Chapter Text
The room they put him in was not a cell.
It had a window. The window had no bars. Dunk stood at it for a long time after they brought him in and thought about what that meant, and could not decide. The fair was still visible from here if he pressed close to the glass, torchlight, distant music, the ordinary noise of people who had not just struck a prince of the realm and were therefore still allowed to go about their evenings.
He sat down on the floor with his back against the wall because there was no chair, and he waited.
They came for him before the candles burned out.
Those who came for him were not rough in bringing him. They walked him down a corridor and through a door and into a room where the air smelled of tallow and old argument, and they left him standing in the middle of it.
Five men. A long table. Candles guttering in a draft from somewhere.
Prince Baelor Breakspear sat at the table's center. His bearded face showed few signs of anything. To his left sat Prince Maekar, who looked at Dunk when he entered with an expression that was difficult to read and did not try to be easy.
Two lords flanked them on either side, men whose names Dunk did not know. He knew their type well enough. Men who had learned when to speak and when to make their faces blank, and who were presently making their faces blank. They would have little say here, Dunk knew.
Aerion stood apart from the table. Near the wall. He had a cloth against his jaw, and he was watching Dunk like a hunter watching his prey.
Maekar spoke first.
“You struck my son.”
“Aye,” Dunk said.
The word landed in the room like a dropped horseshoe.
One of the unnamed lords shifted in his seat. Baelor did not move at all. Aerion's mouth curved downward, almost a snarl.
“Aye,” Maekar repeated. The word in his mouth seemed as if it tasted like shit to the prince. "You struck a prince of the blood of Aegon the Conqueror, in the middle of a fair, in front of witnesses, and you stand here and say aye to me as though I asked you if you'd had your supper, you fucking simplenton."
“I don't know what else to say, my lord.” Dunk paused. “My prince. He had his hands on the girl.”
Aerion was a man of twenty namedays; he ought to have known better and been better besides.
“The girl.” Maekar's voice did not rise, but somehow became crueler, more severe, almost poisonous to those who heard it. “A puppeteer. A traveling player. A woman of no name and no house and no standing, and you decided that she was worth a prince's blood. You, a hedge knight of no name and no house and no standing.”
Dunk said nothing. There was nothing to say to that which would help him.
“The law is clear enough,” said one of the unnamed lords. He had a careful voice, the kind built for rooms like this one. “Striking a member of the royal family is a serious matter. The question is not whether it occurred, but how it is best addressed.”
“Addressed,” Maekar said flatly.
“The tournament is not yet finished. There are eyes here from half the realm. A public punishment…”
“Makes Ser Duncan a cause, a martyr,” Baelor spoke finally.
His voice carried without effort, unhurried, the way water carries without hurrying. Several heads turned to him.
“He acted badly, and he acted publicly,” Baelor continued. “That is true. But if we punish him loudly, we invite questions about what provoked him. Men will talk. They are already talking. A common knight striking a prince does not happen without reason, and people will go looking for the reason if we give them the impression we are trying to bury it. And the reason will not satisfy them.”
Maekar looked at his brother as if he knew his word was right but hated it regardless. “You're saying we protect the hedge knight.”
“I'm saying we protect the crown,” Baelor corrected, simply. “The hedge knight is incidental.”
Dunk stood very still and did not say that he was in the room. His fate was beyond him now.
The lords argued for a time. Not loudly. These were not men who argued loudly, or if they were, they had trained themselves out of it. The two lords offered angles and precedents and the kind of careful language that meant things without quite saying them. Maekar interrupted twice. Baelor did not interrupt at all, but when he spoke, the room listened.
Dunk picked up what he could, but much was above him.
Cannot be released. He caught that much. Cannot be made an example of. Cannot be left to himself. A pause. What remains.
What remained, apparently, was him standing in this room, waiting to find out what shape his life was going to take from here.
“He is not a schemer,” Baelor argued, when the argument had tired itself out somewhat. “Look at him. He is not a subtle man. He is not ambitious, not political, not building toward anything. He saw something he thought was wrong, and he acted. Badly. Without thinking.” A slight pause. “That is a dangerous quality, but it is not a treasonous one. It does not require a traitor's answer. His crime is impulse, not malice.”
Maekar remained quiet then, though his eyes said much. His jaw was set in a way that meant he had arrived at something and did not like it.
“We could cut his hand off, the offending foot similarly,” Baelor explained to Dunk’s great terror. “Or, he could be of use. Supervised. Kept close. Given no room to cause further incidents while the tournament runs its course. After that, we can arrange-”
“I'll take him.”
Somehow, Aerion's voice was pleasant, in the way a knife is pleasant to look at before it opens you and leaves you bleeding.
The room changed.
Not visibly. No one moved. But Dunk felt it, how the air shifted.
Maekar turned to look at his son slowly, disapproval clear in his gaze. “You'll what?”
“Take him into my service.” Aerion drew the cloth down from his jaw. The bruise beneath had darkened splendidly across his cheek. “The boy has proven he can strike. I have found there is always use for men who can strike, provided the blow is guided by the proper hand.” His mouth curved faintly. “And it answers the matter cleanly, does it not? He is watched. Contained. Accounted for. No man can say we turned him loose to wander the realm.”
Dunk wondered whether it wouldn’t be better to have his hand off.
“No one can say it,” Maekar growled, “because no one would fucking believe a man who struck you in the face is now riding in your household.”
“Stranger things have been believed.”
“Aerion.”
The name came out like a dagger, cruel and cutting.
Aerion met his father's eyes, not combative but not giving in either.
“You are not taking him,” Maekar commanded severely.
“Father, I am offering a solution-”
“You are offering yourself a toy.” The words were clipped, precise, and entirely without gentleness. “You think me so foolish as not to understand what you'd make of him in a fortnight? The man would be dead or broken, and we'd have a worse problem than we started with. You are not taking him.”
It seemed the second prince, and Duncan agreed then, something the hedge knight could have hardly expected.
Aerion was quiet for a moment. “You think so little of my self-restraint.”
“Boy,” Maekar spat, “I place no more faith in your restraint than your typical conduct has ever earned.”
Silence.
Dunk thought to speak, to offer his own thoughts, then thought better. This was no place for him to interfere, just like it hadn’t been his place to interfere any previous time either.
Aerion turned away from his father and looked at Dunk instead.
His face betrayed no emotion, yet his eyes burned brighter than firelight, haunting in their fury and utterly without mercy.
It was worse than the open anger would have been.
“Prince Baelor,” said one of the unnamed lords, carefully, after the silence had stretched long enough. "You suggested supervised proximity. Perhaps-”
“It would be a strange arrangement,” Baelor said at last. Silence followed, while Dunk watched him turn the matter over in his mind. Not merely the politics of it, though those weighed heavily enough, but the shape of the thing itself, as a man might weigh a sword he disliked yet found sounder than the others before him. “Yet Aerion is not wrong. Direct supervision often solves more troubles than it breeds. A man left to roam may still stumble into mischief.”
Maekar looked at his brother, displeased. “You’re actually considering it.”
“I'm considering what works, what benefits us,” Baelor clarified. "Those are not always the same thing as what I'd prefer."
The two unnamed lords exchanged a glance that meant nothing and everything, the kind of glance men share when they are present at a decision they did not make and do not wish to be remembered as having made.
Maekar was quiet for a long moment. The candles guttered. Somewhere outside, the fair was still going.
“He'll be dead in a fortnight,” Maekar whispered. It was not quite an argument anymore. The prince knew his word was mute now.
Duncan’s blood ran cold. This was Aerion’s father, yet even he knew what kind of monster the cruel prince was.
“Perhaps,” Baelor said. “Or perhaps Aerion will find him useful enough to keep.” His eyes went to his nephew then, lingering there a moment as if weighing a thing unseen. “And perhaps Ser Duncan may teach him something of honor and right conduct.” A faint sigh escaped him. “Though it may serve them both equally well to learn the mastery of their tempers.”
Maekar pushed back from the table. “Fine. Do what you will. Let him fucking die then. I'm done with it.”
He left without looking at his son.
The guards grabbed Duncan soon after.
Back down the corridor, back toward the room with the window and the missing chair. The man walking with him was not unkind about it, not kind either, just present, a body between Dunk and any direction he might have thought to go.
Dunk had not thought to go anywhere.
He was thinking about Aerion's face.
The prince had not smiled when the decision settled. Had not looked satisfied, or eager, or any of the things Dunk might have expected from a man who had just been given what he wanted. He had only watched, still and quiet, his eyes on Dunk the whole time Baelor spoke, the whole time Maekar raged and left. Violet eyes, pale as bruised ice. The kind of eyes that did not need to move to follow you.
Dunk had met men who frightened him before. Big men, violent men, men who liked hurting things and made no secret of it. He knew how to read that kind of danger. Aerion's danger did not live there. It lived somewhere behind those eyes, patient and settled, like something that had been waiting a long time and had made its peace with waiting.
Duncan had a feeling he would soon come to know very intimately the true rage the young dragon held within him.
“Seven save me.”