Archive of Our Own

The house was on a street Dunk had not, in his thirty-one years in King's Landing, ever had a reason to walk down.

It was a quiet street. Old thick trees down both sides, just coming into their full late-spring leaf. The houses set back from the pavement behind low stone walls and wrought-iron gates that had, on inspection, been wrought a century ago by hand. The cars parked along the curb were the kind you did not see in Flea Bottom — long, low, expensive in the old way, the kind of expensive that did not announce itself but did not, on the other hand, attempt to hide it either.

He had got off the bus three stops early because he had been too nervous and had wanted the walking time to shake out the nerves. Now, after the six block walk, Dunk found himself with an arrangement of flowers, looking at houses that could easily have been museums.

He had not been able to settle on the flowers this morning; he had stood at the bench for almost twenty minutes with Tanselle behind him pretending not to watch. Are you going to be all day, Dunk? she had said, eventually, in the patient voice she used on customers who could not decide between two perfectly nice bouquets. He had said, Tanselle, I am going to a woman's house who is my boyfriend's ex-wife, and she is going to brief me on his entire family with a binder she has prepared, and I have no idea what flowers to bring. Tanselle had set her tea down. PomPon Dahlias. Three stems of pale pink stock. And one branch of lemon verbena from the herb table. Trust me. He had asked why. She had said: Stock is what nobody else is going to bring her. Florists do not bring stock to dinners. Florists bring lilies. Stock is what you grow in your grandmother's kitchen garden when you do not have money. Stock is what you bring when you want a woman to know you have thought about her.

He had cut the dahlias himself — five Wizard of Oz, soft pinks and pale yellows, the color of a soft sunrise — and three stems of the stock from the bucket Tanselle kept for the customers who knew to ask. The lemon verbena he had pulled from the herb table, where it was still in pots and not, technically, supposed to be cut; he had taken a single branch, the longest, and laid it across the top of the bunch as an old grandmother in a kitchen garden would have laid one.

He looked at the bunch now, walking down the shady street.

It was a good bunch.

*~*

The house was on the corner. Dunk had been told the number, had been told there was a front garden, but he had not been told that the house would look like this.

It was a tall narrow city house — three storeys, brick the colour of old honey, white window-frames, a black door with a brass knocker shaped like a dragon's head. It had the quiet dignity of a building that had been here a long time. The brickwork was very old. The windows were the original windows, the slight wave in the glass visible from the pavement, the white frames painted and repainted by the same kind of careful hand for, at a guess, a hundred and fifty years. There was a low stone wall along the front of the property, perhaps three feet high, and over the wall the front garden was, by Dunk's professional estimate, somewhere between very serious and extraordinary. It had been planned. Not by a landscape company. By a person, over years. The bed running along the front of the house was a long sweep of late tulips going out and early peonies coming in, in a colour palette — coral, white, the faintest blush — chosen by someone with a strong opinion. Along the wall, lavender and rosemary and salvia had been planted together on purpose, years ago, by someone who had thought about the heights at maturity and the bloom times. The gate had a climbing rose on it. The climbing rose was a Madame Alfred Carrière, which Dunk knew because his shop had been trying for years to get them for a wedding client and the supplier had refused, because Madame Alfred Carrière did not, by long custom in the King's Landing flower trade, travel well, and you only got one if you knew someone who knew someone who had one in their garden.

Someone in this house had known someone for, on the available evidence by how large it was, a hundred years.

He stood at the gate for a moment.

Baelor lived here.

Baelor grew up here.

He had been told, over the phone while Baelor was making something for the weekly Sunday dinner at Maekar's, that Jena had got the house in the divorce because Baelor had wanted her and the boys to keep the home that the boys had been growing up in. Baelor had said it as he said all practical things — without weight, without performance. He had simply moved out. The flat I am in now, Baelor had said, is the flat Aerys bought me. The house Jena is in is the house my great-great-great-grandfather built and has been passed down to each oldest son.

Dunk had nodded at the screen at the time. He had not asked the question he was asking himself now standing at the gate.

How much of what Baelor was had been built inside this place?

He was also struck fairly harshly by something else.

I have not, until this moment, fully understood that Baelor comes from money that runs deeper than the Blackwater.

He had some idea, of course. He had known, in the abstract way a man knows things about a tenured professor who did not seem to be looking for a higher position or a second source of income. He had known about Baelor's expensive taste in chocolate and jewelry. Especially rings. Gods, the man had so many rings. He had not, until the Madame Alfred Carrière on the wrought iron of a Targaryen house, seen.

He took a breath as Old Arlan's voice echoed in his head: You're hovering, boy. Ring the bell.

He rang the bell.

*~*

Something reddish-brown skittered at the door before it opened. Dunk could see it in the glass on either side of the door frame.

The bell had been answered, on the inside, by a creature of clear opinions, who was, by the sound of it, conducting a thorough strategic assessment of the threat at the threshold while Jena's voice — calm, amused, the voice of a woman who had been through this with this creature for years — said on the other side, Beric, Beric, it is a guest, please contain yourself, and the door opened.

The woman who opened it was perhaps fifty. She was tall, perhaps five-foot-ten in flat shoes, which she was wearing. She had bright red hair pulled back at the nape with a silver clip, dark eyes that were not Dornish-dark but Marcher-dark — the slightly different brown of a woman whose ancestors had spent a thousand years on the contested edge between Dorne and the Stormlands and had, in that thousand years, intermarried with both — and the high-cheekboned face Dunk's eye recognized at once as the face of a person whose family had been a named family for a very long time. She was wearing trousers and a soft green shirt and silver earrings shaped, on a closer look, like four-pointed stars. The earrings, Dunk understood with the slow recognition of a florist who had been making bouquets for noble clients for fifteen years, were her family's sigil in miniature, worn by long custom in the daily way.

The creature, on the floor, was a wire-haired terrier of red-brown mixed parentage, perhaps fifteen pounds, several years old, with the bright clear assessing eyes of a small dog who had been given the run of a Targaryen house and had, on the whole, made the most of it.

"Duncan."

"Hi. Hello. Jena."

"Come in, come in. Don't stand there. Beric, down, the man is taller than the doorframe, you cannot — Beric, down — I am so sorry, he has decided you require a personal greeting from him and he is, as all small dogs are, not a man to be reasoned with."

The dog had reared on his back legs and was, with enormous serious dignity, looking up at Dunk from a height of perhaps two feet.

Dunk crouched.

He crouched as a man six-foot-seven crouched to meet a creature of clear opinions, slowly, with both knees, the flowers held carefully out of harm's way. He offered his free hand.

The dog sniffed in the careful manner of a dog who took his work seriously, and then he sat. The new person was acceptable. He thumped his tail once on the tile as if to illustrate that point.

"Oh," Jena said.

"He's a good dog," Dunk said.

"He is not, but that is kind of you to say. He is usually quite reserved with new men. Maekar bribed him with cheese in advance and that's the only reason he tolerates him."

"Most animals like me."

"You also crouched. Most men do not. They stand over him and put a hand down from the height of a doorframe, which is, I gather, terrifying. Beric is clearly taking notes."

Dunk laughed.

He stood up, slowly. Beric, on the floor, walked one proprietary lap around his ankles, and went back to his basket by the umbrella stand, and lay down in it with the air of a creature who had completed his official onboarding and was now off-duty.

"Beric is an interesting name."

"Baelor did not want a dog. He said Ser Roland of Highgarden did not share his kingdom with anyone." She smiled softly. "Valarr only asked him once and he broke instantly, but demanded he have a name that was fitting to share a house with his Roland. Valarr had spent the summer being read to about Stormlands history by his uncle. There was a Beric Dondarrion who was a heroic knight in my grandfather's bloodline, so Valarr named him instantly."

Dunk laughed.

"Alright, let's get out of this doorway and begin the debrief. It will take a bit and I don't want to start dinner too late."

*~*

The hall was long and narrow with a black-and-white tile floor, clearly original. The walls were a soft pale grey chosen, on the evidence of small scuff marks near the floor, in the past few years — Jena's choice, Dunk guessed, painted over whatever older colour the family had favoured. A long narrow console table held a single white pitcher with three sprigs of rosemary in it and a framed photograph of two boys, perhaps ten and seven, on a beach in a colour palette that suggested the photograph had been taken in the early years of Matarys's life. There were four hooks for coats, two of them in use.

The hall ran the depth of the house, and at the far end of it Dunk could see, through an open door, a kitchen with the late afternoon light coming through it from a window that overlooked something green.

"These are for you," he said, holding out the flowers.

Jena took them without a sound. She looked at them, briefly, turned them slightly, brought them, briefly, to her nose.

She did not, for a moment, say anything.

When she did speak, it was very quietly.

"My grandmother grew stock in the kitchen garden at Blackhaven for sixty years. It was the flower of her kitchen. She put it in a pitcher on the kitchen table every spring from the time I was small. The florists in this neighbourhood do not carry it. They consider it old-fashioned."

"Tanselle said —"

"Tanselle was correct. Tanselle is — Tanselle, I have been told, is a person of considerable wisdom. Come into the kitchen."

The dog had come up out of his basket. He trotted, in the dignified pace of a senior member of staff, ahead of them down the hall.

Dunk followed.

The kitchen was a kitchen as Dunk's flat was a flat, in that they shared a noun. Beyond that they had very little in common.

It was a long kitchen, running the full width of the back of the house. The floor was the same black-and-white tile as the hall but with the white more worn — by Dunk's estimate decades of feet and dogs and children, several of them named Targaryen. Including Baelor. The cabinets were dark wood with brass handles that had been polished by a careful hand for, again, a long time. The counters were a long unbroken stretch of dark marble with chip marks in two places where heavy things had been set down too hard over the years. There was a six-burner range against the back wall. There was a window above the sink that looked out at the back of the house, and through that window Dunk could see, at a glance, the kind of back garden he could not, in his professional capacity, fully assess from one look — large, walled on all three sides in old brick, with mature trees and a long lawn and beds along the walls and, at the back, a small structure that was either a potting shed or a writing room, he could not tell. On the floor in the middle of the room was a square of late afternoon sun. Beric, who had come into the kitchen at the head of the procession, walked into the square of sun and lay down in it with the air of a creature who had decided this was his sun, and that the human matters could now proceed without further consultation.

"He runs the kitchen," Jena said. "I have made my peace with it."

She went to the sink, filled a glass jar with water, and unwrapped the flowers from their paper. She set it, briefly, on the counter, looking at it again, and then she did a thing Dunk had not been expecting: she took it apart.

She took the lemon verbena off the top. She trimmed the dahlia stems by half an inch with a pair of kitchen scissors that lived in a ceramic jar by the sink. She trimmed the stock. She put the bunch back together in a different arrangement from the one Dunk had brought — more open, with the heads turned slightly out, the dahlias at the front, the stock behind them rising, the lemon verbena resting across the top center. She set the jar in the centre of the kitchen island and smiled.

"I am sorry I have done that in front of you. I learned to do flowers in my mother's kitchen and she had very specific opinions."

"No — no. I like it. They look very nice."

"Thank you. I am quite proud of myself."

"You — you took it apart and put it back together better."

"Some florists would have been offended by that kind of thing."

"I am not offended at all. I actually prefer it to what I did."

"I am glad you think so."

She looked at him for a long second, before, very quietly: "Pádraic was right."

"...Pádraic?"

"My fiancé. Pádraic. He looked at your social media on Friday and told me, after some thinking, Jena, do not give this man the standard onboarding. He is in this for the long haul. I had thought he was being kind. He was not. He was being correct."

"Oh, I —"

"Sit down, Duncan. The kettle is on. I am going to need a minute to revise my entire prepared script."

He laughed and sat down.

The kitchen had a long farmhouse table that ran along the wall by the window to the garden. The table was old. The wood was scarred and stained as wood was scarred and stained when it had been the table of an actual family — with a round burn near one end where someone had set down a pan too hot, and a slight dip in the middle where the boards had given over time, and marks at one corner that looked, on examination, like crayon.

He ran his thumb, before he could stop himself, over the crayon marks.

Jena, at the kettle, said without turning: "Valarr. He was four. He had decided the table needed decorating. I had decided I was not going to be the kind of mother who scrubbed it off, because life is short."

"Yeah."

"This table came up from Blackhaven when I moved in. It was my grandmother's. The Targaryen one was a beautiful mahogany piece, and very fine, but it is now in storage where life doesn't happen to it. This one — this one is where a family is allowed to grow up."

She set his tea in front of him and sat down with her own.

"All right," she said.

"I have been preparing to give you my debrief and will be making an assessment to send to Baelor, just like I did for Rhaegal. Gormon took the briefing very personally. I'm pretty excited to finally do a second one, if I'm honest. Dyanna did not need the briefing at all as she had been here before me." She laughed softly before clearly trying to be serious again. "I have been told a great deal about you already. By Baelor. By Maekar. By Daeron, who has called me to tell me about what a disaster the flower shop was. It seems like I have been preparing, over the last three days, for a particular kind of person."

"And?"

"You are not that kind of person. I am going to have to give you a different briefing."

"Better or worse?"

"Better. Much better. In fact, I think I will enjoy it as well."

*~*

"So the first thing you should know is that the family is wealthy, Duncan. Considerably wealthy. It has been considerable for several generations. None of them — none of them needs to work, but they all do. Baelor and Aerys teach. Rhaegel composes. Maekar is a lawyer. They have chosen, each of them, a thing to do with their lives, because the alternative — having nothing one was responsible for showing up for in the morning — was, by long Targaryen tradition, what drove the previous generations mad."

"Ah."

"Maekar started the family fund in the spring after the accident. Baelor was just out of three surgeries and would need, by everyone's estimate, a great deal of care for the rest of his life. Maekar — and you have to understand him to understand this — Maekar at fifteen sat down at his father's desk with a piece of yellow legal paper one evening, and worked out a system. The system was: he was going to take care of Baelor. The system was: he was going to use the family money, sitting in accounts none of them really thought about, and he was going to put it into a fund whose only purpose was to absorb the cost of Baelor's care for the rest of Baelor's life — the medical bills, the housekeeping, the physical therapy, the eventual flat that would accommodate a body that could not, on bad mornings, climb stairs. He presented this plan, on the yellow legal paper, to his father. His father agreed. The fund was set up within the month."

She took a sip of her tea.

"Within the year, Baelor had refused to be the sole beneficiary."

"Refused?"

"He was twenty-three, in a back brace, sitting in a wheelchair, and said, if Maekar is going to do this for me, the rest of the family does it too. I am not the only person who is going to need help. The fund takes care of all of us, or it takes care of none of us. And so the fund was — was repurposed. It is now the fund that pays for the cleaner who comes to all of our houses throughout the week. The gardener who does the front of this house and Baelor's window boxes and Rhaegel and Gormon's small terrace. The woman in Cobbler's Square who does all of our taxes. The summer house in Sunspear. The handful of standing arrangements — Duncan, you should know, because you will eventually be one of the beneficiaries — the standing arrangement that pays for the family's flowers on five fixed occasions a year, which has been, until now, with a shop on the Hook that we have, after some discussion, decided to leave before you even arrived."

He looked at her.

"You are not — you are not telling me that the family's standing flower order is going to come to my shop."

"I am, in fact, telling you exactly that. Maekar wished to know whether we ought to wait until the relationship had become more formal before transferring the standing order, but Baelor told him not to be ridiculous. Rhaegel agreed with Baelor, although Rhaegel agrees with Baelor about everything as a matter of long-standing policy. Aerys had no opinion. So the standing order is going to come to your shop, starting with the next dinner, which is two Sundays from today, and which Maekar will, I expect, be ringing your shop about by Wednesday."

"...Jena."

"You shall, of course, refuse to discount the order. Maekar is going to attempt to negotiate. You are going to refuse. He will, after some token resistance, accept the full price. He shall enjoy losing. He does not, in his ordinary life, get to lose, and on the few matters where he does, he treasures it."

"Jena —"

"Drink your tea, Duncan. We are not done."

*~*

It was a large binder, heavier than Dunk had thought a binder could be. It was navy blue, with a gold-stamped insignia on the front — a forked purple lightning bolt on what would, in proper sigil colours, have been a black field, although the binder cover was navy. The four-pointed stars were arranged around it in the same pattern as her earrings.

"This was my mother's binder. She used it for her recipes. When she died, she left it to me. I emptied it of recipes — they live now in a tin in the cupboard above the fridge — and I made it my onboarding binder. I have been adding to it for fifteen years. There is a section for each member of the family. There is a section at the back for the children. There is a section, at the very back, for the dogs and cats. We are, by current count, at seven across the family. Beric you have met."

"Seven."

"Ser Roland, who you have met. Two cats at Maekar and Dyanna's — Sand and Salt, who Dyanna named in honour of the proverb about welcoming guests, and who do not, in the manner of any cats anywhere, actually welcome any guests. One enormous dog at Rhaegel and Gormon's, a Stormlands hound named Mole — Mole, on account of being entirely black with a single white spot on his nose. One small grey cat at Daeron's named Charity, who is the most beautiful animal you will ever see and who has no use for any human she has not personally selected. And one cat at Aerys's named Septa Aliandra, who has a story."

"What's the story?"

"Septa Aliandra was a gift from one of Aerys's graduate students last year. Aerys, who has not in all of his years expressed an opinion about animals one way or the other, became, against his own expectation, one of the most committed cat people I have ever met. He keeps photographs of her in his office. He sends me updates. He is, on that matter, a changed man. The graduate student is going to get tenure on her merits, but I shall confess that Septa Aliandra has helped."

She smiled and passed the binder to him, unexpectedly. "You can look through it, but we aren't going to go over it."

"Why?"

"You need information about Baelor, not his family."

*~*

She began to tell Dunk how she and Baelor met.

She had been twenty-six, finishing her clinical residency at the university hospital, working at a student-and-staff therapy clinic the university ran free of charge. Baelor had been twenty-five. He had been a few years out from the accident. He had been, by his own description, the most physically articulate and least emotionally articulate man at the clinic, a young scholar of medieval romance who could write seven pages about the symbolism of a sworn oath but who could not, at the start of his sessions, get past the question how are you without a thirty-second silence. He had been referred to the clinic by Aerys, who had become alarmed at Baelor's social withdrawal after the accident and who had taken the unprecedented step of intervening.

Baelor had been Jena's client for six months when she realized what was happening.

"I came into the clinic on a Monday morning to do my session prep, and I sat down at my desk, and I looked at my notes on him, and I had the clear thought I am about to fail this man. The thought arrived from nowhere, Duncan. I had not been having it on the way to work. I had not had it the previous Friday. It arrived on Monday morning at eight-fifteen, and the thought meant I have, between Friday and Monday, somewhere in the back of my own head, begun to want a thing about this man that I cannot want as his clinician. I did not know what the thing was, exactly, but I knew it was not appropriate. I left it where it was on the Monday morning, and I went to my supervisor's office at ten that day, and I told her I needed to transfer a patient because I was no longer impartial to him. She reassigned Baelor to a colleague, and I never saw him again as a patient. I called him that afternoon to tell him the case was being transferred. I gave him the simple version. I am not going to be a useful clinician for you going forward, and I am transferring your case to my colleague. He did not, on the phone, push. He said all right. He thanked me. We hung up. That was the end of my professional relationship with him."

"...all right."

"I was, for some weeks afterward, ashamed of myself. I had not done anything wrong. I had managed the situation correctly. The handover was clean. The new clinician was good. Baelor finished his work and moved on with his life. I had no further contact with him for three years."

"Three years?"

"I finished my residency. I went into private practice. I moved to a flat in Cobbler's Square. I dated a Reach man for eighteen months and that ended without drama, and then I ran into Baelor at a faculty event."

"At the university?"

"Yes, there was an event for a colleague of mine who was being given a teaching award, and Baelor was there as one of the colleague's former students, and we found each other across a room of about a hundred and twenty people, and the eye contact across the room felt like it does in novels. We both, in that single instant, knew that the three years had not done what we had thought they were doing. He came across the room. He said, very plainly, Jena, I am no longer your patient. I have not been for some years. I do not know whether you have, on the basis of professional ethics, decided you cannot speak to me. If you have, I shall respect it and will leave you alone. If you have not, I should very much like to take you for a coffee. I agreed instantly."

Despite himself, Dunk smiled.

She set down her tea.

She looked at the kitchen for a moment — at the dog in the square of sun, at the bouquet of dahlias and stock she had remade, at the back garden through the window — and she did the considered movement of a woman who was about to tell the part of the story that had cost her something to think about.

"What I am about to tell you is what I have come to think, over the years, about the marriage. I want to tell you because I want you to know what I know. I do not want you to be surprised by it. I do not want you to come to it on your own three years from now in a hard moment. I want, if I can, to spare you some discovery you would otherwise have to do alone. Is that — is that all right with you?"

"Yes. Please."

"Good."

*~*

She told him about the parents — Baelor's father, who had died seven years ago, and who had been a difficult and brilliant man Baelor had never quite reconciled with, and Baelor's mother, who had died four years ago, and whom Baelor had loved without complication. Baelor and his mother, Jena said, were the closest thing I have ever seen in any family I have known. She was, in his life, the unchallenged person. When she died, he did not write anything for four months, which had not happened to him in his entire career. We were already divorced. He barely slept or ate. He looked truly lost without her. He wears a sort of cedar cologne she gave him for his birthday on very special occasions. He has been using it sparingly ever since she passed.

"He wore it on Saturday."

Jena paused.

"He told me he had been saving it for an evening when he was on a date with the most handsome man in all of the Seven Kingdoms."

Dunk could feel how red his ears were.

Jena's face did a thing he could not quite name. It was not, exactly, surprise. It was the slow private adjustment of a woman who had just had a fact confirmed about her ex-husband that she had not, until that moment, been entirely sure of.

"I have been telling myself, over the last week, that he was probably very fond of you, but I had not been sure of the seriousness of it. The cologne is — Duncan, the cologne is the seriousness. He has used it, by my count, on four occasions, all of them academic events at which he was being honoured. He has not used it on a person. Not once."

"...oh."

"I am going to be a great deal more invested in this briefing than I had originally intended to be."

From the start, Baelor had been a great husband. He had been the kindest husband any of her friends had ever met. He had remembered her mother's birthday and her sister's wedding anniversary and the small bad days she had at work. He had, when she was pregnant with Valarr, read aloud to her every evening from a different fourteenth-century romance because he had decided, on his own, that this was a gift he could give her at a time when she could not, for reasons of nausea, hold a book herself. He had, when Valarr was born, taken eight weeks off teaching and slept in the nursery on a folding bed, because Jena had been recovering from a difficult birth and he had decided that he was not going to be the kind of father who did not, in the first six weeks, know his own son. He had done the same with Matarys. He had cooked. He had cleaned, in the competent way he did things. He had been, in any matter that could be observed from the outside, the ideal husband.

She told Dunk that he had also, all that time, been a man whose attention was not, in the manner she wanted it to be, on her.

"I do not mean," Jena said, "that he did not love me. He did. He loved me with the entirety of the capacity he had. The capacity he had for me — I want to be careful about this — was very large. He loved me with great care and great consistency and great loyalty. He never wandered. He never wanted to. He was not the kind of man who wanted to. He was, in all the ways I could measure, faithful to me in the most demanding sense of the word. He thought about me. He worried about me. He was glad about me. He came home to me. He preferred my company to almost anyone's."

"But?"

"What he was not — and this took me years to understand — was attracted to me as I was attracted to him. I do not mean physically; the physical part was fine, the physical part was — this is the part I am going to skip past, because it is yours now in a way it is no longer mine — the physical part was good. He was a kind lover. He was attentive. He was patient. He was, in his own particular way, generous. What I came to understand, very slowly, was that the kindness was the entirety of the offer. He was kind to me in bed as he was kind to me at the kitchen table. The hunger — and I am going to use that word because it is the only word I have for it — the hunger I had for him was not, on his side, hunger. It was simply kindness."

"You — you don't have to —"

"I am going to. I am telling you this because you need to know why it ended."

"...okay."

"I came to understand, in the last year of our marriage, that what he was offering me was the entire offer of a man who was not particularly attracted to women. He had not, when we had married, known this about himself. He had grown up in the family he had grown up in, in the class he had grown up in, in the period he had grown up in, and he had simply not — he had not had the experiences that would have told him. He had been, in the small sad way of a man raised inside a certain kind of expectation, certain he was going to marry a woman. He had been a virgin when we married. He had thought he loved me; he had thought what he felt was love. He had been, in many ways, correct. What he had not realized — what he could not have realized, given the small information available to him about himself — was that the thing he was feeling for me was the largest version of love a man can feel for a person he is not, in his bones, drawn to."

There was a tightness in Dunk that he could not completely breathe through.

"And so — I came to understand, in the slow way these things sometimes come, that I was going to have to be the one who said something. He was not going to. He was happy. He had a wife he loved, two children he was besotted with, a kind life he was running with great care. He was not going to wake up one morning and decide he was unhappy. He was going to stay in the marriage with the kindness intact for the rest of his life. He would have. I am certain of it. He would have died at eighty in the room next to mine and would not, in any of the years between, have wanted to leave."

"And — and so."

"So, I sat him down at this kitchen table on a Sunday afternoon in late September, with the boys upstairs napping, and I told him."

"What did you say?"

"I said —" she paused. She was looking at the table now, not at Dunk. "Baelor, I think we have to talk about something that is going to be difficult for both of us, and I have been working up to it for some time. I love you. I am going to love you my entire life. I have not been able to escape, over the last year, the understanding that you are not — that the part of you that wants me as a woman is not, on the whole, the part of you that wants. And I have come to understand that I want, in my own marriage, to be wanted as I think you want, but cannot give, because the want is not, in the deepest sense, in you for me. And so I think we are going to have to do a thing that is going to be hard."

"...fuck. Oh gods, sorry."

"That's pretty much how I felt about it as well." She laughed before taking a slightly shaky breath. Dunk reached out gently, letting her move if she didn't wish to be touched. She reached out as well and squeezed his hand firmly.

"He had known. Of course, it didn't really click until that moment, but when I said it, he was — Duncan, he was relieved. He was relieved, and he was sorry, and he was — he was appalled at himself in the careful Baelor manner of being appalled at himself. He apologised to me for weeks. He cried, twice, both times in this kitchen. I told him to stop apologising; I told him I had not been wronged; I told him that the thing he had given me had been, on its own terms, very good, and that I had not been cheated, and that I was going to be perfectly all right, and that the boys were going to be perfectly all right, and that he was going to figure out, in his own time, what came next for him. He did not believe me on the last one." She smiled fondly. "But he has, in the years since, figured out a great many things in his own time, and he is now, by your account and by his, sitting across candle-lit tables with a six-foot-seven flower-shop owner who he is, by every measure available to me, in love with."

"Gods."

"So you see."

"I see."

"The marriage ended because it had to. The friendship survived because we are both, on the whole, people who try. The boys are fine. Baelor is fine. I am — I am about to be married again, I have been meaning to tell you, to a Marcher architect named Pádraic who I have been seeing for two years, and he is a person who wants me as I have, all my life, wanted to be wanted, and who is, by the way, very enthusiastic about Baelor in a manner that has, in the early going, slightly confused him, because he had not been prepared for an ex-husband who was going to be a member of the family. He is getting used to it. Baelor has been very kind, as fucking always."

"That's wonderful."

"Thank you." She set down her tea. "The boys are staying with us until Matarys finishes secondary school. Then Pádraic and I are buying a flat together — somewhere smaller, and ours, and not a house with this much Targaryen history in it. The house will, by long-standing agreement with Baelor, go to one of the boys eventually. Probably Matarys, who has the temperament for an old house. Valarr does not. Valarr is going to want a flat with no provenance whatsoever, when his time comes."

"You — you have been thinking about this."

She did the slow private smile of a woman who had, on her own evidence, just been understood.

*~*

She came back, after a few minutes — after Dunk had eaten another biscuit and Jena had topped up his tea — to what she had been waiting to come back to.

"There is one more thing, Duncan."

"Yes?"

"I have been thinking," she said, "about how to describe what being in love with him was like. I have, on the whole, given up trying to explain it to people I was close with, because most of them were going to assume that whatever I said was bitterness, and I was not bitter. The thing I felt for him, while I was married to him, was real, so I am going to try, with you, because you are the person for whom it is most useful."

"Try."

"All right. Being in love with Baelor was like — and this is the only metaphor I have ever found that did the work — like watching an old film you loved as a child."

She paused.

"You know the kind I mean. The film you watched at six. The film your mother put on for you when you were sick. The film that has, for the rest of your life, the entire shape of itself in your head — the music, the colors, the lines of the dialogue you can recite. The film that, when you put it on again at twenty-five or thirty, still holds the entire weight of the feelings you had at six. You watch it and you are, briefly, six. The film is doing for you what it did for you at six. The film is, in that respect, unfailingly faithful. It is not going to fail you. You can put it on at any age and it will give you what it gave you the first time."

"Yes."

"But you are not six anymore."

"...oh."

"And the film, on the second viewing, on the third, on the tenth — the film does not, on those viewings, give you the rest of what you have become. The film does not contain the years between six and sixteen, when you began to understand sex. The film does not contain what you learned at twenty about loss. The film does not contain the year you spent in a country whose language you had to learn. The film does not contain — the life you have lived since the first viewing. It cannot become the rest of you. It can only be what it has always been."

She looked at him.

"That is what being in love with him was. The film was very, very good. The film was, on its own terms, the best film of my early adulthood. The film holds, even now, and I watch it, in moments, every so often for the rest of my life, and I'm glad I have it. But the film is not — Duncan — the film is not what I needed at thirty-five to carry the next forty years. I needed a film that grows up with me. I have one now, in Pádraic."

The kitchen was, for a moment, quiet.

Dunk did not, for a minute, say anything.

He was thinking.

He was thinking about what the metaphor meant for him.

Jena smiled and reached over, squeezing his hand.

"You need to focus on his own film when you think of this. Our marriage was a film he was making in his thirties. The film stayed that way because he could not yet — he couldn't give a woman the part of himself that was the next film. The happy sequel that he is going to make with a man."

"Jena —"

"With a man, I think, the film grows. I think the film is going to be the film he has been preparing to make his entire life and is now, at forty-seven, ready to begin. I am not someone who predicts these things; I am, by training, careful about prediction. But I have known him for years and I have not, in all of that time, seen him want a thing as much as he wants you. I am — I am very glad you exist. I am very glad you are sitting in my kitchen, because I think it's going to be beautiful to see what you two make together."

He had to set his tea down.

He thought about a man on a couch in a flat above a shop, on a Saturday night, with his thumb on Dunk's cheekbone, who had said same. He thought about the cologne. He thought about the violets. He thought about the receipt at the Brass Lantern, and about Baelor stopping on the corner because he had, in the moment, understood a thing about Dunk that Dunk had not yet understood himself.

I am going to be in this film for the rest of our lives.

"Thank you, Jena."

"You are very welcome."

"I — I am not going to be able to say this as well as you said it. I am not — I am not as good with words as you or Baelor are. But — I am going to take care of him."

"I know."

"I am going to — I am going to take care of him in the way I think you have been taking care of him, alongside everyone else in this family, and I am going to do it because I — because I love him, and because I want to make that film with him."

"I am going to cry in a moment if you continue, and I do not, on the whole, cry, so I am going to ask you, kindly, to take a biscuit and let me recover."

*~*

The boys arrived at five-fifteen.

Valarr came in first. He was tall — five-foot-ten, broad in the shoulders, as Baelor had described him — and he had Baelor's hair, although Valarr's was less silver, and Baelor's mismatched eyes in the subtler version Baelor had warned him about. He was wearing a careful jumper and clean shirt of a boy who had been told that today was the day he was, formally, meeting someone. He set his lacrosse bag in the hall. Beric the dog had come out of the kitchen at the sound of his key and was, with great seriousness, doing the daily ceremony of greeting that he and Valarr had been doing for years.

"Hello," Valarr said. His voice was lower than Dunk had expected — it was already, somehow Dunk had not been able to anticipate, recognizably Baelor's voice in its low register. The pace was the same. "I'm Valarr. Sorry I am late."

"Dunk. And it's definitely all right."

"May I sit?"

"Of course."

He sat down and Jena, without being asked, slid her own cup across the table to him. He drank from it without comment, in the efficient manner of a seventeen-year-old who had been drinking his mother's tea by long household custom.

"Do you go by Duncan or Dunk?"

"Dunk, usually."

"Does father know that?"

"I — I haven't really discussed it with him."

"I will." Valarr did the slow private smile that was, on his face, an almost-amused thing — recognizably his father's smile, in the smaller seventeen-year-old version of his father.

"Now I have some questions for you."

Dunk steadied himself for it.

"What is your favourite thing about my father?"

He had been preparing for who are your parents or what are your intentions, not this.

"He noticed me. I have — I have spent my life noticing other people. He was the first person who, when he started chatting me, noticed me back. He has been noticing me ever since. He noticed a scar on the back of my hand he had only seen on a screen. He noticed that I had been quieter than usual after a wedding on the phone last week. He notices — he notices everything, and he does it without making me feel scrutinized. He does it because — yeah. That is my favourite thing about your father. He sees me."

The look on Valarr's face was an unguarded one for one full second. Then it composed itself again into the careful evaluative look.

"It was a good answer. Question two."

"Go."

"My father is, in some weeks, very ill. He is going to be ill at some point in the future during your relationship with him. My question is — what is the thing you do for yourself when someone you love is having the worst version of their week?"

Dunk looked at the boy.

Old Arlan would have liked this kid.

"I bring soup. I do not, on the whole, take it personally. I have learned, by long practice, that a bad week is the body's week, and the body's week is not about me. I have also learned that the worst thing I can do for the person in the bad week is to require them to attend to me during it. So I — I do my work. I sit with them when they want me to sit. I leave when they want me to leave. I have a friend, Tanselle, who you have not met but you will meet, and on the worst days I have, all my life, taken a long walk by the river with Tanselle, and we have not talked, mostly, on the walk. That is what I do for myself."

Valarr nodded.

"All right."

"My father has — I am asking because I am the one who is, in some unfortunate sense, responsible for him being on the dating apps in the first place — spent most of his life being a person who has not, on the whole, been very brave about his own happiness. He has been competent. He has been kind. He has not been brave. My question is — Dunk, what are you going to do, when he is afraid?"

Dunk looked at the boy.

"I am — I am going to —" Dunk paused. He honestly didn't have a quick answer for this one. "I think I'll just ask him. Talk to him about what he's scared of. Tell him I am here for him. That whatever it is, we can meet it together."

Valarr was, this time, quiet for a long moment before breaking out into a glowing smile. He jumped up and ran around the table, wrapping his arms tightly around Dunk in a tight hug.

"My father has been waiting for that man his whole life. I'm so glad he found you."

Dinner was not, in the end, long.

They ate at the kitchen table, the four of them, with Beric under the table at Valarr's feet. Jena had made a simple Marcher chicken with rosemary and the small wild onion that grew on the lower slopes above Blackhaven in May, which her mother had sent her a parcel of last week and which Jena had used in the pan with the chicken. The boys ate as teenage boys ate. Matarys did not look at Dunk for the first ten minutes; in the eleventh minute he asked Dunk, without looking up, whether he had ever made an arrangement of Iris pseudacorus, which Dunk had not, and they had a careful conversation about flag iris that lasted three minutes, at the end of which Matarys looked at Dunk for the first time and said, in the grave voice of a fourteen-year-old:

"I think you should know that he has been talking about you non-stop for two weeks."

He went back to his chicken.

Dunk, across the table, did not, immediately, say anything.

Jena, beside Matarys, smiled fondly at her youngest and simply nodded at Dunk.

*~*

He turned to leave at a quarter to seven, after he had helped the boys clear the table.

"Jena. Thank you. For all of it."

"You are very welcome, Duncan."

"I — I think I am going to need to walk before I get on the bus after all of this, but I am extremely grateful."

"I'm glad. The river path is the prettiest, if you go down two blocks and turn left."

"Thank you."

She walked him to the door. Beric trotted alongside, in his ceremonial pace, as a creature escorting a new acquaintance to the threshold. In the hall, Jena stopped.

"One more thing. The wedding is going to be in this house, in the back garden. We would like — I would like — for you to do the flowers."

He looked at her with the flat astonished face of a man who had not, for a second, understood what was being asked.

"You — you want me to do the flowers for your wedding?"

"I do. We shall, of course, pay full price; we are not in the business of asking for free flowers from friends; and the wedding shall be small enough that you can manage it without disrupting the shop too much, but we would like it to be you."

"...Jena."

"Will you?"

"Yes. Yes, of course. Gods. Yes."

"Good. We shall come to the shop next week, the both of us, and plan it. Tanselle will be there, I hope?"

"Yeah. Tanselle will be there."

"I should very much like to meet her."

"She will be — she will be very excited."

"Good. Goodnight, Duncan."

She leaned up and kissed him on the right cheek, and then, after the pause her grandmother had taught her to leave, on the left.

He laughed softly and she quickly joined him.

"You — you do it too."

"Of course I do. It's a lovely custom."

"Goodnight."

"Goodnight."

Beric, at her feet, gave Dunk a final evaluative look. Then, in the dignified manner of a creature concluding the official business of the day, he turned and walked back to his basket in the hall.

*~*

He walked home along the river path.

The path was quiet at seven in the evening on a Sunday in May. The light was the long gold that came down between the buildings at the end of a clear day. He walked with his jacket open and his hands in his pockets and tried not to let his mind race too quickly.

He came up to the river-path bus stop and watched the river as he waited for it to arrive. When it came, he took his usual seat — left side, two rows from the back, near the window — and the bus pulled away from the stop and headed toward Flea Bottom.

*~*

The first drops hit the window halfway through the ride.

He noticed them but did not mind them. King's Landing rain in May was rain that came down for fifteen minutes and went away again, and he had been in worse, and he had — he had been doing a great deal of thinking on the walk and the thinking had warmed him to the point of not minding the weather. He watched the drops on the window for a few minutes. He watched the buildings going past, going grey under the rain. The rain came down harder. He could hear it on the roof of the bus now — the steady tinking of a real rain getting going. The bus driver turned the wipers on. 

By the time the bus came up to his stop in Flea Bottom, the rain was no longer rain.

The rain was — Dunk pressed his face briefly to the window — pouring. The kind of pour that came down at an angle. The kind of pour that hit the pavement and bounced. The kind of pour that turned the gutters along Bracken Street into actual streams of water, with leaves running in them, with bits of paper, with the temporary debris of a King's Landing alley in a May storm.

He did not have an umbrella.

He did not, in his ordinary life, carry an umbrella. He had decided, around his twenty-fifth year, that umbrellas were a thing for people who did not have flower shops to get to in the morning, and that the inconvenience of being occasionally wet was, on balance, less than the inconvenience of losing umbrellas on buses six times a year. He had been right about this nine times out of ten. He had, on the tenth time, been very wet.

He stood up at his stop, thanked the driver, and stepped down from the bus.

The minute he hit the pavement, he ran.

*~*

He ran as a six-foot-seven man ran through rain — long-legged, fast, with his jacket pulled up over his head with both hands and his chin tucked against his chest and the absurdity of a tall man running in a way that did not, technically, save him from being wet but felt like it ought to. He ran the four blocks down Bracken Street with the rain coming straight at him from the south, and he laughed once — out loud, into the rain, because there was no one to hear him — and he turned the corner onto his own street.

He saw the shop.

He saw the awning.

He saw, under the awning, a man.

The man was leaning on a cane with his weight slightly on his right side. He was wearing a dark wool jacket that had been, on inspection, the wrong jacket for the weather, because the bottom hem was darker than the rest of it from the rain that had blown in under the awning. He was holding, in his left hand, a small white bakery box with a gold seal. He had been watching the rain coming down in the bright lit manner of a man watching a King's Landing storm when he had decided he was in no hurry to be anywhere else, with the look of a man composing sentences he might use later, with the careful smile of a man who had been standing under an awning for twenty-five minutes and was finding the standing — Dunk could see this even from twenty feet away, through the grey blur — enjoyable.

Then he looked up.

He looked up and saw Dunk.

His face lit up.

His face brightened, in the manner of a face when its man had been waiting for someone for some time and that someone had just come around a corner. The dark and purple eyes both did what they did when Baelor was unguarded — they went wider, briefly, and then they crinkled at the outside, as Dunk had been watching them crinkle on a screen for ten days and across the lamp light of his own couch. The careful mouth opened on a breath that had been waiting for him. The hand on the cane tightened, briefly. The whole face — the whole man — was for an unguarded moment the face of someone who was delighted to be here.

*~*

"Duncan, you are very wet."

"I am."

The rain came down harder but Baelor's lit face had not, by any of the evidence Dunk was watching for, gone out.

"Baelor."

"Yes?"

"What are you doing here?"

"Ah. Yes." Baelor adjusted his grip on the box. "Jena sent me a text on her way back from walking you out. She said Baelor, your young man is a remarkable young man, and I am very fond of him, and the briefing went well, and I am writing to you now, before he arrives home, because I want you to know that he is the right one."

"Oh."

"I read it at my kitchen table with Roland at my feet, and I — I could not sit anymore after that. I could not wait for you to ring me later. There are some pieces of news a man cannot, by his nature, sit at a kitchen table and absorb in silence. So I called a cab. I went to a bakery on the Hook. I bought a box of the honey cakes — small Pentoshi-style ones with cardamom — and I came down to your shop, and I have been here under your awning for some time. The rain began not long after I arrived. I have been, for the last twenty-five minutes, a man under an awning in Flea Bottom with a box of honey cakes, watching the rain, waiting for you."

"Baelor."

"I know. I am — I am the most predictable kind of man, Duncan. I am sorry. I have been, all my life, the kind of man who, given good news, will go directly to a bakery. It is a thing I have always done. I am — I am hopeless about it."

Dunk, two feet away in the rain, did not, for a second, move.

He looked at Baelor, the glowing version, at the box of honey cakes in his hand, at the cane, at the wrong jacket, at the hair gone slightly damp at the front.

He is, in his entire being, exactly the man I have been falling in love with for two weeks, and I have not, until this moment, fully understood that he is going to keep being this man for the rest of his life, on Sunday evenings, on Friday afternoons, on Tuesday mornings, in rain and in sun, with the wrong jacket and the right pastries, with the careful gestures of a man who has spent years writing about romance and who is, in his bones, a hopeless romantic and is not going to apologise for being one — and now he gets to be that with a man and I am going to make him be brave.

"Tell me," Dunk said.

"Sorry?"

"Tell me what you were thinking. Just now. When you saw me come around the corner."

Baelor looked at him, blinking, and then fucking blushed.

His voice was quiet when he spoke:

"I was thinking how nice it would be to dance with you in the rain."

"...you were."

"I was."

A pause.

The rain came down between them, on the awning above Baelor's head and on Dunk's hair and on the empty pavement between them.

"And then I was thinking," he said, "that it is, of course, raining, and that we are two grown men, and that one does not — Duncan, one does not, in the ordinary world, dance in the street with another person in the rain. That is a thing in films. It is a thing in the quiet interior corner of one's head where one composes the better version of one's life. It is not a thing one does on a Sunday evening in Flea Bottom, in a wool jacket that is going to be a problem in the morning, holding a box of honey cakes. So I was, in fairness, also thinking — almost in the same breath — that the thought was a thing I was going to keep for myself. As one keeps the thought of a great many things one is not, by the evidence of being grown, going to actually do."

"You have a lot of those?"

"I have years of those. I have a long quiet inner life of things I have, by careful long practice, learned to think about and not, on the whole, do. The thinking is the thing. I have, in my thinking, danced with you a great many times by now. I have, in my thinking, also picked you up from your shop on a Tuesday evening with no warning and taken you to a Pentoshi place by the river that I love. I have, in my thinking, written you a letter — an actual letter — and posted it. I have, in my thinking, given you my mother's ring. The interior life is, by long custom, where I keep all of these things, and the keeping has been, on the whole, a pleasure of its own. I have not — I am not embarrassed by any of them. I am only — practical about which ones I would, in the world, attempt to enact. Today's, in the rain on your pavement, did not make the list. I had already, by the time you came around the corner, set it gently aside."

Dunk, in the rain, with his hair stuck to his forehead and his jacket soaked through and his hands wet and cold —

"Put the box down."

"Sorry?"

"The honey cakes. Put them on the bench."

Baelor, on the evidence of his face, did not understand what was about to happen but did set the box down on the wooden bench beside the shop door under the awning, where the bench was dry. 

Dunk held out his hand.

Baelor looked at it.

"Duncan."

"Yes."

"You — you cannot mean to —"

"I mean to. Come here."

"It is raining."

"It is. The wool jacket is already a problem. We are going to be wet. The dance is going to be short, on account of your back and on account of the fact that I do not actually know how to dance but we are going to do it anyway. Come here, Baelor. Step out from under the awning."

Baelor laughed — surprised, breathless — and stepped out from under the awning.

~

Baelor's left hand came up to Dunk's shoulder; Dunk's right hand came to the small of Baelor's back on the side opposite the cane; Baelor's right hand, with the cane in it, stayed exactly where it was, doing the work of keeping the man upright. They did not move much. They could not move much; the cane permitted only what the cane permitted; Dunk did not, in fairness, know what to do beyond shifting his weight slightly from one foot to the other and tilting himself by careful degrees so that he and Baelor were doing roughly the same thing at roughly the same time.

There was no music.

The street was empty.

It was raining as it had been raining for the last forty minutes — steady, hard, but the kind of King's Landing May rain that had no opinion about whether anyone was dancing in it.

It was the smallest possible dance and it was also, on Baelor's face, the largest possible thing.

His face, in the rain, three inches from Dunk's, was — Dunk did not have a word for it, was the truth. It was the bright face from twenty feet away made twenty times brighter. It was the face of a man who had, by long practice, kept a thought in his interior life for years, and who had, in the space of one minute, been given the thought in the world. His eyes were, now, on Dunk. His lips parted just slightly. The free hand on Dunk's shoulder was tightening, briefly, in the involuntary way a hand tightened when the body it belonged to was registering a thing it had not let itself be ready for.

Dunk kissed him in the rain, with Baelor's free hand on the back of Dunk's neck under the soaked collar, with the lights of Flea Bottom coming on one by one around them as the storm darkened the May evening into something closer to night.

They kissed slow, like this was the only thing that mattered in the world.

Baelor made a sound against his mouth.

The sound was not the sound of a man being kissed. It was the sound of a man who was so impossibly happy and who was going to be happy for the rest of the evening, the rest of the week, the rest of — Dunk thought, distantly, in the small bright place inside his chest — something it was too early to name.

When Dunk pulled back, an inch, his hand was still on the side of Baelor's face.

"Duncan, you — you danced with me in the rain."

"I did."

The men could not stop smiling despite the rain pouring down on them.

"You — you are going to enact a great many things on my list, aren't you?"

"I — yeah. As many as you'll tell me about. As many as your back lets us do. As many as we can. I am going to be — Baelor, I am going to be the man who, when you have been keeping a thing in your head, I'm going to bring it into the world. I am — I am the right one for that, I think."

"You truly are."

"Yeah?"

A pause.

"Duncan, we should — we should go upstairs."

"Oh right, yeah."

"The cakes are going to go soft."

"And your back —"

"My back, on present examination, is, on the whole, content. But my back does want tea. My back, by the way, would like to make a formal note that the dance was — that the dance was very good, and that we are going to have to find a way to do it again."

Dunk laughed and nodded as he picked up the box of honey cakes from the bench, took Baelor's elbow on the cane-arm side, and walked him, slowly, up the steps to the side door of the building.