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The world knew that Westerosi were not like normal men. Any lord could sew an emblem upon a scrap of cloth and claim himself a lion or a stallion or an eagle, but it was the blood of the First Men that still coursed with the old magic.
The songs said that in the night before the first dawn, the people of the realm were much the same as any in the Summer Isles or the Dothraki steppes or the Land of Always Summer. At some point, and neither the singers nor the maesters could agree when or how or why, the change took root. It was a pact with the now-gone children of the forest, the spirits of the land who were masters over branch and stone and beast; it was the will of the gods, though which gods no one knew, that man revert to the animal state from which he came as punishment for some sin long since forgotten; it was a great bloody plague for all the histories could tell, and those it did not kill it changed.
The songs said it was the blood of the First Men that turned man and woman into something neither man nor woman. It was the blood that sowed in them the frenzy, bone-deep and unquenchable but by the lust of their own kind. From the castles to the hovels, it was the blood said to make men horned and hooved like beasts, men with cats’ claws and paws in place of feet, who could slip into and out of skins of scale and fur and feather as easily as one might change his tunic. It was the blood that gave some of the men wombs like women and heats like bitches. It was the blood that gave their women cocks like men and knots like hounds, and it was said that when a beast-man took to wife such a beast-woman it was he who was the wife, who birthed their pups and nursed them at his breast.
The songs said that when the Andals came, they married with the aberrations, not only man to woman but man to man, woman to woman. The bloodlines ran until north and south were overrun with them from the Wall to the red sands of Dorne where soon the Rhoynar would come; from the salt-white cliffs of the Iron Islands to the farthest reaches of the Fingers in the Vale. There were once more humans raised among the clutches and litters of the beastkin. From time to time, when the marriage of two such humans produced a child with an animal’s skin, the offspring was proclaimed blessed by one of their seven gods. The Father became a woman’s god, patron of mare and lioness and doe for the Andal daughters born so blessed, and their brothers were of the Mother, who was then known in Westeros to smile the same at babes born of a man’s loins as those born of a woman’s.
And the songs said that when the dragons came, Aegon of the Narrow Sea looked at the land of mutts and mongrels with a gleam in his dragon’s eyes. He saw at last a land which he and his sisters could claim for themselves, the last living spawn of Valyria’s fleshsmiths. The new royal house kept their tradition of marrying brother to sister as they kept their other relics of the motherland: jealously, senselessly. To taint the dragon-blood by watering it with the blood of beasts of the field would be to bring about a second Doom more final than the first. Generation after generation, Targaryen heirs were born untouched by the stain. Aemma Arryn entered the world two-armed and two-legged without a trace of the feathers worn by her falcon forebears. Rhaenys, who might have been queen, never grew into the proud golden antlers of her Baratheon dam. Not until the marriage of Prince Daeron, called by some Falseborn, did a trueborn babe of House Targaryen enter the world with the old blood thick in his veins.
Why it mattered to the dragons and the high lords of the court that Baelor Breakspear was Father-blessed, a hawk like his mother, had never been explained to Dunk. It was pure dumb chance that he came across Egg to begin with. Most days it was easy enough to forget the boy was Dyanna Dayne’s son, the only blooded child of all Prince Maekar’s brood. Mostly it meant that every fortnight the fine pale down needed plucking from the child’s scalp, and in five years or six he would be struck by the fevre, and the blessing of the Mother gave him some mystical insight into the endless eccentricities of Lord Lyonel Baratheon.
Dunk had no such understanding.
There was only one break in the great grey cliff of the curtain wall. It was ruled by the master of the gate, a slim spectacled man who reported that Lord Lyonel had ridden out in the hour of the wolf, as was his wont when a restless mood seized him. He had done the same many times before and oft in worse weather. It was strange, the man said, but then the lord himself would be the first to admit he was a strange man at times. It seemed no cause for concern.
Ser Myles took the news with a shrug. “As I thought,” he said when he noticed Dunk looking askance at him. “It may be your first time dealing with this, ser, but this is an old routine. He takes flight oft as not when the frenzy strikes him. The beast blood, you see. His kind will run and run until their legs fall out from under them. We’ll search the southern ridges; I doubt he’ll have gone townwards.”
Dunk did not mislike Myles, who snuck his horses apples and cared not at all that he was equal in rank to a hedge knight, but it sat poorly how little the man seemed concerned that Lord Baratheon left the keep in the dead of night with a storm brewing. He shot Dunk queer looks whenever he said something to that end. It was an uneasy ride.
Dunk could not escape the thought that he was missing something, and that Myles had chosen not to tell him what.
They found Kestrel, Lyonel’s mare, with her lead tied to a hawthorn tree two hours from the castle. The horse was stripped of tack and cropping happily at a thick patch of clover. Ser Myles offered to take her back to Storm’s End. Dunk could have cursed him, for his calm and for rousing none but Dunk for a search party, but he could only think of Lyonel. He left the guardsman to himself and urged Sweetfoot on.
Above, the sky boiled black and heavy. There was no proper thunder, but a soft, distant threat of it, a deep great purr that rattled Dunk’s teeth as the wind combed its fingers through his hair. A little breeze, Lyonel had called such winds, leaned against a parapet and showing Dunk how to read the weather from the clouds. Do you feel how still the air is until the wind comes? And not strongly, either, just enough to shift the scents and touch your hair. This is the calm yet, ser. The gods hold their breath before spitting down their hells.
Dunk was not so fine a tracker as any beastkin he’d ever met, but he knew what it meant when he came across the yellow cloak limp and trod-upon in the brush. The last curls of dried velvet were crushed reddish-black into the bark of a nearby pine; the soil at its roots was torn and scarred by the hooves of the buck that shed it.
The cloven tracks led off into the rainwood proper. By pairs at first, like a man on hooves, then stuttering, then in the set of fours Dunk would expect from a true deer.
The smell was thicker here, clinging to the branches and sitting heavy on the roof of Dunk’s mouth when he breathed it in. Spice and musk and the salty cloying sweat that beaded on Lyonel’s brow before his heat.
“Right mess we’ve got ourselves into, here,” he told Sweetfoot. The palfrey snorted and tossed her head, and Dunk amended: “Right mess I’ve got us into, here.”
It was not long before the trees grew too close for Sweetfoot to pick her way through. The deer trails and rough-worn travelling paths wound off to the west and south. The hart had gone east through a close-grown thicket – The better to lose a hunter, Dunk thought, and doubt pulled his stomach into knots. Come this far. Can’t turn back now, not if no one else is looking. Sweetfoot was a good girl, more sensible than most animals. More sensible than Dunk, at the least. He didn’t agonize about sending her trotting off by herself. She knew the way; she would be well enough.
Dunk found him in the heart of the old growth, scrubbing his throat raw against an elm tree.
Lyonel had been long at work making the den his own. The glen was a broad green bowl of earth carpeted in century lichens and pocked by antler-gouges and footsteps. The trees grew walled and clustered at its border, hemlock and oak and bulge-trunked cypress all oddly scored and still weeping from thin deep scratches like a pair of six-fingered hands. Beardmoss hung from their branches in curling silver curtains thick and soft as hair. The scent of old dry plant was yellow-green and resinous in Dunk’s nose under the bright hot burn of Lyonel’s markings.
At the farthest edge of the clearing was the elm. Choked by the rainwood, it was smaller than its kin at Ashford which Dunk had taken for his sigil, but its whisper-dry crown was broad enough to roof the glen in green.
The lord was pacing loose circles round its trunk, wearing only a furred cloak marbled black and grey, stopping every few steps to mutter to himself and scrape his head and neck against the bark. There was already a sticky ring of sap seven feet off the ground. Just above Lyonel’s shoulders, a second ring was being painted on, this of something clear and moist and pungent that gleamed on the elm’s skin and on Lyonel’s.
Dunk made no noise. He didn’t have to. The air shifted, the hart’s ears pricked, and Lyonel’s head snapped towards him so swiftly his antlers tore a handspan of bark from the elm. The look on his face was one Dunk had never seen before, not even with a weapon in his hand: eyes coal-black, lust-black, lip curled like a hound on a trail, teeth shining straight and white in his snarl. Even his curls seemed coarser and more wild, the silver dyed pink from his shed.
“Duncan.” It was as if it was his first time saying Dunk’s name. It was as if it was his first time tasting human speech, and his tongue darted red over his mouth to catch the flavor of the sound. “Ser. Am I dreaming? Did I not leave you at Storm’s End, or is that you in the flesh?”
Dunk went to one knee. “Milord.” No one else seemed like to see that you were well with the storms coming on. Of course there was a reason for that, but Dunk had never been much given to reason, and Lyonel made him less so. Thick as a castle wall, slow as an aurochs. They all knew.
“Ser Duncan,” Lyonel said again, so softly. “I asked you a question.”
He did not know how best to put it into words. I dreamed of you, he could say, because there had not been a night in months where he had not been hunted in his sleep by a brindled hart with wolf’s teeth. I thought you were taken mad, he could say, but Lyonel’s eyes were black and gold and the light of frenzy was in his face, and he could very well be mad. He certainly did not look like a man in his right mind, but the madness threw his features into contrast and made him more handsome somehow. It seemed unwise to let you be alone, he could say, because there was a blooming seed of fear in his gut that poor half-mad, half-beast Lyonel on his own in the rainwood would fall victim to bear or wolf or some lost hunter—
Foolish, Dunk knew, since the hart had survived his heats near as long as Dunk had been alive. Even a direwolf might pause at the sight of Lyonel and his splendid rack of antlers, forked like lightning with tines like arrowheads. He was a creature of sleek hard strength and blooded instinct. When his gaze met Dunk’s, it was Dunk who flinched away. What fool would think of hunting him?
The trees were bleeding sap and scabbed with dead velvet where the great hart had raked them with his crown. There was blood on Lyonel’s lips. There was blood in his fur. There was blood in his eyes when he looked at Dunk and bent his head until his face was hidden by tousled hair and spear-tip shadows. The whole clearing was smothering-thick with the scent: ripe as summer fruit, spiced and hot as perfume, sweat-salt and musk and the animal bite of sex. Lyonel stood so still beneath his elm that Dunk could have taken him for a statue. Some wild old god carved from marble, crowned with bone, draped in bloody deerhide. The fur curled thick and dark through his skin from jaw down to breast, thinning at his ribs before it darkened again beneath his navel into a coarse black tangle. Here and there it was lightened by the greys or broken by bare swathes of sun-dark flesh that shone as if oiled. There was blood there too. It was dried and rusted along his temples and his throat, the last red vestige of his shed.
It occurred to Dunk only then that a buck grew his antlers with the coming of the mating season, not the turning of summer, and when he shed them…
Dunk the lunk. He could curse himself for his stupidity, but it would do him no good now. He knew little of the animal nature of the blooded and less of their mating seasons. He knew Lyonel well enough – he liked to think so – but the hart was not Lyonel, and Dunk was not wearing armor.
“You left,” was all he managed in the end, and Lyonel’s laugh was mad and breathless.
“You followed.” He moved all strange like this. In a man’s body the cadence of his steps would be a limp, but on Lyonel it was natural, almost more so than his regular gait. Some magic ran in the blood to dull the pain from the change between human and beast, but there must have been another kind of magic that made Lyonel graceful as a cat and lovely as a dawn even as he stalked across his wood with that red wolf-smile baring teeth too sharp for man or deer. He stopped only when he was close enough for Dunk to reach out and touch him.
Thick bands of silver ran down his pelt along his chest and stomach, following the lines of muscle. Dunk sorely wished to see the hart in all his glory, to know if his soft-furred muzzle was black as most deer or blazed like a horse’s might be.
“You should not have come here, ser,” Lyonel said.
“I – I can leave, milord. I didn’t mean to… I can leave.”
“If you did, I would chase you.” Dunk could feel the heat spilling off Lyonel’s body from steps away. He did not seem to blink. He did not seem to breathe. “I have your scent now, boy. You can run…” His hand was on Dunk’s face, fingertips black and hard as rock, dewclaws digging into Dunk’s jaw. “…but not as fast as I can.”
“I don’t mean no threat to you, truly. My lord.”
They felt thin and weak, those words. Lyonel did not even seem to hear them. He was not smiling now, only staring at Dunk with eyes dark enough to drown in, heat-sweat spiced and shining upon his brow. His mouth was slightly open. He drank the air as a fish drank water. Dunk could see the fevre on him like a second skin. Dunk could feel the hardness of him, muscle like rope and bone like steel beneath his fur, and the fur was wet at the join of his coiled haunches.
“What I mean, Duncan, is that unless you leave now and put your heels into your Sweetfoot until you’re so far clear of the wood that not even this old hart will hunt you down, I will gore you to a tree and wring you dry of every last drop of spend this massive husk of yours can give to me.” He spoke like a man possessed. Dunk could feel it spreading to him. The heat-scent was so strong he could drink it, so strong it could get him drunk, so strong that he could not have lifted a finger to resist it for his life. “I’ll have you until you’re pleading for me to stop. I’ll have you until you’re weeping from the pain, and I’ll not let you up until I’m so full of your seed I can scarce move from it, let alone wrestle you.” His hand became fully human with soft pink fingertips, and he traced Dunk’s lower lip with his thumb, something reluctant in the curve of his mouth. “If you don’t go now…”
He was something from a dream. He was something from a nightmare. He was something from a song, the ancient wailing wedding ballad of Durran and the goddess who first cursed him half-doe so that their sons would carry her magic.
Dunk had heard a hundred different songs on the blood of the First Men and how it came to change those that it touched. There was Jonquil the dove-maid and brave foolish Florian so devoted to her that he would drop to all fours and bark like a hound if she wished, until the day came that he became a hound in truth. There was Lann the Clever, who skinned a lioness and wore her so long that her pelt became his own. In payment for his crimes he was cursed with her heats and in payment for his wit he won Casterly Rock. In the far north there were so many King Brandons only the singers could keep them separate, and they were ravens and direwolves and mammoths; there were rival kings with blades so sharp they could flay a man’s beast off him and leave him bleeding in the snow. A man so skinned would die quickly of his wounds if he was lucky and slowly of madness if he was not.
In the stormlands it was sung that the maiden Elenei was a whirl of storm and seafoam. Shaped as woman yet born of gods, she had no blood to mix with Durran’s, no sex to accept his manhood, no womb to quicken with his seed. It was known then to sorcerers and skinchangers and Durran’s clever bride that men were kin to beasts of the field and sky and sea. A mortal man shared more blood with a dog or a hawk or a common deer than with the wind itself. It was possible for the two animals to be made into one. Elenei found in the wild sprawl of the rainwood a doe with fur black as an autumn thunderhead, black as her husband’s hair. She had her sons from the doe’s womb and Durran’s loins, and Durran had his crown; gold upon his head and bone growing from it, king of storms and king of man and king of the rainwood.
The crown was Lyonel’s, still stained with his blood. His antler was slightly tacky to the touch. The weight of Dunk’s hand on Lyonel’s head made him go still at last. His long ears flicked as Sweetfoot’s did when she was in a strop. His eyes were trained on Dunk’s face, and there was a chance he might be listening.
I beg your leave, milord. I should not have disturbed you in your condition. Dunk had no right to Lyonel’s body or his heats. He had done well reminding himself of that all this time: that Lyonel took him into service after Ashford tourney was generosity. Generosity was all it was no matter what he said or how he acted or the way his gaze lingered on Dunk longer than it ought. Generosity was all it could be, for Lyonel was blooded and Mother-blessed, born in Storm’s End to someday rule it, and Dunk was born in a gutter in Flea Bottom from a woman whose name he could not even remember. It would be an honor, milord, but it would be wrong. Lyonel had been married. That marriage gave him children, and the children were fine and tall and handsome, highborn from both their parents. Even ten years widowed with two healthy heirs he could not simply pluck a servant from his household to take as a mate. Of all the knights sworn to Storm’s End, Dunk was the lowest. He knew well that he was no fit consort for a Lord Paramount. He had to remind himself often, for even Egg seemed to have forgotten that of late.
“I wouldn’t go,” was what he said, “not if milord would have me,” and no sooner did he finish than Lyonel was on him.
Dunk felt a castle wall in truth, and Lyonel a battering ram. In the span of a heartbeat he was lost to his heat. Dunk was on his arse under a living tide. The deerskin fell lifeless and heavy to the side, gleaming raw and red where Lyonel peeled it from his shoulders. Beneath it, he was sweat-glossed skin and coarse, curling man-fur. His cock was fully hard. Like all men blessed by the Mother, his sex diverged, and behind the root of his manhood Dunk could glimpse his folds pink and glistening amidst the hair. Slick was weeping from him, dripping down the contours of the muscles in his legs, and when he threw himself into Dunk’s lap the brush of his groin against Dunk’s trousers left wet patches on the fabric.
“Off with this now,” he said, ripping the pin from Dunk’s cloak. “Off with these fucking clothes or I’ll tear them off you. I’m like to gut you on accident if I try, and I want a good hard fucking before you die on me—”
They were proper clothes, finespun wool not like the rags he’d had to wear as Ser Arlan’s squire when he grew too big and too quickly to be worth the expense of better fabrics. They were in Lyonel’s colors, for Dunk was Lyonel’s man; if anyone but the lord had tried to take them from him he would have fought, but it was Lyonel himself tugging at his tunic like its mere existence was some grave offense. He was more hindrance than help in the process of undressing. Urgency made him clumsy. The smell of him was everywhere, a perfume unlike any other, sharp and sweet from cresting fevre.
It was a terrible effort to unbuckle his belts, unlace his breeches, take off his boots. He didn’t know where his clothes ended up after they were finally off. In the brush, in a tree, in the bay for all he cared. Lyonel was splayed atop his thighs, fierce and heavy and smelling like that, and then he was kissing him.
Dunk had imagined it before. Dunk had imagined it…many times, if he was honest, and never quite the same way twice. Lyonel would come out from his solar to the hall where Dunk stood guard and greet him with a kiss at the corner of his mouth. He would rub their cheeks together almost as he did with his fawns, soft and sweet, and afterwards his scent would cling to Dunk’s neck and collar. Lyonel would take him up to the high table after dinner and dancing as was his habit, pretending to be deeper in his cups than he was, and when he spilled out of his chair and pressed his lips to Dunk’s, he would taste of sweetmeats and strongwine. Lyonel would pin him after a spar and steal his victory quick as lightning; he’d nip at Dunk’s mouth until he couldn’t move and then bound off laughing, taking up his sword. It would be summer in the wood as the first drops of rain hit the thirsting earth, and Lyonel would look at Dunk as though there was nothing else in the world worth looking at, and water would catch in his curls like beads of diamond before he leaned down and fit their mouths together.
He tasted like animal. It was not quite pleasant, but the scent of heat was thick enough to swallow, and it lingered on the roof of Dunk’s mouth. Lyonel’s teeth scraped his lip. His beard scraped Dunk’s jaw. His fur was roughspun and his cunt was searing velvet, slick and twitching against Dunk’s thigh, smearing wetness as Lyonel hitched his hips up.
“You’ve ridden warhorses,” Lyonel said. His curls were a black-and-silver halo around his head, his antlers reddish forks of lightning against the darkening sky. “Have you ever ridden a blooded mount, ser?”
Dunk did not know if there was a right answer, so he gave the truth. “Once.”
“Once?”
“There was…” Remembering was pulling teeth when Lyonel was pressing him down into a bed of moss. “…There was a lad. At one of the taverns in Durranton.”
“Mother-blessed?” Lyonel’s eyes never left Dunk’s face as he curled himself over Dunk’s prone form, furred knees bracketing his waist, one supple thigh almost touching Dunk’s hardness. “Like me, then?”
“He was a deer too,” Dunk blurted out. Olyvar was his name, and he’d had dark doe eyes and fine straight antlers. “But not like you.”
Slimmer, shorter, softer. More like most Mother-blessed men Dunk had met, who did not often match Lyonel’s height and breadth across the shoulders, let alone his temper or his skill at arms. Olyvar wore gowns as the Mother’s sons should; there was no hair on his face except when it was deerskin; Dunk brought him meadowsweet and clover for his uncle’s horses, and only after did he take Dunk up to his room in the attic. It was the first time Dunk had ever lain with anyone. It was the first time he’d lain with a man, even one with a sheath and a soft golden deerhide. It was the last on both counts, because Olyvar heard Dunk cry Lyonel into his narrow freckled shoulder and laughed him out of bed.
It beggared belief that Lyonel was real, and beautiful, and cupping his face in his hand like Dunk was something precious to be touched carefully or not at all. He looked half a monster and half a god, more terribly lovely than he had ever been in dream or memory. “My Duncan,” he rumbled. Dunk could feel his voice, soft and dark and deep in his chest. He could feel Lyonel’s pulse throbbing in his wrist and thighs and cunt. He could feel the hart draw a thumb across his cheek, so gently. “I’ll ruin you for any other. You’re my blessing from the Seven, aren’t you? They made you tall, they made you brave, they made you good, and they gave you to me, not some tavern boy.”
The tavern boy had not been much more experienced than Dunk, and their coupling had been an awkward thing of false starts and fumbling. Lyonel carried his lord’s bearing even into this. There was a flash of white teeth and red tongue, and then Lyonel was touching him direct, one hand spread sure and flat across Dunk’s stomach and the other wrapped around his cock. The breath left him in an instant. Distantly, he heard Lyonel speaking, sweet things, ser and darling and mine in the same honeyed voice he used on his horses, but all he knew was the brand of fingers around his base. Clever fingers, swordsman’s fingers, long and powerful and rough from sword and lance. There was a lingering rasp of nail-hard hoof that stained Lyonel’s hands dark after his change. He pulled the skin back to bare Dunk’s drooling head in a way that made lightning split and crackle in his belly. Lyonel was quick to learn just how to make Dunk feel as though it was he who was in heat, blind and drunk and rutting at nothing whilst his blood boiled in his veins.
“I’m going to flay you,” Lyonel was crooning, “going to take you down to sinew and cloak you in mine own pelt until you have me sunk into your blood – sunk into your bones, sweetling, in the deepest secret parts of you. You’ll never be rid of me, my ser, my Duncan—”
There was more, each of his promises wilder and lustier and more vicious than the last. Lyonel swore to carve his claim into Dunk’s flesh with fang and antler and bear his blue-eyed fawns until his womb failed, but as he spoke his thighs were tensing, his hips canting up, and the slit behind his cock was a soft wet kiss where he dragged it along Dunk’s length.
Dunk’s hips jerked up. Somewhere there was laughter and a shifting of the weight atop him. He grabbed at it, at Lyonel, anchoring himself in the hard curve of hip and the softer curve of arse, fighting to remember how to draw air into his chest as the wetness slid up and down his shaft. Lyonel knew some devilish bed-trick that let him roll his cunt against Dunk’s cock without ever letting it inside. He was laughing as he did, cruel and feverish with his sea-black gaze and clever thighs.
Lyonel’s name was on his tongue. Lyonel’s name was in his lungs, burning in his chest. Lyonel’s grin was a savage slash across his face. His hand went from Dunk’s groin to his throat, fingers not quite clawed but still sharp against his pulse. Before Dunk could find the strength to sob, he pressed down. The muscles in his legs bunched like bowstrings. Dunk’s neck stung something fierce. The glide of Lyonel’s cunt was up to his tip. The folds were flushed an eager pink, glistening with slick and milky pre-spend, on him, around him, swallowing him.
Above him there was a noise like a wounded animal. Dunk could not think for the heat inside. Lyonel was silken steel and feverish flesh. His thighs were quivering as he speared himself deeper, lowering himself into Dunk’s lap inch by torturous inch, head thrown back and long throat bobbing and ribs pressing shadows into his heaving chest. Dunk could feel his body stretching as he went; he could feel every one of the gasps Lyonel pulled in; he could feel every twitch of his cunt, clenching and unclenching as his body tried to shape itself to the intrusion.
A hart was not a warhorse, but the tension in Lyonel was the same he knew from Thunder, wide-eyed and frenetic. He would scarce feel pain as he was, drowning in the first wave of heat, but Dunk could not bear to hurt him. In the tangle of the rainwood there were no reins nor blinders nor spurs to guide him, slow him, calm him.
“Lyonel,” Dunk croaked. He tightened his grip on the narrow hips, felt him shaking from legs and hands and the heat inside.
“‘M fine,” Lyonel snarled. “Just – Mother’s furred cunt, just give me a moment.” The trembling in his thighs was such that Dunk slid his hands down to cup his arse and take some of Lyonel’s weight. He eased a little, but not enough. “Can feel you in my antlers, Mother weeping—”
Dunk pressed into the meat of his upper thighs hard enough to bruise until he felt some of the tension slacken. Lyonel gave into his touch, hair dripping into his face and sweat dripping from his hair and slick dripping down the curve of Dunk’s body, and little by little the vice of muscle yielded until Lyonel was grasping instead of strangling.
His eyes slid shut as he sank himself down, lashes fanning dark against his cheeks. Dunk knew the beauty of a well-formed horse or a finely-crafted helm. Lyonel was a different beast altogether. Warhorse, he reminded himself. At the tips of his fingers he could just barely feel the soaked velvet skin where Lyonel’s legs joined, close enough to the stretched lip of his cunt that the lightest touch made him shiver and bear down. Dunk stroked his calloused finger pads along that skin. Lyonel responded like a strummed harp with a sharp wavering keen and a rippling tightness.
A hart was not a warhorse, but he rode much the same. Lyonel gathered composure enough to arch his back and roll his hips down. Dunk kept him tight in hand and thought too hard about just how much of those powerful legs he could hold like this, the firm curve of Lyonel’s arse and the delicate steely muscles fluttering in the inside of his thighs. At the juncture of his sex, even the Laughing Storm was so sensitive that a glancing touch could draw a cry. Anything firmer than the brush of a fingertip would have him wound so taut he tipped his head and howled. Slick soaked through the thatch of hair around Dunk’s root into thick warm channels down his stones and the cleft of his arse. Every breath he took was heavy with heat-scent, sweet and hot with a sharp wet tang.
Lyonel dragged himself fully down onto Dunk’s cock with a shuddering exhale. He sat there for a heartbeat, bearing down in short heady pulses while he rocked his hips back and forth until they were fit together so closely that there was no line between the end of one body and the beginning of the other.
His eyes slid open just enough for a glance down at his seat. His teeth gleamed sharp in his hunter’s smile. He braced his hands on Dunk’s breast, curved his back, and lifted. The movement sparked lightning-bright down the length of Dunk’s cock up to his belly, his spine, his fingertips. Lyonel’s cunt grabbed at him as he rose. When he sank back down, he hissed.
“There,” Dunk thought Lyonel might be saying, though he didn’t speak so much as groan. “There, there, deep in as you can get, that quenches it, gods, boy.”
“Here?”
“Here.” He put Dunk’s hand across his stomach. From the tip of his thumb to the end of his little finger he could span the whole breadth of Lyonel’s hips, and under his touch he felt the muscles coiling, felt just barely the deep insistent flutter of his cunt, felt – seven hells. Felt what could only be the blunt outline of his own cock, and how Lyonel’s whole core was tensed around it. His breath came in gasps.
“Get it like that, in there, right up to the mouth of my womb. You feel—” He tightened until Dunk’s sight went dark for a second. “—that, you feel that, sweetling? There. If I can stand upright once we’re done I shall be so-orely disappointed – oh, gods, Duncan, Duncan.”
There was soft and firm all at once, the only part of Lyonel that didn’t give when Dunk fucked against it. He wants me to fuck him there. He wanted Dunk to spill there, he wanted Dunk to give him more babes, he wanted Dunk so fiercely he was babbling in prayers and tongues and sounds no human throat could make as he threw himself onto each thrust.
The tavern lad had never wanted Dunk like that. Dunk had never been wanted like that in all his life, except by Egg and by Lyonel himself. It was the same swooning ache he remembered from the first time he was called Ser Duncan. It was the drunkest and most clear-headed he’d ever been. It was Lyonel’s head dropping as he worked himself up and down and up when Dunk rocked his hips to meet him.
Duncan, Lyonel said, over and over again, my Duncan. His heat had melted his silver tongue. Those seemed to be all the words he was capable of between the low rolling deer-keens Dunk felt in the flutter of muscle round his cock.
The closer Dunk came to his peak the less he could hear even that. Whether it was the scent of heat or the blood gone to his loins that should have been in his head, he didn’t know, but he could muster no thought beyond how beautiful Lyonel was and how very right it felt to be in him. Would that I had the old blood, that the gods shaped me to fit with him. He had no horns to lock with Lyonel nor a knot to lock inside him. Pleasure came over him in waves, then bright and then dark, then sweet and then agonizing, then loud and then soft. Lyonel’s body drank all the seed he had to give. The grip of his cunt when his climax hit him sapped his strength and made stars spin behind his eyelids.
He heard a whine when the weight fell off of him, and did not know if the noise was his or Lyonel’s.
“Hand.”
Dunk forced his eyes open to Lyonel’s face inches from his, bright and flushed and terribly intent.
“Give me your hand.”
At first he did not understand. His head felt…sticky, his bones like water, the simmering searing liquid feeling not faded yet for him to make sense of Lyonel’s words or his gestures or anything at all. There was a sharp snort and a hand around his wrist, curling his fingers into a fist, and a press of wet heat at the edge of his knuckles from the dripping lips of some pursed mouth. It swallowed him up and then clamped down, holding him there, vicelike around his wrist when he tried to pull back.
“Keep it inside,” Lyonel was saying, though Dunk did not note that he was talking until after it hit him that his clenched fist was caught fast in Lyonel’s cunt. Tied in Lyonel’s cunt, trapping the seed within for however long it would take for his body to go lax and release the knot – which was Dunk’s hand, which was stuck inside. “Go on and close your eyes while we wait. Get your legs back under you. You don’t think that was it?”
Dunk felt more a deer than he ever had before.
It might have been two more days. It might have been three. It might have been a lifetime there under the trees. Dunk stopped keeping count after the fifth time they coupled, and as Lyonel’s heat burned on and on he began wondering if numbers even went that high, and if they did how anyone could possibly keep track of them.
The worst of it came and went as did the tides. By the first nightfall, Dunk was so thirsty he was nearly sick, and only when Lyonel bent behind him to lick at his back did he realize he’d been bleeding. In the half-state between stag and man he had short sharp dewclaws on every finger but his third and fourth, sharp enough to shear through skin when he grabbed at Dunk’s shoulders as they rutted. He slept hard and often. The highborn called it fevre because it galled them to say heat – heat was debasing, for animals and peasants – but it was a fever in truth, and Lyonel’s skin was so hot to the touch that Dunk would fear for him if he didn’t know he was made to burn so high. Sometimes when he woke he didn’t want to be fucked, only touched. He rubbed his wrists over Dunk’s face and neck as he did with his siblings and his daughters and the closest of his companions. Marking you as his, Dunk knew, and sat quietly delighted through whatever odd urges came to Lyonel when he was not demanding to be bred.
He was demanding. In the tales, the Mother-blessed were sweet and pliant even in their heats. Their great loves were always Father-blessed to match, and the mating urges were equal and opposite; it was the nature of one to dominate and the nature of the other to yield. Mayhaps Lyonel had never heard the tales. More likely they were exaggerated in the telling. He was imperious as he always had been. Dunk belonged to him as he belonged to Dunk, and the time passed at his leisure.
When the rains came proper, they came relentless. The breaking storm stirred Lyonel back into his frenzy. He writhed and fought until Dunk threw him into a tree hard enough to knock the breath from him, and when he got it back, he laughed. Laughed and laughed and laughed. Laughed as Dunk bent him near in half and fucked him with his legs thrown up over Dunk’s shoulders, laughed as Dunk drove so deep his antlers punctured bark, laughed until his bones split in the midst of his climax and his hooves scythed air as Dunk spilled inside him. Dunk could barely kiss him after as he giggled. Rainwater sluiced summer-warm off his nose and plastered his curls to his skull. Wet season, Lyonel cackled, and then Dunk was laughing too.
The roof of leaves leaked enough for the storm to rinse away their mingled filth. They bedded down on grass and moss, and when the rain lashed hard, Lyonel slipped fully into his deerskin and pressed Dunk into the curve of his body to shelter him from the worst of it. Dunk slept with the great crowned head resting heavy on his hip, warmer than any cloak. Inevitably, he would wake to find the man prowling the limits of the den or, often, already on top of him. Sometimes Lyonel roused him by crawling into his lap. Sometimes he forced his antlers away and took Dunk in his mouth, and when Dunk awoke confused and hard he was greeted with a bitter-tasting kiss and the wet mouth of Lyonel’s cunt swallowing him down.
Near the end Lyonel only wanted to be mounted on his knees. He lost the clarity to keep his hart from spilling out. The noises he made when Dunk took him from behind were all but voiceless, animal groans from his raw throat. The fur grew down his spine thick as a mane and ended in a little black-and-white tail. It was longer than Dunk thought it would be, soaked on the pale underside from the mess of slick and spend between Lyonel’s legs, just long enough for Dunk to take the surprisingly delicate length of it in one hand and tug until Lyonel’s cunt seized and rippled around his cock as he came again. The frenzy of the first day was gone; whether it had been fucked out of him or simply waned as his heat went on, Dunk wasn’t sure, but the peaks were not so long or brutal and the valleys where Lyonel simply wished to sleep and hold and be held stretched out. He refused all food no matter what Dunk tried to offer him and wobbled off on shaking fawn’s legs only to drink. His thirst seemed endless; for water, for touch, for the salt of Dunk’s sweat. When Lyonel was not lapping mindless at his groin and neck where the blood-scent would have been strongest if Dunk was so blessed, the rains would return and wash off the spittle, and then he grew cross and had to do it all over again.
By the last day Dunk could barely stand for how sore he was, and Lyonel not at all.
There was warmth on his face that he thought could be blood. He did not know for certain. The taste of iron and salt and cunt was so thick on his tongue he no longer remembered other tastes existed. In his delirium, he thought of venison, a feast so grand it made him sick, and giggled weakly into Lyonel’s curling mane. The hart was on his knees now, the only position he could manage. He trembled shoulder to ankle and made drunk pleased noises into the moss while Dunk ground his cock so deep he could feel each inhale and exhale, each rabbit-swift beat of Lyonel’s heart.
His legs were shaking enough that Dunk had to brace an arm under his hips to stop him collapsing. His hand brushed Lyonel’s stomach, and his mind went blank. At first he thought it was the deerskin – countless times Lyonel had slipped between man and not, bone snapping and flesh swelling and skin stretching in the unnatural way that never seemed to bring him pain – but he was steady in his current form, furred and antlered with his little tail curled down against his arse as Dunk rocked their bodies together. He hadn’t shifted himself towards one skin or the other for hours.
Then Dunk was struck with the chance that it was not just heat. The worst of Lyonel’s temper was mellowed, but his skin was hot and flushed and his temper still mercurial. It could be some sickness distending his belly like that. Worms or water or blood filling his abdomen, something like to kill him unless—
“Duncan,” Lyonel purred. He rolled his hips backwards, changing the angle just enough to force Dunk’s manhood as deep inside him as they could manage. “Duncan, stop thinking. Wan’ you to fuck me fat with fawns, not think, silly knight.”
Dunk ran his hand down the curve of Lyonel’s swollen stomach. It was firm to his press but not rigid, and the touch seemed to bring Lyonel no pain. Dunk feared he would hardly notice it among the hundred aches and cricks that were setting in as his fevre burned lower. Did I hurt him? Did he burst something? He hadn’t been gentle, Lyonel hadn’t wanted him to be, he didn’t think to be afraid of injuring him in the urgency of their mating. Did—
Lyonel tightened around him with a sigh. His release was a thin trickle down his thighs rather than a gush, but every time he climaxed his cunt rippled and clenched until Dunk inevitably followed him.
Lyonel’s brindled chest heaved when Dunk slipped out afterwards. He worked his hand in as an afterthought, for Lyonel made wounded noises if Dunk was so careless as to let any seed spill out. His body clamped around Dunk’s fist easily as it would a knot. Lyonel was still purring when Dunk felt for his belly again – more swollen than it had just been, as if it was Dunk’s spend inside him bowing out his narrow waist, filling him so full that he already looked to be with child.
It was only Lyonel’s fingers threading through his own that reminded him he had to breathe, and the sound of Lyonel’s laughter that reminded him how, exactly, to go about it.
“Don’t turn craven on me now.” Lyonel’s voice was warm and more like himself than it had been since – well, a fortnight past when the fevre began to build in him. This was familiar, this Lyonel, who laughed at Dunk but not to mock him, who had the head to tell him off for agonizing. “It’s been days. I’ve had more of your spend in me than the realm has had rain for the whole of this wretched summer. Like as not it’s caught already.”
More than anything Dunk feared thinking about that. It was madness, that dream, and he was not so thick or slow that he dared waste hope on it. Best not dream about what he couldn’t have, be it Lyonel’s bed or Lyonel’s hand or Lyonel heavy with his children. Blue-eyed fawns bedded down on the carpets in Lyonel’s solar with their slender legs folded under their little bodies. Blue-eyed fawns that stumbled into chubby blue-eyed toddlers, waddling into Dunk’s hands, smiling Lyonel’s smile. That dream was all the crueler for how often Lyonel smiled. Every time he did Dunk thought the want might make him sick, not only for the fawns but for Lyonel and the warmth he gave out so freely. It spilled out of him like sunlight, and Dunk’s place was in his shadow.
He swallowed. “Lyonel…”
“You can take your hand out. I’m not like to die without you in me any longer, and – seven shitting hells, is that sore. Cock like a destrier and those bloody great paws of yours, it’s the Stranger’s own luck I’m not dead somehow. Gods. Be a dove and help us up, will you? I feel like a sausage about to split its casing. Fuck.”
It did not seem to bother him, being half-carried into the brush to drink rainwater off of leaves and flush seed out of himself until he was no longer muttering about sausage. Dunk supposed that was the hart. That was the way it happened, riding through his heat in a forest with no bed but grass and no blanket but his mate. Then again it could have just been Lyonel, who Dunk often thought was born without a sense of shame.
Dunk’s cloak was sacrificed as a towel so they could clean themselves best they could. Lyonel could only just walk without assistance, and even then he was so bowlegged he couldn’t stand upright. He lay in their place under the elm where the moss was dented in the shape of their bodies. He had strength enough to smile when Dunk joined him, but it melted into a frown.
“You’re bleeding, dearheart.” Lyonel’s thumb traced the edge of the gash on Dunk’s cheek; one of the thousand little injures he was only just noticing, a match to the smear of blood on the smallest of Lyonel’s tines.
Dunk could not remember exactly when it happened. It was not deep, but touch made it burn from his cheekbone all down to his jaw. He would need a maester’s attention to sew it shut and make certain no filth from Lyonel’s antlers could foul the wound. Privately, Dunk hoped it did fester, only enough to make it scar terribly. The blooded do that to their chosen mates. It was no marriage before a septon, nor even a mating with a heart tree as witness, but it was more of a marriage than a bloodless tumble in a featherbed. When Dunk’s duties took him to seeing that Lyonel’s daughters kept out of trouble, Sowyer would let him stand in the room for their lessons, and he could vaguely recall King Jaehaerys had made some law to that effect. Dunk pressed his cheek into Lyonel’s hand. The pain flared, and so did the warmth in his belly. Not a marriage, but a devotion of a kind.
“It’s not bad.” He misliked the frown that furrowed Lyonel’s brow. Already he was beginning to agonize, and he added: “You never meant to.”
If a half-accidental claim in the depth of fevre had to be written off as clumsiness for the rest of Dunk’s life, if that was all he kept from this, well. Gold could be spent. Roofs could fall through. Neither man nor beast nor maester could unmake a scar once it had settled, and this scar would be Dunk’s until he died.
Lyonel’s eyes were very dark. His fingers drifted feather-light over Dunk’s savaged cheek. “I meant to be more gentle.”
“I’m not a maid, Lyonel.”
“You are. You were, before I blooded you. My sweet boy.”
Dunk was a knight, a man, and hardly a delicate one, but Lyonel’s scent was ebbing warm and his fur was drawing back under his skin. He brought Lyonel’s hand to his mouth and brushed his lips against his fingertips, the knuckles rough and reddened and too swollen for his wealth of rings, the crescents of blood trapped under his nails where his claws shrunk down to nothing. It was all the devotion he owed his lord, and if it made Lyonel smile, and if Lyonel’s smile made Dunk forget his scratches in a heartbeat, well. There was no one there to notice but the songbirds and the old gods and the man smiling at him like he’d just discovered sunrise.
“I’ll be gentle with you next time,” Lyonel murmured. He bedded into Dunk’s chest, turning his head until he could slot it beneath Dunk’s chin without cutting him further, bone framing his jaw smooth and cool against his skin. “I can be, with precious things.”
Dunk dropped his face into the curls between the antlers and let himself think of fawns.