated. Aerion ignored it. “Your scent displeases me.” He complained.

Valarr raised his hand to his bloodied lip in incredulity. “You have a rare talent for making every kindness regrettable.”

“Indulge me some other way.” He pleaded unabashedly. “Forbid my body any craving but your tongue.”

Valarr leveled him a ravenous look, hands coming to grasp at Aerion’s strong thighs and travelling higher on his body. One of Aerion’s hands dug into his shoulder and the other buried into his hair. “As my prince commands,” said Valarr undoing the laces on Aerion’s breeches. He mouthed at the slick soiling his groin, purring as it flowed more freely the more he lapped at it.

As Valarr’s mouth closed around his cunt, Aerion buckled off the bench of the cart in oversensitive surprise. His hips pressed shamefully against Valarr’s face, then were forced to settle back down by Valarr’s forearm. He pushed against Aerion’s waist, firmly holding him immobile as he pleasured him. “Take it, little dragon.”

“Seven hells.” He cursed, hands flying around, pressing desperately into Valarr, drawing out a guttural groan from his throat. The sound reverberated into his core, made him quiver wetly. Valarr’s tongue invaded him, once, twice, before it flattened to roam from his entrance to his nub, circling it before replacing it with suction. He held the back of Valarr’s head firmly against him, unable to stop himself from grinding against him. One of Valarr’s fingers invaded him, curling inside just as his mouth suckled at him, drawing enough moisture he managed to insert a second finger inside almost without effort.

Valarr knew his body too well, and there was not a touch misplaced nor a pause mistimed, his fingers stretching him open just as his mouth worked him, and soon he felt a knot coiling at the base of his abdomen, just out of reach.

Aerion ought to have been able to lose himself in it, yet everything in him felt subtly wrong. His own skin sat too tight upon him, as if he had been sewn back into it poorly after Ashford. He could not come, his pleasure forever catching on some invisible barb beneath the surface, until frustration throbbed harder than want.

The thing went sour in him before it ever broke and he felt a desperate urge to strike something rise until it was uncontrollable. He wrung Valarr’s hair sharply and painfully to dislodge him.

He shoved Valarr away with more force than the space required, breath going sharp in his throat. The thwarted ache in him had soured at once into something meaner. His skin felt unbearable now, too close and fevered, sweat cooling on him in miserable detail, while the moisture caught in his tights made every shift of cloth feel obscene, the air in the chariot thick with their mixed scents.

He needed out of the stifling little box of silk and heat and failure before he did something truly ugly.

Valarr drew back, lips parted as if to speak, one hand still half-raised from where Aerion had torn free of him. Something stricken passed nakedly across his face before composure gathered itself again. “Aerion—”

“Do not.” The word came flat and vicious. Aerion dragged a hand down his face, already fumbling for composure and finding none. “If you mean to ask what is wrong, I shall hate you for it.”

Valarr’s mouth tightened; then, with visible effort, he let the sting of it pass. “Shall I pretend not to understand?” He jerked his chin toward the road beyond the canvas, where the horses and the hedge knight must still be keeping pace.

“Damn you to hell, Valarr,” said Aerion. He wrestled his clothes back into order with furious motions. The chariot seemed to have shrunk around him, every inch of it rank with trapped heat and breath and shame. He struck the roof of the cart loudly with the flat of his hand. “Stop the cart.”

There was a startled murmur from outside.

“Now,” Aerion snapped, rapping the roof again. “Unless the crown has grown too poor to let a prince piss by the roadside.” The cart lurched to a halt.

Yorkel and Wandel were there at once, both moving as Aerion swung himself over the side. Yorkel reached first, hand half-lifted as if to steady him by the elbow. Aerion looked at it until the man thought better of the gesture and stepped back.

Valarr neither moved to help nor spoke to stop him as he leapt out. Pain bit at once, from calf to hip, and for half a heartbeat the road threatened to tilt beneath him, but he would sooner have bitten through his own tongue than let either of them see him weakened by it.

Dust stirred around his boots. The heat lay thick against his face. Behind him, he could feel Valarr still in the carriage, still watching, though Aerion did not turn to confirm it.

“I am going to relieve myself,” he said.

“As you say, Your Grace,” said Yorkel.

Aerion took three steps toward the hedgerow before he heard them following and stopped at once. The pause dragged just long enough to make both men halt in turn. “Surely,” he said, without looking back, “I need not explain how pissing is done.”

Yorkel cleared his throat. “Orders, Your Grace.”

Aerion turned then, slow and dangerous. “I am not some blushing maid to be escorted into the bushes.”

Wandel’s mouth bent, and there was a small, nasty light in his eyes that set Aerion instantly on guard. “No, Your Grace,” he said. “Though by the smell of you, a man might be forgiven the mistake.”

Aerion moved.

Steel flashed.

Wandel’s scream was sharp and brief. His hand struck the tree behind him and stayed there, pinned through the flesh by the dagger, his spear falling from nerveless fingers into the dust.

For an instant he only stared, as if his own hand had become some strange thing nailed to the bark. Then the pain seemed to reach him in full, and the breath burst out of him in a wet, broken cry.

“You should be grateful,” Aerion said softly, leaning close enough that the man could feel his breath, “I am not asking for your tongue.” He wrenched the blade free. Blood flowed freely then. Wandel made another sound, smaller and uglier than the first, and folded half to his knees, clutching his ruined hand.

Yorkel had gone white beneath the road dust. “Your Grace—”

“Stay where you are,” Aerion said, not raising his voice. He flicked the blood from the blade into the grass. “Or I may be forced to think you equally witless.”

Aerion held where he was. The dagger remained in his hand, the red on it bright and fresh. Beyond Wandel’s cries came the creak of harness, the abrupt hush of voices cut short, the first quick beat of hooves turning out of line. He felt the whole road turn toward him.

And then, with the same miserable clarity by which he had lately become aware of every other indignity, he felt it: attention fixed upon him, heavy as a touch between the shoulder blades.

He sought him out before he could stop himself. The hedge knight sat ahorse a little way down the road, wrists bound before him, his great brown face turned wholly toward Aerion, staring at him as if he had never seen him before. There was something naked in the look—alarm, perhaps, or pity—and Aerion was once again filled with hatred.

He turned his face away at once. Let Duncan look if he wished. Let him think whatever a lowborn brute was capable of thinking. Aerion had no desire to see it written plain.

Hoofbeats pulled his attention behind him, quick over the packed road and near enough now to kick dust round his boots. Daeron came out of the line at a canter with Ser Roland Crakehall at his side, the white cloak bright beneath the road dust. They reined in hard at the edge of the disturbance.

Ser Roland was moving before his horse had fully settled, one hand on the reins and the other already at his sword. Steel whispered free as his gaze fixed not on Aerion, but on Wandel in the dust, bleeding and half doubled over, as if the greater danger lay in what a wounded fool might do next.

Daeron said nothing at first. His eyes went over it all in one sweep: Wandel clutching his hand, Yorkel rigid as a spearshaft, the ring of halted men pretending not to stare, Aerion with the dagger still red in his grasp—and beyond them, Ser Duncan on his horse, far too big to go unnoticed.

By then Valarr was coming through the small knot of men as well. Silk whispered at his shoulders; dust caught at the hem of his cloak. He did not look first at Aerion, nor at Wandel, but at the men who gathered around them.

Daeron’s eyes flicked once to Yorkel. “What happened?”

Aerion’s mouth hardened, unwilling to give word to his own humiliation. Around them the road had gone unnaturally still; even Wandel’s wet breathing seemed too loud. “He presumed to speak of matters above his station.”

Yorkel swallowed. “Your Grace,” he said to Daeron, “Wandel spoke out of turn. Of the prince’s… condition. He made coarse mention of the prince’s scent, Your Grace.”

Ser Roland’s blade did not lower. Valarr’s gaze moved over the watching men one by one, and heads began to dip before he had yet said a word.

Understanding touched Daeron’s face, though lightly, and was gone again at once. “I see,” he said. His voice lowered a notch. “Then I do not wonder you were angered.” His mouth twitched, though whether with sympathy or irony it was hard to tell. “But if you mean to carve up every man who has a nose, brother, we shall have no convoy left by sunset.”

“Enough,” Valarr’s voice carried. Ser Roland still had steel in hand, Daeron still sat his horse, and Valarr’s gaze had already found every face worth remembering. He turned to Yorkel. “Bind that hand before he bleeds out.”

At once the stillness broke. One man stooped for the dropped spear. Another tore cloth. Yorkel moved at last, as if released from some spell, and went to his fellow. Hands found work. Eyes found somewhere else to rest.

Valarr let them busy themselves a moment before he spoke again, quieter now. “No one speaks of this. You saw a prince correct a man. Nothing more.”

His gaze passed once more over the watchers, and paused just briefly on Ser Duncan’s bound hands before moving on. “That includes every man here.”

Men lowered their heads and obeyed. Even now, with Aerion’s blood still hot and Wandel’s on the grass, Valarr could do in three quiet words what Aerion must do with steel.

By then Daeron had dismounted as well. He crossed the last few paces to Aerion and fell into step beside him as though they had merely resumed some interrupted walk. He did not look too closely at Aerion’s face. Aerion marked the courtesy and hated himself a little for it.

Together they watched Yorkel get Wandel half to his feet. The man’s injured hand was wrapped now, though badly, blood already showing through the cloth.

“You do have a gift,” Daeron said, “for turning manageable scandals into memorable ones.”

“I have corrected a man who forgot himself,” Aerion said.

“Yes,” Daeron replied mildly. “And if you continue, your hand will tire before their folly does.”

His eyes moved, and Aerion’s followed. Across the road Valarr stood a little apart with the hedge knight, speaking low. The brute’s big head bent once in answer.

The hedge knight had no business being counted among princes or guards, yet there he was all the same.

“There rides the whole jest of it,” Aerion said bitterly. “A hedge knight with his teeth in a prince, too large to hide and too honest to lie well.”

Daeron’s mouth twitched. “I do not wonder you are out of temper,” Daeron said. “I might be short of it myself, had half the realm watched me bitten, bloodied, and packed into a cart like freight.”

Daeron walked a few paces more before he stopped. When he spoke again, the jest had gone out of him. “For what little comfort it is worth, when they begin their muttering, I will be there to make them ashamed of it.”

Aerion halted. For a moment he only stared. Of all the things he had expected from Daeron, pity was not among them, and loyalty least of all when spoken aloud.

“Why?” he said at last, the word sharper than he meant it to be.

Daeron looked at him sidelong. “Must there be a reason?”

“There is always a reason.”

“Very well.” Daeron’s mouth twitched, though his eyes did not. “Because you are my brother. Because half the fools in this family mistake cruelty for strength and silence for wisdom. Because if they are set on making a monster of you, I would rather not hand them the knife.”

Something in Aerion’s chest gave a queer, unpleasant turn. He looked away at once, as if the road itself might spare him the answer to that.

“You’re too sentimental when you’re sober.” He said.

“Who says I am sober?” said Daeron. “I am merely practical. You are difficult, but you are ours.”

They had walked farther than Aerion realized. Ahead, Ser Duncan sat mounted beneath guard, his bound hands resting awkwardly before him. The big knight’s face turned as they approached.

Daeron followed Aerion’s glance and gave a soft sound that might almost have been amusement. “There is the root of half your troubles,” he said. “And the other half, I suspect, is the way he looks at you.”

Aerion’s mouth hardened. Duncan was watching him still, and there was something in the look Aerion could not bear to name. Something worse for being gentler.

“He looks,” Aerion said coldly, “as though I am something cracked.”

Daeron’s gaze flicked between them once. “No,” he said. “That would be simpler.”

He went no farther than that. Mercy again. Daeron only clapped Aerion once, lightly, against the uninjured shoulder and moved ahead to speak with the guards, leaving Aerion to follow or not as he pleased.

Aerion stood a beat longer than he should have, feeling the road heat through the soles of his boots, feeling the dull throb in his leg, the sharper one in his neck, and beneath both of them that other miserable pull, steady as a hook set deep.

It drew him toward the hedge knight even now. He came up beneath the gelding’s head and stopped. Duncan looked down at him at once. He could hate Duncan well enough when he thought of Ashford . He could hate him more easily still for having heard a guardsman speak of him like some camp whore fit for coarse jests.

The man should never have seen that.

At Ashford Duncan had beaten him before the eyes of lords and princes, and here too he remained beyond Aerion’s reach: bound, guarded, set apart by command stronger than his own. Aerion could not strike him, could not silence him, could not even force his face to turn elsewhere. He was left only with the knowledge of that look upon him, and the intolerable sense that Duncan had seen too much.

Yet beneath the shame, something meaner stirred. Aerion could not deny that either. Let Duncan look. Let him see the bruise-dark mark his own mouth had left at Aerion’s neck, raw still beneath the wrappings, throbbing with every pulse as if to mock them both. If the knight meant to stare at him as though he were something damaged, let him stare at the proof that he himself had done the damaging. There was a bitter sort of pleasure in that, small and venomous and not nearly enough.

He wondered if Duncan could smell Valarr on him.

“If you have something to say, ser, say it,” Aerion said. “I am weary of your face doing the work for you.”

Duncan frowned. “I wasn’t saying nothing.”

“No,” Aerion said. “Only staring as if you have mislaid your wits somewhere in my direction.”

Duncan shifted awkwardly in the saddle, his bound hands moving against the reins. “You bloodied that man less than he deserved,” Duncan said.

For half a heartbeat Aerion only stared. He blinked. Just once. That the knight should understand the insult for what it was—and worse, agree it had merited answering—struck somewhere awkwardly near relief.

His smile came slow and without warmth. “How comforting,” he said. “To find you not wholly witless after all.”

Duncan’s gaze stayed on him. “I didn’t say I agreed with your method.”

“No?” Aerion tilted his head. “You seemed, for one shining instant, almost to have grasped the matter.”

Duncan’s mouth hardened. “I said he deserved correction. Not that you ought to be throwing steel in the state you’re in. You can hardly ride.”

Aerion’s smile thinned. “And whose work do you think that is? I did not beat myself into a cart.”

Duncan's jaw tightened. “I beat you at Ashford, aye. I’ll own that. But this trouble? You made that for yourself.”

Aerion’s eyes narrowed. “Do you mean to tell me I am at fault for all of this?”

Duncan met his gaze without flinching. “Aye. I do. You started, first with the puppet girl. Then the servant. With every time you put your pride before sense and call it a prince’s might.”

Aerion’s mouth curved, though there was nothing of mirth in it. “And what would you call it,” he asked softly, “when a hedge knight takes it upon himself to claim a prince as if he were some kennel cur to be mastered?”

The knight’s mouth snapped shut promptly. For once, no ready answer came to him. He sat there in the saddle, broad and awkward and bound, with shame plain enough in his silence.

When he did speak, his voice was rough. “I’m sorry for that.”

That was worse.

That made an insult of everything uglier in Aerion: the restless pull in his blood, the sleepless nights, the treachery of his own body turning toward the very man he ought to despise. Sorry, as if it had been only a wrong turn of temper and not something that had lodged itself beneath Aerion’s flesh and made a mockery of him ever since.

Fury rose hot in his throat. “Keep your sorrow.”

Duncan’s mouth hardened. “I’m not sorry I beat you. Someone had to stop you.”

Aerion’s mouth curved, though there was no mirth in it. “Had you not chosen to fight like a kennel brute and put your teeth where they had no business being, I might have beaten you.”

Duncan stared at him. For a moment he looked almost too astonished to answer. Then his gaze dropped, plain as daylight, to the way Aerion stood: too stiff through the spine, favoring one leg despite all the pride he spent trying to hide it, one hand still white-knuckled about the dagger.

“That’s a lie and you know it,” Duncan said.

Aerion’s face hardened. “I know I was cheated.”

Dunk shifted awkwardly in the saddle, his bound hands moving against the reins. “You can scarce stand easy. You’re being carried in a wheeled house.”

“I can ride.”

Dunk blinked at him. “No, you can’t.”

The flatness of it bit deeper than contradiction had any right to do. Aerion drew himself up. “Fetch my horse. I am tired of being carted about like some feverish widow.”

Dunk gave a short, disbelieving breath. “For what?”

“Must I explain horsemanship to you as well as breeding?”

“You’re near folded in half where you stand,” Dunk said. “And now you want to ride half-dead through the Reach to prove a point no one cares about.”

Behind him, there was a brief silence. Aerion did not need to turn to know that Valarr and Daeron had heard every word of it. He could feel their witness as keenly as he had felt Duncan’s. And worse besides—the witness of guards, grooms, servants, common men, all of them measuring him.

A groom in the retinue made the mistake of meeting his eye. Aerion fixed him with a look.

“You,” he said.

The man stopped as if a hand had closed round his throat.

“Bring me my horse.”

The man only stared.

“Do not make me repeat myself.”

He dismounted at once and hurried back toward the led horses.

“Aerion,” said Valarr sharply. That struck deeper than Dunk’s doubt had done. A servant’s insolence was filth. A hedge knight’s contradiction was vulgarity. But Valarr knew better. Valarr, who had never been his better in the saddle, now thought to forbid him the one field in which truth could still be made visible.

He did not turn.

“Do not be a fool.”

“A little late for such counsel,” said Daeron dryly.

Valarr ignored him. He came a step nearer instead, anger beginning to show through the polish of him. “You can scarcely stand. If you fall trying to mount, every man on this road will remember it longer than they will the knife.”

Aerion laughed once, low and ugly. “Then let every man here remember that I mounted anyway.”

“What they are being given,” said Valarr, “is proof that pain has finally devoured what little judgment you possessed.”

Aerion did not answer. Across the road the man was already hurrying back, leading Aerion’s destrier by the reins with the cautious, wide-eyed misery of one approaching a fire. The animal tossed its head once, impatient with the halt and the noise.

Valarr saw it too. “No.”

Aerion took the reins from the man without so much as a glance, and if the servant flinched from the blood still wet on his hand, that too went unanswered.

“Move,” Aerion said.

The man stumbled back at once.

“Aerion,” Valarr said again, quieter now, which was always more dangerous than anger. “Do not make me stop you.”

At that, Aerion finally looked at him. “You may try.”

When Aerion spoke, he did not pitch his voice for Valarr alone. He lifted his chin, the white bandage stark against the heat-flushed gold of his skin. “If any of you have mistaken me for something lesser, correct yourselves now. I am a Targaryen. I am of the blood of the dragon before I am anything else.”

Pain went through him white and vicious as he set his foot to the stirrup. For one ugly instant the world narrowed to leather under his palm, to the pull in his leg, to the bright sick throb in his ribs and shoulder. He could feel eyes on him from every side, waiting for the stumble, the slip, the proof that the cart had told the truth and he had not.

He gave them none.

He hauled himself into the saddle in one hard, graceless motion and sat it, breathless but upright, his face gone pale beneath the gold.

“There,” said Daeron softly, not without admiration.

Aerion gathered the reins in his blood-marked hand. “I will ride where I am meant to ride,” he said. “At the front. At my father’s right hand, behind my uncle the heir. My place is not in a wheeled box like freight, nor hidden behind servants and guards as though I were something to be managed.” His eyes flicked once to Dunk, then away. “Let any man who thinks otherwise say so now, and I will answer him as I answered the last.”

No one spoke.

Aerion turned the horse with more force than grace and rode toward the head of the convoy, straight-backed in the saddle though each step of the beast jarred through him like punishment. Let them watch. Let them whisper. He would ride in pain before he was carried in shame.

Chapter Text

Dunk had not meant to linger by the prince’s tents.

He had only meant to pass. That was what he told himself, at least, as he stood in the thinning dark with the chill of dawn still clinging to the camp and the ash of last night’s fires gone grey and soft beneath men’s boots. Horses stamped in their pickets. A groom yawned into his sleeve. Somewhere a pot lid rattled as a cook bent over the coals, coaxing them back to life. It should have been a peaceful hour. Men still looked twice toward the prince’s tents, and spoke softer than they had before.

Dunk had not slept. He had tried. He had lain down, turned over, turned back again, shut his eyes, opened them, and listened to the night go by in pieces. There had been the cough of some guard outside, the hiss of a dying fire, a horse scraping at the ground, men muttering in dreams. More than once he found himself on his feet again, out beneath the paling stars before he knew why. Always, somehow, his feet carried him back within sight of Aerion’s pavilion.

Ser Roland had taken a dislike to this habit of Dunk’s, and with reason, since he had been put there to stop it.

Ser Roland had eased with him some, though he still watched close. The first day he had stood over Dunk as if he were like to bolt or break something. By now he mostly only grunted and told him where to stand.

A man would have to be blind not to see Dunk was suffering. Rest did not ease him. Cold water did not ease him. Walking it off did not ease him either. He kept quiet all the same and asked for nothing, but Ser Roland had eyes.

At last the white cloak had cursed under his breath, gone red about the ears, and muttered, “Go on, then. Be quick about it.” And let Dunk slip off beyond the wagons.

Dunk had said he only meant to piss. Ser Roland had looked at him once, hard, then looked away. Dunk had wanted the ground to open under him. He mumbled thanks all the same and went off past the wagons and into the trees.

He had been coming back after finishing his business, still hot in the face and ashamed, when he saw light under the princes’ tent. He would have gone on by. He knew better than to linger near such talk. But then he heard Aerion’s name from inside, and after that he could no more keep walking than he could have flown.

He knew it was a shabby thing. Ser Roland had trusted him farther than he had before, and Dunk was paying him back poorly. But if princes were speaking of Aerion, Dunk meant to hear it.

The prince’s tent stood a little apart. Voices came from within.

“…through Bitterbridge,” Prince Maekar was saying.

“It will set every tongue in the Reach wagging,” Prince Baelor answered.

“They are wagging already,” Maekar sounded near done with the argument.

“Aye, and must we hand them a lord’s hall to do it in? A bridge full of guardsmen, grooms, servants, ferrymen, singers?”

The words hung there a moment.

Dunk shifted his weight, then stilled when the leather of his boot creaked against the packed earth.

“The boy needs a maester,” Maekar said. “He needs a roof, a bed, and to be across the Mander before sunset. Bitterbridge gives us all three.”

“And gives the realm a better look at the tale as well.”

“The realm may choke on it.” Maekar’s voice was iron. “I will not drag him through fields and goat tracks to spare a few whispers.”

No one answered at once.

Then Maekar said again, quieter now, “He is still my son.”

That landed harder than Dunk would have thought. Even through the canvas he could hear the weariness in it.

He should not be here.

A twig snapped behind him.

“What did I tell you?” said a voice, low and angry.

Ser Roland Crakehall stood there in his white cloak, broad as an oak trunk and none too pleased. In the half-light his face looked dark with temper.

Dunk felt the shame rise hot in him all over again. “I only—”

“Aye,” said Ser Roland. “You only. Back to your tent.”

He did not take Dunk by the arm, but he did not need to. He walked him back as if he were a boy of six caught stealing apples, and Dunk went red as any girl. At the tent flap Ser Roland stopped and fixed him with a look.

“Next time,” he said, “when I let you step off to ease yourself, you ease yourself and come back. You do not go creeping after princely talk.”

Dunk muttered an apology, though it sounded poor even to his own ears.

Inside, the tent was close and dark. He lay down, then turned over, then onto his back again, watching the canvas above him pale by slow degrees with the coming day. He wished there were no tent over him, only the open sky and the stars, but dawn had washed them all away.

The order came later, after sunrise had burned the last of the chill from the grass and the camp was breaking in earnest. They would turn for Bitterbridge. No reason was given. None was asked aloud. Men folded tents, packed saddlebags, muttered to one another, and rode where they were told.

Dunk fell into line beside Prince Daeron and Egg, who rode a little ahead of the main body as if they had nowhere in particular to be and therefore could go where they pleased. Daeron looked half-woken and none too pleased by it, like a man hauled from a warm bed and set to some tiresome duty. Egg was bright as morning, sharp-eyed and ready, his bald head shining in the sun like a fresh-polished nut.

“What’s at Bitterbridge?” Dunk asked after a while.

Daeron did not look at him. “A bridge, most like. The name would be a poor jest else.”

Egg snorted. “It’s House Caswell’s seat. On the Mander. You have to cross there unless you mean to waste half the day hunting some ford fit for horses, wagons, and princely tempers.”

“There are other roads,” Dunk said. “The grassy vale runs straighter.”

“Straighter is not the same as better,” said Daeron. “Not when you’ve half the court on wheels and the other half in armor. A goat path may serve a hedge knight. It serves princes less well.”

Dunk grunted. “That the only reason?”

Egg shifted in his saddle. “They need a maester.” He jerked his chin toward the head of the column. “For him.”

Ahead, riding side by side, were Valarr and Aerion.

Valarr sat his horse as if he had been born to it, easy and elegant as a song. Aerion sat too straight. That was what struck Dunk first. Too straight, too still, as if every part of him were being held in place by will alone. There was color high in his cheeks that had nothing to do with the sun. He moved little. When he did, it was quick and controlled, the way a man moved when every shift cost him something and he would rather die than let anyone see the price.

Dunk felt thick as an ox. If they needed a maester for Aerion, they were never like to go creeping cross-country.

He thought of Aerion the day before, mounting up hurt and furious after he had put steel through Ser Wandel. Dunk had wanted to shake him for a lunatic and stare at him besides. The prince was brave as any man Dunk had known, and crueler than most.

Egg lowered his voice. “He hasn’t been sleeping. I’ve seen him up half the night, walking about and biting the heads off anyone who comes near. More than common, I mean.”

“Gods,” said Daeron, “and he was such a sweet-natured lad before.”

Egg gave a snort.

Dunk stared down at his reins. “The beating he had earned. The bite… that was foul. I should not have put my mouth on him.”

Egg looked up at him at once. “Ser, no one blames you for that. Not for what happened in the fight. He was trying to kill you.”

“Aye,” Dunk said. “Still.”

Daeron glanced ahead toward Aerion and shrugged. “Egg has the right of it. My brother had the beating well earned, and if he chose to fight bare-throated like some fool mummer of old Valyria, he has only himself to blame. Pride is a poor gorget.”

Egg grinned. “They’ve told him often enough to wear an omega’s gorget, but he’d sooner die.”

“That,” said Daeron, “has always been one of his more tiresome virtues.”

Dunk said nothing to that. He only looked ahead again, and wished he had not. Aerion was still sitting too straight, as if the pain were something he might master by refusing to bend before it. He knew that sort of pride. In Flea Bottom, if folk found your sore spot, they pressed it till you cried out.

The road narrowed as they drew nearer to Bitterbridge, and with the narrowing came traffic. First a cart here, another there, then wagons laden with grain, wool, timber, barrels of whatever the Reach grew and sold and sent downriver. A pair of septas walked barefoot at the verge, hems muddied, heads bowed. Drovers shouted at oxen. Somewhere ahead a wheel struck stone and a man cursed with all the weary feeling of someone who had been cursing this same road for years.

Before long they came up on the tail of a line, slow and thick with wagons waiting their turn for the bridge. Men sat on axles chewing sourleaf, or stood in the road with reins in hand and bad looks on their faces. No one seemed pleased to be there.

Egg rose a little in his stirrups. “What’s that?”

Daeron shaded his eyes. “A lord’s bridge,” he said, “which means a lord’s toll, and therefore a lord’s delay.”

One of the carters ahead spat into the dust. Another was arguing with a man in Caswell colors farther up the line. Dunk could not make out the words, but he had heard that sort of voice before. A man being kept from where he meant to go, and charged silver for the hindrance.

Dunk glanced where Egg was looking, up toward the bottleneck and the guards and the narrow stone span beyond. Then his eye slid lower, to the roadside ditch where the grass had been worn flat by passing feet and wheels. At first he took the thing there for a rag heap. Then it stirred.

There was a man beneath them. He lay twisted in the grass with one arm flung out, as if he had fallen reaching and lacked the strength to crawl farther.

Dunk reined up.

“Ser,” Egg began.

Dunk dismounted.

The man was not dead. “Water,” he whispered.

Dunk took up his flask. The water inside had gone warm, but the man drank it as if it were a gift from the gods, swallowing what he could and letting the rest spill down his chin.

The man clutched at Dunk’s sleeve with fingers that had no strength in them. His lips were cracked. Most of the water ran back out again.

Dunk held his head until the grip on his sleeve weakened and his hand slid away.

Behind him, the line had begun to snarl. A carter swore. A horse tossed its head and sidled. Someone farther back shouted for the road to keep moving. What had been a slow crawl toward the bridge was now a knot of men, beasts, and wheels, all of it checked for the sake of one beggar in a ditch.

“Ser Duncan.”

Dunk looked up.

Aerion had turned his horse. He sat there watching, the sun in his hair making it shine pale as beaten gold. Beyond him Dunk saw Valarr too, reined round and looking back, with Egg and Daeron beside him, all of them fixed on Dunk in the ditch as if he were the strange thing there.

Valarr’s voice came first, not unkind. “He’ll be with the Stranger before the day is done. Leave him be, ser.”

Dunk wiped his wet hand on his breeches. “He wanted water.”

Daeron sighed. “Wine would have been a greater comfort. There’s nought you can do.”

Dunk looked up at that, stung. “I did not have any wine, Your Grace.”

What choice did I have, he thought, but to try and offer a little dignity to the dying?

Aerion’s mouth curved. “If you mean to show him mercy, you need only make your dagger swift and true, and keep your hand steady on his throat.”

Dunk stared at him. For a moment he thought he had heard wrong.

“I’ll not kill a man for being poor.”

Egg cast a quick look back at the road, where the line was thickening and tempers with it. “We can ask the Crone to lead him gentle,” he said. “That’s no great delay.”

Aerion rolled his eyes. “We shall reach King’s Landing sometime after my grandchildren are dead if every mud-footed wretch by the roadside is owed prayer and ceremony, ser.”

Dunk’s head came round hard. “They are. Same as any lord.”

And before any of them could answer, Egg slid from the saddle and knelt beside the man. Dunk would not have known the prayers, but Egg did. He made the sign of the seven-pointed star and began the prayer in a low clear voice, the way a septon might have done.

The beggar’s eyes opened at that. For a moment they seemed almost clear. His cracked lips moved. “Bless you,” he whispered, so faint Dunk barely heard it.

Egg bowed his head and went on.

No one said anything. When Dunk looked up, Valarr had turned his face away, and Daeron’s mouth had lost its jest, whatever answer he might have made died unborn. Only Aerion gave nothing back, save that he sat his horse too straight, his face smooth as if the words had struck some other man.

Dunk gave the beggar a last nod, as if the man could still see it. Then he looked to Egg. “Come on, lad.”

Egg rose from the ditch, brushed the grass from his knees, and climbed back into the saddle. His violet eyes were filled with tears, but he did not shed them. For a little while no one said anything. Then Valarr nodded, turned his horse back toward the road, and Aerion followed him.

Dunk mounted too, his sight set on Aerion’s back so firmly he could burn a hole through his tunic. After what Aerion had said, he did not care to lose sight of him.

The road did not allow for much space between them after that in any case. The nearer they came to Bitterbridge, the more carts and riders crowded in, until their little company was bunched tighter than before, horse to horse and knee to knee, all of them forced into one another’s company whether they liked it or not.

The line groaned forward again. Carts creaked. Horses sidled. Men muttered in the dust, waiting their turn to be halted, counted, and made to pay. Dunk looked at their faces and knew them better than he knew the men he rode with. Men counting coins in their heads before another lord took them out of hand. Their bad tempers felt closer kin to Dunk than all the princely silence ahead of him.

At first it seemed no more than the common misery of a crowded road near a bridge. But the nearer they came to Bitterbridge, the less it felt like mere delay.

Aerion seemed to have noticed it too.

He had gone still in a different way now. Not the stiff stillness of a man riding hurt, but the watchful kind. His head turned once, then again, following the men at the roadside where they were stopping carts before the bridge. One held a tally stick. Another a leather purse. A third did most of the talking, though from the set of the men around him Dunk would have taken him for no more than a steward’s underling.

Drivers argued over the count of their wheels, the weight of their loads, the worth of their coins. One man held his piece out flat upon his palm and got only a sneer for it. Another was waved aside after paying, while the wagon behind him was halted again.

Dunk saw Aerion’s eyes narrow.

He said something low to Valarr then, and pointed toward the toll men. Dunk could not catch the words, but Valarr followed the gesture at once.

Valarr’s face changed a little at that. He lifted one hand and gave a small sharp signal ahead. No order that Dunk heard. Yet the shape of the road began to alter almost at once. Guards farther up pressed their horses forward and started waving carts aside.

Men shouted. Reins were hauled. One of the toll-men was wagging his head and arguing yet when he caught sight of the white cloaks and went pale.

Their own people had shifted too, though no one had told Dunk a thing. Dunk could see Prince Baelor was at the front now, with Valarr to one side and Maekar to the other, white cloaks close about them. Dunk found himself riding in behind with Aerion, Daeron, and Egg, all of them packed tighter together than before. The empty chariot rolled after, then the grooms and the rest.

Daeron caught his look and smiled without mirth. “Did you think Prince Baelor was like to fish out a clipped penny and wait his turn?”

Ahead, one of the toll-collectors was still trying to protest, all bobbing head and fluttering hands, until the dragon banners came up behind Baelor and the words died in his throat. After that he bowed so low Dunk thought he might fold in half.

Dunk had caught flashes of red before between horses and shoulders, but now the standard rose clear above them all, the three-headed dragon rippling dark and bright in the wind. He felt the change at once. Men who had been shouting a moment before swallowed the rest of it. Drivers bowed from the waist where they stood. Others only dragged off their caps and stared. The whole road seemed to shrink back from them.

Their company slid through the village mouth as water runs through a cut in earth, everyone else pressed back to either side. A woman gathered her child to her skirts. Two carters pressed themselves hard against their own wheels. Even the men who looked sullen did so from farther off. No one wanted to be too near a dragon when it passed.

The village itself was little more than a scatter of houses strung along the road, with a timber hall leaning slightly to one side and an inn crouched where the track narrowed. Smoke rose thin from its chimney. The yard was already too full. Carts angled poorly, horses tied too close, men standing where they should have been moving. Past the crooked roofs Dunk glimpsed Bitterbridge at last, pale above the river with the bridge stretched out below. He could not see why they were slowing. They were near enough now.

“I think we’re stopping, ser,” Egg said.

He had the right of it. Prince Maekar reined up and looked once along the road, once toward the bridge, and once at Aerion. “We stop here,” he said. “For the night.”

One of the household men spurred ahead toward the well. “You there,” he called to the woman, though she looked fit to flee outright. “Where’s the inn?”

She pointed with a wet hand, not trusting her voice at first. “There, m’lord. By the hall. The one with the red shutter.”

Another servant had already ridden on before she finished, shouting for the yard to be cleared. A door shut too quickly. A woman at the well lowered her bucket in a hurry and spilled half of it.

Daeron looked toward the inn and gave a small sigh that might almost have been pleasure. “At last,” he said. “A roof, a fire, and wine that has not spent the day riding in a skin. I was beginning to fear we should be forced to sleep with decorum.”

Egg grinned. “The first time we met was at an inn, do you remember, ser?”

Dunk nodded. He had been half starved and half lost, and had mistaken him for a stableboy.

“It was not such a bad inn,” Egg said. “So this one may not be so bad either.”

Dunk said nothing to that. He was thinking of stew, thick bread, and maybe a bit of roast if the place was better than it looked. Then another thought came hard on the first. Would they expect coin of him? He had none worth the name. But surely they would not make a captive pay for his own supper. Surely.

The innkeeper came out already bowing, wiping his hands on his apron with a smile too eager to be anything but fear.

“My lords,” he said. “You honor us—”

The words had hardly left his mouth before Prince Maekar and Prince Baelor were upon him. They spoke low, too low for Dunk to catch more than the tone of it: Baelor calm, Maekar clipped, the innkeeper nodding too fast at both.

Dunk’s eye went instead to Aerion.

The prince had ridden up close to his father and was saying something under his breath, quick and sharp. Dunk could not hear the words, only see the set of his mouth and the way Prince Maekar’s face changed at them. A tightening round the eyes, a brief glance toward the road behind them, then toward the bridge.

The four of them were close enough now to hear Prince Maekar say, “Enough. We will speak of it on the morrow, when you have rested.”

Aerion’s mouth thinned. He said nothing more.

Prince Baelor turned then and saw Dunk sitting there with Egg and Daeron. Something in his face softened a little.

“Ser Duncan,” he said, and there was apology in it before ever the rest came. “The inn is not large enough to hold us all. My sons and I will take rooms within, along with Prince Aerion and the maester when he comes. The rest of the household must make camp outside the village.”

Dunk gave a shrug. “Aye, Your Grace.”

Baelor glanced toward the white cloak at Dunk’s shoulder. Ser Roland Crakehall had said nothing since the road, and stood now as he always did, broad and silent as a post driven into the earth. “Ser Roland will remain with you.”

“Aye,” Dunk said again. “That’s fair.”

If Ser Roland was to keep watch over him still, best it be beside a cookpot and not on an empty stomach.

Egg looked up at him. “You do not sound much offended, ser. Most men would not care to have a white cloak for a nursemaid.”

Dunk snorted. “Ser Roland has more cause to be offended by the task than I do.”

At that, Ser Roland gave a short grunt through the nose that might almost have been a laugh.

Behind them, back on the road, a merchant was still shouting at the toll men. Dunk could not hear the words, but the sound carried plain enough. The innkeeper’s smile grew tighter.

“My lords,” he said again, too quick, with a little bow toward the door. “If it please you. Inside. At once. We have a private room prepared.”

Prince Valarr went in first with no more than a nod. Prince Maekar did not so much as glance back before crossing the threshold, and Daeron followed as if he had been invited to a feast. Egg went too, though not before looking once toward Dunk.

Aerion lingered.

He sat his horse a moment longer, looking past the inn and out toward the bridge, his face unreadable.

Prince Baelor noticed. He stepped back from the door and laid a hand on Aerion’s knee, gentle but firm.

“Come,” he said.

Aerion’s jaw tightened, but he dismounted and went in.

Inside, the inn had done its best to look grand.

The common room had been swept in haste and hung with a few faded bits of cloth that might have passed for finery in dim light. At the far end, beneath a smoke-dark beam, they had set a long board upon a low dais for the princes, with the best chairs dragged from every corner and a pair of candles already burning though the day had not yet gone. The rest were left to trestles below.

Dunk was set with Ser Roland and the household men at one of the lower tables, which suited him well enough. He would sooner sit where he could stretch his legs than perch stiff-backed near princes who spoke in lowered voices and looked as though they were chewing on trouble instead of supper.

The innkeeper’s folk served them quick as fear. Bread came still warm from the oven, a pot of thick brown stew after it, then cheese, onions, and a heel of salt beef cut thinner than Dunk would have liked but not so thin as to shame the house. Ale followed close behind. Dunk had half feared someone might look at him hard when the bowls were set down, as if to ask where his coin was, but no one did. The innkeeper wanted them fed, quiet, and gone again before dawn if the gods were good.

At the dais Prince Baelor was speaking low to Maekar, with Valarr listening and Aerion saying something now and again in that sharp clipped way of his. Dunk could not hear the words. He saw only the bend of heads, the set of mouths, and once Prince Daeron leaning back with his cup as if whatever they discussed had confirmed some private jest of his.

Dunk might have watched longer, but the boy across from him chose that moment to speak.

“So what’s it like?”

Dunk looked round with a spoon halfway to his mouth.

The speaker could not have seen more than sixteen namedays. A broad-shouldered lad, yellow-haired, with the first down of beard trying and failing to make him older than he was. One of the household guards, or near enough. His ears had gone pink already, though whether from ale or boldness Dunk could not say.

“What are you on about?” Dunk asked.

The lad shifted, glanced once toward the dais, then back. He lowered his voice, though not near enough. “Being bonded to a prince. Is it true what they say about them?”

Dunk said, “Uh—”

That was as far as he got.

Ser Roland looked up then, slow as you please. “Finish that question,” he said, “and I’ll have you eating broth through your gums.”

The boy went red to the roots of his hair. “No, ser. I only meant—” He swallowed. “It’s just he smells a bit of ash, and I thought—”

“Thought wrong.”

“Aye, ser.” The lad dropped his gaze at once, staring down into his stew as if he hoped to drown in it. “I meant no harm.”

Dunk could see plain that he had not. The boy looked wretched now, more calf than man, and sorry enough for three offenses.

Ser Roland snorted and tore a piece of bread in half. “That is how harm mostly comes. From fools not meaning it.”

Dunk sat with his spoon in hand, feeling slower than a cartwheel in mud. Then, little by little, the words caught up with him.

He smells a bit like ash now.

Dunk blinked.

Ash?

He had smelled woodsmoke all day, and horse, and dust, and the rich good scent of stew rising from his bowl. But now that the thought had been put into his head he did not know what to do with it. He could not very well lift his own arm and sniff himself like some dog in a yard. His face began to heat all the same.

Across the room, up on the dais, Aerion laughed at something one of his brothers had said.

Dunk looked up before he meant to.

The prince’s hair shone in the candlelight like pale fire. For one foolish moment Dunk wondered whether that was what the boy had meant.

He dropped his eyes so fast he near spilled his stew.

Ser Roland saw that too, of course. “Eat,” the white cloak said.

Whatever Dunk might have said to that was lost beneath a crash from the front of the room.

The door had flown open hard enough to strike the wall. The merchant from the road came in with all the force of a storm let indoors, red in the face and loud besides, one hand still wrapped round the strap of his purse as if he thought even now some lord’s man might snatch it from him.

“I paid once already,” he was saying, not to anyone and everyone both. “Paid honest silver, and then your man says the weight is wrong and the tally’s wrong and the bridge is closed besides unless I pay again. Is this a crossing or a robbery?”

The innkeeper went white as curds.

“Goodman, no,” he said at once, hurrying forward with both hands spread as if he might push the words back into the fellow’s mouth. “Outside. We’ll have this outside.”

The merchant tried to pull away from him. “Outside so your friends can strip me quieter?”

Chairs scraped at the lower tables. No one rose, not yet, but heads had turned all through the room. On the dais Prince Baelor had gone still. Valarr’s cup halted halfway to his mouth. Daeron looked entertained. Maekar did not.

The innkeeper was bowing already, sweating through it. “Forgive him, my lords. He does not know—”

“No,” said Aerion.

It was not loud. It did not need to be.

The innkeeper froze.

Aerion set down his cup. “Let him speak.”

For a moment no one moved at all.

Dunk felt it go through the room like a draft under a door. Even Valarr looked at his cousin then. Prince Baelor’s brows rose a little. Daeron’s mouth twitched, as if he had just been handed a private jest by the gods themselves. Egg leaned forward outright.

Since when, Dunk thought, did Aerion care what such a man had to say?

The innkeeper swallowed hard. “Your Grace, he is only a merchant—”

“Yes,” said Aerion, with that smooth thin edge in his voice. “We had gathered as much. I should still like to hear him.”

The merchant stood there panting, cap crushed in one hand, fury and fear fighting in his face. He had not looked meant for princes when he came through the door. Now that he had them, plain before him on the dais, he seemed half sorry for it.

Prince Maekar said, “Well? You have made enough noise for ten men. You may as well tell us why.”

The fellow swallowed. “My lord, I came from Longtable with wool and dyed cloth for the fairs eastward. Paid the bridge toll at noon, fair and proper. Then your men stopped us again before the village and said the tally was wrong.”

“Whose men?” Prince Baelor asked.

The merchant glanced toward the door, as if half-afraid they might appear there. “Bridge men, my lord. Men in Caswell colors.”

“First they said my axle count was off. Then they said one of my coins was clipped. Then they said the bridge was overburdened and no cart would cross before dawn unless another fee were paid for holding a place.”

A murmur went round the room at that.

Aerion did not move. “How much?”

The merchant blinked. “Beg pardon, Your Grace?”

“You seem to have been robbed in several fashions at once,” Aerion said. “I asked how much.”

“Three stags at the bridge. Two more at the road. Then a silver penny to hold the cart till morning.” He licked his lips. “And when I said I had paid enough, they laid hand on my mule and told me I could fetch him back after I’d found my manners.”

Daeron let out a soft breath through his nose. “Enterprising.”

Maekar’s face had gone to stone.

Aerion held out his hand. “The coin.”

The merchant stared. “What, my prince?”

“The clipped one. Unless you ate it.”

Fumbling, the man dragged a penny from his purse and crossed the room to lay it in Aerion’s palm. Aerion turned it once between finger and thumb, no more than he had done on the road. Then he passed it to Valarr.

Valarr looked at it and his mouth set.

“Not clipped enough to refuse in honest trade,” he said.

“No,” said Aerion. “Only clipped enough to refuse when a man means to keep it.”

The innkeeper had begun to sweat. “Your Graces, there may have been some confusion—”

“There was theft,” said Maekar.

His voice cracked across the room like a thrown board striking stone. The common room went still all at once.

Egg had slipped from his bench without Dunk even seeing him move. Now he stood near the dais, listening with both hands braced on the edge of the table, eyes bright and hard.

Prince Baelor said, quieter than Maekar and somehow worse for it, “Who gave these orders?”

The innkeeper bowed too quickly. “My lord, I would need to ask the toll-master—”

“You may do so,” said Aerion, “after he is brought here.”

That earned him another look, this one from Baelor himself.

Dunk saw it plain: surprise first, then thought.

Aerion only leaned back in his chair as if this were no more than the natural course of any decent supper. “The merchant says he paid at noon. Others were halted after. The bridge was not full. The road was. Someone is taking coin twice, and doing it badly.”

Daeron smiled into his cup. “That, I think, is the part my brother cannot forgive.”

A few men laughed at that, though not loudly.

Aerion’s eyes slid toward him. “No,” he said. “The unforgivable part is doing it under our banners.”

That shut the laughter off.

Prince Baelor rose.

That did more than all the steward’s bowing and the merchant’s shouting together. Every man in the room seemed to remember his knees at once.

“Fetch this toll-master,” he said. “And the men who laid hands on the merchant’s mule. Bring the tally stick, the purse, and the day’s collections with them.”

He looked to the innkeeper then, who had gone so pale he seemed likely to vanish into the wall.

“You may bring more wine,” Baelor said, “and pray to the gods this matter ends smaller than it appears.”

“Y-yes, my lord.”

As men hurried for the door, the merchant still stood in the middle of the room clutching his cap as if he did not know whether he had saved himself or damned himself.

It did not take long.

The men sent for the toll-master came back with him between them, one hand still closed on his arm though there was no true need for it. He was a thickset fellow in a stained wool surcoat, with a tally stick at his belt, a leather purse hanging from it, and the look of a man who had expected to bully carters until dark and found himself instead before princes.

He dropped to one knee so fast he near stumbled doing it. “My princes. If there has been some complaint, I swear—”

“You make a poor picture of humility on your knees,” Aerion said. “Stand and lie properly.”

A strange little silence followed that. Even Daeron lowered his cup.

The toll-master rose.

Aerion held out his hand. “The purse.”

The man hesitated only long enough to make the thing plain, then unclipped it and passed it over. Aerion weighed it in his palm, opened it, and tipped part of the contents onto the table before him. Coins rang softly on the wood.

“The tally stick as well.”

That came off more slowly.

The merchant was still standing in the middle of the room, cap crushed in both hands. “They said my axle count was wrong,” he blurted. “Then that one of my coins was clipped. Then that the bridge was overburdened and I’d have to pay again if I wanted my place held till morn.”

“No,” said Aerion. “There was not.”

He tossed the tally stick to Valarr, who caught it one-handed and glanced it over.

“Bridge tolls,” Valarr said.

“Then there was the clipped coin,” Aerion went on. “Which you refused.”

“A bad coin, Your Grace.”

Aerion flicked the merchant’s penny across the table. It spun, rang, and fell flat near the man’s hand. “Bad enough to refuse from him. Not bad enough to remove from your purse.”

The room seemed to lean in.

Aerion reached into the toll-master’s purse and drew out another penny, then another. He set them beside the merchant’s coin in a neat little row.

“Here is one clipped more deeply than his. Here another, worn almost smooth. Yet somehow these passed inspection.”

The toll-master wet his lips. “My prince, coins pass from many hands—”

“Just so,” said Aerion. “And somehow they all pass into yours.”

Aerion’s gaze went back to the purse. He reached in with two fingers and drew out a folded scrap of parchment, worn soft at the creases from being handled too often. He opened it and held it flat upon the table.

Dunk saw writing there, though he could make nothing of it. What caught his eye was the seal at the bottom, pressed in black wax: a three-headed dragon, crudely made and wrong.

Dunk did not understand at first why the room had gone so still. Then Egg leaned close and whispered, “That’s not ours.”

Aerion looked from the seal to the toll-master.

“Treason,” he said softly.

Aerion took up the first tally stick. “One for Lord Caswell’s due,” he said. He looked at the toll-master. “And the second?”

The man said nothing.

Maekar’s voice cracked like a whip. “Answer.”

“The Black Dragon’s due,” the toll-master whispered.

Chapter Text

Aerion saw the change pass through his kin before a word was spoken. Baelor had gone very still, which in him was its own sort of alarm. Maekar’s mouth set hard; he looked half a heartbeat from calling for steel.

Valarr had marked the toll collector by the hearth, but Aerion had known him for what he was the instant he spoke: some Redding creature, by the arms upon his surcoat, though not the lord himself. The cloth was too good for a common gatherer of coppers, the speech too practiced, the insolence too easy. Here was a man long used to being obeyed by those beneath him and shielded by those above. Aerion’s hand closed more firmly round the tally.

The parchment was cheap and much folded, its edges gone soft, the ink browned by damp or handling. A few lines had been set down in a clerk’s neat hand—figures, weights, sums—and at the bottom, pressed into black wax, was a dragon.

Daeron remained as placid as ever, which soothed Aerion somewhat; had his brother dreamt death in this, he would have fled the matter as neatly as he had fled the lists at Ashford.

Around them, the villagers did not move. If anything, they bent harder over their cups, their hands, the warped grain of the tables. The innkeep had gone pale beneath his smile.

Then Aerion saw them: two men near the door easing backward through the stillness, not running yet.

Baelor saw them at almost the same instant. His expression did not alter, but something in him closed.

“Bar the door,” he said quietly. “No word leaves this inn until I know in whose name it has been moving already.”

Maekar did not wait for obedience. “You,” he snapped at ser Donnel. “The door. Now. And if either of those men sets foot outside, lame them.”

Maekar turned then upon the Redding man.

“Whose man are you?” he asked.

The toll collector tried to draw himself up beneath the badge on his breast, but there was less of him in it now. “My prince, I serve at Lord Caswell’s pleasure—”

“You serve someone,” Maekar said. “That much is plain.”

Baelor stepped forward before the man could stammer out some fresh lie. His voice was calm, but all softness had gone from it now.

“This matter will be answered before Lord Caswell,” he said. “Not here. You will come with us, and you will bring your tally, your seal, and every account by which you have taken coin in an usurper’s name.”

The strip of black wax turned once between his fingers, and the crude three-headed dragon caught the candlelight. Ill-made thing. Ugly thing. The heads were wrong, the proportions worse. It insulted the eye almost as much as the treason insulted the blood.

“Before Lord Caswell?” he said. “How convenient for them all.”

“No one is to be judged here in fear and confusion,” Baelor said sharply. “An inn is no place for the king’s justice.”

“You think him alone on his treachery?” Aerion said, looking round the room. He still held the tally in one hand, the black seal swaying beneath it. “A man does not send riders out the door the moment he is discovered unless he has friends to warn and hands to help him warn them. This inn has been serving them from the first.”

The innkeep flinched as if struck. Around him the villagers seemed to shrink where they sat.

But Aerion was not looking at him now. He was looking at the innkeep, who had gone from pale to gray.

Valarr’s eyes went to the dais they had set for them. “That was swiftly done,” he said. “We gave little warning of our coming, yet they found a platform fit for princes almost before we had crossed the threshold.”

“The food came too quickly,” Aerion said softly. “The ale too. The beds promised before we had named our number. He has been eager to be rid of us since we crossed his threshold.”

The innkeep’s lips trembled. “No, my prince, no, I only meant—”

Aerion heard Ser Rolland curse under his breath. “They’d have had scouts,” the knight said. “Someone marked us on the road and warned the inn ahead.”

Maekar’s face darkened. His gaze swept the room like a blade. “This village has harbored treason from one end to the other,” he said. “This is no inn. It is a traitor’s nest.”

Aerion felt, for one brief instant, a fierce and private satisfaction. There was his father.

The innkeep made a broken noise in his throat and fell half to his knees, clutching at the edge of the nearest table as though it might keep him upright.

“I never took none,” he blurted. “I never touched the coin, m’prince. It went to Ser Alester. Ser Alester Flowers, that’s the Seven’s truth. He’s the one as had it.”

The Redding man had gone the color of curdled milk. His uncle turned to him, set his unnerving mismatched eyes on the man.

“You will speak plainly now, and if there is any grace to be found for you, it will be found in truth.”

Ser Alester was a landed knight, they said. A hard man, but clever. He had come with promises—silver for the innkeep, favor for the Redding man, advancement, protection, better custom, better standing. All they need do was keep their eyes open and their mouths shut. Coin taken at the crossing went where Ser Alester directed. Messages too. Provisions sometimes. Not always by the same hands. Beggars carried word where mounted men might be marked. Septrons and wandering brothers passed tidings more freely than soldiers. Merchants bore coin and small goods hidden amongst honest trade upon the Mander.

“To where?” Baelor asked.

Neither dared meet his eye.

“We do not know, Your Grace,” said the Redding man. “I swear it on my soul.”

“We were never told,” cried the innkeep. “Only that it was upriver, or down, as need be. We never had the naming of it.”

The innkeep all but stumbled over himself in his haste. “Your Grace, we never meant no harm by it, not to you, not to the king, I swear it—”

One merchant near the wall, broad in the belly and rich in dye, seemed to find his courage only once the worst had been said. He pressed both hands to his chest as though affront itself had made him pious.

“Your Grace,” he said to Baelor, “no guild worth the name would ever think to dishonor the king in such a fashion. If any merchant has lent himself to this, he has done so as a rogue and not by honest leave—”

“Spare me,” said Maekar.

The man stopped as if struck.

Maekar turned back to the Redding creature. “You,” he said. “Where do we find this Ser Alester?”

The fellow swallowed. His mouth worked once before sound came. “There is a holdfast, my prince. Half a day’s ride west of here, near the old ferry road. He comes and goes, but—”

“But?” Maekar said.

“But if word has not outrun us, he may still be there.”

May. A coward’s word, Aerion thought. Yet the man was shaking hard enough now that his teeth near chattered, so perhaps fear had at last stripped him down to honesty.

His father looked as if containment would be greatly eased by the hanging of three or four men before supper.

Ser Donnel stepped forward then, one hand on his sword belt. “Your Graces, with leave, Ser Rolland and I could ride for the holdfast at once. If this Ser Alester is there, we’ll have him before you by nightfall.”

“Or his head,” said Maekar.

Ser Donnel inclined his head. “Aye, my prince.”

Baelor’s gaze shifted to his brother. “No.”

Maekar turned on him at once. “Brother?”

“No heads,” said Baelor. “Not unless he leaves you no other choice.

Baelor went on as if no one had spoken. “If a man knows he may yield and be heard, he may yet bend the knee. If he thinks there is no hope but the sword, he will fight to the death and take what truth he knows with him.”

Aerion stared at him. Had father’s mace addled him? Treason, and his uncle spoke of being heard? A man took coin in a black dragon’s name, moved word and provisions through the Mander, set scouts upon the road to mark royal passage—and Baelor spoke as if the question were courtesy.

Or perhaps that was the trick of him. Other men called it goodness, this habit he had of making mercy sound kingly. Aerion had never been so certain.

“I will ride with Ser Donnel,” Aerion said.

Then Daeron gave a soft, disbelieving laugh. “What are you, a sandwich of stupidity?”

Aerion turned his head.

Daeron spread one hand, easy as you please. “I have just watched you drag yourself half-dead through a day’s ride out of spite and bad breeding. You are in no shape to fight anyone.”

“I am in better shape than most men born to it,” Aerion said.

“Undoubtedly,” said Daeron. “And should you fall off your horse before reaching the holdfast, I am sure Ser Alester will die of remorse.”

“This is the one thing we ought not do if we mean to settle this cleanly,” Valarr said. He did not raise his voice, but there was a firmness in it Aerion had always found particularly intolerable. “You are hurt, overtired, and angry. Even whole and rested, you are not exactly fitted for calm arrests and orderly testimony.”

Aerion smiled without warmth. “Say it plainly. I am too volatile.”

Valarr met his gaze. “Yes.”

For one bright instant Aerion hated him with perfect clarity.

Baelor spared him no rescue from it. “If Ser Alester yields more readily to a king’s peace than to a prince’s wrath, I mean to give him that chance.”

Maekar’s mouth hardened. “You’ve proved your courage for one day. I’ve no need to watch you prove your folly too.”

The hurt of it rose so fast it near choked him. Maekar, after all this day, after the pain and the blood and the long miles ridden half lame to prove that he was not broken. His father’s mouth refusal sounded perilously like unfitness. For one treacherous instant, Aerion thought he might shame himself before them all.

He swallowed it.

When he spoke, his voice was steady. “Then split the force.”

That won him a moment’s silence.

Baelor looked at him. “What?”

“You and my father must take these men to Lord Caswell,” Aerion said. “The steward, the innkeep, the merchants, whatever else this nest yields. They must be questioned at once, and in person, if you mean to know how far this reaches. But you cannot send both Ser Donnel and Ser Rolland after Flowers whilst Ser Wylde is still half-spoiled from Ashford and scarcely fit to guard a chicken coop.”

Maekar’s eyes narrowed, but Aerion pressed on.

“If this is more than one knight’s private greed—if it is insurgence, and not merely theft in a black dragon’s name—then it is dangerous to keep the party thin whilst you sit questioning peasants in a hall. Nor can you wait until morning. By dawn this Ser Alester will be gone.”

That, at least, landed. Aerion saw it in them: Baelor measuring it, Maekar resenting that it made sense, even Daeron sobering a little despite himself.

“I am injured,” Aerion said, before any of them could say it for him. “I know that. But I can still ride, and you need another man of rank and weight upon that road.”

Valarr spoke at once. “Then I will go.”

“This is small enough,” he said. “A handful of men with more ambition than sense. Let me ride out. Speak with them. Have it ended before it becomes something larger.”

Aerion turned on him so sharply his leg near betrayed him.

Of course. Valarr, whole-bodied and composed, with his easy authority and his infuriating talent for making usurpation look like service.

Then, from beside the wall, Aegon said, “Ser Duncan could go.”

The room paused.

Aegon looked from prince to prince, earnest as only a boy could be whilst proposing further disaster. “He’s strong enough,” he said. “Stronger than most. And if it comes to fighting—”

Aerion stared at him.

He felt the heat of it rise so fast it was almost dizzying. After everything—after the ride, after the pain, after tearing himself bloody to prove he was still of use—they would trust the giant brute.

“Of course,” he said. “A hedge knight. Why send a prince of the blood when we may dispatch the horse boy instead?”

Aegon flushed at once. “That’s not what I meant.”

“No?” Aerion said. “It sounded very like it.”

Baelor said, “Aerion—”

“No,” Aerion snapped, then checked himself. Too many eyes. Too many ears. He could feel the whole room leaning toward them without daring to seem it.

He stepped nearer instead, close enough that what followed need not carry beyond the circle of his kin and the sworn swords nearest them.

“This is folly,” he said, low and hard. “You would not even know of this whole nest of piss and treason if I had not seen it. I am going. You may all play at prudence behind me if you like, but I am going, and you cannot stop me.”

Valarr’s answer came just as quietly.

“Fair enough,” he said. “We cannot.”

Aerion felt, for one brief instant, a vicious flare of triumph.

Then Valarr looked past him.

“But he can.”

And pointed to Duncan.

The sickness came so swiftly Aerion thought for a moment he might truly disgrace himself. It seemed to hollow him from throat to belly all at once.

Not only that Valarr should say it. That was vile enough. But that he should say it so calmly, so easily, as if this too were only another lawful instrument to be taken up when required. As if the bond were not a horror and a humiliation, but merely one more means by which better men might rule him.

Aegon made a small, shocked sound. Even he looked stricken.

Duncan only stared. “What in seven hells is he talking about?”

Daeron answered before any of the others could.

Low. Cold. Angry now.

“He means,” he said, “that it is being suggested you use the bond to master him. As men once mastered dragons. By force of command.”

Duncan went white beneath the bruises.

Aerion dared a glance toward Maekar then, despite himself.

His father had gone pale as milk. There was something near sick in his face.

“No,” Duncan said at once.

Not loudly. But with such naked refusal in it that even Aerion blinked.

“No. I would not do that.”

Daeron’s eyes did not leave Duncan’s face.

“I’d never do that,” Duncan said, harsher now, as if the thought itself had offended him. “Never.”

Aerion felt it low in his chest, a slow tightening, as if some unseen hand had closed round a thing in him that was never meant to be held at all. It had been there before—on the road, in the dark between tents, in those strange instants when Duncan’s nearness seemed to press against him even in silence—but never so sharply as now.

If the oaf spoke the right way, with enough force behind it—

Aerion did not finish the thought. He would not.

Baelor did it for him, in another fashion.

“No,” his uncle said at once, before the silence could deepen into horror. His voice was not loud, but it cut clean through the moment. “No one is commanding anyone.”

Baelor stepped forward then, putting himself squarely at the center of it, between panic and possibility alike.

“That is not to be spoken of again,” he said. His gaze passed over Valarr, Daeron, Duncan, the guards who had heard too much, and at last came to Aerion. “Not here. Not by any man in this room.”

Aerion said nothing. He did not trust his own mouth.

Baelor’s tone shifted then, from warning to order.

“This is how it shall be. Valarr will go. Aerion will go. Ser Rolland and Ser Duncan with them, and enough guards to make seizure if need be. They will ride for Ser Alester’s holdfast at once and bring him in alive, if he can be taken so.”

Maekar’s jaw tightened, but he did not interrupt.

“My brother and I,” Baelor went on, “with Ser Donnel and the rest, will take these men to Bitterbridge and put the matter before Lord Caswell before rumor outruns us all. We are not here to reap half the Reach. We are here to settle this before it turns into something worse.”

Baelor’s eyes rested on him last of all. “No one will command you,” he said.

Baelor’s words settled over the room like a lid clapped down upon a boiling pot. No one looked easy for it, but men were already moving again, and movement at least was better than that still, sick silence.

Orders began to pass. Ser Donnel turned at once to the business of sorting men, pointing this one toward the prisoners, that one toward the horses, another toward the gathering of ledgers, purses, and whatever else might serve as proof before Lord Caswell. The innkeep, having emptied himself of courage and confession alike, looked fit to be sick where he knelt. The Redding man had gone dull-eyed, as if he had at last understood that there were roads down which no badge and no smooth tongue could carry him safely.

Aerion scarcely saw them.

He was too busy feeling Valarr’s presence draw nearer. His alpha scent was near intolerable now.

Not close enough to touch. Valarr was never so careless in company. Yet somehow Aerion felt him all the same, as one might feel the coming of rain before the first drop fell. His cousin said nothing at first, only stood beside him while servants and sworn men hurried past, and that silence was in its way more provoking than speech.

At the far end of the room, Duncan had not moved either. He still looked as if someone had struck him in the face with the flat of a shield. Good, Aerion thought. Let him choke on it. Let him feel a little of the ugliness he had dragged into the world.

Ser Rolland approached first, practical as ever. “Your Grace,” he said to Valarr, then to Aerion, with the smallest pause between the two titles, “we’ll want to ride light. If this Flowers means to bolt, speed will matter more than show.”

“Light, but not foolish. If the holdfast is better manned than this creature admits, I would sooner not discover it with six swords and a prayer.”

Ser Rolland inclined his head. “Aye, my prince.”

Behind him, Duncan had at last found his feet. He came nearer slowly, as though uncertain whether he was wanted, and looking very much as if he would rather face another trial of seven than one more word about bonds, dragons, or commands.

For one hateful moment Aerion thought of telling him not to bother. Thought of flaying him with his tongue before Valarr and the guards and the whole room. Thought of saying, You have done enough.

Instead he only watched.

The big lout stopped a little way off. “They said I’m to ride,” he said, and even now he sounded more bewildered than proud. “So I’ll ride.”

It was somehow intolerable that he should make obedience sound so plain. No grasping at honor. No swelling at trust shown him. Only that dull, monstrous steadiness of his, as if being asked to hunt down a traitor knight in princely company were no more than being told to fetch water.

Ser Rolland glanced at him, took his measure in one look, and seemed to find something serviceable there.

Servants came and went around them, carrying cloaks, waterskins, a bundle of torches, a satchel of bread gone hastily hard. One groom was dispatched limping toward the stables; another ran full tilt for the yard. Outside, horses whickered and stamped in the dark. The whole inn had become a kicked anthill.

Aerion drew breath too sharply and felt the pain in his leg at once, hot and mean and pulsing. The room swayed for half a heartbeat. He hated himself for it more than for the pain itself.

Then Aegon appeared between them, red-haired and furious and trying his hardest to look princely enough for both. “They’re bringing the horses round,” he said, glaring first at Aerion, then at Duncan, then at Valarr as if all three had disappointed him in separate and important ways. “And don’t start anything before you get there. That would be stupid.”

“Aegon,” said Valarr.

“It would,” Aegon insisted. “We already found the traitors. There’s no need to become more.”

Then he stalked off before any of them could answer, which at least proved he had spent enough time amongst princes to learn the value of a retreat made at speed.

Ser Rolland returned with two guards behind him and jerked his head toward the yard. “Now, Your Graces.”

Valarr moved first. Naturally. Men made way without his asking it. Aerion followed a pace behind, because to limp ahead and be seen doing it would have been worse than death. Duncan came last among them, broad as a door and twice as awkward, ducking his head beneath the lintel as though the inn itself might take offense at his size.

The night air struck cool against Aerion’s face. For an instant it helped. The yard beyond was a confusion of lantern light, mud, steaming horseflesh, and men hauling girths tight with half-frozen fingers. Somewhere off in the dark a prisoner was crying. Somewhere nearer, Maekar’s voice cracked like an axe through timber, and another man went silent at once.

Aerion’s horse was being held for him already. Held and waiting, as if everyone had already judged that he would need help mounting.

He went cold all over.

Duncan saw it at once. Curse him, he saw too much for a man who ought to have known nothing.

The lout stepped forward. “I won’t touch you,” he said quickly, low enough that only Aerion could hear. “Not unless you ask.”

Aerion looked at him.

He hated that too. Hated the care in it. Hated the patience. Hated most of all that some small, traitorous part of him had unclenched the moment the words were spoken.

Aerion set his hand on the saddle and said, without looking at Duncan, “Pray that I never do.”

Chapter Text

They rode with too few men for comfort.

Once the village fell behind them, the road narrowed to a hard-packed lane between summer hedges and low stone walls. It was no proper war party, nor even a decent patrol, only three princes, a few guards, and two Kingsguard. And me, thought Dunk.

That evening outside the inn Ser Rolland had given him back his sword, after cutting loose the last of his bonds. The white cloak had said, I pray you swing that better than you sit a tilt, ser. Dunk had been too glad to be reunited with Ser Arlan’s old blade to mind the scorn. Bearing it, he felt more a knight than captive.

Dunk rode at Aerion’s right. He only knew it after he had already guided his horse there, when he glanced across and found the prince there beside him, bright as a blade in the sun.

The prince sat his mount too straight, as if spite were all that held him upright. His cheeks were flushed, but his mouth had gone bloodless. His left boot rode light in the stirrup, favoring the hurt leg. Yet he kept his seat cleanly all the same. Better than many men did whole.

Valarr rode beside Aerion, easy in the saddle, handsome and polished. Yet each time Valarr’s horse drifted nearer, Aerion’s own palfrey seemed to feel the check of his hand and edge back the other way, until Dunk found the prince crowding his side of the lane instead. Dunk took it for the hurt leg at first, some small awkwardness of seat the prince would rather die than name, but it happened too often to be coincidence. Egg rode behind them, uncommonly silent for once, all his bright quick curiosity turned inward.

He had insisted on accompanying the patrol, arguing a squire’s place was beside his knight. Eventually Prince Maekar had allowed him to go, if he promised to observe his cousin Valarr and keep out of trouble.

Dunk knew the boy meant no harm when he had suggested Dunk to join the patrol after Ser Alester, but Dunk had learned the hard way that a man need not intend harm to cause it.

In his mind he heard the washerwoman’s words, come back to trouble him again. You didn’t mean to bind him either, I suppose. You only claimed him before half the realm, like some starving cur in the mud. And later: To the puppet girl, you were a knight. To the prince… well. I think he would name you something else.

Dunk was sworn to obey, and Valarr was a prince. He could see the sense in keeping Aerion close, and see as well how letting him ride on might breed trouble later. Yet the thought of setting himself over Aerion, of speaking to him as master to man, sat wrong in his belly. The prince was hurt, not broken. Bound, perhaps, in some queer way neither of them had asked for, but not his to command.

Dunk didn’t even know if he could do such a thing, and he had no desire to find out.

And there were the villagers to consider. The old ones, the children, the folk with dirt under their nails and no more say in this than their pigs do. What hand had broken men in their lord’s quarrels? He thought, suddenly and unwillingly, of what it might mean for a village to be named traitor. Would they hang too? Would they burn? Would the road run red because some fool had stamped wax with the wrong dragon?

The question got too big to swallow.

“What’s to happen to the smallfolk?” Dunk asked at last. “The ones in the wells and fields. Are they all to be put to the sword?”

Valarr glanced across at him, almost surprised. “Of course not. No one’s wasting good steel on a pack of peasants.” He shifted easily in the saddle. “They’ll pay for their lord’s negligence, same as villages always do. A levy, a fine, whatever my father sees fit. This was never truly about them.”

Egg, riding just behind, said, “It’s Lord Caswell who’ll answer for it, or ought to. He’s the lord here. If treason’s been breeding on his lands, he either knew of it or failed to know, and neither speaks well of him.” The boy hesitated a moment, then added, with a gravity too old for his years, “They’ll likely be demanded hostages. And Lord Caswell will be fortunate if Bloodraven asks no more than that.”

Dunk frowned, chewing on nothing. “A levy too grand could beggar a village this small.”

“Kindness invites a second offense,” Aerion warned. His voice had gone low, almost conversational. “Fear does not.”

Egg looked at him. “The smallfolk must love their king. King Daeron is a good and gentle king, and Prince Baelor will be better still. If men are loyal, they’ve naught to fear.”

Dunk thought all the goodness in the world could not stop bellies from going hollow in winter. “The smallfolk want food in the pot and no fire at the door,” he argued stubbornly, “It matters little to them whether the dragon is black or red, so long as they’re left in peace.”

Ser Rolland gave Dunk a hard look. “Mind your tongue, ser. We are marching to put down one rebellion. We need not give men cause to whisper of another.”

“And they were aiding Ser Alester,” Egg said, a touch defensively. “Flowers is a bastard’s name. Everyone knows bastards are treacherous and wanton by nature.”

Dunk turned in the saddle to look at him. “Egg,” he said, “didn’t you ever think I might be bastard-born?”

Aerion turned his head so sharply it might have been a strike. “You are not,” he said. “Do not say that again.”

“No trueborn child would be mistaken for baseborn,” Aerion said coldly. “Trueborn sons are conceived with the Father’s blessing on them. That is why they present as alphas and omegas. That is why blood matters. Bastards are born of weakness and appetite. They are betas by nature.”

“Daemon Blackfyre was an alpha, though,” Dunk said. “Wasn’t he?”

Aerion did not so much as glance at him. “Yes, well. The Pretender was born of Aegon Targaryen and Daena Targaryen. There was dragon blood on both sides of the bed. That is rather different.”

Different how? Dunk wondered. He doubted his own father and mother had ever shared more than a patch of straw in Flea Bottom. It was not the sort of place for blessings or bonds. “In Flea Bottom,” Dunk started, “folk got hungry, got drunk, got hurt, and sometimes got children besides.”

Valarr twisted halfway round to stare at him. “You’re from Flea Bottom?”

Dunk wished he had been born mute.

Ser Rolland gave a snort. “Flea Bottom?” he said. “Gods be good. How did you survive your presenting there?”

“I wasn’t there,” Dunk said, feeling heat creep up the back of his neck. “Ser Arlan had already taken me on.”

“The old hedge knight?” asked Ser Rolland.

Dunk nodded. “He was a beta. He knew a deal about horses and not much about alphas. It… came somewhat as a surprise.”

That seemed to amuse Valarr more than it ought. The prince glanced once at Aerion, then back at Dunk, and the corner of his mouth curled. “Ah,” he said. “That explains a great many things.”

Ahead of him, Aerion said nothing at all. Yet when Dunk glanced over, the prince’s cheeks had gone almost as red as Dunk’s ears, the color high in his face and his mouth pressed tight.

Aerion’s scent, which had been all heat and spice and the sharp clean edge Dunk had come to know too well, turned suddenly richer. Warmer. It caught in Dunk’s throat before he knew what it was, near as strong as wine on an empty belly. As if in response, Valarr’s own scent went hard and sour as spoiled fruit.

He gave his horse a touch with the heel and let it go half a step forward, so Valarr was left speaking a little to his back.

Dunk glanced between them, wrong-footed. Aerion’s face had gone empty. Valarr, by contrast, rode looser than before, but there was nothing easy in the way his fingers closed on the reins.

When Aerion broke the awkward silence that had settled, his voice had the unmistakable tone of finality to it. “It does not matter what the knight has or has not learned,” he said. “What binds dragonlords is not the same as what binds common men. Targaryen bonds are their own matter.”

Dunk thought again of Valarr’s easy suggestion at the inn, how he had said it so readily, as if a bond were a bit and bridle to be taken up by the proper hands. Dunk wondered, not for the first time, what passed between the two princes when no one was there to see. Whether Valarr himself would have done it himself, had he been the one bound to Aerion.

The thought sat ill with him.

Dunk the lunk, thick as a castle wall. He was forever peering where he ought not, trying to set crooked things straight, and more often than not it was other folk who paid for it. Best stay to his own road and let princes keep their princely secrets.

___________________________

Whatever else Ser Alester Flowers had been, he had been no great hand at keeping a holding. A rough barrier of timber had been dragged half across the path, not stout enough to halt a mounted man, only enough to force him to check his pace. There was a lean-to of branches and patched canvas, a trough gone green at the edges, a split stump for chopping wood, and beside them a low stone house under old slate mottled with moss. Not a peasant’s hovel, but not quite a knight’s seat either.

Ser Alester Flowers rode out to meet them halfway.

His jerkin had once been good leather, though it had been mended too often and badly in places. One patch sat darker than the rest across his shoulder, and the stitching at his side had gone uneven where the seam had split and been drawn shut again. His sword was older than the jerkin by far. The hilt was costly work, silver chased and worn smooth at the grip, the sort of thing a poorer man might inherit and spend half his life refusing to sell. As he rode, his hand kept going back to it, fingers stroking the pommel as if to remind himself it was there.

He drew rein a few yards off and bowed from the saddle. “Your Graces,” he said. His eyes went first to Valarr, then Egg, and from them to the white cloaks. Yet it was Aerion who rode a little forward first, bright in the sun and sharp as drawn steel.

Dunk looked to Valarr without meaning to. He was the elder prince here. If there was to be questioning, it ought to come from him. Ser Alester seemed to be of the same mind, because it was at Valarr he was looking when he asked:

“To what pleasure does old poor Wyvern’s Watch owe the honor of such presence?”

“You took the king’s toll twice, ser,” cut Aerion, “once for the crown and once for its enemies.”

Only then did Flowers turn his head toward him, and even that looked an afterthought. “If a mistake was made, I’m sure it can be mended.”

Valarr’s horse moved forward a step. “You stand accused of high treason, ser,” he said, all smooth courtesy. “False levies made in the king’s name, and papers sealed with the black dragon. We are well past the matter of overbold collecting.”

“Do you deny it?” demanded Aerion.

Flowers lowered his eyes at that, as if the weight of the charge grieved him. “I deny no prince his right to question me, Your Grace. But I would beg leave to say there has been confusion here. My lands are poor, my men poorer, and not all of them so lettered or so careful as they ought to be.”

“A clumsy hand may miscount a toll,” Aerion said. “It does not conjure black wax and a false dragon.”

Flowers let that pass as if he had not heard. He turned instead, absurdly, to Ser Rolland. “Ser, if false papers were shown you, I would see them myself. It may be some fool used a seal he did not understand.”

Valarr’s mouth hardened. “A fool does not stamp black wax with a black dragon by chance.”

“No, Your Grace,” said Flowers meekly. “But a seal-cutter knows shapes better than meanings, and wax is wax when stores run low. If some petty collector pressed the wrong stamp into the wrong color, that is folly, not treason.”

“Who sealed them?” Ser Rolland asked.

Flowers spread one hand. “There are ledgers within, ser, and men who can answer that better than I. My steward keeps the tallies. If some clerk or collector ran out of red wax or erred in his sums, I would have the truth of it before I named him false.”

“Then why did he not ride out with you?” Egg asked at once. “If the matter is no more than a clerk’s mistake, why are you here alone?”

Flowers bowed his head again. “I came myself because I am loyal, Your Grace. Had I meant to hide behind clerks and tallymen, I would have sent one of them in my place.”

Egg, riding just behind, leaned forward in his saddle. “If the toll is Lord Caswell’s by law, why were your men collecting in the king’s name at all? And why would any clerk of yours have a dragon seal to hand?”

Flowers sighed. “Because men are fools, Your Grace. Because petty officers borrow names larger than their own when they want obedience, and clerks keep old seals and broken ones in their chests long after they ought to have been melted down. I do not say that is well done. Only that it is done.”

“For a man accused of high treason, you are strangely measured,” said Ser Rolland. “You speak as if you knew what charge would be laid before ever we opened our mouths.”

“What would you have of me, ser?” Flowers asked. “Bluster? Denial? I am in the presence of princes. If wrong was done on my land, I must answer for it.”

“And will you?” Aerion asked.

That seemed to strike closer. Flowers hesitated, only for a heartbeat, before pressing on. “I will answer whatever is asked of me, Your Grace. I am bastard-born, but not faithless. Vyrwel blood, if that still counts for anything. My father had this patch of land for old service, though no one living recalls the hand that granted it. Redgrass did not scour honor from the bones of every man who survived it. Some of us still keep faith with the king our fathers bled for. Old fields grow over. Old names do not.” His hand drifted once more to the old hilt at his hip.

“Cease this farce,” Aerion said. “While you prate of confusion and clerks, your tollkeeper is being questioned. Whatever mummer’s part you mean to play here, ser, it will not serve you much longer.”

Flowers turned his head then, and this time the contempt in his face was plain. Not the wary dislike he’d shown the others, but something thinner and fouler. His nostrils flared. He took in a slow breath, as if scenting the air between them, and Dunk saw Aerion go still in the saddle.

His gaze dropped at once to the man’s sword, the one he kept nervously touching. “And that,” he said. “The pommel. Show it to me.”

Flowers’s hand closed over the hilt. “It is nothing, Your Grace. An old blade. A poor heirloom.”

“Then you will not object to surrendering it.”

Flowers did object to that, though he tried to hide it. His eyes went first to Valarr, then to Egg, as if one of them might call Aerion off. Then, ludicrously, they flicked to Dunk.

Dunk felt the shift before he understood it. Beside him, Aerion seemed to gather into himself, like something drawing back before it struck.

“I said,” the prince repeated, “show it to me.”

Flowers drew back a fraction. “With respect, Your Grace, it was my grandsire’s—”

Aerion moved before the last word was out of him. He rode in close, caught the hilt in one hand and Flowers’s wrist in the other, and wrenched the sword half free. The motion was too quick to stop cleanly and too deliberate to call rash. Silver flashed black in the grooves of the pommel, and there, plain as insult, was the dragon.

But not the red three-headed dragon of House Targaryen.

Aerion held it up between them. “What is this?”

“The Reach has had the wrong dragon these many years,” said Flowers. The words came easier now, as if the sight of the thing had loosened something old in him. “Look about you, Your Grace. Dry fields. Empty granaries. Men paying twice for grain and thrice for safety. King Daeron was weak, and an omega besides. Had Daemon sat the Iron Throne, this land would not have been left to wither so.”

No one spoke. That’s madness, Dunk thought. Flowers took that silence for leave to continue.

“He would not have bound the realm up with Dorne in the first place. He would not have filled the Red Keep with their kind, strutting about with their strange ways as if they had as much right there as the blood of the dragon. Nor would he have suffered this folly of omegas drilled to lance and war as if the world had turned upside down.” His lip curled. “If the gods had been good, Daemon would have won.”

Aerion had settled into a terrible sort of calm.

Dunk saw it then, the way a man sees a storm break over a field: Egg too far forward and angry, Ser Rolland already half-turned in his saddle, hand near his sword, Valarr’s horse sidling closer to Aerion’s flank as if by instinct. Flowers stood on his own threshold with his hand reaching for his hilt and his men somewhere beyond the gate. The whole yard had the feel of men standing knee-deep in oil, waiting on a spark.

Valarr spoke first. “Daemon Blackfyre has been dead more than a decade,” he said, “and still his shadow leads fools to their graves.”

Flowers met his gaze without flinching. “Pretender or no, my grandsire bled for his king just the same.”

“He bled for a rebel,” Egg said, too quick.

Flowers’s eyes cut to him. “One dragon or another, boy, it is all the same to the dead.”

Aerion did not take his eyes off Flowers.

“Ser Rolland,” he said, “seize him.”

The white cloak moved at once. For half a heartbeat Dunk thought he might have to draw as well. Flowers was mounted still, with good muscle and not too rusty reflexes and treason on his head; a desperate man might do anything. But Ser Alester did not fight. He let Rolland drag him from the saddle and wrench his arms behind him as meekly as if he were yielding up a purse.

That struck Dunk wrong at once.

“As ever,” Flowers said through clenched teeth, “an omega sets better men to do his bidding.”

Aerion’s face did not change, but the air round him seemed to sharpen. Dunk noticed the look on Aerion’s face—not hurt, not exactly, but recognition. This was an insult he had known before. His whole life, maybe. “So this is about gender, after all.”

Flowers laughed once, short and ugly. “This is about power.”

“Whose power, exactly?” Aerion asked. “Whose name do you sell for? Who do you send the coin to?”

Flowers lifted his chin. “My answer is fit for Prince Baelor’s ears, and no one else’s.”

Aerion seemed to have run out of patience, if Dunk was to judge by the firmness around his mouth. He realised he had seen the expression once before, in a tent at Ashford, right before the prince had gone about breaking fingers.

“Light a fire,” he ordered.

One of the guards hesitated only a moment before dismounting. Valarr turned sharply. “Do not be a fool, ser,” he said to Flowers. “Tell us the names.”

The guard was already at the split stump, kicking old ash apart with his boot, feeding dry twigs and chips into the red heart beneath. Smoke rose thin and blue. Still Flowers did not seem frightened. Bitter, yes. Proud, yes. But not frightened.

Not until Aerion stepped forward with the sword in hand.

With one hard twist he tore the pommel loose from the hilt. Old silver flashed black in the grooves where the dragon had been worked. Flowers jerked against Ser Rolland’s grip then for the first time.

“No,” he said. The word came out raw. “No. That is all I have left.”

Aerion held the pommel above the growing flame. “Names.”

Flowers said nothing.

The fire licked higher.

“A name,” said Aerion, and there was nothing princely in his voice now, only command.

Flowers shut his mouth hard.

Aerion lowered the pommel into the flame.

Flowers made a sound when the silver blackened. Not loud, but ruined. For a moment Dunk thought that would be the end of him.

It was not.

When Flowers looked up again, the grief in his face had curdled to something meaner. He looked at Aerion then, truly looked at him for the first time since riding out, and what sat in his eyes was no longer caution or contempt alone, but hatred worn old as leather.

“For a prince,” he said, “you are very eager to prove yourself a man.”

Ser Rolland struck him across the mouth before the last word had quite left him. Flowers reeled, blood bright on his lip, but he laughed when he straightened.

Valarr’s voice came cold as steel. “You have condemned yourself with your own tongue, ser.”

Aerion was furious. It ran off him like heat from banked coals; his face had gone pale beneath the flush, his mouth bloodless, his eyes bright and terrible.

“Burn it,” he said.

No one moved at first.

Aerion turned, slow and deliberate, and pointed toward the low stone house, the lean-to, the yard, the patched roof gone green with old damp. “Burn this place to the ground. It is a lair for the false dragon.”

The guards hesitated. Dunk saw one of them look to Valarr instead.

“There is no false dragon,” Ser Alester spat through blood. “But the one who now sits the iron throne.”

“Burn the holdfast, yes,” said Valarr sharply, before Aerion could speak again. “Not the household. Drive out the servants, the women, the children, any man too old or weak to bear arms. Then put the place to torch. Let there be a lesson here.”

Dunk looked past them to the yard, to the trough and woodpile, to the dry earth and the fields beyond. “Not the crops,” he said. “If the fire spreads, it’s the smallfolk who’ll pay for it.”

Aerion turned his head. “Then they should have chosen their loyalties more carefully.”

“What choice had they?” Dunk said, harsher than he meant.

Valarr cut across them both before Aerion could answer. “The crops are to be spared,” he said. “The holdfast only. See to it.” He addressed the guards calmly, and then turned to face them.

He laid a hand on Aerion’s shoulder. “Easy, cousin. The oaf is right. We do not make war on smallfolk to satisfy a prince’s temper. The crown’s first duty is to protect its people, not your vengeance.”

Two of the guards had moved as soon as Valarr had said the word, one for the lean-to, one for the house, with brands snatched from the stump-fire and smoke already twisting thin about their hands. Horses sidled from the heat. Men turned in their saddles to watch.

Dunk watched them too, and a hard thought came on him all at once. Perhaps Prince Baelor and Valarr had been right to hesitate over sending Aerion on this business. The prince had wit enough, and courage past any doubt, but he did not know how to let a slight pass him by. He never yielded an inch, never let a quarrel cool, never backed from anger when anger would serve. He only knew how to drive a thing forward until it broke.

The men were looking at the fire, at the dry wood catching, at smoke beginning to crawl along the old slate and patched canvas.

Dunk never heard the first men coming.

One moment there was only the yard, the smoke, the horses shifting under them, and Ser Alester Flowers bloodied in Ser Rolland’s grasp. The next the hedges broke all at once.

They came out of the hedges, clubs and spears and old swords in their hands, desperation on their faces, round the house, over the low wall and through the half-barred lane, shouting as they ran. Spears, cudgels, wood-axes, rusty mail, patched surcoats, a few mounted men behind the rest. In half a heartbeat the yard that had seemed mean and empty was full of enemies.

That was why Ser Alester had yielded so easy, Dunk came to a horrible realisation. He had only been buying time.

The first spear took one of the escort horses in the neck. The animal screamed and went down. Behind them Wyvern’s Watch had caught in earnest, and the yard leapt red with it, men and horses flickering through smoke and firelight like figures in some hellish mummer’s show.

Everything after that happened too fast for thought.

Dunk drew and turned his horse broadside before Aerion without meaning to. It was a stupid thing to do. The prince was no maid to hide behind a shield wall. But instinct had him by the throat before sense could lay hold of him.

Aerion did not need the shelter.

The first man who came at the prince died before Dunk reached him.

Aerion moved like a thing born to war—quick, economical, vicious in all the places skill is vicious. He did not hack. He did not batter. He cut where men opened, stabbed where they overreached, turned in the saddle with impossible grace for a man who had ridden half the day with a leg that ought to have hindered him. Even so, the hurt cost him; once, when he had to wheel hard, his movement caught and checked for an instant, and the man before him lived a heartbeat longer than he should have. One man lost the fingers from his sword hand. Another took steel under the arm where his jerkin gaped. A third overcommitted and found Aerion’s blade in his throat before he seemed to know he’d made the mistake.

Dunk swore and wheeled, and near lost his own head for it.

His style had never been pretty. Ser Arlan had taught him what he could before he died, and the rest Dunk had learned from hard miles and harder blows. He fought like a wall falling. Strength, reach, weight. He could not dance a blade as the princes did, but he had never needed to. When his sword came down, men stayed down.

A young boy came at Egg with more courage than sense, a fish spear clutched in both hands. Dunk shouted and reached for him, but Egg was quicker than any boy had a right to be. He ducked as his mule shied sideways, and the spearpoint scraped leather instead of flesh. Then Dunk was there, and the flat of his blade caught the boy across the temple with a crack like a branch split for kindling.

Not dead, he hoped.

He had just time to see Egg still ahorse, hauling his mule round with both hands and shouting, “Dunk, behind you!”

Dunk turned.

A man had got in under Valarr’s horse’s head and was dragging himself up with one bloody hand, dagger in the other, reaching for the prince’s leg. Valarr had cut at him once and missed cleanly. His blade had gone where the man had been, not where he was, and in a fight that was the same as not striking at all.

Dunk leaned from the saddle and brought his sword down hard. The man folded under it.

In the same instant another thought struck him, hard and ugly.

At Ashford, the dangerous men had ridden past Valarr’s shield as if it were not there, bowing and smiling and sending him safe opponents so he might look every inch the dragon’s heir. But a melee did not bend for birth, and the middle of a fight was a cruel place to learn that particular lesson.

There was no time to think on it. A mounted man burst from the lane with a boar spear leveled for the prince, and Dunk hauled his horse round again, cursing, because if Valarr died here the whole realm would drown in the blood of it.

He met the charge hard. The spear glanced off his shoulder with a force that numbed half his arm, but his own blow stove the rider from the saddle. Horse and man went separate ways. Dunk barely saw which. Another came in from his left, and another after that, and for a little while there was no world but sweat in his eyes, steel in his hand, and the jolting shock of each blow up his arms.

When he found a heartbeat to look, Ser Rolland was cutting his way through the yard like a man reaping. No wasted motion in him. He killed one fellow with a backhand cut across the face, turned in the same breath, and took another through the throat before the first had struck the ground. That was what true skill looked like, Dunk thought: not tourney grace, not bright armor and bows, but a cold hand and a blade that never went where it need not.

Egg was still ahorse as well, making what fight he could of it. He had no strength to match a man, nor reach either, but he kept his mule moving, ducking and wheeling and shouting warnings when he saw danger coming. Once Dunk saw him slash clumsily at a hand that reached for his reins, more anger than art in it, but enough to make the man snatch back bleeding.

Valarr had learned better at last. He was no help to anyone in the crush, but neither did he shame himself again. He kept clear of the worst of it, gathered his horse under him, and stayed out of the bloody way while more apt men did the killing. For once, Dunk could not fault him for it. A prince alive and useless was better than a prince dead underfoot.

The guards who had gone to drive out the household came running back then, smoke behind them and swords bare, and with them the fight began to turn. One rebel threw down his club and ran for the hedge. Another never made it. A third was dragged from the low wall and beaten to the earth beneath mailed boots. The yard that had seemed all ambush and shouting a moment before was becoming slaughter.

And through it all there was Aerion.

Glorious.

The prince was blood-spattered and bright-eyed, pale with fury and alive in every inch of him. He rode as if horse and man were one creature, all quickness and wrath and terrible precision. He was no tourney knight, made handsome for ladies and songs. He was something older, fiercer, made for the moment steel met flesh and one man’s will broke another’s.

It came to Dunk then, sudden as a prayer: it would be a sin to cage such a man. Whatever else Aerion was—and he was cruel, vain, and dangerous as a torch in dry straw—he had been born for this. In that red, ringing instant he seemed as if the Warrior Himself had taken horse and come down wrathful into the yard.

What had Valarr been thinking, back at the inn? He had wanted to ride out himself. What had he meant to do? Talk them gentle? Smile them into obedience? This quest had needed a prince who could fight. Between Valarr and Aerion, there was no question which of them that was.

The shouting was going out of the yard. What was left now was the ugly work after—groans, horses blowing hard, a man crawling in the mud with one leg trailing wrong behind him, another on his knees with both hands over his belly as if he might keep himself from spilling out through his fingers.

Dunk turned slow in the saddle, breathing hard. Most of the dead were no soldiers. He saw no gilded helms, no fine mail, no lordly surcoats. Only men in patched wool and rough-spun, with wood-axes, fish spears, cudgels, old swords gone brown in the spots where the oil had failed. Men who ought to have been in fields, or mending walls, or gutting trout by the stream. Poor men. Fool men. Dead all the same.

And for what? To die for a bastard knight who had spent them on his grievance as if their lives were coin? None of them had gained a thing. They had come roaring out of the hedges to save one man’s pride, and laid themselves open only to feed the crows better. What difference had any of it made? None and less.

Then Ser Rolland said, “Where is Flowers?”

The question cut through what little noise remained. Dunk looked round at once. The white cloak had blood to the elbow and a dent in one shoulder of his plate, but his eyes were on the yard, searching.

“There,” Egg said, pointing toward the wall.

Ser Alester might have escaped them, had the gods been kinder or the yard less full of horses. They found him in the churned mud by the wall, half under the deadweight of the animal. His own, Dunk thought dimly, or one near enough. One stirrup was twisted under the carcass, and so was Flowers. They must have tried to drag him clear in the crush, but no one had managed it.

Aerion was the first to dismount. Valarr came after him, cursing softly when he saw what was left. Egg hung back only a moment before coming too, pale and tight-mouthed. Dunk followed last.

When the men heaved the horse enough for him to be seen proper, Dunk wished they had left it where it was. Flowers was alive, but only just. One leg was bent the wrong way beneath him. Blood bubbled dark at the corner of his mouth each time he tried to breathe. When they dragged the horse off, Flowers made a sound that turned Dunk cold. His hips were crushed. His belly had gone slack and wrong.

The ambush had come to save him, and saved him into this. Valarr swore.

“Maegor’s teats,” said Valarr. “He was for Bloodraven.”

He looked up at once, scanning the yard. A few of the rebels still lived. One was crawling for the hedge. Another staggered across the churned mud with a hand pressed to his side.

“Take them alive,” Valarr snapped to the guards. “Any who can still be taken. We may have someone to question yet.”

At that, Ser Alester laughed. Or tried to. The sound was no more than a wet rattle. Blood bubbled at his lips and ran down over his chin.

Aerion gave a small, tired sigh.

Then he drew his sword and opened Flowers’s throat before any of them could stop him.

The bastard knight died quicker than Dunk would have thought possible. One shudder ran through him. Then he was still.

“What did you do that for?” Valarr said sharply.

Aerion looked at him. For a moment he seemed almost stricken, as if the question itself had cut deeper than the blade had. “If Ser Alester could answer,” he said, “I think he would tell you he preferred the swiftness of my sword to Lord Bloodraven’s mercy.”

Dunk looked down at the dead man, and for once, he thought the prince had the right of it.

Egg stared a long moment. “He would not have lasted to Maidenpool,” he said at last. “Not as more than meat.”

Ser Rolland came back blood-splashed and breathing hard. “Three alive,” he said. “Trying for the hedge.”

“Good,” said Valarr at once, and the word came out near a prayer. “Seven be praised for that.”

Baelor would praise that, Dunk thought. Maekar too. The realm liked living prisoners. They made finer shows of justice.

They brought the captives in a moment later, bound at wrist and elbow, bloodied and stumbling. One had a broken nose. One limped so badly Dunk wondered how far he had meant to run. The third was no older than Egg.

Dunk looked at him, and Egg did too. The boy had mud on his face and terror in his eyes, and for one foolish instant he looked less a rebel than some miller’s son hauled from the wrong crowd at the wrong hour. Then Ser Rolland and another guard jerked his arms behind him, lashed his wrists tighter, and flung him belly-down across a horse. The boy made a small sound when his ribs struck the saddle.

Dunk looked away.

So this was what it meant to serve the blood of the dragon.

“None of this seems right,” he muttered.

Egg heard him. Of course he did. The boy’s mouth tightened. “Mayhaps you were better when you were a hedge knight, ser.”

Dunk glanced down at him. “Better?”

“Freer,” said Egg. “When your choices were only your own. Before every choice grew heavy with the weight of the realm.”

Chapter Text

They came into Bitterbridge at dusk with blood on them.

The light had gone copper by then, thick and low across the road, so that the mud shone red-brown under the horses’ hooves and every cartwheel seemed rimmed with rust. Dunk sat sore in the saddle and felt each step of his horse up through his spine. He wanted water, sleep, and most of all, an end to the day. Since dawn it had been one hard turn after another: the bridge, the inn, Wyvern’s Watch, the flight, the men in the trees, Flowers dead, the three they had taken alive. Bitterbridge had begun to feel like a mercy simply because it was not the road.

Egg had been silent the entire journey.

He rode near Dunk, sullen and sharp-faced, his gaze fixed again and again on the youngest of the prisoners. The boy had been flung him belly-down across a horse, wrists bound and shoulders slumped with pain and shame, his cheek gone dark where someone had struck him. Every time the horse jolted, he flinched as if bracing for another blow. Egg kept looking at him and then away, then back again.

Despite his mind’s protests, Dunk’s very own self demanded him to turn his head to the princeling that was the root of all his troubles.

The prince no longer sat his horse with that hard, unnatural straightness he had held all day. It had given way to a tiredness that seemed to drench him to the bones. His shoulders were beginning to slope. Once his weight tipped badly to one side and only the saddle horn kept him from pitching farther. Twice in the last mile his gelding had chosen the line of the road for him, and once Aerion had been slow to gather the reins back in.

The worst of it was his scent.

It came and went with the evening air, catching Dunk unawares beneath the smells of horse and blood and leather gone sour with sweat. Heat. Spice. Something richer now, thicker, overripe almost. Each time it reached him, Dunk had to fight not to shift in the saddle like a man with a cramp. It set his teeth on edge, his gums throbbing, and made his own skin feel too tight over his bones.

Valarr could smell it too. Dunk was sure of it by the way the prince kept easing his horse nearer, riding guard in little half-circles. Once his hand came half-lifted from the reins when Aerion swayed, only to settle back again at once when the prince righted himself. Valarr’s face gave nothing away, but there was a tightness about his mouth now that had not been there before.

Ahead the road broadened and the walls of Bitterbridge rose out of the copper light.

They were handsomer than Dunk had expected of a bridge town. Not some bare toll-post and muddy gate, but old worked stone pale as bone in the dying sun, with towers set at either side of the river road and carvings worn smooth by weather and years. Horses and men were worked there together in the stone—centaurs, Dunk realized after a moment, or what some lord’s mason had meant for them, with longbows in hand and curling beards upon their human faces, half-wild and half-proud. Ivy had got into the lower seams in places, and smoke had blackened the stone above the gate where folk had lived and cooked and quarreled beneath it for years untold. It was handsome, aye, but lived-in handsome. A place meant for use, not songs.

Men had already seen them coming.

A knot of riders spilled out from the gate to meet them, hooves striking sparks where the road ran stony. One bore a lantern, though the light had not yet wholly gone. Another was a heavy man in a dark surcoat worked with centaurs and chevrons, donning good mail and a firm grip on his sword hilt. A third wore the same colors Dunk had seen already on the tollkeeper, and that he marked at once, though he could not have named the man or his place in the house. Half a dozen more came behind them, armed and sober-faced.

Dunk saw them, and for one foolish heartbeat felt relief loosen something in him. Then he realised none of them had the look of men riding out in welcome.

They reined in short of the party and bowed from the saddle, but Dunk’s eye had already gone past them.

Inside the gate, in the deepening light beneath the towers, Prince Baelor and Prince Maekar were waiting. Prince Daeron stood with them, and beside them a man Dunk took for Lord Caswell only because the others made room for him. He did not look like any lord Dunk had ever seen. One shoulder sat higher than the other, and his hands had gone queer and swollen, the fingers bent awry as old roots. Behind them servants and men-at-arms were held back in a knot, all of them watching too hard. No one there looked surprised to see blood.

Beside him Ser Roland gave a low grunt through the nose. “Well,” he said, not loud enough for any lord to hear, “that’s a cheerful sight.”

The Caswell household men approached hesitantly, but neither prince gave them their orders.

Aerion could not. He only sat there swaying faintly with the horse’s last step, white about the mouth beneath the fever in his cheeks. Valarr’s horse edged nearer again, near enough that their stirrups might almost have touched, and this time Valarr did not seem to care who marked it.

Then Ser Roland said, sharper, to the riders before them, “Take the prisoners first. The youngest too, and mind he does not slide from the saddle before you have him.”

Two of the household men moved at once for the prisoners, one catching the youngest. The boy stumbled on his bound hands and near went to his knees. Egg flinched as if he had felt the jolt himself.

This can’t go on forever, Dunk thought. I must talk to the lad.

Together, bloodied and swaddled, half mounted and half afoot, they passed beneath the gatehouse and into the outer yard. The short distance felt gloomy in the dusk that had deepened into true evening. Torches had been lit above the gate, and their fire made the pale stone look honey-red in places and black in the cracks.

Lady Caswell stood at the inner threshold with a servant behind her with clean cloths over his arm. She was younger than the man Dunk took for her husband, dressed soberly but well, with the sort of stillness that made other folk move quicker round her. She did not come down into the mud to meet them.

Prince Valarr was first to dismount. He did it cleanly, despite the long day, and went at once to his father with his head bowed the proper measure, all grace and duty. “Father,” he said, and there was humility in it, not showy, but plain enough for all to see.

Maekar’s gaze passed over him only briefly before going to Aerion, still in the saddle and near done.

“The maester,” he snapped. “Now. My son is bleeding.”

The old man came hurrying from within with two boys at his heels, his chain glinting as he crossed the yard. One look at Aerion and he clicked his tongue. “Have you set yourself to reopening every stitch, boy?” The maester put a hand to his good leg and another to the saddle, steadying him before he could try to come down and make worse of it.

One of the boys stepped forward with a cloak, and the maester drew it round Aerion’s shoulders and across his lap, quick and practiced, shutting him from the staring yard as much as cloth could. Then he took fresh-folded linen from the second boy, laid it over the soaked dressing at Aerion’s thigh, and pressed.

Aerion’s hand tightened on the pommel. His mouth went hard, but he did not fight him. He looked too battered for that, and too spent.

“Hold,” the maester muttered, more to the wound than the prince, keeping the pressure there until the fresh red seep slowed beneath his hand. Only then did he bind it fast and firm over the old dressing, his fingers deft despite their age.

Then Baelor said, very quietly, “Where is Ser Alester Flowers?”

Silence held for half a heartbeat.

Aerion, still being tended by the assistant, lifted his head. “Dead,” he said.

Maekar swore. It seemed to wake the whole yard.

Men moved at once after that. The three prisoners were dragged clear of the horses and handed over to Caswell’s men, not gently. One of them found his feet and stood cursing through a broken mouth until the man in chainmail and heavy heraldry struck him once across the face and knocked the noise out of him. Another only blinked as if he had not yet understood where he was. The youngest crumpled when they pulled him down and might have gone sprawling in the mud if the ginger one had not caught him by the rope first and jerked him upright like a hound on a lead.

Aerion tried to swing down on his own and nearly folded for it. One of the maester’s helpers caught him under the arm before he could pitch outright. Aerion’s face went white with rage and pain together, but he let the man hold him.

Baelor’s eyes had gone from Aerion to the prisoners and back again, measuring which hurt must be seen to first and which could wait. “Take them under guard,” he said. “Separately.”

“Separately?” Lord Caswell echoed. His voice was thin and strained, as if dragged over gravel. “My prince, these are peasants.”

Baelor turned his head. “Aye,” he said. “And peasants can carry word as well as lords, if someone teaches them where to run.”

That seemed to shrink the yard a little.

Lady Caswell had not moved from the threshold, but Dunk saw hand lifted once, small and precise, and two servants vanished inward at once while another stepped forward with more lanterns.

Aerion stood in the middle of it all, breathing through his mouth now, one hand white-knuckled on the maester’s assistant’s sleeve. The yard lanterns found too much of him: the sweat bright at his temple, the strain in the set of his jaw, the ugly flush in his face.

Daeron saw it as clearly as Dunk, however. He came over without haste, as if the thing were no spectacle at all, and with a murmur too low for most to catch, took the maester’s assistant’s place beneath Aerion’s arm. “I did warn you,” he said under his breath, “that galloping after glory is a poor remedy for self-destruction.” Aerion only turned his head and looked at Daeron, as if he could not decide whether to be grateful, offended, or both. For a moment he stood there, white about the mouth and furious to need the help, but once Daeron had him he managed to gather himself again. By the time they moved, he was standing straighter, as if it were pride, and not his brother’s quiet hold, that kept him on his feet.

“Father,” Aerion said. “These men were captured trying to aid Ser Alester Flowers’s escape.”

Lord Caswell had begun to look sick. Dunk did not know enough of lords to say how much of this was surprise and how much shame.

His gaze went to the three men on their knees with their hands bound behind them, one bloodied about the mouth, another squinting through a swelling eye, the third staring fixedly at the dirt as if he hoped it might open and take him.

One of the prisoners spat blood into the mud. “We done nothing,” he muttered thickly.

The heavy man in chainmail Dunk could only assume to be Caswell’s master-at-arms rounded on him. “You’ll say what you done where it’s asked of you.”

“Take them inside,” said Maekar. “All of them.”

Baelor turned to the hunched Lord Caswell, “My Lord, we require use of your dungeon.”

“Of course, Your Grace, you have it.”

The order set the place moving once more. Guards turned the prisoners toward a side door. Servants scattered before the princes’ path. The maester murmured something low to Aerion that Dunk could not hear, and got no answer for it. Then the whole company began to draw inward, out of the copper light and into the hall.

Dunk had not thought to put his hands on Aerion again so soon, nor before so many eyes.

But the stairs were steep, the prince’s strength was near spent, and Daeron, for all his princely ease, was no match for dead weight and stone steps. So Dunk took Aerion’s other side when Daeron shifted him nearer and said nothing of it. Aerion did not thank him. He did not protest either.

Even so, Dunk felt the sting of being watched. If he lifted his head, he’d be met with Prince Baelor’s unmatched gaze on them.

Dunk kept his eyes on the steps.

Quietly, so as not to carry, he said, “What happened here?”

“Father and uncle came ahead with Redding and the innkeeper,” Daeron said softly. “Caswell was hoping this might have been laid at one knight’s door. Redding lost his courage almost at once. It will be a deal less convenient now that you’ve come back with a corpse. Dead men are awkward things to blame. They cannot be bullied into confessing, and not even the Watch is desperate enough to take them.”

Aerion gave the smallest shift at that, as if the word dead still struck somewhere raw.

Daeron went on, not ungently. “Caswell is blaming misrule, bad servants, false levies, all the usual songs weak lords sing when their roofs begin to leak treason.”

“So Flowers was meant to bear it all,” Aerion murmured, pale with pain and contempt alike. “One rotten board cut out, and the house declared sound.”

“And Baelor?” Dunk asked.

“Waiting,” Daeron said. “Which in him is more dangerous than shouting.”

They gained the top of the steps and passed into the hall. Egg had come in after them and now hovered close behind, small and quick, and by seeming not to mean it at all contrived to put himself half in Valarr’s path. Valarr had drawn in too near on Aerion’s other side, near enough that Dunk saw the set of his mouth harden when there was no room to come closer still, and when his eyes met Dunk’s there was annoyance plain in them, as if this too were somehow his fault.

Dunk felt the change at once. Servants stood where servants ought, moved when they were needed, vanished when they were not. At the far side of the entry, guards were already drawing the three prisoners away.

Egg looked round once and frowned. “It’s very tidy,” he said.

Dunk glanced about, not seeing what the boy meant. “Aye,” he muttered. “But I do not know that now’s the moment to admire the hall, lad.”

Aerion turned his head the little he could and fixed him with a look. Even half-dead, it had scorn in it.

“You great oaf,” he said softly. “It means this puppet show was rehearsed.”

Lord Caswell’s voice filled the hall.

“…a monstrous outrage, my princes, monstrous—upon my lands, under my roof, and without my knowledge, I swear it—if Ser Alester has presumed to use my name so basely—”

He did not cease as they entered. Not for breath, not for shame, not for the sight of his prince half carried up the stair. The words seemed to spill out of him of their own accord, protest and horror and submission all in one unlovely stream.

Baelor cut Lord Caswell off with no more than a lifted hand.

“Enough,” he said. “I will hear the account entire.”

That stilled the old lord more effectively than any shout might have done. His mouth worked a moment longer, but no sound came of it. Baelor’s gaze had already gone to Valarr.

Valarr stepped forward at once. He did not raise his voice. He had no need to. He gave the tale cleanly, stripped of heat and dust and the shouting that had gone with it on the road: Wyvern’s Watch, Ser Alester’s denial, the black dragon on the pommel, the confession, the ambush, the dead, the three men taken alive trying to help Flowers flee.

Dunk watched Prince Baelor and Prince Maekar as he spoke. Neither interrupted. But he could see them working over each piece of it against what they had heard already. A tightening about Prince Baelor’s eyes at one point. A darkening in Prince Maekar’s face at another. Redding had told them one thing, Dunk thought, and the innkeeper another, and now Valarr was laying the third piece atop the first two and making one ugly whole of it.

When Valarr came to Flowers’s death, there was the smallest pause.

“Dead,” he said. “Crushed beneath a horse in the mêlée that followed. He was not fit to be brought back.”

Maekar swore again, lower this time.

For a moment no one spoke.

Then Lady Caswell did. Until now, she had not raised her voice once. Had not wrung her hands, nor fluttered, nor rushed in with pity for Aerion or horror for the prisoners or outrage for the scandal. She only stood there in sober silk with her face composed and her eyes very still, watching everything.

“My princes,” she said then, and her voice was calm enough to make Lord Caswell’s sound all the more ragged by comparison. “Surely there is no profit in trying to wring sense from half-fainted men in a doorway.”

Every eye in the hall seemed to shift toward her then, though she had not moved from where she stood.

She went on, not hurriedly, and not as if she begged any favor. “Your men are bloodied, dust-choked, and hungry. Mine as well. The prisoners are secured. Nothing that has happened these last hours will unhappen because a question waits the length of a meal.” Her gaze passed once, neatly, over Aerion, over Dunk, over the mud still drying on Ser Roland’s boots. “Supper is already being laid. Bread and salt are under my roof. Let all of you eat, wash, and breathe before this matter is taken up again.”

Lord Caswell made as if to speak, but one look from her checked him better than Baelor’s hand had done.

Daeron, standing near enough for Dunk to hear, murmured, “Clever lass.”

“There must be some reasonable accounting for what has passed,” she said. “And if not, it will keep until my lord prince has been given the truth with clear heads before him, not empty bellies and a hall full of spent men. Let it be spoken of as gentlemen after meat, not fought over like carters in a yard.”

Baelor did not answer at once.

His eyes went to way the guards had taken the prisoners. To Aerion, pale and shaking between Dunk and Daeron’s shoulders. Then, very briefly, to Maekar.

Dunk was no great strategist, but even he could feel the dilemma. They were under another man’s roof. They were not so many in number as to be at ease. And bread once broken before witnesses was not a small thing, not with treason already in the air like smoke.

At last Baelor inclined his head.

“Supper, then,” he said. “And afterward we will hear the rest.”

Lady Caswell bowed.

_____________________________

The hall itself was large enough for a decent lord, stone-floored and timbered high, with rushes newly strewn and a long board already set near the hearth. The place smelled of woodsmoke, lamp oil, clean linen, and meat fat warming somewhere beyond the screens. It should have felt welcoming. Instead it felt held tight, as if the whole house had drawn a breath and not let it out.

Servants began setting the board in earnest then. Bread first. Salt after. Then trenchers, cups, knives, steaming platters borne in under cloth. The sight of it made Dunk’s belly wake all at once, mean as a kicked dog. He had not noticed how empty he was until the smell of supper reached him.

Dunk did not know half the games lords played with food and forms and old custom, but if those games put hot meat on a board men were meant to sit and and eat before the knives came out for a little while, he was not one to complain. His belly was gnawing at him, and lord knew when next he would eat like this.

The high table stood nearest the hearth, raised only a little above the rest, but enough that every eye in the room was drawn there first. Prince Baelor was given the center seat, as was his right. Prince Maekar sat at his right hand, Prince Valarr at his left. Aerion was placed beside Valarr, near enough to the fire to warm him and near enough his kin to be watched without the watching seeming pointed. Daeron took the outer place beyond Maekar, lounging into it with the ease of a man too princely to be out of place and too contrary to sit where he was meant unless made.

Lord Caswell was not seated amongst them at once. That struck Dunk. For a little while the old man stood below the dais with his lady beside him, waiting until Baelor himself gave leave for him to join them. When he did sit, it was lower in honor than he would have had in his own hall on any other night, and everyone there knew it.

Dunk and Ser Roland were placed below with the household knights and sworn men, near enough the dais that a prince might call to them without shouting, far enough that no one need pretend they were table fellows. Egg was made to sit above Dunk and below his elders, close enough to the dais to hear most of what was said, which pleased him not at all. Dunk saw his eyes keep straying toward the side passage where the prisoners had vanished.

Dunk noticed one more thing then, thick as he was. No one had sat him where he might easily leave, nor where Aerion might easily come near him without the whole hall seeing it. Whether that was chance or care, he could not say. But Ser Roland to one side and Ser Donnel to the other made a neat sort of cage.

Wine was poured first for the princes, then for Lord Caswell, then downward through the hall in due order.

Dunk could make little enough of lordly suppers at the best of times. This one was worse. Men spoke softly, cups were filled before they stood empty, trenchers changed hands, and all the while the whole table seemed stretched tight as a bowstring. No one raised his voice. No one laughed overmuch. Yet Dunk would sooner have sat by a campfire with outlaws than under that roof with every man and woman pretending not to feel the thing in the room.

“Must we all sit as if waiting on our own hanging?” Daeron’s voice cut through the silence. “For pity’s sake, send for singers. Silence is the cruellest course you’ve set tonight, my lady.”

At a word from Lady Caswell, two singers were fetched in with a harp between them, pale as whey beneath the hall’s watching eyes. They conferred only a moment before the older man set hand to the strings.

Dunk knew it by the turn of the melody and felt his stomach sink. Ill chosen, the sort of thing men sang with tankards roaring about gallant outlaws. Of all the cursed foolish choices.

“Not this one,” said Baelor.

The word fell clean as an axe. The singer’s hands died on the strings.

The older singer swallowed, cast one frightened look toward the high table, and changed the chord beneath his hand. This time the air came lighter.

Dunk knew that tune too.

He wished he did not.

A bear there was, a bear, a bear!
All black and brown, and covered with hair.
The bear! The bear!

No one told them to stop, even if it was fit for a warmer hall than this one. In another place it might have raised a laugh. Dunk half wished they’d go back to playing The Day They Hanged Black Robin.

Lord Caswell had scarcely sat before he began apologizing. He offered chambers, their cells, a hall at their disposal, their rookery, their maester.

“My princes,” he said, fretting at his cup with those queer swollen hands of his, “you had no warning sent before you, else I would have had a better board laid for you. Such as it is, it is yours, and all within my walls besides. I beg Your Graces’ pardon that Bitterbridge offers no finer welcome.”

Lady Caswell, seated a little lower, said calmly, “In truth, my lord, the last word we had put the royal party still at Ashford.”

At that the maester, who had been hovering near Prince Aerion with all the grave importance of his chain, cleared his throat and said, “There have been some very queer reports out of Ashford.”

Aerion gave a soft, humorless laugh. “Strange how slowly truth must travel, yet give a lesser man a tale of high blood that may be mocked and it arrives at a gallop.”

Prince Baelor spared him by turning the matter.

“It is true,” he said. “There was a Trial of Seven at Ashford. The first in more than a hundred years.”

Maekar exhaled hard through his nose, a sound nearer a growl than a sigh. He looked as though the whole business had left a bitter taste in his mouth.

Lady Caswell’s eyes moved then, not to Aerion, but to Dunk, seated where no man like him had any right to be beneath a lord’s roof while princes supped. Her face did not change.

“Yes,” she said. “I should think it must have been a remarkable affair indeed.”

Dunk felt the words strike him though they were politely spoken.

Prince Baelor cleared his throat.

“You were not at the tourney, Lord Caswell.” It sounded mild enough.

Lord Caswell dabbed at his mouth before answering, though he had scarcely eaten “No, my prince. To my lasting shame, no. I am not the rider I was.” He gave a little motion with one of his swollen hands, and Dunk had never seen hands like that before.“ These joints have been traitors to me these last years. The maester names it gout. It makes a horse a hard friend and a tourney ground harder still. I delegate where I must.” He gave a breath that might have passed for a laugh in a stronger man. “A pity I was not there all the same. I might have had the honor of seeing—”

“Yes, yes” said Maekar. “We can all see you’re an old cunt. But unless gout has taken your whole line with it, I assume House Caswell still possesses a son of fit age.”

“My son is at Evenfall Hall, Your Grace,” said Caswell quickly. “Squiring there. He is able-bodied, aye, but absent by leave and long arrangement. And these summer winds…” He gave a helpless little spread of the hand again. “They delayed crossings. Had I known what was moving in my own lands—”

Valarr spared him with a politeness that somehow did not feel merciful. “How old is your son, my lord?” he asked, turning his cup idly between his fingers. “I had taken Lady Caswell for a younger wife.”

That made Dunk look up.

Lady Caswell answered before her husband could spill over himself again.

“I am his second wife, Your Grace,” she said. “We have been wed some years now.” Her face did not alter in the least. “No children have come of it. We are both betas, and such things are not always easily managed. I am sure their Graces understand the difficulty.”

Maekar’s smile at that was thin as old parchment. “In truth, my lady, no. Most Targaryens present one way or another.”

Lady Caswell lowered her eyes just enough to make the courtesy of it sting. “Of course, my prince. More one way than the other, perhaps.” Then she added, with perfect smoothness, “Prince Aerion’s designation having been so unfortunately made plain before half the realm, while His Grace has ever borne such rarer matters with all dignity. Father Above grant King Daeron long life.”

Lord Caswell gave a strained little laugh, eager to smooth what had not yet broken. “Ah, yes, well. No house can reckon for every mischance God sends it. Yet Your Grace, and yourself, my prince, bore yours with such stern restraint that no disorder came of it. We are poorer creatures here.” His swollen fingers fluttered weakly at his cup. “And for a hedge knight set where no man could have foreseen him, strange turns at tourney and on the road besides! No house can reckon for every rash act of every low man under heaven, I fear. Not even the greatest.”

Egg heard it too. He sat up straight at once. “Ser Duncan fought in a trial before gods and men,” he said. “He did not lie in wait on roads and take coin twice over.”

Lord Caswell spread his hands, or tried to. “No insult was meant, Your Grace. Only that the world is wider than any lord’s grasp. Who at Ashford could have predicted what came to pass? Who can say he governs every hand beneath him so tightly that no folly can spring up unlooked-for?”

Daeron smiled faintly into his wine. “If Ser Duncan is to stand for all unforeseeable human disorder, my lord, he has grown wonderfully useful to weak men.”

The maester cleared his throat. “The reports said Prince Aerion fought in his own trial, which I had taken for one of those embellishments rumor grows in the telling. Surely that part at least—”

“Of course I fought in my own trial,” Aerion interrupted. “My mother was Dornish. She saw I was raised in the manner of her house.”

Prince Maekar’s mouth tightened. “Yes,” he said. “And so is Lady Myriah, the queen.”

Daeron smiled into his cup. “I trust our good maester does not mean to question the customs of the crown’s own house. The Dornish being so small a presence at King Daeron’s court, and your lord so little troubled by scrutiny as to loyalty.”

Lady Caswell was the one who turned it back to safer ground, if any ground that night could be called safe.

“Whatever follies lesser men may borrow from greater quarrels,” she said, “I would pray Your Graces not to think the whole of Bitterbridge sick because a few men proved rotten. If Ser Alester overstepped, he did so under false pretense and to the shame of this house, not with its blessing.”

Lord Caswell seized on that at once. “Regrettable,” he said. “Monstrously regrettable. I can call it nothing else. And fortunate—most fortunate—that Prince Valarr saw these men for what they were and offered himself to bring them to justice before the rot spread further.”

Their steward, who Dunk had learned was named Alyn Middlebury, sat a little below him and bowed his head at once. “My lord speaks true. Had Your Grace not moved so promptly, there is no saying how much farther the rot might have spread. Well done, Your Grace.”

The heavy man in a surcout had turned out to be Ser Braxton Lyberr, the master-at-arms, who grunted into his cup. “Aye. There was speed in it, and sense both. Fit for a prince, it was. Another night and Flowers might have been gone for good.”

Gwayne Redding, who had so far looked as if he would rather have been anywhere else in the world, found his voice enough to add, “My cousin was ever a fool, my prince, but not bold. Someone gave him courage. It was wisely seen.”

Aerion, who had so far said very little, lifted his head a little from where he sat too pale by the fire. His cup untouched, and if his mouth had gone bloodless and thin, and his back was too straight for comfort.

Valarr, for his part, bore it as he bore most things: with grave courtesy and just enough modesty to make contradiction seem mean-spirited. “My lord is generous,” he said. “We were all of us served by haste, and by Prince Aerion’s sharp eye.”

The room still bent toward Valarr all the same, the way flowers bent toward the sun whether they meant to or no. The tune of Oh, Lay My Sweet Lass Down in the Grass started filling the hall.

Daeron’s mouth twitched. “A remarkable instinct for the worst possible song at any given moment. I look forward to Bessa the Barmaid once the fish is served, and Farewell, My Brother with the sweetmeats, and then we shall all have to pretend surprise when he turns up floating in the Mander.”

After that the talk fell away into lesser things, or what passed for lesser things under such a roof: the state of the road, the river traffic, harbor masters becoming fussier about manifests and passengers, late summer rot in the barley, whether the ferrymen had complained of high water, whether the west road was still passable after rain. From there it strayed farther. A ship out of Myr delayed twice over and said to have buried men at sea. A fever in Tyrosh, or Lys, or both, depending on which merchant had last lied most persuasively. More riders on the roads than there had been in years past. A wandering brother turned back from a market town because no man could say cleanly whose sermons he had been preaching. How it was harder for hedge knights to find employment these days.

Dunk caught little of it save names and places. It was courtly talk, meant perhaps to cool tempers or prove that men could still speak as gentlemen with prisoners below and treason under the boards At last the final trenchers were cleared. One by one men set down their cups and pushed back from the table. Benches scraped. Cups were set down. The whole hall seemed to gather itself again, the brief pretense of ease falling away like a cloak shrugged from the shoulders.

“We will begin the proceedings now,” said Baelor.

Then his gaze shifted. “Valarr. Aerion. Aegon. Ser Duncan. Attend me.” He turned to Lord Caswell. “My lord, I have need of your private solar first. There are particulars of Ser Alester Flowers’s apprehension I would hear entire before the wider questioning begins.”

It was not truly a request.

Lord Caswell bowed at once, all submission and strain. “Of course, my prince. It is yours.”

Valarr was on his feet almost before the words were finished. Aerion rose too, but the movement cost him. Dunk saw it plain: the brief whitening of his face, the hand that caught the table edge and held there half a heartbeat too long, the way his shoulders tightened as if to pull the whole of him upright by force. He would have gone on all the same. That was the worst of him and the finest.

Dunk stood too.

“Your Grace,” he said.

The words came out rougher than he meant them to. Too many heads turned at once. He felt them and hated it, but there was no drawing it back now.

Baelor paused. “Ser Duncan?”

Dunk glanced once at Aerion, who was still standing by spite and not much else, and then back to the prince. “Prince Aerion fought valiantly against the outlaws who tried to help the traitor,” he said. “But he was at disadvantage from the start. Surely the maester can see to him before he is questioned further.”

There was fury in his face, and humiliation too, black and bitter. Aerion’s hand bit hard into the table edge

Dunk cleared his throat. “Beg pardon, my princes. He—” His eyes flicked once to Aerion’s leg and away. “He ought to be shown to their chambers.”

Baelor’s eyes narrowed a little, not in anger, but in thought. He looked from Dunk to Aerion and then to the maester still hovering near the hearth.

The old man did not wait to be invited. “Your Grace,” he said, “the prince should indeed be seen to. At once.”

Maekar exhaled once through his nose. Then he looked full at his son, and whatever he saw there seemed to answer the question before any man gave it words. “Very well,” he said. “The boy is no use to any man if he falls senseless on the floor.”

Aerion’s head turned a fraction at that, enough to show the flash of temper in him, but Baelor had already decided the thing.

“Yes,” he said. “Prince Aerion will be tended now. We can have his account on the morrow.”

“Ser Rolland,” said Maekar, “see him to his chambers.”

“Aye, Your Grace,” said Ser Rolland at once.

The maester’s assistants were moving even before the prince finished speaking, one coming up at Aerion’s left hand with the timid look of a man approaching some bright dangerous beast.

Aerion looked as if he might sooner bite than lean.

Daeron saved him from that much, rising at last from where he had lingered by the board and crossing to him with his usual air of having wandered there by chance. “Come,” he murmured, low enough that only those nearest could hear. “You have spent yourself quite enough for one night.”

Dunk caught it then, even through rushlight and meat and old stone: Daeron’s scent, wine-soft and familiar, went round Aerion like a hand at the back of the neck, and whatever wild thing had been clawing at the prince seemed to ease enough for him to breathe through it.

“The men we brought,” Aerion said, each word looking dragged up from somewhere costly, “Do not let them sleep. Men are truest at the first scream.”

“Not tonight,” said Baelor. “They will still be alive on the morrow, and so must you.”

Aerion gave the smallest nod, sharp as a curt. The look he cast over his shoulder promised he had yielded nothing, but he was unable to press the matter further when the maester and one of his men took him between them, Ser Rolland falling in beside them. This time Aerion did not throw them off, seeming very much like blood and pain had wrung the fight from him.

As they moved to guide Aerion away, guards were already turning toward the lower passage where the prisoners had been taken, servants gathering supplies. It all seemed to happen at once, the room dividing itself cleanly between those meant for questions and those meant to be fed to them.

Baelor gave no more time for any man to settle.

“Which way?” he asked.

Lord Caswell led them from the hall, limping slightly as if the floor itself resented him. The princes followed at once, and Ser Donnel with them in his white cloak. Even Egg went with them straight-backed among so many taller men that Dunk could not well shame himself by lagging behind, though every step he took under that roof still felt borrowed. He heard Daeron behind them too, slower and lighter, not coming into the knot of them so much as trailing its edge.

Dunk glanced back once.

At the far end of the hall the maester’s men were getting Aerion turned toward the stair. For a moment Dunk thought the whole business ill-made. Leaving him in that state. Then the prince lifted his head as if he had felt the glance, and whatever Dunk had thought died at once. Aerion did not need his pity. He would sooner have cut a man for it.

So Dunk followed the others.

The passage beyond the hall was narrower and darker, lit only by a few wall lamps smoking in their brackets. Their boots struck differently there, stone instead of rush and plank, the sound of them close and hard. Somewhere below came the muffled slam of a door and a man’s raised voice cut short.

Lord Caswell stopped at the solar door and fumbled the latch with those swollen hands before getting it open at last. He stood aside at once. Ser Donnel took post without being told, white cloak pale in the dim passage.

“My princes.”

Baelor entered first.

The room within was smaller than Dunk had expected of a lord’s private chamber, though better furnished than anything he had ever called a room himself. Shelves lined one wall, half ledgers and half dust. A narrow table stood near the hearth with two candles already burning, an enormous pile of recently opened letters stacked precariously in it. Another servant must have been in before them, for wine had been set out there and fresh tapers besides. There was a high-backed chair behind the table, one cushioned bench by the wall, and two stools that looked as though they had been dragged in from elsewhere to make up the number.

Baelor did not sit in the lord’s chair. Instead he turned once the others had entered and said, “Lord Caswell, remain. Daeron—if you please.”

Daeron gave a little half-bow that might have meant anything and closed the door behind them before taking himself to the wall by the hearth.

Dunk did not know whether he ought to stand or sit until Baelor glanced once toward the bench, and then he sat because it seemed less foolish than standing there like a post.

Then Baelor looked at Valarr and Egg.

What followed was not a tale told clean from one end to the other. The holdfast, Flowers’s first denials, the black dragon worked into the pommel, the way he had turned from excuse to confession once the sword was bare, the men hidden near enough to spring the yard, the false yielding that had only been time bought with words. Yet by the time Valarr was done, the blood and shouting of the yard had been stripped away and what remained was tidy enough to set upon a board beside a trencher: Ser Alester discovered, his disloyalty exposed, his rescue attempted, his men taken. Aerion’s name came where it must. Dunk’s too.

Baelor and Maekar listened without interrupting much. Now and again one of them would put in some small hard question, and then Dunk would hear how what had happened on the road sat against what Redding and the innkeeper had already told them. A barn mentioned here. A rider there. A delay that had not been innocent. A seal one had seen but not named. Each piece seemed to lock to another out of Dunk’s sight. It was a queer thing: Prince Baelor asked the questions, but Dunk had the sense that Prince Maekar’s temper set their weight.

Then Maekar said, “And Flowers himself?”

That halted the room in a fashion the rest had not.

Valarr did not answer at once.

Baelor’s gaze moved from his son to Dunk. “How exactly did he die?”

Dunk opened his mouth and found no ready words in it.

He saw it too plainly again: Flowers under the horse, his hips gone slack and wrong, blood at the mouth, the ruin of a man that had no mending in it. The finality of it had been swift.

He hesitated.

It was Egg who told it plain, grave and trying hard to look older than he was. “Prince Aerion killed him,” Egg said. “It was a mercy kill.”

Maekar shut his eyes a moment, as if the words themselves had wearied him.

“I love my son,” he said, “but merciful he is not.”

Dunk looked up then. He remembered Aerion’s words. If you mean to show him mercy, you need only make your dagger swift and true, and keep your hand steady on his throat. He had thought him horrendously callous then.

“Well,” he said, rougher than he meant, “today he was.”

All of them looked at him.

Dunk wished at once that he had held his tongue, but the thing had been true and so he went on. “Flowers was crushed. He’d never have made it here. Not alive in any way worth the name. He was meat by then, begging only by breathing. Prince Aerion gave him a quicker death than the gods would’ve.”

Baelor did not rebuke Dunk for speaking. That was worse somehow. He only looked down a moment, his hand resting on the table’s edge, and Dunk could see the difficulty of it settling over him. Flowers was traitor enough dead or alive. Yet a man cut down after surrender was another sort of matter, and mercy from Aerion Targaryen was the least convenient truth in the world.

Maekar had begun to pace by then, three steps one way, turn, three steps back, like a man trying to wear a path through thought itself. “This worsens the matter,” he said. “If Aerion acted from pity, that will be twisted by one side. If he acted from temper, by the other.”

“He acted from both, perhaps,” said Daeron.

That got a look from Maekar sharp enough to skin bark.

That was what frightened Dunk. Aerion had a way of making the blackest thing sound almost clean. If Dunk let himself understand him too well, he feared he might begin to think cruelty, and pride, and goodness, and mercy were but the names for the same stroke of a knife.

Baelor let the silence sit before he said, “We will not settle Flowers tonight. He is beyond us. The living remain.”

Baelor let the matter sit a moment longer before he spoke again.

“We do not leave for King’s Landing on the morrow,” he said.

That landed harder than Dunk would have thought. Lord Caswell looked up at once. Valarr’s face altered only by the smallest degree. Maekar did not seem surprised, which meant he had already come there in his own mind.

Baelor went on. “Not now. Not with three prisoners below, a dead knight above ground, and false tolls taken in a black dragon’s name beneath Lord Caswell’s very walls. This must be settled as far as it can be settled here first. We will need the prisoners questioned, the roads checked, the stores and books examined, and word sent where word must be sent.”

“A few days, at least,” said Maekar, flatly. “Perhaps more if the rot runs wider than it first appears.”

Baelor’s gaze passed once over Dunk and then away. “Which means,” he said, “that the matter from Ashford must wait as well.”

All the while they had ridden as if King’s Landing waited at the end of the road with answers in hand. Now the road had bent under them again. All of their personal troubles delayed with the rest.

If you wanted to make the gods laugh, Ser Arlan used to say, all you need do was make a plan.

Lord Caswell cleared his throat, eager and miserable together. “My princes, if there is any service my house may offer in the meantime, any books or men or—”

Maekar turned on him with such force the old lord near recoiled where he stood.

“You may offer silence,” he said. “And your solar. And when I have need of either no longer, you may thank the gods I asked no more.”

Lord Caswell opened and shut his mouth. When he spoke again, it sounded very much chagrined. “I will see that no one disturbs Your Graces.”

Maekar did not so much as look at him. “See that it is so.”

Caswell bowed himself backward through the door, drawing the room shut behind him like a curtain.

Then it was only them.

Baelor remained where he was by the table. Maekar stood before the hearth, looking taciturn. Dunk, who would rather have faced ten more men in the yard than another princely room, stayed where he had been put and tried not to feel clumsy in his own hands.

Maekar fixed Dunk with a look hard as hammered iron. “First you tell us my son must be tended before he is questioned, and then you defend his killing of Flowers as mercy.” His mouth tightened. “You show a great deal of compassion for a man you beat bloody into the mud less than six days ago, ser.”

Baelor said nothing at once, but there was thought in his face now, and not all of it was comfortable.

“Tell me true,” Prince Maekar said. “Is the bond solidifying?”

Dunk blinked.

“I don’t know, Your Grace.”

Maekar’s mouth set. “You do not know.”

“No, Your Grace.” Dunk shifted his weight, suddenly too aware of where every limb of him was. “I don’t feel… different, if that’s what you mean. Not in any way I can name.”

Daeron made a soft sound at that. “Gods save us.”

Valarr turned on him with a stare sharp enough to turn wine bitter.

Daeron raised his cup a little in apology, though none was in it. “What he means, I think, is that he has not yet grown reflective enough to notice. At moments he and Aerion both smell like a winesink above a brothel.”

“Language,” said Valarr, measuredly.

Dunk went hot all over. “I am no great hand with scents, Your Grace,” he said, groping after the words, because it was true, and because he could think of nothing else fit to say before princes.

“Then tell us what you do know.”

Baelor’s voiced nudged him not unkindly. Dunk looked from one face to the next and wished he had less honesty in him.

“I know he is cruel,” he said at last. “And vain. And terrible hard to like.”

“Aye,” said Egg at once. Then he flushed. “Well. He is.”

“But,” Dunk went on, because once begun he could not seem to stop, “I mean no offense, Your Graces, only—” He swallowed. “Only none of you are soft men. You go about killing and frightening and levying and forcing folk to bend, and then seem astonished when a prince raised amongst you turns out sharp-edged too.”

Dunk, having come thus far, stumbled on. “He may have gone too far with the puppeteers. Aye. And with the flogging. And the burning too, like as not. I do not say he is right in all he does.” He gave a helpless little motion of the hand. “But we have seen false dragons on the road, false tolls, traitors breeding under a lord’s nose, and men leaping from hedges to die for it. So when he says folk grow too bold with dragon signs and dragon talk… well. Mayhaps he was not wholly wrong to see danger where other men laughed.”

Egg made a small, troubled noise in his throat. Valarr sat very still after that, his cup untouched in his hand.

Dunk felt the shame of having said too much and could not tell, from their faces, which part had done harm.

At last Maekar said, “Life would indeed be easier if Aerion were meek.”

“Queen Naerys was meek,” he continued. “The realm is forever praising meek omegas after they are safely dead. And my royal father was ever gentler made than I. But that is not how my son was raised.”

There was, to Dunk’s surprise, no apology in it. Nor even much regret. Weariness, yes. Anger, perhaps. But beneath both, something else. Something near pride, Dunk saw it plain, and felt a little slow for not having seen it sooner. Then Dunk remembered, stupidly late, that Prince Maekar was not made soft by his own nature either.

Dunk thought of Aerion in the yard at Wyvern’s Watch, blood-spattered and terrible, and knew at once that no man had ever raised him to be meek.

Then the foul part of it came back to him, and because Dunk had never learned when to hold his tongue before princes, he said that too.

“May be so, Your Grace. But Prince Valarr still spoke of commanding him.”

Valarr went still in a way that made the room seem smaller. His hand tightened on the chairback, not enough to show strain in any common man, but enough that Dunk saw the knuckles pale. For half a heartbeat he looked as if he might answer at once. Then whatever first reply had risen in him was mastered and put away.

Dunk met it because he had already committed the sin of honesty and there was no salvation in half measures now.

“As if he were some puppet to be worked,” Dunk said. “Begging pardon, Your Graces, but that sat ill with me. It sits ill still.”

Valarr did not answer at once.

That was worse than anger would have been. He looked at Dunk as if he could scarce believe a hedge knight thought himself fit to judge what passed between princes. When he did speak, his voice was level.

“You think I meant cruelty.”

Dunk shifted on the bench. “I think you meant to use what happened to him.”

“To preserve him,” Valarr said at once. “And the rest of us with him.”

Dunk opened his mouth, but Valarr was not done.

“You were there,” the prince said. “You saw him on the road. You saw him in the yard. You saw what a single word from a fool can do when it strikes the wrong place. If there is a means by which he can be steadied before he does himself or others irreparable harm, then it is my duty to consider it.”

“Your duty,” Dunk repeated, because somehow that was the part that stung.

“Yes,” said Valarr. “My duty. To him as my blood. To my father and Prince Maekar. To the realm, if you mean the broadest name for it. You say “use him” as if it was a foul thing. Counsel is use. Marriage is use. Silence is use. A sword is use. If the gods or old Valyria have put into your hands some power to stop him from running headlong at ruin, I would count it monstrous not to weigh it.”

Dunk stared at him.

There it was again, spoken fairer than before, but no better for the fairness.

Baelor did not interrupt. Maekar stood very still by the hearth. Daeron watched Valarr over the rim of his cup with the look of a man who had heard a song before and disliked its ending.

Dunk said slowly, “You speak of him like a horse gone dangerous.”

Valarr’s face changed then, just a little.

“No,” he said. “I speak of him like a man I know better than you do.”

Dunk looked down at his hands, broad on his knees, split-knuckled and ugly as ever. When he spoke again, the words came heavier.

“And if he hated it?”

Valarr gave a short, impatient breath. “And what would you have me do? Set one man above the realm?”

Dunk did not have to think on it. “No, Your Grace. But a man’s not a harness to be taken up when it suits you.” He swallowed. “If what belongs to a man can be taken whenever it proves inconvenient, then it was never his to begin with.”

The word sat in the room like a stone dropped in still water.

Valarr’s brows drew together. “You cannot mean that.”

“I do.”

Baelor’s face changed first, though only a little. Something old and tired stirred behind the calm of it, as if something in the words had struck nearer home than Dunk knew.

Maekar said nothing at all. He only looked at Dunk with a steadiness that made the room feel close.

Valarr pressed on, truly angry now.

“You would sooner let him destroy himself than lay a hand upon the reins?” Valarr asked. “Say nothing while he tears himself open in front of every watching fool from here to King’s Landing? Pretend there is no new danger because the means of mastering it offends your hedge-born conscience?”

“I’d have you leave him his own will.”

Valarr’s face hardened. “And if his own will kills him?”

Dunk did not flinch. “Then he dies belonging to himself.”

That seemed to strike the room harder than shouting might have done, but Dunk had gone too far now to stop.

It was too much, said too plain and too lowbornly, and Dunk knew it even as the words left him. But they were true in him and he had no courtly trick for wrapping truth in cloth.

Valarr’s face had gone very still. “You speak as a man with no responsibility beyond his own soul.”

“Aye,” said Dunk, “and maybe that’s why I can still tell the difference.”

Egg moved then, one step only, but it brought him back into the middle of the room.

“What difference, ser?” he asked.

Dunk turned toward him and wished he had less courage or more sense.

“The difference between ruling and owning,” said Dunk. “Between what’s right and what’s easy.”

No one breathed for a moment.

Dunk heard his own pulse in the silence.

Daeron studied him a moment in silence, his expression gone oddly still, as if he had just seen the shape of something dangerous and precious both.

Baelor’s gaze had lowered to the table, not in shame, not quite, but as if some old tired part of him had heard the shape of the thing and was weighing how much it cost to know it.

It was not a shout. It did not need to be.

He looked first at Valarr.

“My son,” he said, and there was warning in it now where before there had only been anger. “You will not speak of commanding him again. Not in that fashion. Not while I draw breath.”

Valarr bowed his head a fraction. It was not full obedience. It was not refusal either. Something in between, which was perhaps the most princely answer he could make.

Then Maekar looked at Dunk.

“And you,” he said, “do not mistake me. I asked because I must know what danger is growing under my own roof. Not because I mean to put a bridle in my son’s mouth and hand the reins to a different man.”

Dunk nodded once. He believed him. That did not ease matters much.

Baelor lifted his head at last.

“The realm does not improve for our wishing,” he said. “Nor for truth spoken bluntly, though sometimes it is the only sort a room deserves. We are where we are.” His eyes moved from Valarr to Dunk, then to Maekar. “The question is what must be done next.”

Daeron let out a little breath, half amusement and half sorrow.

“Isn’t it always?” he said.

“We send word to King’s Landing,” Baelor ignored him. “At once. A full account of Bitterbridge. The King must be told where we stand, and others may be consulted besides.”

Baelor’s eyes settled on Dunk.

“And hear me now, Ser Duncan. Whatever this bond is becoming, you must not yield to it.”

Dunk felt the heat rise at once, though nothing in Baelor’s tone invited shame. It was the plainness of it.

Baelor went on. “It has been endured before. Prince Aemon the Dragonknight and Queen Naerys never gave way to theirs, though singers have made enough of the rest to poison seven generations.”

Daeron gave a small, ugly laugh.

“Yes,” he said. “And keeping Daemon Blackfyre from his omega sent the realm into such peace and harmony that we are all still enjoying the fruits of it.”

Maekar’s head turned sharply. “Daeron.”

But Daeron had no mind to stop. “We are very fond in this family of calling a wound virtue when it has had time enough to become legend.”

Valarr answered him before Baelor could.

“Our great-aunt Daenerys did her duty to the realm,” he said. “She married Prince Maron Martell and bound Dorne to the crown. That was worth more than private comfort. Aerion will do the same when his time comes.”

The room went still at that.

Dunk looked toward Maekar first, not Valarr. He did not know why, save that Valarr’s answer had sounded too smooth, too ready, as if the future of Aerion’s body and life might be laid out on a board like dowry terms.

Maekar spoke slowly, and to Dunk’s surprise there was more anger in him at the idea than at the insolence.

“I am not yet so beaten down by this world as to think a man is only what use may be wrung from him,” he said. “Nor do I take my sons for finished creatures, to be packed off under a seal because they have proved troublesome young.” He looked first at Valarr, then at the hearth, then nowhere at all. “I believe men may change. Gods help me, I must. Or else there is no raising sons, only breeding them for other people’s purposes.”

Something in Dunk set hard at that. If this was what waited for Aerion among his own blood—bargains, uses, a future spoken over his head—then the prince ought to be got away from it, if only for a while.

Then, because no one else seemed minded to speak plain, and because he had already made too great a habit of it to stop now, he said, “Your Graces.”

Baelor looked to him. “Yes, ser?”

Dunk swallowed. “Mayhaps there’s a simpler road.”

Daeron made a face. “Gods preserve us.”

Dunk ignored him. “You have prisoners here. A dead traitor. A lord’s house to sort out, and roads and stores and all the rest of it. If Bitterbridge needs princes, then let it have them.”

Baelor’s eyes narrowed slightly. “Go on.”

Dunk took a breath. “Split the party. Let Your Graces remain and settle this whole mess proper. And let me ride on with Prince Aerion to King’s Landing, to lay the matter before King Daeron without more delay.”

Egg’s head came up so fast Dunk heard the little catch of breath he made.

Dunk went on because the silence had become worse than the words. “Ser Roland, too, if you like. Or others. But fewer men ride quicker. If the king must hear of this, best he hear it sooner. And if Prince Aerion must be kept from further trouble, there is less of it on the road than in halls full of questions.”

Valarr’s face altered first. Not much. Enough.

“No,” he said.

The word came clean and quick, before any elder prince could answer, and that itself told on him.

“Whatever speed such a plan promises, it promises worse besides. The road is not empty. The bond is uncertain. Aerion is hurt, half in heat, and scarcely steady under his own skin. To send him out into the countryside with the man who bit him—” He stopped there, but only because he had sense enough to know he had already said enough. “No.”

Maekar gave a grim nod. “At last, some reason. I will not send my son, omega and worsening, into the country with the alpha who put his teeth in him.”

Baelor did not answer at once.

That was enough to make Maekar’s face harden.

“You cannot be seriously weighing it.”

“The thought is not without merit,” Baelor said quietly.

Maekar stared at him.

Baelor went on before his brother could speak. “A smaller party rides faster. The matter from Ashford should not wait longer than it must. And from all we have seen, Ser Duncan has been nothing if not chivalrous.”

That drew every eye to Dunk again, which he hated.

Baelor’s voice remained calm. “He has had chance enough to exploit what happened and has done no such thing. Indeed, he appears more frightened of it than any of us.”

“That is a very poor comfort,” said Valarr.

Baelor ignored him. “And I cannot forget how it happened. A Trial of Seven is no common brawl in a ditch. If the gods chose that field and that form to bind them together, then I will not say the thing is meaningless merely because I dislike what it may mean.”

Maekar’s disbelief showed plain. “You cannot be serious.”

Baelor sighed then, and for a moment looked every year of his weariness. “Bonds are old things, brother. Old and queer and seldom answerable to our preferences.”

“Well,” Daeron’s voice was so soft it jarred Dunk into thinking of a different night, but no less heavy than this one, “I have seen a giant pale beast flying up out of blood and ruin, Ser Duncan, and you were in the middle of it. So perhaps Uncle Baelor is not the only one prepared to admit the gods, or whatever lies behind them, have a taste for uglier jests than ours.”

Maekar rounded on his eldest son. “Daeron, you are drunk so often I have trouble believing what you see when you are wide awake.”

Daeron did not so much as flinch. “Do you?” he asked mildly. “That is odd. You do not believe in prophetic dreams, yet you spent half the road muttering that Bitterbridge had been in your troubled sleep, and here we all sit.”

“I was thinking of Bitterbridge because it made tactical sense, you dullard.”

“Yes,” said Daeron. “And how fortunate for all concerned that your sleeping mind should prove so sound a strategist.”

Egg’s eyes flicked to Dunk’s.

In that brief look, Dunk had the queer sense that his plan was no longer only talk.

Dunk scarcely heard the next breath or two. Something in him had gone all strange and sore at the thought itself. The wanting of it came on him so hard he was ashamed of it at once.

He did not want Aerion. Not that way. Not in the way they feared.

But he wanted him away from these people with a force that near frightened him.

Valarr had gone cold now, all the softness driven out of him. “This is madness,” he said. “You speak as though the road were some sept and the matter one of prayer. It is not. It is risk.”

“And staying here is not?” Daeron asked lazily.

“We are not discussing your appetites for doom.”

“No,” said Daeron. “Only your preference that all dooms occur under supervision.”

“Enough,” said Maekar.

That cut across all of them.

Maekar looked first to Baelor, then away.

“We decide this on the morrow,” he said at last. “When we have had sleep, and I have had less of prophecy, sentiment, and lowborn ingenuity pressed upon me in one room.”

Baelor did not smile, but something in him eased. “On the morrow, then.”

Maekar’s eyes moved to Dunk. “You will not go near my son tonight.”

“No, Your Grace,” said Dunk at once.

Dunk rose. Egg did too, all injured pride and restless curiosity. Daeron lingered only long enough to drain what was left in his cup before setting it aside and peeling himself from the hearth.

As they made for the door, Dunk looked back once.

Baelor had gone to the table, both hands braced upon it. Valarr stood rigid and bright as a drawn blade. Maekar remained by the fire, not moving at all.

And for the first time that night Dunk thought not of what princes might decide, but of how very tired they all looked.

Maekar’s gaze went to the door. “Ser Donnel.”

The white cloak appeared almost at once.

“Escort them to their rooms,” Maekar said. “And see that they stay there.”

They went out in a straggle rather than a line, which somehow felt less like dismissal and more like being turned loose from a room too full of breath.

Egg was first through the door and first to break.

“That was absurd,” he burst out the moment the solar door shut behind them. “Utterly absurd. Why should anyone think Ser Duncan would—”

“Because he is an alpha who bit a prince in the mud before half the realm,” said Daeron, easy as you please. “And because men are cowards where strange things are concerned, especially when they touch inheritance, sex, and power all at once.”

Egg swung round on him. “That is not an answer.”

“It is the only answer you are like to get tonight.”

The corridor was dimmer now, the lamps smoking low in their brackets. Somewhere below them a bolt shot home with a hard iron sound. Somewhere farther off a man raised his voice and was sharply hushed. The castle had not slept yet. It only seemed to be pretending at it in smaller pieces.

Dunk said nothing.

He was tired enough that his thoughts came heavy and slow, as if each must be hauled up out of deep water before it could be looked at. Yet all the same he could not shake the feel of that room. Valarr’s face. Maekar’s temper. Baelor’s weariness. The way Daeron had spoken of dreams as if they were weather men were fools to deny.

Egg, who had never been able to leave a thing alone once it got into him, kept at it.

“You should not have said that of Prince Aerion,” he said to Daeron. “About the beast and the fire.”

Daeron glanced at him sidelong. “Should I have lied?”

“You might have held your tongue.”

Dunk found his own voice at last. “What did you mean?”

Daeron looked at him.

For a moment Dunk thought he would give some prince’s answer, half jest and half smoke. Instead he only said, “Exactly what I said.”

“That doesn’t help much.”

“No,” said Daeron. “Dreams seldom do.”

They had reached a turning in the passage by then, where one stair went up toward the family chambers and another down toward the hall and whatever was being done below it. A servant flattened herself to the wall to let them by, eyes downcast. Dunk stepped aside awkwardly for her, too large by half for such corridors, and nearly brushed the stone with his shoulder.

Egg had gone quiet now, but not from peace. Dunk could feel him thinking like a pot left to boil over.

At last the boy said, “They will not send you off with him.”

“No,” said Daeron. “I think they rather fear he might come back wanting you.”

Egg colored violently. “I did not mean that. I’d sooner think he’d bitten Ser Duncan mad.”

“Pity. It would have been more interesting.”

Dunk might have laughed on another night. As it was, he only rubbed at the back of his neck.

He did not know what he wanted. That was the worst of it. In the solar, when Baelor had spoken of sending him and Aerion on ahead, something in him had leapt so hard it was near pain. More like hunger finding a name and being ashamed of it.

And he wanted never to be left alone with him again.

“You look,” said Daeron said quietly, “as if someone has put a live toad in your mouth and bid you sing.”

Dunk grunted. “I’m tired.”

“That as well.”

They had not gone six paces before Daeron said, as lightly as if resuming some idle supper talk, “For what it is worth, Ser Duncan, if they mean to marry Aerion off after all this, they may at least have the grace to choose someone who knows what to do with that mouth of his.”

Dunk stopped dead.

The heat came into his face so fast it felt like being slapped. “Your Grace—”

Egg made a scandalized noise. “Daeron!”

But Daeron only looked amused with himself. “What? We are speaking of the prince’s future. It seems discourteous to leave out the part that most directly concerns his disposition.”

Dunk had gone red to the roots of his hair. “It’s not right,” he said, the words dragged out of him before shame could stop them. “Standing there speaking of his future without him there, as if he had no choice in it.”

Daeron’s laughter died. Not wholly, but enough.

“My brother is a prince of the realm, Ser Duncan,” he said. “The song was chosen for him long before he could learn its steps, and all of us have only ever been made to follow the tune.”

Dunk stood there longer than he ought, staring at the prince. He kept thinking how wrong it all sat with him now. At last the words slipped out of him before he could stop them. “He should at least be allowed to be there.”

Ser Donnel gave a snort. “When has any matter ever been improved by the presence of Aerion Targaryen?”

Egg turned on him at once. “Ser Duncan, you were the one who said he ought to be sent off to the maester before he fell over in the solar. Now you complain he was not there?”

Dunk rounded on him. “To have his leg tended,” he said. “Not to be managed.”

Egg folded his arms. “And you say Valarr is bad.”

Dunk stared at him.

“How was that any different?” Egg demanded.

Dunk opened his mouth and found nothing fit to say.

Dunk stopped. He had meant to spare Aerion the solar, not send him out of it. But that was what he had done.

“I’ve got to mend it,” he said. “I’ve got to tell him. All of it. What was said. Beg pardon for presuming.”

Daeron stared at him.

Then he began to laugh.

Not his usual low princely amusement. This was worse. Real laughter, helpless and astonished, bending him half over himself there in the corridor while Egg looked scandalized and Dunk stood burning.

Ser Donnel, who had thus far kept the grave patience of a man accustomed to princely nonsense, stepped in at last.

“Ser,” he said to Dunk, “I cannot let you go anywhere near Prince Aerion. Not now. Not in the middle of the night.” His nose wrinkled. “Gods above, can you not smell yourself?”

That only set Daeron off again.

When he could breathe enough to speak, he waved one hand weakly between them. “No, Ser Donnel, it is well. Escort this kicked puppy to my brother’s door, if he must go. Only remain outside and see that Aerion does not chew him alive.”

Egg gaped. “Daeron!”

Daeron wiped at one eye, still laughing. “Ser Duncan may have developed altogether too much fellow-feeling for a man he beat half to death less than six days ago, but Aerion has certainly not forgotten. And my brother,” he added, with wicked satisfaction, “has never been shy with a knife.”

That shut Egg up.

Daeron, at last recovering himself, clapped Dunk once on the shoulder as if they were boon companions in some winesink instead of princes and prisoners in a half-sleeping castle. “Go on, then,” he said. “Apologize. Confess. Explain. It will make no one happier, which is how you will know you have done it properly.”

Dunk stood there mortified and miserable and unable to say that none of it was funny, because some small treacherous part of him feared it might be. Not the knife. Not Aerion’s temper. But the truth in it: that he did feel for the prince, and too much, and in ways he did not know what to do with.

Daeron stood in the wavering lamp smoke, one hand light against the wall, his face gone older all at once than his wine and laughter usually let it seem. When he spoke next, the teasing had gone from him.

“Whatever they decide on the morrow,” he said, “do not mistake this for a thing that will simply be judged and put away.”

Egg frowned. “What thing?”

Daeron’s mouth twitched faintly. “All of it.”

He looked first at Dunk, then past him, as if the stone itself had grown briefly transparent and he could see through it to farther rooms, farther years, farther blood.

The prince straightened from the wall. “Get what sleep you can,” he said. “The morrow will be tiresome, and I dislike being the only one in a room allowed to look haunted.”

Then he was gone up the stair, all in one loose-limbed princely motion, leaving Egg gaping after him.

For a little while neither of them moved.

At last Egg said, “He’s mad.”

Dunk looked at the stair where Daeron had vanished.

“Mayhaps,” he said.

Ser Donnel looked from one to the other and decided, as sensible men must, that this had all gone well beyond reason.

“If I do this,” he said to Dunk, “you are to stand where I place you, say what you came to say, and leave when told. If he draws steel, I pull you out by the heels if I must.”

Dunk nodded at once. “Aye, ser.”

Egg stared at him as though he had lost the little wit he ever had.

“He’s terrible,” Egg whispered fiercely. “You know he is.”

“Aye,” Dunk said at once. “I know.”

Aerion was no innocent thing gone wrong. The world had tried to make him smaller and failed. What was left was sharp enough to cut. Dunk feared that. He admired it too, though the thought terrified him.

Ser Donnel gave Egg a look that brooked no argument and saw him to his chamber first, though the boy went grudging and none too quiet. Only then did he turn Dunk back the other way and lead him on toward Prince Aerion’s rooms.

The keep had not slept. Along the way Dunk heard the soft comings and goings of servants, the far-off clink of armor from the yard below, the muted opening and shutting of doors. Lamps had been lit along the walls, their yellow light catching on old plaster and the worn rushes underfoot. Somewhere deeper in the keep a woman laughed. Somewhere lower down a prisoner shouted once and was abruptly silenced.

A servant passed them carrying a tray of bitter herbs steeping in hot water. Another followed with a small stoppered vial.

They had not gone far before they crossed Maester Yormwell coming the other way, his chain glinting dull in the lamplight as he turned a corner with one of his boys at his heels. The old man carried himself briskly for all his years, with the look of one who had too much to do and no patience for princely tempers set atop it.

He stopped when he saw them. His eyes went first to Ser Donnel, then to Dunk, and narrowed a little, as if measuring whether either of them was likely to improve the night.

“If you are bound for Prince Aerion,” he said, “you may save yourself the trouble and me mine by not exciting him.”

“How is he?” Dunk asked.

Maester Yormwell looked at him as if the question itself were indecent. “Alive.”

The maester took two more steps, then stopped. With a little sound of irritation, he reached within his sleeve and produced a second vial. “He bid me give you this.”

Dunk stared.

Inside the glass, dark liquid caught the lamplight.

“For me?”

The maester’s face suggested he had no patience for men who required the obvious explained. “For you,” he said. “I am not in the habit of dosing corridor guards for pleasure.”

He held it out until Dunk took it, then went away muttering to himself about princes and foolishness and men who stood about after midnight asking questions better put to gods.

Dunk looked down at the vial in his hand. Something in his chest eased all the same.

They found Prince Aerion’s door guarded by two men in Targaryen livery and a lamp burning low between them. The light threw long shadows up the plastered wall and made the red dragon on their breasts seem black.

Ser Donnel stopped short of it and turned to Dunk.

“Say what you came to say,” he muttered. “Say no more than that. If he throws you out, come away. If he draws steel, shout before he sticks you full of holes.”

Dunk nodded, though his mouth had gone dry.

Ser Donnel rapped once against the wood with the back of his knuckles, then again, more softly.

Dunk could hear his own heart. For a moment there was no answer from within.

Then Aerion’s voice came through the wood, low and sharp with pain and temper both.

“If that is another maester, I’ll kill him.”

Chapter Text

Aerion had been given a chamber fit for a lesser lordling’s bride: warm, clean, and quiet, with rushes newly strewn, a brazier burning low, and a bed wide enough to mock him.

He paced it all the same.

From hearth to window, window to bed, bed to door, and back again, his boots whispering over the rushes in a ceaseless turn that set the wound in his groin throbbing hotter with every pass. The room was close with the smells of rosemary, clean linen, and the sharp bitter trace of the maester’s salves. He could still feel Yormwell’s hands there, brisk and impersonal, stripping away the blood-stiff bandages, washing the cut, binding him up anew while speaking to him in the careful, maddening tone old men used for skittish horses and injured princes.

Do not strain yourself, Your Grace.
No sudden movements.
Try to rest.
Drink this.

Aerion had drunk it. He had even endured the moon tea without remark, though the taste of it had been foul enough to curdle milk. Yormwell had watched until the last swallow was gone, as if half-expecting him to spit it back in the man’s beard. Then he had bowed, gathered up his cloths and cups and little pots of stinking unguent, and left Aerion with his pain, his temper, and instructions.

Aerion turned sharply at the window and hissed when the movement pulled at his crotch. The candlelight wavered in the leaded panes, throwing back a pale, angry ghost of him: silver hair loose at the shoulders, mouth hard, one hand pressed against the fresh binding beneath his tunic.

The last time he had had opportunity to drink the foul thing had been when they were still at Ashford, and perhaps it had been too long between his doses.

His body remained restless as a horse held too long at the bit. The edge of his heat had dulled, perhaps, but only enough to leave him aware of every pulse beneath his skin, every drag of linen against flesh, every beat of blood like a hand knocking from within. It made the room feel smaller. It made his own skin feel close and ill-fitted.

Aerion stopped beside the bed, both hands braced on one of the carved posts, head bowed, breath coming too warm. The chamber felt stifling now. The brazier had burned low, yet the heat in him went on all the same, mean and insistent, a pulse with teeth in it.

His body ached with it. Every pulse of blood felt like mockery. He had known discomfort before. He had ridden hurt, bled in armor, sweated through fevers. This was not the same; his body’s need was a humiliation if it could not be mastered.

Bugger it all, he wanted Valarr.

He shut his eyes and saw Valarr at once. Valarr’s mouth. Valarr’s hands. The old ease of being known there, the old relief of yielding to someone who had always been there to catch him. It made something in Aerion twist with want so sharp it was near rage. Valarr would be in council with Princes Baelor and Maekar, all grave brow and measured voice, helping sort prisoners and witnesses and dynastic inconveniences.

No.

His fingers tightened on the bedpost until the knuckles whitened. He would not go to him. He would not crawl back into that familiar cage. Not tonight, when he could still hear the shape of Valarr’s betrayal in his head, all reason and realm and practicable necessity. Valarr offering Duncan the Tall as if he were discussing where to stable a horse or how best to post a watch. Not when he knew too well what choice would always be made if the crown were laid in one scale and Aerion’s freedom in the other.

No, he would not go creeping back to that.

“Traitor,” he muttered to the empty room, though whether he meant Valarr or himself he could not have said.

His head bowed and he tore at his own clothes with more violence than was needed and let the fury of it carry him, as if force alone might drag his body into obedience. Still standing, one of his hands braced against the bedpost and the other traveled the expanse of his torso, catching on one of his hardened nipples, downwards, towards his navel, and lower, to where it was throbbing with want, his fingers slipping inside easily with how wet he was. He ground against the palm of his hand, his hip thrusting forward involuntarily. There was nothing graceful in it. Nothing languid. Just anger with nowhere to go. He was too keyed up, too bitter, too sore in his groin and temper both.

It was like the chariot all over again—that maddening brink, that mounting strain, the body driven harder and harder toward relief and still refusing to give it. Valarr’s mouth had not been enough then. Aerion’s own hand was not enough now. He stuck another finger inside, and it still was not enough. The frustration of it turned vicious. He could hear himself breathing and hated the sound. He could feel the sweat gathering at the nape of his neck, slipping down his spine, and hated that too. He closed his eyes and tried throwing his head back, standing with his feet apart for better access.

He wanted release and found only his own temper.

“Seven hells,” he muttered, and then something fouler.

He shut his eyes and tried to think of nothing, which was impossible. Valarr came first by habit, but the thought of him would no longer stay sweet. It curdled at once into rage. Aerion’s mouth twisted. Even in memory, he could not bear him cleanly now.

And then, against all reason, another man forced his way in.—broad-shouldered, infuriating, honest to the point of insult.

Ser Duncan the Tall with his rough hands and rougher conscience, Duncan reddening like a maid one moment and standing like an immovable wall in the next, as if that, too, were his right. Duncan in the yard at Wyvern’s Watch, all weight and violence and blunt, impossible loyalty, turning his horse without thought to shield Aerion. Duncan saying truer words than a courtier would ever dare and meaning every word of them. Duncan, that infernal giant, ordering him off like some feverish child and then looking ashamed of it. Duncan who would not command him, and dared claim the virtue of it, only to decide for him all the same.

Aerion made a low, angry sound in the back of his throat. It should have disgusted him. Perhaps it did. But disgust, humiliation, fury, want—his body had long since ceased to care for neat distinctions.

This time his body answered him. It came suddenly and without mercy, as if wrested from him rather than won, leaving him breathless and damp and abashed. For an instant there was only the hard stammer of his pulse and the faint shiver that followed. Then even that was gone, and he was left with the chamber, the sweat cooling on him, the disordered bed, and a brief, ugly lessening and the thud of his own heart.

For a moment he stayed as he was, resting his forehead against his extended arm, breath sawing in and out of him. Sweat cooled on his skin. The chamber smelled of spice, rosemary, and shame.

Wonderful.

Aerion stood bent over for a moment, one hand braced against the mattress, his hair fallen into his face. He felt wrung out, but not soothed. He was still dragging himself back together, still slick with sweat and bitterness both, when a knock sounded at the door.

Aerion froze.

Another knock.

“If that is that maester again,” he said aloud, voice raw with temper, “I shall have to kill him.”

A voice answered from the far side of the door, muffled by oak and iron.

“Uh—no, my lord. Not the maester.” A pause, and then Ser Donnel, sounding suddenly less certain than a knight of the Kingsguard had any right to sound. “It’s Ser Duncan the Tall. He came to apologise.”

For one absurd heartbeat, Aerion only stared at the door.

Ser Duncan.

The words seemed not so much heard as struck against him. He looked once, stupidly, at the rumpled bedclothes, at the discarded garments, at his own half-bared state, and then moved all at once.

“Seven curses,” he muttered, snatching up the first thing to hand.

It was only a loose nightrobe, soft and much too thin, but he dragged it over himself with none of the dignity he would have demanded from any witness, belting it carelessly as he crossed the room. His hair was unbound, his pulse not yet settled, and there was no time to straighten himself either. Ser Duncan was at his door. Ser Duncan had come. Duncan—

Aerion’s hand closed on the latch and pulled.

The door opened.

Duncan stood there in the passage with Ser Donnel a half-step behind him, broad as a gatehouse even with his head bowed. The hall torches threw gold against his rough brown hair and the planes of his face, leaving his eyes shadowed beneath lowered lashes. He had come plainly enough—no courtly preparation, no polished speech readied on his mouth, only that huge awkward body held too stiffly, as if he would rather meet a lance head-on than a prince in his chamber.

Then the door moved wider.

Duncan drew breath.

Aerion saw it happen.

It was almost animal in its swiftness—that first involuntary scent of the room, the warm air of it rushing out into the corridor carrying rosemary, banked coals, sleep, sweat, and something else beneath, something far more private and far less fit for company. Duncan’s head came up at once, sharp and instinctive, like a hound catching blood on the wind.

His eyes met Aerion’s.

His pupils were black and blown wide.

Colour struck across his face so fast it was almost comical: throat first, then cheeks, then all the way to the tips of his ears. He went scarlet as any maid surprised half-dressed at her bath, and the sight of it sent such a vicious spark of satisfaction through Aerion that for an instant it near overcame the humiliation.

Of course he would know, thought Aerion, the room all but reeked of it. Aerion could feel the heat rising anew in his own face, though whether from anger, shame, or the memory of what had brought Duncan to his door at precisely this cursed moment, he could not have said.

Ser Donnel, to his credit, understood that something had gone very wrong at once.

“Ah,” he said, with the air of a man who would much rather be facing ten outlaws in a ditch. “Perhaps this is—not the best—”

He reached a hand toward Duncan’s arm.

Too late.

Duncan had already dropped.

Gone clean to his knees on the stones with all the terrible earnestness of a man throwing himself before a judgment seat. The movement was so sudden that even Ser Donnel made a startled sound and checked short. Duncan kept his eyes lowered now, fixed somewhere near the hem of Aerion’s robe, his great hands open and empty at his sides as if to show he carried no threat but himself.

“Your Grace,” he said.

His voice was rougher than usual. Aerion could hear the strain in it.

“I came to beg your forgiveness.”

For one long moment, nobody moved.

The corridor seemed to narrow around them: torchlight wavering on stone, Ser Donnel hovering in alarmed uncertainty, Duncan on his knees like some penitent giant out of a fool’s tale, and Aerion himself standing in the doorway with his hair wild and the smell of his own arousal still warm in the air between them.

Something hot and ugly twisted low in Aerion’s belly.

Here he was again, then. The infernal man. Red-faced from breathing Aerion in, on his knees at his threshold.

Aerion rested one hand against the doorframe, because suddenly he was not entirely certain his legs meant to remain steady.

“For what?” he asked at last.

The words came colder than he felt them. That was well. Let them. His pulse was still hammering hard enough to shame him. If Duncan heard it, let him choke on that too.

“For sending you away,” Duncan said, still not looking up. “For speaking where it weren’t my place. For—” He swallowed. “For taking the decision from you.”

Aerion’s fingers curled against the wood.

There it was, then. The blunt, impossible thing itself, laid at his feet like a weapon surrendered hilt-first.

Behind Duncan, Ser Donnel shifted, plainly wishing himself anywhere else in the Seven Kingdoms.

Aerion looked down at the bowed head, the broad shoulders, the thick brown hair catching firelight at the crown, and thought, not for the first time, that Duncan the Tall would have been far easier to endure had he possessed the ordinary decency to be a hypocrite.

And now he was kneeling in Aerion’s doorway, breathing the air of his chamber into those great lungs and begging forgiveness with pupils still blown black from it.

Aerion’s mouth curved, though there was no kindness in it.

“If you came to surrender yourself to me, Ser Duncan,” he said softly, “you need only ask.”

“I meant only that your leg wanted tending,” he said. The words came slowly, as if he mistrusted each one and meant to set it down plain before him. “Your wound too. You could scarce stand, and they kept on at you as if you were made o’ oak. I thought—” He stopped, jaw working. “Well. I thought I was doing right.”

Aerion’s mouth curved, though there was no kindness in it.

“You do like to choose a man’s worst moment to display your virtues, ser,” he said softly.

“Aye,” he said. “And I know better now than to ask pardon and think that mends it.”

Aerion said nothing.

Duncan’s mouth hardened. He was still on his knees, still looking downward, but there was nothing abject in him now. Only that same terrible plainness.

“I won’t do it again, Your Grace.”

At that, Aerion’s expression altered despite himself.

Most men apologized in one of two ways: by excusing themselves until no fault remained, or by kneeling prettily and expecting the grace of absolution to do the rest.

“I’ll not speak for you again,” Duncan went on, still with his eyes lowered. “Nor send you off, nor take it on me to choose what’s to be done with you, no matter what I think’s best in the moment. I was wrong.”

Ser Donnel made a small sound in the back of his throat, perhaps because he knew enough of princes and vows alike to hear what had just been said. Aerion himself only stared.

Even those who loved him— perhaps especially those who loved him—had never once thought to place his person before their own judgment of what ought to be done.

And here knelt Duncan the Tall, all rough hands and rougher honor, swearing as solemnly as any knight before a sept that he would sooner let Aerion choose badly than be ruled wisely against his will.

For one strange, bare instant, Aerion could only stare at him.

So naturally he answered it with steel.

“See that you never put me in the place of needing such a promise again.”

Duncan looked up then. Only a little. Enough for Aerion to see the open honesty of his face, the shame still burning there, and beneath it something steadier.

“I’ll try my very best,” he said.

Gods.

There was nothing courtly in him. Nothing polished, nothing princely, nothing fine. His face was too broad, his features too plain, his hair forever one combing short of respectable. A great brown homely creature with a knight’s back and a laborer’s hands and a conscience too large for his own good.

Aerion looked at him and had, all at once, to still his own fingers against the doorframe lest he do something unpardonably foolish with them. They wanted, treacherously, to sink into that thick brown hair, to close there and drag him nearer, down to where heat still smoldered low and mean in Aerion’s belly. He could imagine it too easily: the weight of that bowed head against his thigh, Duncan startled into silence for once in his life, all that earnestness broken open and put to some proper use.

His pulse jumped. He did not move.

And then Duncan ruined it by opening his mouth again.

“They’re staying,” he said.

Aerion made a faint sound that might have been amusement if the gods had made him a kinder man.

“At Bitterbridge, I mean.” Duncan went on. Where was the oaf driving with this? “For some days. More, mayhaps.”

Duncan scrubbed one hand over the back of his neck. “There’s too much rot here to leave untended. The prisoners, the roads, the books, the stores. Lord Caswell tried to make it sound as if Flowers were the whole of it, but Prince Baelor and Prince Maekar don’t believe that.”

“No,” Aerion said. “They would not. One landed knight does not raise false tolls, bribe ferrymen, seed warning eyes along the roads, and gather armed men from hedges by accident. He requires at least one fool above him willing to call rot mischance. ”

Duncan blinked. “Aye. That’s near the shape of it.”

“And so our progress to King’s Landing is delayed,” Aerion stated flatly.

Duncan shifted where he knelt, still careful of the threshold, and risked a hesitant look over his shoulder towards where Ser Donnel stood. “Aye.”

Had the fool come only to tell him what he already knew?

Aerion laughed once under his breath. “Of course. The road bends, and all our private miseries must wait politely upon treason. My uncle would not leave rot underfoot merely because I have inconvenienced the dynasty in a more interesting fashion. Is that it?” Aerion’s mouth bent. “Go on, ser. I have not the strength tonight to be entertained by your amazement at my ability to follow a thought.”

The great oaf looked momentarily bereft of speech. He cast his eyes downwards, then he met Aerion’s gaze again.

“I said mayhaps there was a simpler road. That if the princes must stay and settle Bitterbridge, a smaller party might ride faster. That I could go on with you to King’s Landing.”

For the first time that night, thought failed him. He, who had borne the rest with all the bored contempt of a man hearing weather recited, went still. Then he felt his brows lift without his leave.

“You,” he said.

“Aye.”

“You offered that.”

“I did.”

Aerion locked eyes with Ser Donnel, who met him with a shrug. Was the hedge knight mad?

He stared at Duncan a moment longer, then gave a short, disbelieving breath. “How in all seven hells did you come up with that?”

The man’s face went red all over again. Ordinarily that flush might have offered sport. At present he was too taken aback to enjoy it.

“Because the princes must stay,” he said. “Because there’s rot here yet to be cut out, and the bond business seemed urgent still. King’s Landing needed reaching, and we are both able to ride on.”

Aerion’s mouth twisted. The brazier’s heat had gone mean and close again. “And in that great empty field you found no better option than us going unaccompanied.”

Duncan frowned, not in offense but in honest puzzlement, as though Aerion were the one being difficult on purpose.

“Who else was there?” he said. “Prince Valarr?”

The name struck like cold water.

For one bare instant Aerion only looked at him.

Duncan went on, because of course he did.

“Prince Valarr’s poor in a melee,” he said, with the blunt certainty of a man naming weather. “You know that as well as I do.”

Aerion forgot the heat for half a heartbeat. Forgot the soreness in his groin, the close stink of rosemary and spent want still clinging to the chamber, the humiliating thinness of the robe belted carelessly about him. He could only stare.

The oaf had not merely seen it. He had said it.

And worse, he had said it to Aerion as if handing over some common truth between them, as if this were a thing both men might acknowledge without the walls themselves recoiling.

Duncan shifted on his knees, still heedless of the enormity of what had left his mouth. “You, me, Ser Roland, and a few men besides, if they liked. Small party. Fast road. We could have reached King’s Landing soon enough, I think.”

Soon enough.

As if they were discussing packhorses and weather. As if Maekar would ever place Aerion in the hands of a hedge knight and call it prudence. As if Baelor would not hear scandal howling in it from Dorne to the Wall. As if the realm did not already look at Duncan and see an upjumped brute with his teeth still in a prince’s flesh, and at Aerion and see a danger best watched, soothed, managed, and never once trusted.

Aerion laughed then, but there was no mirth in it.

“This would never happen in a thousand years,” he said. “My father would never trust you with me, and the rest would never trust me with you.”

Duncan’s face did not change much, but something in it settled.

“Mayhaps,” he said. “I still think they’re wrong about you.”

That checked Aerion almost as sharply as the first thing had.

“They asked how Flowers died,” Duncan went on. “Egg told it plain. That you gave him a mercy he’d not have had elsewise.”

At that Aerion felt his face alter a little, though not much. He looked away.

“And?”

Duncan hesitated. “Prince Maekar did not much like it.”

“No,” said Aerion dryly. “He would not.”

Duncan’s jaw hardened. “You deserve a little more credit than what they give you.”

And there it was again, that infernal plainness of his, the thing that made mockery so wearying and gratitude impossible. He had not meant to flatter. He had not even meant, perhaps, to comfort. He had simply looked at the shape of the matter and found it crooked.

Fool.

Aerion’s mouth bent.

“And now the hedge knight takes a lively interest in courtly judgments,” he said. “How fortunate for me.”

Ser Duncan rose to his feet. Slowly. Dangerously, Aerion’s mind supplied. “It were wrong,” he said, with more force. “The way they spoke. Praising Prince Valarr and burying what you did, as if any of it would’ve come right without you. The way they weigh him against you.”

Did the fool think this wound new?

“He was praised, was he?” Aerion asked lightly. “How strange. I had thought perhaps in my absence they might crown a stableboy for my wit instead.”

The bright heir’s son standing upright in the song, clean-handed and courtly, whilst the uglier truth was folded away beneath the verse where no one need dwell too long on what had bought the day. It was an old trick. So old that half the realm mistook it for order.

Ser Donnel muttered something under his breath and shifted his weight, but neither of them spared him so much as a glance.

Aerion went on, softer now, which made it worse. “Tell me how kindly they buried me beneath him. I should like the shape of the grave.”

“Mock if you like. You bled for them. You had earned your place in that room and in their trust.”

Aerion laughed, though there was no mirth in it. “Then perhaps I should be grateful instead. Was I called useful, at least? Sharp-eyed? Brave in some regrettable fashion?”

“It weren’t only unjust, it were foolish besides. You saw the shape of it quicker than any of them, and once you were gone the whole matter bent crooked.”

Good, Aerion thought, bitterness flaring so sharp it was near a pleasure. Let him learn what courts call virtue.

“Yes, well. You saw to it I was not there, so now my uncle must play the gracious host instead of the prince. Lady Caswell has had her guest right, and the prisoners keep their skins till dawn.”

Duncan blinked. “Guest right? That’s what supper was about?”

Aerion gave a short, humorless laugh. “You great stupid ox. Did you think she was being kind?”

Duncan stared at him.

“Bread and salt,” Aerion said. “She fed my uncle under her roof and made him her guest before he could sit in judgment. That was not courtesy. Tonight, it bought them their reprieve.”

“My uncle cannot call for rougher questioning tonight, and Valarr will no doubt approve, after standing there to be praised for wit he did not trouble to bring with him.”

Duncan’s eyes widened.

“Rougher questioning?” Duncan's voice, when it came, was low and rough.

“Not now, of course. Now they will be sent to the Wall, perhaps. If Baelor is feeling merciful and my father tired. Or a cell until fear loosens what loyalty has not. A rope is crude. There are better ways to pull truth from a man.”

Duncan’s face altered and for one moment he looked stricken. Not frightened, not scandalized in the manner of court ladies and septons, but honestly and personally wounded, as if Aerion had taken something clean in his hands and dirtied it before his eyes.

“There’s no call for that. They’re scared enough as it is, and one’s scarcely more than a boy. They’ll tell what they know soon enough.”

“So they will speak. That does not tell us whether what they say is true. Bring me the cousin he loves best. Take the eyes where he can watch, and he will discover a marvelous gift for memory.”

“And how in seven hells would that help?” Duncan snapped. “A man in pain will say anything if he thinks it’ll make the pain stop.”

Aerion smiled with one corner of his lips. “Oh, do not look so pained, ser. You heard me well enough at supper. Men are truest at the first scream.”

Duncan stared at him then, straight on, with something in his face that had not been there when he came to the door.

He took a step toward him, anger overcoming sense, before Aerion could answer. “Why?” he demanded. “Why are you always so eager to prove the worst of what they say of you? They fear a monster, and you hand them one.”

Finally, some vicious little part of Aerion thought. Let him see the Brightflame.

Ser Duncan,” said Aerion. “You do not believe them wrong.  You only dislike hearing it said aloud. The world names a man before ever it knows him; best to clothe yourself in the name and harden it to armor, else they will use it to find the tender place and drive the point home.”

The change in Duncan was almost absurdly plain. Aerion watched it happen as one might watch weather move over open land: the last of the shame and uncertainty going out of his face, the color rising dark along his cheekbones, the mouth setting hard. Even his body seemed to alter. Not larger—no man alive could have made him larger—but grimmer, somehow. Less awkward. Less apologetic.

For one thin bright instant, Aerion despised him for it.

Duncan took half a step forward, then checked himself. “You think this is wit? This surrender to the farce?”

“The dragon,” Aerion said, each word clipped and cold, “does not concern himself with the opinion of sheep.”

Duncan’s face hardened. “Except you’re not a dragon,” he said. “You’re a man.”

No, Aerion thought. I cannot be a man. A man can be diminished. A dragon need only burn.

“Am I wrong?” Aerion asked. “Would it not be useful? Would it not save lives in the sum of it? Is that not what I am for? To do the ugly thing early, so better men may keep their hands clean?”

“Aye,” said Duncan. “That’s just it. You let them make you into whatever shape suits them best. Prince. Weapon. Monster. Whatever’s wanted.”

“There speaks the hedge knight again. Tell me, ser. What should my lord cousin have done? Refused the praise? Rebuked his royal father in open hall? Thrown himself into the rushes and cried that no, no, the glory belonged to poor sweet Aerion after all?”

Duncan said nothing.

“You all do the same,” Aerion said. “My cousin stands upright in the song and I get folded neat beneath the verse where no one need dwell too long on what bought the day. They call me monstrous when I refuse the lie. Yet when fear is wanted, they use it. When force is wanted, they use it. What they hate is not cruelty. It is honesty.”

“If you know them false,” Duncan said, low and stubborn now, “why do you still let them use you?”

Aerion pushed off the frame, one hand still on the wood, knuckles pale where they gripped it. “Because songs become memory, and memory becomes law, and law becomes the hand at your throat. Courts do not merely lie, ser. They decide which lie shall live longest.”

He tipped his head back against the frame. The lamplight caught the hollows beneath his eyes. He looked feverish still, too pale, all sharpened edges.

“The realm is held together by threats, punishments, marriages, silences, and blood. Then afterward men like Valarr call it peace, and men like you call it duty, and both expect me not to notice.”

Duncan stared at him, red and angry and stubborn all at once. “That can’t be all.”

Aerion smiled, and there was nothing pleasant in it. “No? Then you have lived a gentler life than I gave you credit for.”

Duncan’s voice dropped further. “You know when they’re using you.”

Aerion almost laughed. “What revelation.”

“You do,” Duncan said. “You know when they let you do the thing they won’t own. You know when they hide behind you.”

“And what would you have me do, ser? Be good?”

“I’d have you stop helping them make you into what they want.”

Aerion almost laughed. That self-righteous oaf still looked at the world as if truth must somewhere lie plain beneath the muck, waiting only for a clean hand to brush it free..

Aerion pushed himself upright, ignoring the pull of pain.

“What then, ser, when the better man is still the lesser one, and the world knows it, and chooses the other anyway?”

Duncan’s eyes did not leave his, and for one moment Aerion feared he had just bared his soul to this too honest-faced man.

“Then why spend yourself for men who shame you for the very strength they use?” he said. “Why keep serving a crown that hides you, corrects you, and takes your worst deeds gladly so long as someone else gets to name them order?”

Fresh, exquisite injury—hearing it from the mouth of a hedge knight too honest to know he had laid his hand on the rawest part of him.

“You fool,” Aerion said. “You still think the world capable of better.”

“Aye,” said Duncan. “All men are fools. Else there’d be no knights.”

“Tell me, then,” he said. “What is this better thing? Mercy? Honor? Justice? Pretty little words men use until winter comes or crowns are at stake, and then they begin cutting one another open with the same hands they joined in prayer?”

“They’re not pretty words.”

Aerion could not have said, afterward, whether the sudden heat in him was fury or something far more dangerous.

“No?” Aerion said. “Right and wrong are what men name a thing afterward, once the blow is struck and the knife washed clean. The realm survives because someone is willing to strike it. Mercy is always paid for by another man’s ruthlessness.”

Duncan shook his head once. “That’s a lie you tell yourself.”

Aerion’s fingers tightened on the frame until the knuckles blanched.

“I know what I see,” Duncan said. “Men lie and call it order. Men use you and call it duty. You know it. You’re too clever not to.”

“What you see,” Aerion snapped, “is a world run by men stronger than your songs. My father is a prince. My uncle is heir to the realm. My cousin will sit the Iron Throne if the gods are good. Kingdoms are not held together by simple virtue, ser. They are held by force, by marriages, by silence, by fear, by men doing what must be done and bearing the filth of it without weeping.”

The vein at Duncan’s temple was throbbing. The man was unbearably close now.

“You talk as if you’re freer than other men.”

“I am.”

The answer came too quickly.

Duncan’s temper rose to meet his. “That’s easy said for a man who cares so much what songs they make of his cousin.”

Aerion straightened, very slowly.

“The crown may be ungrateful, timid, hypocritical, contemptible. It is still the instrument by which the world is shaped, and none of us escapes that fact.”

Duncan’s face had gone strange and set. “And that is freedom to you?”

“It is truth.”

“No,” said Duncan. “It’s the excuse.”

“And there,” Aerion said softly, “you show yourself the greater fool. You think because a thing is true where steel is drawn, it ought to matter everywhere else. You think the world can be shamed into justice. It cannot.”

Duncan did not move. “I’d have you stop letting them tell you what your life is for.”

Aerion’s mouth twisted. “And I suppose you know better?”

“I know this,” Duncan said. “You hate being handled. You hate being managed. You hate men deciding what you are for. I’ve seen that plain enough. Yet you let them do it all the same.”

Aerion laughed like broken glass. “Let them?”

“Aye.”

The word hung there.

“You say the dragon don’t answer to sheep. Well then—why do you keep cutting yourself to fit a realm that will never thank you?”

Colour rose high in Aerion’s cheeks. “Tread carefully, ser.”

But Duncan had gone too far to stop.

“That’s why I cannot stomach this from you,” he said. “Not because you don’t see the world plain. Because you do. You see it plain as any man I’ve ever met, and still you help them make you into the thing they want.”

Something low and vicious stirred in Aerion’s chest. As if he had chosen this creed for ease. As if there were anything easy in seeing the world plain and finding it governed not by merit, nor courage, nor splendor, but by category, convenience, and the old blind preferences of frightened men.

“You think me unjust,” Aerion said, “because I do not pretend the world is clean.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“No,” said Aerion. “You only stand there looking wounded that the world does not run upon the lines you’d prefer.”

Only then did Aerion hear what was missing. The castle, lively a little while before, had gone dead quiet around their shouting. Ser Donnel remained where he was with one hand at his pommel and the other hanging useless, plainly too wise to interfere and too witless to flee, looking ridiculous in all that white.

Duncan did not so much as glance aside.

“Mayhaps I am a fool,” he said. “But I know this. If a thing’s wrong, it stays wrong, no matter how dear it costs.”

Aerion’s eyes burned. “Hard? You speak to me of hard?” His voice had dropped. “You think yourself noble because you can afford to. You can lose a hand and call it honor. Lose a foot and call it right. You are nothing, Ser Duncan. You may throw yourself away and no realm trembles for it.”

Duncan took that and did not flinch.

“Aye,” he said. “And I’d do it again.”

Aerion laughed once, sharp as broken glass. “Easy for you. A hedge knight may afford a conscience. He has so little else to lose.”

Duncan did not stop.

“You know what’s right,” he said. “You do. Don’t tell me you don’t. You know it because it’s been done to you.”

Aerion opened his mouth.

Nothing came.

“That’s the worst of it,” Duncan said. “Not that you’re cruel. That you know better.”

The words hung there in the warm, bitter air of the chamber.

“Find a better way.”

Aerion gave a hard, contemptuous laugh, but it broke in the middle. “In the Seven Kingdoms? As prince? With this family? This court?”

“Aye.”

“You fool.”

“Mayhaps.” Duncan held his gaze. “But I’d still rather be a fool who does right than a prince who knows the right and turns from it because it asks too much.”

Aerion looked away first.

He felt like standing with bare feet in broken glass.

Aerion straightened by degrees, drawing himself up from the frame though his body protested it. The nightrobe hung loose on him, his hair unbound, his side throbbing, the smell of his own shame still in the room between them, and still he found enough hauteur to look down his nose at the great oaf.

For one heartbeat too long, he said nothing.

He had no answer fit to give.

The corridor seemed suddenly too narrow, the air too warm, the robe too thin upon his skin. He felt flayed—not merely angered, not merely shamed, but scraped raw, as if Duncan had taken some stiff-bristled brush to him and scoured until there was no princely polish left, only the red meat underneath.

Ser Donnel shifted at last, with the care of a sensible man who had decided the whole business had gone as far wrong as it could without steel being drawn.

“My prince,” he said carefully, “mayhap this has been enough for one night—”

Aerion did not look at him.

“Take him away.”

The words came cold enough, though he could feel the heat beating hard in his throat.

Ser Donnel did not need telling twice. He reached at once for Duncan’s arm, not roughly, but with the grim efficiency of a man hauling some beloved hound out of a sept before it could piss on the altar.

Duncan did not move at first.

He stood there broad and stubborn and infuriatingly still, his face yet dark with the remains of temper. For one mad instant Aerion thought he might resist, that he might plant those huge ugly feet and make Aerion repeat himself like some fishwife in a market square.

Instead he lowered his eyes.

“Aye,” he said, though whether to Ser Donnel or to the command itself Aerion could not tell.

The great hand flexed once at his side. Then Duncan let the Kingsguard take hold of him and gave one small shake of the head, more to himself than any of them.

“Coming here was a mistake.”

The words struck so deep that Aerion near swayed.

For half a blink the corridor vanished. There was only that sentence, black and clean and final, opening under his feet like a well.

Something violent and immediate rose in Aerion so fast it blotted thought clean away. If he had had a knife in hand, he might have struck him then and there. Not because Duncan had shouted. Not because he had judged him. Not even because he had been right.

Because he had said mistake in that rough, wounded voice and made Aerion feel, in one hideous instant, cast off.

Aerion’s fingers bit so hard into the doorframe that pain shot through them.

Duncan was already allowing Ser Donnel to steer him back a pace, that great body yielding at last, head bent. The torchlight caught in his rough brown hair, along the line of his neck, across the broad square of his shoulders. Aerion hated all of it with such force that for an instant he could scarcely draw breath.

“Then go,” he heard himself say.

The words came out low and cutting. Good. Let them. If his voice shook beneath it, none of them would dare say so.

Duncan stopped.

“Go, if your conscience has had its supper,” Aerion said. “You have done your holy work here. You may sleep easy now, knowing you have scrubbed the monster and found him black beneath.”

Ser Donnel cast him a look somewhere between alarm and resignation. Duncan took it without lifting his head.

“That ain’t what I meant.”

Aerion laughed.

It sounded horrible in his own ears.

“Of course not. You never mean half the harm you do. That is your chiefest virtue.”

Duncan’s jaw tightened. He looked up then, only once, and the hurt in his face was so plain that Aerion might as well have put his own hand into a wound and felt the blood.

For one treacherous heartbeat he wanted to call it back.

He could not. Pride held what was left of him upright, and pride was all that remained now that Duncan had stripped the rest bare.

Ser Donnel tightened his grip. “Come away, ser.”

This time Duncan obeyed. They paused once more at the turn of the passage, and somehow Aerion knew for certain it was the hedge knight’s fault. He did not look back.

“Good night, Your Grace,” he said.

Aerion might have borne anything better than that.

Only then did he realize he was still holding the frame hard enough to tremble.

He shut the door with more force than was needed, set the bolt across, and stood there with his forehead against the wood, breathing as though he had run a mile in mail. The chamber behind him smelled of rosemary, banked coals, sweat, shame, and the fading trace of Duncan’s presence. It was intolerable.

Aerion made a noise low in his throat, not quite a laugh and not quite a curse. He wanted to smash something. He wanted to cut the sheets to ribbons. He wanted Duncan back at the door so he might strike him across the face and drag him down by the hair and demand how dare you—how dare you come here and say such things and leave me with them.

Instead there was only the room, close and warm and mocking.

No good choices, he thought wildly. None.

And because the gods were base creatures with a love of jests, what hurt most was not that Duncan had judged him.

It was that Duncan had believed him capable of better.

Aerion turned and struck the nearest bedpost with the heel of his hand.

Pain shot clean up his arm. The post did not so much as shiver. The room remained what it had been a moment before: warm, close, offensively well-kept, with its brazier glowing low and its bed turned down and its rushes fresh and sweet underfoot like a bride’s chamber laid ready for use. The sight of it filled him with such sudden loathing that he kicked at a stool and sent it clattering over onto its side.

“Fuck you,” he said aloud, though whether to Duncan, to Valarr, to the room, or to the gods themselves he could not have said.

His voice sounded thin in the chamber. Too human. Too hurt.

That enraged him further.

He paced once, twice, then stopped because the movement dragged at his dressings and made him suck in air through his teeth. His hands were shaking. He hated that too.

He tried to steady himself.

It did not work.

Had Duncan spoken like a septon, Aerion could have despised him cleanly. Had he spoken like Baelor, all patience and duty, Aerion could have borne it. Had he spoken like Valarr, all necessity and measured cruelty, Aerion might even have laughed.

But Duncan had said: aye, it is harder. Aye, it costs. Do it anyway.

Aerion pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes until bright points sparked there in the dark. He hated him. Hated the stupid certainty of him. Hated the great ox-hearted honesty of him. Hated that he had come to the door red-faced and breathing Aerion in like a beast and then dared speak as though he had leave to know him better than princes did.

He dropped his hands and stared at the bed.

The sheets were rumpled still. The room held the sweet-sour scent of what he had done there not half an hour before—heat, release, sweat, the private humiliation of his own body turned traitor. It clung to the linen and the warmed air and the loose robe at his skin. He had meant to master himself and instead made the whole chamber smell like confession.

Wonderful.

Duncan had come in on the heels of it, smelling the room, going scarlet, dropping to his knees like some fool out of a song. Aerion had wanted him then with a force ugly enough to shame him, and now all he had left of it was bitterness.

He crossed to the bed with the unsteady fury of a man intent on destroying evidence of his own disgrace. He stripped the upper sheet halfway free, then stopped because the pull dragged at his wound and left him breathless, furious, ridiculous. So he let it fall and sat on the edge instead, then hated himself for sitting in the very place that reeked of him.

Aerion bent forward, elbows on his knees, and let his head fall into his hands.

The room was too warm. The bed too soft. The linen at his skin too scented with old want. He could still see Duncan at the turn of the passage not looking back. Still hear the rough, tired shape of his voice.

Coming here was a mistake.

Aerion shut his eyes hard enough to hurt. Beneath the violence there had been something worse: the mad immediate urge to call him back. Not to beg. Never that. But to wound him again, or touch him, or make him unsay it, or force him to stand there until the thing between them could be turned into something Aerion knew how to master.

Instead Duncan had gone. Ser Donnel had taken him. The corridor had emptied, and Aerion had been left with the truth and the smell of his own body and a room fit for a bride.

He rose at last because sitting still was no easier than pacing, and because if he remained bent over like that a moment longer he might begin to look too much like a man praying.

He drank water straight from the jug and found it warm. He spat the first mouthful into the rushes and drank again anyway. He crossed to the window and pushed the shutter open a crack for air. Cold night came in thin and mean, smelling of damp stone and horses and the river somewhere beyond. It did little to cut the sweetness in the room.

Nothing could.

At last, with no better answer left him, he crawled into the bed he hated and dragged the blanket over himself like a wounded animal seeking cover. The sheets had cooled somewhat, but not enough. They still held traces of heat, of shame, of the restless body that had writhed there wanting one man and found release only with another in mind.

He turned onto his side and his wound protested. He turned onto the other and found his body no more willing that way. On his back the ceiling seemed too low and the dark too full. Every time he shut his eyes Duncan returned: Duncan kneeling, Duncan flushed scarlet, Duncan furious, Duncan saying do better as if that were a thing a man could simply choose because it was right.

As if rightness were not itself a privilege.

And yet—

Being too costly is not the same as being wrong.

He slept eventually, because the body will take what mercy it can wring from exhaustion. But sleep did not bring rest.

It brought Ashford first, only wrong. The mud too red, the cries too sharp, Duncan’s teeth at his throat not in battle but in judgment, dragging him down before a crowd with Valarr watching and saying nothing. Then Summerhall, corridors long as grave roads, Maekar at the far end with Baelor’s hand in his and both of them turning away as Aerion called after them and found he had no voice. Then Bitterbridge again, only the supper never ending: bread and salt and songs and all the while beneath the table Redding screaming and screaming while Lady Caswell smiled over her cup and Valarr took the praise that ought to have been Aerion’s and Duncan sat silent, looking at him with pity. Suddenly, the whole room was engulfed by bright green flames, wildfyre licking at all he held dear.

Then the dream changed.

He was standing in some chamber he did not know and yet knew at once, as one knows places in dreams: a room all drowned in silver, with no hearth lit and no window visible, only a tall mirror set in a carved frame of pale wood. The glass shone brighter than any true mirror should have done. It drew the eye the way still water did, promising depth where there ought only be reflection.

Aerion went to it.

At first it was only himself. Silver hair unbound, mouth hard, face too pale, too sharpened by pride and want and sleeplessness. Then the image altered without altering. The brow grew calmer. The mouth softened into that grave composure men always mistook for virtue. The set of the shoulders changed, not weaker, never weaker, but easier in the world. More legible. More beloved.

Valarr.

Not as he was in truth, perhaps, but as he had always been made to stand in Aerion’s mind: the man he might have been if the realm had wanted something different from him. The man meant for inheritance, for order, for being praised where Aerion was endured. The man Aerion had loved and envied and wanted to beat bloody all at once. The man his father could respect without effort.

Valarr in the glass looked back at him with that same unbearable calm, as if he knew some answer Aerion had spent his life failing to find.

Aerion lifted a hand to the mirror.

So did the figure.

He wanted—he did not know what he wanted. To strike it, perhaps. To seize it by the throat. To pull it through the glass and ask what was so easy in that face, what secret law of gods or men had written legitimacy into its bones. Or else to touch it only once and see whether it was warmer than his own hand, whether the old hunger in him would quiet if he could only reach.

His fingers touched the cold surface.

The glass rippled.

And it was not Valarr anymore.

His father looked back at him.

Maekar stood in the mirror where Aerion ought to have been: older, harder, all rough-hewn lines and discipline hammered into flesh. Not handsome as Valarr was handsome, not beautiful as Aerion himself had once been taught to be, but formidable. A man made respectable by force of will. A man who had cut whole provinces out of himself and gone on standing. His face bore no softness. No longing. Only that same iron severity the realm mistook for wholeness because it had never seen what was buried underneath.

The man he might become.

The man his father had made of himself.

The man his father would have of him.

Aerion jerked back as if burned, but the image moved with him, Maekar’s eyes fixed upon his with that old merciless disappointment that had lived in Aerion since boyhood. Not anger. Worse. Expectation without tenderness. A judgment that did not need to speak because it had already settled itself inside the bones.

Aerion struck the glass.

It shattered at once.

The sound rang like steel in a chapel.

Cracks raced outward in a white starburst, then the whole mirror gave way, breaking into a thousand bright shards that fell and fell and never seemed to reach the floor. For one instant he saw himself in every piece—himself twisted, himself bloodied, himself too young, himself with Valarr’s face, himself with Maekar’s eyes—then even that was gone.

When the last of the glass vanished, there was no one left in the frame.

Only Aerion standing alone in the dark chamber, hand half-raised, his own breathing loud in the silence.

He woke from that last one with his heart pounding and the blanket twisted hard round his legs.

The room was dark still, though thinner now at the shutters. Dawn not far off.

His mouth tasted sour. His hair clung damply at the nape. Every joint ached. For one stupid instant he did not know where he was, only that he had dreamed badly and woken worse.

Then the chamber came back to him. The brazier. The bed. The sweet stale smell still lingering. The memory of Duncan’s face in the torchlight. The rushes underfoot, the sweet stale scent of the room still clinging like mockery to the bed.

Wonderful.

His side hurt. His head hurt. His mouth felt mean. If he had been born with scales and wings instead of silver hair and a prince’s face, he thought sourly, he might have burned the castle down where it stood.

He pushed himself upright and at once regretted it. Sleep had done him no kindness. It had only stiffened every bruise and driven the ache deeper into his bones. His hair was in knots down his back, his nightrobe twisted, and his temper so near the surface it seemed a wonder the bedclothes did not catch.

A knock sounded at the door.

Aerion closed his eyes.

Of course.

Knocks at his door had thus far brought him nothing worth having: maesters with their bitter draughts and officious hands, hedge knights with their apologies and truths, old men, younger fools, instructions, management, indignity in fresh wrappings. He considered, for one brief and not wholly unserious moment, climbing through the window and taking his chances with the drop.

Another knock came, louder this time.

Before Aerion could tell whoever it was to go drown in the Mander, the door was rattled impatiently from the other side and Ser Roland’s voice came through, carrying as if he were still in a yard full of men-at-arms.

“Prince Aerion! Your father wants you in the solar.”

Of course he did.

Roland, being Roland, did not wait for leave to be granted or temper to be vented. The latch lifted at once and the door swung inward enough to show the knight’s broad shape filling the gap, one hand planted on the wood as if he expected resistance and meant to weather it.

Aerion stared at him from the bed with all the warmth of a drawn knife.

Ser Roland took one look at his face and had the wisdom not to comment on what he found there. “Now, Your Grace,” he said instead, in the tone of a man trying not to prod a wounded hound and being forced to all the same. “Prince Maekar said at once.”

Aerion wanted very badly to tell him what Prince Maekar could do with his summons.

Instead he threw back the blankets with more violence than was strictly needed and sat there breathing through his nose, barefoot on the edge of the bed, feeling the full litany of his grievances parade before him. His father wanted him. The solar. Morning. After a night like that. There was no version of it that boded anything but ill.

“Then shut the door,” Aerion said. His voice came out rougher than he liked. “Or stay and lace my boots for me. I care little which.”

Roland snorted once through his nose, whether amused or offended Aerion could not tell. “I’ll wait without, if it please Your Grace.”

“It does not.”

“Still.”

The door closed.

Aerion sat another heartbeat in the dim chamber, jaw hard, the dream’s broken mirror still clinging like grit somewhere behind his eyes, Duncan’s voice fouler in memory than any hangover, Valarr no kinder in absence than in presence, and now his father calling for him before the sun was fully up.

No good choices indeed.

At last he hauled himself to his feet.

If Maekar wanted him in the solar, then Maekar might have him. But he would have him upright, washed, dressed, and sharp enough to cut with, not dragged from bed like some chastened child or spent whore. Let his father be disappointed in daylight, then. Aerion had no intention of making it easier for him.

By the time Aerion entered the solar, he had himself back in hand.

He had washed the worst of the night from his face, dragged a comb through his hair, and put on garments fit for daylight and princes rather than fever and dreams. The effort had cost him. His side had protested every bend and reach. The bruise-dark ache behind his eyes had not lessened. The temper remained. But outwardly, at least, he had made himself presentable, which was more than the morning deserved.

Baelor and Maekar were already within.

His uncle stood by the narrow table with both hands resting on it, grave as judgment in the slanting grey light. His father had taken the space nearer the hearth, arms folded, his face set in that hard rough-hewn stillness which in Maekar might mean anger, weariness, or both. Between them sat the opened letters, a cup gone untouched, and the general air of men who had been up too long and had no expectation of the day improving.

Aerion, seeing all that, took the nearest chair and all but flung himself into it.

If his groin objected, it might object in private.

“Well?” he asked, letting one leg stretch out before him with more languor than comfort. “Have the prisoners sung already?”

Baelor frowned in the mild controlled disapproval of a good man presented yet again with one more reason to be disappointed in his kin.

“The need for sharp questioning was unfortunate, but inevitable,” he said.

Aerion closed his eyes for one heartbeat.

Oh, for the love of all the gods above and below. There it was again, that note of weary princely righteousness, and with it Duncan’s voice rose at once from the fouler chambers of memory, rough and obstinate and intolerably certain. Find a better way.

The self-righteous oaf prodded at the back of his mind like a splinter under the nail.

Aerion drowned him ruthlessly.

“So they have sung,” he said, opening his eyes again. “How edifying.”

Maekar’s mouth tightened. Baelor ignored the insolence as he ignored most things he judged beneath rebuke.

“They told us enough,” his uncle said. “Enough to know Flowers had warning before you reached Wyvern’s Watch.”

Aerion sat up a little straighter despite himself.

That, at least, was interesting.

“From the inn?”

“Not only.”

Baelor looked at him, measuring perhaps how much to say before Maekar cut in. Or perhaps only whether Aerion was presently in a mood to hear reason without setting fire to the furniture.

“It was a beggar on the road,” he said at last. “One of Flowers’s warning eyes. He saw the royal party pass, marked the banners and numbers, and word was carried ahead.”

For half a beat Aerion only stared at him.

Then he laughed with a disbelief so sharp it was near insult.

“You jest.”

“No,” said Maekar.

“The beggar?” Aerion repeated. “That dying fucking beggar in the ditch?”

Baelor’s brow furrowed faintly. “You saw him too, then.”

Aerion turned to look at his uncle as if the man had suddenly begun speaking Ghiscari.

“Saw him?” he said. “The giant gave him water.”

The words came out fouler than perhaps they needed to, but the absurdity of it was too much. He could see it again at once: the thing huddled in the roadside muck, all rags and misery and piteous filth, and Duncan lumbering down from the saddle with that same broad-faced earnestness he brought to every mistake he made, all because some creature in a ditch looked likely to die without witness.

The gods must be having a laugh.

Maekar exhaled once through his nose. “It seems the man had kin or fellows farther along the road. A hedge septon, a ferryman, one of the bridge men. It matters little which. Flowers knew to prepare.”

Aerion barked another laugh and let his head fall back against the chair.

Of course he did.

Of course mercy itself had sprouted eyes and legs and run ahead to warn a traitor. Of course the realm was rotten in precisely that fashion: not clean villainy in silk, but hunger and pity and ruin all put to use at once. A beggar in a ditch. A prince on the road. A cup of water. A warning carried swifter than honor ever was.

And Duncan, gods curse him, had likely not even understood what he had done. Had given the water because it was there to give, because the man had thirsted, because some brute honest law in him would no more pass by suffering than a hound would pass by a bone.

Aerion ought to have found it funny.

“Remarkable,” he said. “The Seven themselves seem to have taken to practical jests.”

Baelor’s frown deepened. “There is no jest in it.”

“No?” Aerion’s mouth curled. “A starving man in a ditch sees a prince ride by, takes water from the very fool sent to apprehend treason, and the traitor is warned in time to muster men from the hedges. It has a certain shape, uncle. The singers would love it.”

Maekar cut across that before Baelor could answer. “Enough.”

Aerion looked at him.

His father’s face had gone that flint-hard way of his, but there was something under it this morning besides anger. Fatigue, certainly. Perhaps disappointment, though Maekar wore disappointment like other men wore boots—daily and without remark. Yet there was also, Aerion thought, the smallest rawness to him. The sort that came when a man had been awake all night with truths he did not like.

“The beggar is dead by now,” Maekar said. “So if you mean to be amused by this, do it quickly.”

That silenced Aerion for a beat.

He had half a mind to say that made the whole business neater. One less mouth. One less witness. But the words curdled before they reached his tongue. Duncan’s hand at the ditch. Duncan’s stupid pity. Duncan’s voice at the door. You know what’s right.

Aerion wanted, very suddenly, to put his fist through something.

Instead he drummed his fingers once against the carved arm of the chair and said, with all the composure he did not feel, “Well. There is your answer, then. Flowers did not need loyal household men or ravens trained to cleverness. He needed only the Seven Kingdoms as it is.”

Baelor looked at him sharply, as if hearing more in that than Aerion had quite meant to show.

“And what is that, in your view?”

Aerion smiled without warmth.

“A land where misery is a road, uncle. And every decent impulse on it may be put to work by worse men.”

The words sat between them.

Too close to Duncan. Too close to the truth. Too close, perhaps, to something Aerion did not care to inspect this early in the day.

So naturally he ruined it at once.

“Still,” he said, “the giant will be delighted to know his cup of water served the Blackfyres so well.”

Baelor did not answer at once.

He stood by the table with one hand resting on the heap of opened letters, his thumb beneath the edge of the uppermost parchment as if he had been sorting and resorting them since dawn and found none improved by handling. The pale morning light made him look older than he had the night before. Not weaker. Never that. Only worn thin at the edges by too many roads converging at once.

“It is because the Seven Kingdoms are as it is,” he said at last, “that we cannot linger here longer than we must.”

Aerion’s gaze dropped to the table.

Letters, then. Several of them. Some still folded back upon themselves, some broken open and flattened, one weighted by an empty cup as though it had been read too many times and trusted too little. He felt his temper sharpen further. Of course there were letters. There were always letters after scandal, each one another lord or fool or pious corpse trying to turn a family’s shame into doctrine, opportunity, or both.

Baelor drew one of the parchments free.

“We received word yesterday and again this morning,” he said. “From Oldtown, King’s Landing, Casterly Rock, and Lord Brynden.”

The last name shifted something faintly in the room. Maekar’s face did not change, but Aerion knew his father too well not to see the slight tightening at the mouth.

Baelor went on. “The Starry Sept writes that what passed between you and Ser Duncan bears the signs of a union blessed by the gods.”

Aerion barked a laugh.

“Charming,” he said. “Has the Most Devout taken to divining marriage law from mud and teeth now?”

Baelor ignored him.

“The Great Sept says the contrary,” he said, lifting another letter. “That the thing is unnatural and an abomination, and must be dissolved if it can be dissolved.”

There it was. Westeros entire in two breaths: sanctify it or burn it, with neither side pausing long enough to wonder whether Aerion himself might have a view on the matter.

“And Lord Brynden?” Maekar asked.

Baelor’s eyes moved briefly over the contents of the third letter, though he knew them already. “As ever, Lord Brynden wastes no ink on morality. He writes that the matter has escaped privacy and entered politics. He advises speed, discretion, and above all that we allow no rival faction to shape the first settled account of what occurred at Ashford.”

Which meant, Aerion thought, that Bloodraven was frightened.

Baelor set that one down and took up the last.

“This,” he said, with such dryness that even Aerion looked up more sharply, “is from Lord Paramount of the West, Damon Lannister.”

That alone was enough to sour the air.

Baelor unfolded the parchment fully. “He writes that if the crown means to dissolve this union, yet still intends to bind a Targaryen omega suitably and soon, he has an eligible young alpha son of age and would be honored to discuss terms.”

For one blink Aerion could only stare.

Then he laughed. Harder this time. Not because it was amusing, but because if he did not laugh he might have had to put his head through the wall.

“Of course he does,” he said. “What is a prince’s public humiliation if not a marriage market to some Westerman carrion bird?”

Maekar’s expression had gone black.

Baelor let the letter fall back to the table.

“So,” his uncle said, “we cannot afford to delay our arrival in King’s Landing much longer. Bitterbridge must be settled, yes. But the matter from Ashford is no longer merely a family embarrassment. It is a question of septs, great lords, and how the realm is to speak of what happened. That answer cannot be left to travel without us.”

Aerion sat very still.

He could feel it coming now, the real shape beneath all this parchment and piety. Not the letters themselves. The roads they required.

Baelor looked from him to Maekar.

“My thought,” he said, “is that Prince Aerion should go on without delay in a small, controlled party. Ser Duncan with him. Yorkell. Ser Donnel. And Daeron.”

There it was.

Aerion did not move at once, because moving would have made too plain the sudden vicious jolt of thought that went through him.

Mother of Seven, he thought. You are actually going to listen to the oaf.

Somehow Duncan’s blunt, impossible honesty had smashed its way into Baelor’s judgment too. The great lummox had gone to bed scarce an hour before dawn, had likely been hauled from it before the sun itself had properly risen, and still had found breath enough to argue himself into the structure of princes’ plans.

Aerion ought to have been outraged.

He found instead, for one ugly instant, a spark of satisfaction in imagining the inconvenience of it. Summoned near dawn, was he? Hauled half-sleeping before princes and duty like any other useful beast? Aerion pictured him there, rumpled and red-eyed and trying not to smell like the room he had knelt in, and felt another sharp mean spark of pleasure.

Then Maekar spoke.

“No.”

The word came as flat as a blade laid on stone.

Baelor’s gaze shifted. “Brother—”

Maekar cut across him. “Not one party. Two.”

Aerion almost smiled.

Maekar’s eyes were on the table, on the letters, on the ugly geometry of it all rather than on either son. “One with Ser Duncan and Daeron,” he said. “The other with Valarr and Aerion. Smaller, cleaner, less room for foolishness.”

Aerion’s mouth went rigid.

So that was the answer his father preferred. Separate the contamination. Keep Duncan from him and Valarr beside him. Tidy. Sensible. Suffocating.

Baelor’s face remained composed, but Aerion knew him well enough now to hear the objection gathering before it was spoken.

Before either prince could loose it, Baelor said, “We met with Ser Duncan earlier.”

Aerion’s gaze snapped to him.

Baelor went on. “He said he considered it his duty to guard the man he marked. He said also that he would never force the bond upon Aerion, nor permit any man to think him willing to do so. He was… plain on the point.”

Plain. Aerion could imagine just how plain.

Maekar’s mouth thinned. “Good intentions do not govern princes.”

“No,” said Baelor. “Nor may they be wholly ignored when a man has thus far shown restraint where most would have shown temptation. We cannot build policy on his honor alone, but nor can we pretend it is nothing.”

Father Above, Aerion thought, not quite daring to look at Maekar. How? How did the great oaf do it? How did he blunder into every chamber and leave men thinking better of him than they had before?

“Valarr might be enough to stop the whispers and lend some legitimacy,” Baelor said.

Aerion was on his feet before the pain in his side had time to remind him what a bad idea that was.

“No.”

Both princes looked at him.

It was unlike Baelor to appear startled. He managed it now, if only for a heartbeat.

Aerion felt his own pulse hard in his throat and pressed on before anyone could mistake the force of it for petulance.

“Let Valarr remain here,” he said. “With you. With Uncle Baelor. To settle the Blackfyre filth under your feet. If Bitterbridge must be sorted before the whole road can be trusted, you will want another prince here whose presence carries weight.”

Maekar’s gaze narrowed.

“And instead?”

“Send Daeron with the main party.”

Silence.

Then Maekar said, with dangerous calm, “The last time I sent Daeron anywhere near another of my sons without close guard, Aegon vanished into the countryside and turned up later dressed as half a stableboy.”

Aerion met his father’s eyes.

“But I am not Aegon, Father.”

Baelor’s mouth twitched, not in mirth, but in the ghost of approval for a thrust cleanly made.

No, Aerion was not Aegon. He would not disappear into hedges. He would not wander off with some peddler’s train because the wind changed. He would not let Daeron drink himself into inattention and simply evaporate like Aegon did whenever freedom scented the air.

He was Aerion. He would reach King’s Landing or burn the road there.

Maekar looked at him a long moment.

Aerion knew what his father saw. The one thing Maekar had ever reliably understood in him, because it was the same iron from which he himself had been made.

Baelor spoke before Maekar could refuse outright.

“It would also answer appearances better,” he said. “Valarr remains here with us where the treason lies. Daeron goes on, which softens the appearance of Ser Duncan as sole escort. Ser Donnel and Wate give rank and protection. Yormwell gives needful care. The party remains small enough to move quickly.”

Maekar did not like it. That much was plain. Aerion could see the thought moving behind his father’s face, all the possible shames and dangers lined up and weighed like baggage before a campaign.

At last Maekar said, “I mislike sending Daeron into daylight, let alone onto the kingsroad.”

“Yet daylight continues to survive him,” said Baelor.

That won a brief narrowing of the eyes from Maekar and, from Aerion despite himself, the smallest inward flicker of satisfaction.

Baelor took it for assent and pressed his advantage.

“One convoy,” he said. “Aerion. Ser Duncan. Daeron. Ser Donnel. Yorkell. They go quickly. We remain and settle Bitterbridge with Valarr.”

Aerion stood very straight beside the chair, his side burning now where the sudden movement had pulled against the wound. He did not let it show.

Valarr stays, he thought.

The fact of it moved through him too strangely to be called relief. Relief, yes, in one sour sense. Better this than riding beside Valarr after what had passed. Better distance than the old script thrust upon them again before either could breathe. Better to be spared the familiar trap of wanting comfort from the very man who had chosen prudence over freedom.

And yet.

The old instinct in him twisted anyway. Valarr stays. Valarr does not go. Valarr remains where politics matter and weight is counted and princes are useful, whilst Aerion is packed off along the road with a maester, a drunkard brother, a Kingsguard, and a hedge knight who had spent half the night flaying him alive with moral truth.

No good choices.

Baelor seemed to read enough in his face to soften his tone, though not his words.

“You leave as soon as the maester clears you to ride,” he said. “A day, perhaps two. No longer.”

There it was. Not even his own departure belonged wholly to him. He might be packed off to King’s Landing like troublesome freight, but only once some chain-wearing old man had peered at his wounds and pronounced the cargo roadworthy.

Aerion might have laughed. Instead he said, “How generous.”

Neither prince took that up.

It was then, whilst the matter seemed settled and yet none of them had moved, that Aerion saw it.

Only the briefest shift of Baelor’s gaze toward Maekar, and the answering stillness in his father, as if some old cord had been drawn taut between them and both men felt the pull. Weariness sat in them alike, but differently. Baelor wore his as a prince did, open-faced and borne for others. Maekar wore his as he wore everything, driven inward until it had hardened him.

And suddenly Aerion could see the shape of it too clearly to bear.

What were Baelor and Maekar, if not what Valarr and Aerion might have been, had both of them been better men?

Two men who had loved, and not taken; wanted, and not reached; bent themselves to the realm’s yoke so thoroughly that even the wanting had been hammered into something respectable.

Aerion looked at his father and saw, with a bitterness that hurt worse for being edged in pity, what it had cost him to be respected as he was. Whole provinces of himself.

And because Aerion had spent the better part of the night being flayed alive over sacrifice and freedom and what a man owed to his own soul, he could not help but see it plain:
Maekar had not demanded of him anything he had not first demanded of himself.

But for one bare instant, looking his father in the eye, Aerion forgave him.

Not for the expectation. Not for the hardness. Not for any of the thousand cruelties of being Maekar’s son.

For this only: that his father was no more free than Aerion himself.

The moment passed at once.

Maekar’s face shut like a gate, and whatever Aerion had seen there was gone back under iron.

Maekar was still looking at him.

“There will be no nonsense on the road,” his father said.

Aerion’s mouth curved. “You deprive me of all my amusements at once.”

Maekar did not rise to it. If anything, that was worse.

“No nonsense,” he said again. “You will obey Ser Donnel in matters of immediate safety. You will not bait Daeron into making a jest of the whole road. And you will reach King’s Landing intact.”

That last word sat strangely in the air.

Intact.

As if any of them had been that, even at Ashford. As if a man could pass through all this and arrive anywhere whole.

Aerion inclined his head because there was nothing else to do with the order.

“As you command, Father.”

But inside, where things still bit and bled, all he could think was:

The gods were base creatures indeed.

He did not leave that day.

Maester Yormwell came twice, then a third time after noon, with his cold hands and colder eyes and his endless appetite for prodding places that were already sore. He unbound the dressing at Aerion’s side, clicked his tongue, rebound it tighter, and told him no. Not today. Perhaps tomorrow, if the prince meant to sit a horse and not fall from it like a sack of grain before they reached the end of the town.

Aerion informed him that if he touched him again without warning, he would lose the hand.

Yormwell only snorted and told him he was mending badly because he was vain, restless, and unwilling to obey sense. Then he sent up more salves, more linen, more instructions, and a fresh packet of moon tea besides, as if one indignity might be cured by another.

So Aerion waited.

He waited in chambers too warm by day and too close by night, with servants coming and going beneath his notice and yet somehow always managing to offend it. Boots were brushed. Cloaks folded. Shirts aired. Saddlebags packed and repacked. One of Yormwell’s boys came with bandages. Another with dried herbs to steep against fever. A third with some abominable broth that tasted of boiled root and old grief. Every few hours someone came to tell him some fresh practical insult: Ser Donnel had chosen the guards; Wate had seen to the road packs; Daeron’s horse had thrown a shoe and needed reshod; the letters were copied; more letters had come; no, not for him.

He saw little enough of the princes. Baelor was forever below stairs or in Caswell’s hall or bent over ledgers with his father and Valarr. Maekar he glimpsed once at the turn of a passage, speaking low with Ser Roland, hard-faced and unshaven, every inch the war captain grown old in harness. Daeron came and went as he pleased, of course, with wine on his breath and some fresh insolence in his mouth, and had the grace at least not to speak Duncan’s name aloud.

Valarr did not come.

Aerion told himself he was glad of it.

Let him stay where he belonged, amongst parchments and princes and the proper management of treason. Let him stand at Baelor’s shoulder and speak of roads and stores and household men and all the dutiful little mechanisms by which realms held together. Let him keep his distance now, if distance was what prudence required. Aerion had no wish to see him. None.

That was what he told himself when morning passed and no summons came. When supper came and no message with it. When dusk thickened beyond the shutters and still no sign of him. By nightfall the absence had become a shape of its own, and Aerion hated it worse than he would have hated intrusion.

Duncan, at least, had the decency to stay gone.

That should have pleased him more than it did.

Once, from the window, Aerion saw him in the yard below with Ser Donnel, his big ugly shape made smaller by distance but no less recognizable for it. They were checking girths, or packs, or some other labor fit for men who loved the road more than they feared it. Duncan bent to lift something from beside a horse and straightened with that same blunt economy he brought to all bodily things, as if the gods had built him to carry weight and never asked whether he wished it.

Aerion stepped back from the window at once, furious with himself for having lingered there long enough to know the line of his shoulders by sight.

The night before departure he slept little and badly. Waiting then proved its own torment. Every creak of the passage made him think some final word had come. Every change in the yard below made him think horses were already being saddled, though the dark had not yet thinned. Once he sat bolt upright in bed because he was certain he had heard a knock, only to realize it had been nothing but wind worrying some loose shutter in the gallery.

By dawn he was foul-tempered enough to snap at the first servant who crossed his threshold and had almost done it when Yormwell himself appeared instead, chain glinting dull in the early light, and pronounced him fit to ride so long as he meant to ride and not play heroics on the road.

“As if I had any choice but to endure your cautions,” Aerion said.

“No,” said Yormwell, dry as dust. “None at all, which is why I keep repeating them.”

Then the day, at last, lurched into motion.

The yard below filled with the ugly practical business of leaving: horses led out half-tacked, leather creaking, men shouting for buckles and straps and oat sacks and water skins, servants darting under elbows with bundles in their arms. The road had ceased to be some threatened abstraction and become instead a thing made of packed linen, girths, hooves, and the smell of dung and cold morning air.

Aerion dressed more carefully than the occasion deserved.

If he was to be sent off like troublesome cargo, he would at least be troublesome cargo in black silk and good boots. He let them belt him, wrap the fresh dressing at his side, and bore it all with the stiff-lipped patience of a man being readied for execution by well-meaning fools. When it was done, and the chamber that had held him for two nights of heat, shame, and argument stood half-stripped of his presence, he looked once around it and felt only relief that he need never smell it again.

Then he went down to the stables, rawer than he cared to admit, and found the old life waiting for him there.

The stables were all noise and leather and straw.

Morning had got properly into them by then. Grooms shouted over one another, horses stamped and tossed their heads in the stalls, and the whole place smelled of hay, dung, sweat, wet wool, and the sour iron tang of harness buckles handled too often by too many hands. It should have been common enough. Beneath any lord’s roof in the Seven Kingdoms, a stable on departure day looked much the same.

Aerion found that he hated this one particularly.

Perhaps because it was too alive. Perhaps because he had slept too little and dreamed too much. Perhaps because the road had become real in the shape of saddlebags and girths and men too busy to lower their voices as he passed. Or perhaps only because Duncan was there already, broad-shouldered and bent over the tack of one of the horses as if he had been born among harness and hayracks and could no more be out of place in such a setting than a hound in a kennel.

Aegon was with him.

The boy stood stiff-backed beside a half-open stall, saying something low and urgent, his face drawn into that earnest young severity he mistook for manhood. His miserable little skull, newly shorn, only worsened the effect. With that bald head and solemn mouth he looked less like a prince than a novice hauled half-finished from a sept, all eyes and indignation. Duncan answered in the same rough patient rumble he used for skittish horses, frightened smallfolk, and arguments he did not mean to yield.

Aerion caught only scraps.

“…still only a boy…”

“…a boy who ran warning to traitors…”

“…that don’t mean he ought…”

“…you heard what they did to him…”

Aegon’s voice broke strangely on the last words, and that, more than anything, made Aerion understand the shape of it. The youngest prisoner. The one no older than Aegon himself. Whatever had been dragged out of him below stairs, Aegon had now to reckon with the plain fact that his noble uncles, his just father, his whole bright dragon brood had put a child of his own age to the question and called it governance.

Good, some small foul part of Aerion thought. Let him learn early what crowns are made of.

He did not much linger on it.

He could not. Because there, a little farther down the row of stalls where the light came slanting through the open stable doors and striped the dust gold, stood Valarr.

Of all places.

Curse him.

Valarr had one gloved hand resting on the neck of his horse, speaking to a groom who nodded too eagerly and then fled at once with a blanket over his arm. He was dressed for the road though not for riding: dark leathers, a cloak not yet clasped, hair bound back with more care than Duncan would ever give his own. He did not belong in the stable any more than a sword belonged in a kitchen, and yet somehow the place arranged itself around him all the same. Even here, amongst dung and straw and common labor, Valarr looked as though he had stepped out of the song the world had always preferred to sing of him.

Aerion stopped.

A wiser man might have turned aside. Might have made some show of inspecting his own horse, or spoken to Daeron if Daeron was near, or gone to Yormwell, or done any of the hundred little coward’s things by which men spared themselves a wound.

Aerion had never in his life done the wiser thing where Valarr was concerned.

He had gone after him since he had learned to walk. That was the old shameful truth of it. Trailing after him through Summerhall’s galleries with a wooden sword in hand, demanding games, demanding races, demanding notice. Valarr, wait. Valarr, look. Valarr, watch me. Even later, when they were older and sharper and no one mistook the bite under the play, some part of Aerion had never quite learned how not to turn toward him.

He was not altogether sure his body knew how.

So he went.

He went past Duncan and Aegon without so much as turning his head, though he could feel Duncan note his passing as plainly as if a hand had been laid between Aerion’s shoulders. Let him. Let him choke on his duty with a mouthful of horsehair for company.

Straw crushed softly under his boots. The stable air shifted as he crossed into Valarr’s orbit, warmer there from horseflesh and lamp heat and the spice-clean scent Valarr wore as naturally as another man wore skin. Aerion hated that he knew it before he reached him. Hated that his body, treacherous thing, eased and sharpened all at once in the space of three steps.

Valarr turned before Aerion spoke.

For one breath they only looked at one another.

Too public, Aerion thought at once. Too many eyes. Too many ears. Duncan somewhere at his back. Aegon with his little solemn face. Grooms coming and going, pretending not to see. A stable was the worst place in the world for anything real to pass between two men.

And yet Valarr had come here.

“What devotion,” Aerion said softly. “I had not known the proper fitting of a saddle had fallen to the heir’s son.”

Valarr’s mouth moved, not quite a smile and not far from one. “And I had not known Yormwell had cleared you to sneer before noon.”

There it was. That old ease. That old impossible thing by which Valarr could speak one light sentence and make it sound as though none of the world had altered, though all of it had.

Aerion hated him for it.

More, he hated that some buried part of him wanted to lean into it like a starved dog toward a hand.

He stopped an arm’s length away. Near enough to feel the horse’s heat between them. Near enough that, had this been another place and another life, Valarr might have reached and touched the back of his wrist and let the whole of what was unsaid pass there.

Aerion became sharply aware of all of it at once: the stable’s noise too loud, his own pulse too hard, the memory of the council still fresh in his flesh, and Valarr—Valarr in this vile ordinary place where they could not even wound one another properly without a dozen men hearing.

And Aerion, because he had never once in his life learned not to answer the pull of him, stood there beneath the stable rafters with the smell of straw in his nose and blood in his mouth and thought, miserably and with no surprise at all:

Traitor.

Valarr did not look at Duncan.

That, more than if he had stared openly, told Aerion how carefully this meeting had been chosen.

The stable still moved around them in all its common ugliness—boys hauling tack, horses stamping, straw drifting in the doorlight—but there seemed all at once a little pocket of stillness at the end of the row where Valarr stood with one hand on his horse’s neck and Aerion before him. Not privacy. Nothing so generous. Only the thin poor imitation of it that rank sometimes bought in busy places, where lesser men learned to look away if they wished to keep their eyes.

Duncan, curse him, was one of the men looking away.

Very pointedly away.

He had turned back to Aegon and to whatever grave little horror the boy was trying to make sense of, but Aerion could feel him all the same, a huge seething presence a few stalls down, all rough restraint and badly hidden temper. He was trying. Aerion almost admired him for it. Almost.

Valarr lowered his voice.

“I came because there was no proper place left to speak.”

You had a whole day to seek me out, Aerion thought. Doing so now was very deliberate.

So Aerion said only, “Then speak.”

Valarr’s eyes rested on him a moment longer than they should have done.

“I thought—” Valarr stopped there, because the rest is too old and too humiliating to name plainly. “I thought things would be arranged otherwise.”

The words passed between them so softly that, had Aerion not been waiting with his whole skin, he might almost have missed them.

“When we were boys,” Valarr continued, “I thought one day you would be mine.”

He had never heard Valarr say it aloud.

Aerion’s mouth went dry.

“And then?” he asked, because to say nothing would have been worse.

Valarr’s gaze dropped briefly to the horse’s mane beneath his hand. “Then the realm required other things.”

Aerion let out a little laugh, low and sharp enough to cut with. “There is no man in Westeros less in need of speaking the word duty to me than you.”

Valarr took the blow without flinching.

“I thought there would be no need to explain myself to you. There never was before.”

He lifted his eyes again. In the morning light of the stable they looked darker than they had any right to do. Tired, perhaps. Or only careful.

“I wished things were different,” he said.

Aerion nearly answered with something cruel. He had an abundance of cruel things ready where Valarr was concerned. They crowded his throat at once. Did you? On which day? Before or after you offered me up to be ruled? Before or after you remembered I was useful only if governed? All of them would have landed. None would have done what he wanted done, which was impossible and shameful and had no language fit for stables.

So instead he said, “That is a very courtly wish. Useless and beautifully spoken.”

Something in Valarr’s face changed at that, more tired than wounded.

“You think I do not know how I failed you.”

Aerion felt his own temper stir. Good. Better that than the other thing. Better anger than the old pull in his body, the old fatal ease of wanting to step in and let Valarr’s scent and gravity settle him like a hand on the back of the neck.

“I think,” Aerion said softly, “that you knew very well what you were doing.”

Valarr was silent a beat.

“Yes,” he said then. “I did.”

It would have been easier if he had lied.

Aerion looked away first, to the stable door, to the bright square of morning beyond, to Duncan’s broad shape at the edge of his sight turned very firmly elsewhere. His side hurt. The smell of hay was everywhere. Somewhere a horse struck wood with a hoof and a groom soothed it under his breath.

Valarr said, “You know how we are seen.”

Aerion laughed without mirth. “At present? As a scandal, an abomination, and a marriage prospect for every grasping lord from here to the Westerlands.”

Valarr’s mouth twitched despite himself. It vanished almost at once.

“I mean always,” he said. “Before Ashford, before this. We were born to be watched. To be read. Me for what I might inherit. You for what you might become if left too free. They have always measured us by what use might be made of us.”

Aerion turned that over bitterly. “How comforting, to be understood so clearly.”

Valarr stepped nearer then.

“I am not asking you to forgive me.”

“No,” Aerion said. “You know me too well for that.”

“Yes.” Valarr’s voice dropped. “I only ask that you be careful.”

Something in Aerion, already raw from too little sleep and too much truth, bristled at once. “I can take care of myself.”

“I know you can.”

“Then save your counsel for Daeron, who may yet drown in his own wine skin before Tumbleton.”

“That is not what I mean.”

Valarr lifted his right hand then. The ring he wore was a heavy thing in dark gold, plain for princely ornament but unmistakably his for having been on him so long. Aerion had seen it often enough to have stopped consciously noting it years ago. Which was perhaps why the sight of Valarr turning it once on his finger before drawing it free struck him with such force.

For one strange heartbeat Aerion could only look at Valarr’s bare hand.

Then Valarr took Aerion’s hand before he could think to stop him.

Only the fingers. Only the briefest pressure. But that was enough. More than enough. Aerion felt it in his throat.

Valarr pressed the ring into his palm and folded Aerion’s fingers over it one by one.

“If you find trouble,” he said, “send this back to me. No message need be written. No explanation. Only the ring. I will know to come looking.”

Aerion stared at their joined hands.

A stable was no place for such gestures. Not with grooms at the far end and boys running blankets to the yard and Duncan somewhere behind him trying very hard not to look and radiating enough contained fury to warm the rafters.

He drew his hand back.

“I do not require rescuing.”

“No,” said Valarr. “You never have.”

“Then why—”

“Because it would ease my mind.”

Aerion looked down at the ring in his hand. It seemed heavier than it ought to be. Warm still from Valarr’s skin.

He could feel Duncan’s anger behind him now almost as a physical thing, a great silent vibration in the air. He was trying very hard not to watch. Aerion knew he was, and knew too that Duncan would hear enough, smell enough, guess enough, however nobly he turned away.

He accepted the ring anyway.

That, too, stung.

Aerion slid it into the inner fold of his glove rather than onto his finger. “If I send it,” he said, “I expect you to arrive before the songs do.”

Valarr’s mouth bent, small and crooked. More honest than a smile from him had any right to be.

“I always did come when you called.”

That, more than the ring itself, nearly undid him.

Before Aerion could answer, before he could say something witless or vicious or worse, Daeron’s voice drifted in from two horses over.

“Well,” he said lazily, “what a fascinating stable. Every creature in it appears to be in love with the wrong person.”

Aerion’s head snapped round.

Daeron was leaning one shoulder against a stall post, hair loose, gloves half-pulled on, looking as if he had slept in his clothes and found the experience beneath notice. His horse was being saddled behind him by a groom who had gone so still he might have been carved.

Daeron’s eyes flicked to Aerion’s gloved hand, then to Valarr’s bare finger.

“I do hope Kiera is not sentimental about jewelry,” he added. “Wives can be so disappointingly attached to visible signs of propriety.”

Aerion turned away from him at once, because if he did not, he might have said something that would keep them all at Bitterbridge another week.

Valarr, to his credit or his shame, looked only tired.

“It is not what you think,” he said.

Daeron lifted one brow. “My sweet cousin, I should not dare guess which part of this mess you believe I misunderstand.”

“I think,” said Valarr, with that grave calm of his, “that Kiera would be less troubled by the ring than by the fact you still say her name in your sleep.”

Duncan made a noise then. Something rough in the throat.

Aerion looked despite himself.

The giant had gone stiff as an oak struck by frost. Aegon stood beside him with the bridle in one hand, glancing between all of them with the sort of appalled fascination only the young ever managed honestly. Duncan’s face had a look Aerion had seen only a few times before: as if he had stumbled into some foreign rite, knew himself to be offended by it, and had not yet found the right offense with which to object.

There was, in a black little corner of Aerion, a desire to make it worse.

So naturally he did.

Duncan’s eyes met his. Aerion let one corner of his mouth curl.

“We are the blood of the dragon, ser,” he said. “We have always kept our line pure.”

The words landed exactly as he meant them to.

Duncan’s face changed. Not to confusion now. To anger.

Real anger. Hot and immediate and common as a fist.

“Aye?” he said. “And now you’re bound to me all the same.”

Silence cracked through the stable.

Even the horses seemed to feel it.

Duncan heard himself the same moment Aerion did. Regret flashed across his face at once, swift and naked and too late to matter.

It shut Aerion up.

Daeron, curse him, looked delighted.

Aegon went red to the ears.

Valarr had gone very still indeed.

For one blind instant Aerion considered answering with all the poison in him. Something about mud and teeth. Something about lowborn presumption. Something that would draw blood enough to salve the sting.

He found, to his hatred, that he had nothing fit to hand.

So he turned away.

“Mount,” he said to no one in particular, which was as near as he could come to dignity.

The stable broke back into motion around them with visible relief. Grooms reappeared from the walls. Tack was tightened. Hooves struck. Men reached for reins. Ser Donnel came in from the yard with that fixed white-cloak face of a man who had heard just enough to wish for deafness.

Aerion mounted with more stiffness than he liked and bit down hard on the pain it cost him. Duncan came up on his own horse a moment later, not looking at him. Valarr stood below with one gloved hand on his own mount’s cheek, bare finger hidden now by nothing at all.

Aerion did not look at that either.

Then they were out of the stable and through the yard and under the gate, Bitterbridge falling behind them stone by stone.

No one spoke for the first mile.

Or the second.

Or the third.

The road stretched ahead pale with morning dust. To one side the river moved slow and brown between reeds, bright where the sun found it. Hooves beat a steady dull measure into the packed earth. Ser Donnel rode point. Daeron drifted where he pleased. Duncan remained infuriatingly near and infuriatingly silent.

Aerion kept his eyes ahead and his hand well away from the ring hidden in his glove.

Behind them Bitterbridge dwindled.

Aerion looked back once. The castle rose pale above the river mist, all its towers and walls washed thin by morning. In the gate’s shadow stood Valarr, one hand on his horse’s bridle, still as if the road had taken something of his with it. A little apart from him was Aegon, shorn head bright in the light like some ill-tempered novice left behind at a sept door, small beside the men and horses and yet staring after them as if sheer force of will might keep pace where he could not.

Then the turn of the road took them both from sight.

They rode several miles in silence, and every one of them tasted of things left unsaid.