Chapter Text
Dunk learn two lessons early at the inn, with an auntie called Bevis, whose knuckles were hard knots of swollen bone from cleaning pots and sheaving cheese. Never miss a single chance for free food (a little piece of carrot peel, an end bit of burnt sausage with the char scraped off), and especially warm bread and that was because Auntie Bevis trusted in a different kind of hunger to fatten her own stomach. Never draw any special sorts of notice for how fast you're growing; be a bit slumpy. Being a big lad might look a comfort but Bevie knew it was a problem, when you spent too long growing hungry enough.
So he had to practice at slouching at mealtimes and other moments when full-grown menfolk looked across and measured how fast children grew into becoming problems in Flea Bottom. He had to eat quick, quiet, eat without ever once asking how. He could manage all of that, and he had a face which could still charm free food at market day despite the grease stains permanently smudged around his mouth from kitchen fat, like Auntie’s.
The one thing Dunk didn’t need teaching how to ask for, with a grin, was trouble.
“Rafe, no. Come on, come back here,” Dunk said to the girl who wasn’t listening. She ducked a reach with her thin arm and was off around a barrel like some big eel, scuttling in the brown slick and mud and bits of rubbish at the edges of Cobbler’s Square. He lunged for the tail of her shirt—a grubby brown sack, slit at the neck, holes starting in the seam by her hip—but found only a breath of moving air. Too late. She slipped away, cackling, through the crowd of leather-workers yelling their prices. A cart rumbled past, cutting them apart for a heartbeat, spilling fish-smell and sea into the sewer reek of the street. The iron-rimmed wheels crushed wet thatch and refuse under its weight. On the far side, a flash of brown, gone.
He cursed. Rafe wasn't meant to be running, not here, not with him as guard for her, however small that guarding could be. Auntie Bevis had given a proper look. Rafe being a runner wasn't new; a girl could learn faster on her feet than by rules, and Flea Bottom taught every lesson sharp and fast. This had been a lesson in listening to Dunk, and Rafe hadn't listened.
He shoved through a clot of hagglers, muttering, earned himself a sharp elbow to the ribs from a sour-faced woman whose face looked too small for the amount of jowls her chin could carry. “Watch where you're going,” she snarled. He muttered an apology, and she had to know a boy in rags like him was about all that was fit to say it. He scanned the square, but it was just bodies and noise and the metallic tang of fresh blood where the fleshers' stall was doing a good business. Too much to pick one brown sack out of. He took a deep breath of the midden-heavy air, tasting the iron.
Maybe she’d just run to the stalls. She’d run there before to look at the puppies, little squirming things near dying, all piteous, in wicker baskets. Dunk liked the dogs less; he saw a kind of mirror in their eyes he did not like much seeing at all. He could try there, but a quick dart past the butcher's stall revealed only men cutting sides of beef into bloody hunks, not a single skinny girl.
Right then. There was that game, then. That stupid child’s game.
It involved walls. A big, long, blank stretch of them, down the way toward the foot of Aegon's High Hill, and shouting. One person would try and touch the wall, while the other watched. If the watcher caught them before they touched it, they’d get a cuff. Simple. Stupid. Rafe loved it. She’d drag Dunk over to play, and he’d have to stand there, a great lanky lump, and pretend not to notice when she slipped away, just to see the pure, bright joy on her face when her fingers smacked the stone. But today wasn't for games.
The thought was barely formed when he saw it. Not Rafe, but someone else. A boy.
He was standing by a stack of barrels near a tavern, The Sour Goat, if Dunk remembered its sign right. The boy was clean. That was the first thing. Unnaturally so. His clothes weren't silk or velvet, no, but they were whole. No rips, no patches, no stains from gutter oil or fish guts or worse. A simple tunic of fine grey wool, dark hose, and little leather shoes that were so soft and clean they looked like they'd never touched mud. His hair was a pale silver-gilt, almost white in the weak sunlight that struggled through the perpetual haze of smoke hanging over the city. It was cut short, neat, and it gleamed.
He looked like a storybook prince dropped into the middle of Cobbler's Square, and he looked completely, utterly lost. His eyes, a strange shade of violet, were wide, taking in the press of bodies, the noise, the filth, with a kind of horrified fascination. He held himself stiff, as if the very air might dirty him if he breathed too deep.
This was a problem. This was a bigger problem than Rafe running off. A boy like that in Flea Bottom was a lamb in a wolf-pit. He'd be stripped naked, robbed, and maybe worse, before he could blink. Those clean clothes alone were worth a week's food. Dunk could see the eyes already turning toward him. A couple of rough-looking dockworkers lounging by the fish stall were nudging each other, their gazes greedy. The boy was a coin waiting to be plucked from the mud.
And Dunk, with his great lanky frame and his slouching shoulders, was the closest thing to a guard dog the boy had.
Gods be good, Dunk thought, a familiar knot of dread tightening in his stomach. It was one thing to help Bevie with the slops, another to get into a real fight over a stranger. But he couldn't just walk away. He could see the story already, in Auntie Bevis’s hard eyes when he came back empty-handed and bruised: a fool's errand for a highborn boy who’d probably reward him with a clipped ear and a kick for daring to touch him. He’d be a fool and a hungry one. Rafe was still out there somewhere, and now this.
Just as one of the dockworkers took a casual, step forward step, the world provided the second miracle.
Rafe, her face smudged with something dark and dirty, skittered to a halt beside Dunk, tugging hard on the sleeve of his tunic. “Found one,” she announced breathlessly, not of puppies, but of a stolen turnip, held triumphantly in her grubby fist. She saw the way he was looking and followed his gaze to the silver-haired boy. Her face crumpled into a curious frown. “Why's he wearing those?”
“Keep your voice down,” Dunk hissed, putting a restraining hand on her head, more to anchor himself than to quiet her. But her appearance broke the tableau. The dockworkers looked at Rafe, then at Dunk, then back at the boy. A big boy with a small girl looked less like a target, more like… well, like what it was, just a couple of street rats guarding a richer rat. Their greed soured slightly, turning to calculation. Too much bother.
“His face is funny,” Rafe added, still whisper-loud. “Like them grapes at the fruit stall, the posh ones. Too purple."
The violet-eyed boy had spotted them too. His relief was so palpable it was almost a sound. He stared at Rafe and her dirty turnip, then up at Dunk. He didn't look scared anymore, just… wary. He didn't move. He was frozen by that highborn instinct Dunk had only ever seen from a distance, that rigidness that came from learning any wrong move would be noted and punished.
“Go say hi, I dare you,” Rafe wheedled, seeing a new game unfold. Her courage came easy now, with the stranger's imminent peril having passed unnoticed by her.
“No.”
“Chicken,” she croaked.
“Shut your gob,” Dunk shot back, but she was already scrambling toward him, propelled by nine years of impulsiveness and a stolen root vegetable. He had no choice. Rafe couldn't be seen wandering alone, and he certainly couldn't let her approach this strange, clean boy unattended. He started toward her, each step feeling like it was sinking into a deeper pit.
The clean boy watched Rafe approach with the expression of someone encountering a strange, unpredictable dog. He flinched slightly as she stopped a foot away, her nose wrinkled.
“You've got a bit of snot on your sleeve,” she observed.
He didn't. His linen was pristine. But he blinked at her, utterly thrown. It wasn't what anyone would expect. Highborn folk, they probably expected begging, or cringing, or sullen stares. What they didn't expect was clinical critique from a Flea Bottom urchin.
By the time Dunk caught up and grabbed her shoulder, the moment had irrevocably shattered.
“Rafe, what’ve I told you? You don’t just run up to folks,” he started, shuffling his feet, trying for an awkward apology to the boy. “We don’t mean nothin’. She—”
“Hello.” The boy’s voice was high, clear, and refined in a way Dunk had only ever heard yelled from castle ramparts by knights. It was a startling sound in the street's gutter-rumble. There wasn't a bit of Cobbler's Square in it.
Dunk stared, the clumsy apology dying in his throat. The boy was looking straight at him.
“I’m Aerion,” he said.
Just that. A name. Nothing else. No ‘what are you doing,' no 'go away.' A simple statement of fact, delivered as if he expected Dunk to have the next line ready.
“Dunk,” he heard himself say. The name felt ugly in his own ears beside this strange music. Short, thick. Lump-like.
Rafe sniffed loud. “I'm hungry,” she announced, as if it were also a name. She pointed the turnip at Aerion. “Are you hungry? Want some? No sharing, though. ‘Less you’ve got something to trade.”
A strange sort of laugh escaped Aerion’s lips. A soft puff of air, genuine amusement catching the strange purple fire in his eyes. He looked at Rafe like she was the only source of light in a damp, smelly tunnel. Dunk could feel an odd shift then, as if this one laugh had reordered the air itself. The wary curiosity in the boy's posture had dissolved, replaced by a bright, incandescent attention.
“I’m supposed to be fasting, actually,” Aerion said, a wry tilt to his lips. “Septon wouldn’t approve at all. He’ll probably give me extra prostrations before the Stranger when he finds out I’ve snuck out.”
“Sneaked from what?” Rafe asked, losing interest and wandering a step away to poke a mushy cabbage leaf with her foot. Then she paused, her dark head cocking. “He talks funny.”
“He does,” Dunk agreed softly, his eyes fixed on Aerion, whose gaze didn't waver. The dockworkers were long forgotten; all those greedy, glinting looks dissolved like morning fog in the presence of this impossible boy with silver hair. Aerion wasn't of Flea Bottom, but something far more removed from it than even the richer merchants down at the Moonraker markets. A city like King’s Landing held other cities within its walls, secret places hidden behind walls high and armed with swords. places like Flea Bottom, where things starved, and then places that weren't starving at all. He came from one of those invisible places so clean you got the sense the sun shone different in their courtyards.
“I snuck out of… lessons,” Aerion decided on, simplifying whatever grand reality lay behind those words. “History. Balerion the Black Dread, and Aegon’s conquest. I know all that already. Aegon flies, Visenya cuts a path with her sword, Rhaenys falls at the Hellholt. It’s the same old thing.” He rolled his violet eyes. “It gets… boring.”
Even Rafe stopped then. Even she could hear the strangeness of it. Boring to hear about dragons on horseback when Rafe’s biggest concerns in her small life were where her next piece of charred meat end was going to come from. She wrinkled her nose again at the alien luxury of it.
“Are you lost, then?” Dunk made himself ask. A useless question—the boy’s whole presence was an announcement of ‘lost.’ Yet Dunk still did not think him a fool. Only very new.
“I know how to get back,” Aerion said dismissively, looking down the slope of the hill where Red Keep’s towers bit the hazy, pale blue sky. Then he turned back to them, and there was something in the expression, an urgency that bordered on hunger. “Are there tunnels down here? Secret ones. Underneath. Are there?”
It was a question that hit Dunk sideways. There were tunnels, everyone knew. Crumbling smugglers’ runs beneath the Mud Gate. The honeycombed basements of old forgotten houses that swallowed vagrants. Places filled with dark water, worse things that skittered and drowned. Folk spoke of the Dragon’s Catacombs below the street, a myth for kids. But what did some princeling with a belly full of lessons know about any of it?
Rafe grinned, catching the drift where Dunk just felt a strange chill of premonition creep up his spine. Her whole body seemed to animate around the idea of dark, forbidden things to be discovered.
“Course there are!” she crowed. “Nettle-nose went in one to find cheese once and only came out bald. From ghosts!”
A genuine smile touched Aerion's lips again, showing he'd known she was lying but that it wasn't the truth he cared for, it was the lie itself.
“Do you go? To look for them? You must,” Aerion said, pushing away from the barrel. He was smaller than Dunk had first thought; nearly a head shorter, though not as small as Rafe. “Is that what you do all day?”
What they did all day? Mostly they avoided notice. That was the whole of Flea Bottom's true schooling. But this little lord was looking at them like the grit between their fingernails was a mystery only held by them, not something inflicted upon you.
“Sometimes we have fights in the Mud Gate,” Rafe provided, proud as any tourney champion. “Smelly Wally lost a tooth. A big one.” She demonstrated with her finger hooked in her own cheek. “Then Della sold it to an alchemist for a penny ‘cause she knows an alchemist. ‘S true.”
Dunk put a staying hand on her head, fingers laced in her dirty curls. “Rafe. Stop talking.” The whole street felt like it was spinning, not in the motion of its bustle, but in its stories. She turned, trying to wiggle away and finding his grip firm. For Aerion, Dunk gave a hard-edged smile of surrender; something about Aerion's face invited confessions, told you truths you might not be willing to confess out loud. She bit back a complaint with her teeth and turned away to kick dismally at the cabbage leaf instead.
“We gotta go,” Dunk said, thinking of the kitchen muck Auntie Bevis would be waiting on him for by now. “Back to the inn. I work there.” A simple excuse should cut any strange rope of curiosity being stretched between their strange worlds. This could not continue. Rafe could wander off again at a word’s notice. Auntie Bevis’s patience would hold until supper, maybe. Then it broke on people’s heads. That was known.
Instead, Aerion gave a slow, thoughtful nod as if this were precisely the sort of thing he'd been hoping to hear. An Inn. Now that had potential.
“I’ll give you two silver pennies if you tell me about the tunnels.” He didn't even glance around before he said it. “If your boss gets angry, I'll pay him a dragon for you. Will you?”
A silver dragon. The currency didn't matter in the sheer absurdity of the quantity. He could have offered the moon. A silver dragon might buy half the inn outright. A real offer like that was more dangerous even than getting knifed; it meant you might be seen later on as someone holding more than you let show; a thief’s pot to plunder. Or perhaps worse, you'd earned the ire of those watching you, seeing you with more than the gods had deigned for your kind, a sure road to your throat being cut over your winnings before dark.
Even Auntie Bevis wouldn’t know how to be careful with a dragon in her hand. The thought alone was terrifying.
“You are an ass-face,” Rafe told Aerion helpfully. Dunk had a hand around her mouth and the back of her shirt before she could finish. But the curse had been let loose, landing in the quiet wonder of Aerion’s still-standing astonishment.
He blinked; one, twice. And then Aerion laughed.
“Ass-face,” he repeated softly, a perfect imitation, savouring each syllable like a taste of strange wine. This boy with clean clothes, high cheekbones, and a face meant for silks had uttered a street-born filth, not with shock, but with a kind of innocent admiration, the quiet gasp of someone discovering an animal he’d only seen drawn, not quite tamed.
Sheer, stark terror began a small climb up Dunk’s spine. That was worse by far.
“We’re not taking your coin,” Dunk insisted with a final-sounding tone to his voice. “You should be going home.” He was pleading then to the god of good sense which rarely left its shine in this part of the world. He was making a stand at the border of sanity. Just this once.
But Aerion shook the heavy money in the purse. “Take it. I have so much of this. You use coin for food?” His curiosity ran deeper than coin. Their coin was a map of their existence; each scratch had been earned. “I eat in a hall,” Aerion mused aloud, like a man explaining colours. “People put plates in front of us. It just appears,” he confessed.
“Someone pays for it, stupid head,” Rafe grumbled from under the cover of Dunk’s dirty fingers. Her small fist was on her little hip. It felt important he knew some stuff she was sure even some noble folks must know for a truth.
“Hush,” Dunk told her, lifting his fingers from her mouth, only enough so she could breathe a little easier. Then to Aerion, his shoulders a firm line against this strangeness: “You gotta go home, m’lord.”
But Aerion just tucked his little bag of coins away, and the look of wonder turned to determination in pthe sharp brightness of his face. “It’s just Aerion. And I’m going to. Afterward, I mean. I just want to see what the tunnels are like.” He was like a dog with a bone now; Dunk could see the idea taking hold. It was almost physically manifest: the spark in those strange, amethyst eyes, the slight flush of his cheeks. “It's the only free day I’ve got. They'll make me back to lessons by evening. And my father gets angry. He might throw my tutor in the cells for a bit, if I do it again.” He said the last part like it was just some minor, practical thing to be shrugged off, like having to wash a dish.
“He gets angry? Your father?” Dunk asked, finding that at once both baffling and yet not quite so surprising.
“Not really.” Aerion shrugged. “He's busy. Too busy to notice. Uncle Baelor is mostly in charge, and Uncle Baelor's nice. He gives me things and reads to me before supper sometimes. I told him once that when I was a bit older I was going to find him a dragon in the Dragon's Catacombs, and he looked sad. Like he had been looking for one himself, but never found it. And if he can't find one, nobody will, because he's so clever and brave. He rides in tourneys, too.”
Dunk had heard of the Targaryens and their silver and violet, their dead dragons. The gold-cloth and jewels. And this boy had just announced a lord as ‘Baelor.' Baelor Breakspear. It was a title all of Westeros knew, even Flea Bottom. If Dunk wasn’t careful, Aerion was going to start telling secrets soon. He did not know who'd be listening. He wasn’t used to carrying secrets.
It didn’t feel like something he could put down in a hurry.
But Rafe could carry whatever she was given. She already was.
“Well, my da is dead, so.” Rafe sounded almost bored. She gave up fighting the restraining grip and reached a hand to pluck something from Dunk’s hair. “His too. We’re both orphans and live here and we need a bit of food, but we gotta steal it mostly.”
The look Dunk gave her could’ve started fires, and would’ve if he’d had any hope at all she’d read anything but concern in it. “We’re not talking about our dads. That’s done.” And they weren’t. They didn’t need to be.
“Were they knights? Did they fight?” Aerion asked, his voice quieter now. “What did they do?”
Rafe opened her mouth again and laughed soundlessly as Dunk put his fingers around it. “We’re not answering that question. That's stupid, to even say. No one we know is knights. You’re not gonna meet knights here,” he explained to the highborn boy, sounding weary. “We're going.”
He started to pull Rafe away. She tried to squirm from his grip, and he only let her mouth free for a second so that he could grab her wrist instead. But she’d already inhaled, readying another flurry of words. “Bye, Aerion!” she cried. “Have fun looking for dragons!”
And Dunk dragged her back across the street to where a red-faced Auntie Bevis was already waiting, holding a bucket of dirty water for him to take. He got one last, fleeting glimpse of Aerion standing by the barrels. The prince looked small against the rumbling wagons and the stalls and the sellers yelling their wares, almost lost. But his eyes still burned like purple coals, even in the mud, and Dunk felt their light on his back for a long time as they walked away.
✦ ✦ ✦
“Seven hells,” Daeron growled for the dozenth time. His older brother’s voice was a thing of grizzled patience worn down like an old path, trod flat on the same stones for too many years. “You can’t be serious.” He paced the length of the solar, a caged wolf in a silk cage, the heavy fabric of his black doublet whispering with each turn. “Father will have your hide, and my hide for letting you. And Maester’s too. The whole chain of them.”
Aerion sat on the floor, which was where he often went when he was being lectured. The rugs were thick enough to swallow the cold. He picked idly at a loose thread in a tapestry of a dragon burning a city, a scene that had always seemed rather cheerful to him. He didn't look at Daeron. He didn't need to.
“He’s not going to find out,” Aerion said, a statement of pure faith. “And if he does, what’s he going to do? Lock me in my room with my books? Make me eat more pheasant? It’s all the same. I’m bored here, Dae. All we do is pray and learn about the things other men did a hundred years ago. I want to do something.”
“You’re nine years old, Aerion!” Daeron snapped, stopping his pacing to glare down. “Your doing is supposed to be learning to read High Valyrian without sounding like a peasant from the Reach. Your doing is not gallivanting through Flea Bottom with… with whatever you found down there. They’ll eat you alive!”
“No they won’t,” Aerion said, his voice quiet but firm. He finally looked up, and the violet fire in his eyes was banked, but hot. “I’ve been down there four times now. Some weirdos tried to grab my purse the first day. I kicked them.” He demonstrated with a sharp jab of his foot against the rug. “Right in the cods. They made noises like a stepped-on toad. I didn’t even lose a copper.”
Daeron ran a hand through his hair, a gesture of pure defeat. “You’re going to get yourself killed. Then I’ll have to explain to Father how I let my little brother get himself gutted and fucked by cutthroats because he was bored. He’ll probably make me fight a trial by combat against the man who did it. And I’ll lose, because I’m a terrible fucking knight, and then we’ll both be dead. Do you want that shit?”
Aerion just shrugged and went back to the tapestry. “No. But that’s not going to happen. They’re not cutthroats. Not the ones I know.”
“The ones you know?” Daeron’s voice rose, cracking with disbelief. “Gods be good, Aerion. You don’t know them. They’re vermin.” The word was ugly, a heavy thing in the clean, scented air of the solar. Aerion’s hand stilled on the thread. He didn’t like that word. It didn’t fit.
“I’ve met a boy,” Aerion said, changing the subject with the deft ease of a courtier. He laid the thread down, a precise little line of silver against the wool. “He’s big. And he has a little friend, a girl. She’s dirty and she called me an ass-face, but I think she liked me.”
Daeron’s lower eyelid sagged. The muscles of his jaw went slack. He sank down onto a padded bench. The fabric hushed as he compressed it. “Of course you did. Of course there's a boy. And a girl. And you're all fast friends, I'm sure. Fine. What's the boy's name? So I have something to tell the City Watch when they find your body parts in different alleys.”
“Dunk,” Aerion said. The name felt strange and satisfying in his mouth, like a hard nut to crack. “His name is Dunk,” he repeated. “I like the way it sounds. It doesn't mean anything.”
Names at court meant everything. Daeron. Aemon. Rhaegel. They were songs, histories. ‘Dunk’ was just a sound. A fist hitting a table.
They talked for another hour, Daeron’s anger slowly draining away into a weary ocean of resignation, the way it always did. He made Aerion promise, swear by the Warrior and the Mother and even the bloody Stranger, to stay within the Red Keep for a whole week. A week of prayers, lessons, and staring at the same walls.
Aerion promised. He was good at promising promises he knew he would break.