Chapter Text
Week four.
The battle had pulled north toward the Blueburn ford. Which meant the southern camp was quiet in the way of camps after fighting—not peaceful, not safe. Just emptied of the fury that had made it mean something.
Lyonel could feel it regardless.
The wet, rattling cough from a maester’s tent that had not stopped since yesterday, and would not stop, he suspected, until the man was dead or the war was. The reek of the latrine trench, overfull and black with flies despite the cold. The horses standing with their heads low, too spent to lift them. The low and persistent groan of men who were not quite dying, but had not yet resolved themselves to live.
He had been awake for two days.
The map in front of him showed four weeks of fighting in charcoal smears—the ford, the camp’s position, the road forward—and somewhere in the second sleepless night, he had stopped being able to look at it as strategy, and started seeing it only as a record. Of his choices. Of his making.
He was still staring at it when the tent flap opened.
His hand found his sword before the shadow was fully through. The two men-at-arms at the entrance were already reaching, already moving, the trained reflex of soldiers who had survived by not waiting to think. For a brief, dizzying moment, Lyonel thought—spy, assassin, would Aegon really, after everything—
Then he saw the size of the shadow.
Nobody was that size. Nobody who moved like that—the familiar stoop at the entrance, the practiced duck of a man who had spent fifty years learning to fit himself into a world built for smaller people. For other people.
Lyonel laughed.
It came out of him before he could stop it. Not the Laughing Storm laugh—not the weapon he had been carrying since he was six and ten, honed and deliberate as any blade—but the real thing. The ugly and helpless sound his body made when the world had outpaced him, and there was nothing left to do but acknowledge it.
He waved off his men-at-arms. They looked at him the way soldiers looked at a commander who had been awake for two days. He probably looked exactly like that.
Susceptible to madness, or something worse.
“You,” he said.
Ser Duncan the Tall, Lord Commander of the Kingsguard, was not wearing his white.
He was wearing rough, undyed wool—the homespun grey of a camp follower, the kind of color that eyes moved past without recording. Mud on his boots to the knee. A strip of linen wound around his left forearm, the blood gone brown at the edges, old enough to crust. His face—that scarred, handsome, ruinously earnest face—carried the expression of a man who had understood, mid-stride, that he was walking toward his own death, and had kept walking anyway. Had probably picked up the pace.
He looked, for a blink, like a hedge knight whose toes Lyonel had stomped on.
The vision wavered, and the man let the flap fall behind him.
“Eastern side,” Dunk said. “There’s a ford half a mile downriver. Sentries change at the fourth hour—the shift gap runs fifteen minutes. Folks use it to carry water and food. Cook women, mostly. A few camp men. I used it.” A pause. “Your men on the east flank are eating the horses’ grain.”
Lyonel stared at him.
“That’s what you came to tell me.”
“No.” Dunk crossed to the stool across from him and sat. He moved the way he had always moved—with the slow, deliberate care of a man who had knocked over one too many lanterns and stepped through one too many floorboards. Needlessly charming Lyonel for decades. “I came to tell you to stop.”
“Ah.”
“Lord Lyonel—”
“No, I understand.” Lyonel did not move from his chair. His hand was still on the sword hilt. He made himself release it, finger by finger. This was Dunk. This was Dunk. “The king sends his Lord Commander alone through active battle lines, unarmed, wearing another man’s wool. To tell me to stop. The Targaryens always did have a certain way about them.”
“The wool is mine, and he didn’t send me.”
Silence. Somewhere outside, the maester coughed.
Lyonel became aware, distantly, that he was grinning. He had no particular right to be grinning. Just disbelief. Just fury.
Dunk did not look away. He never looked away—it was one of the things about him that Lyonel had spent thirty years failing to manage. To embody. That steady and infuriating patience, the quality of a man who had decided to wait for the truth to come out. However long it took. However badly it cut.
“You came on your own.”
“Yes.”
“Through enemy lines.”
“Smallfolk lines. There’s a distinction, I think.”
He wasn’t being clever, that was the thing.
Lyonel looked at the mud on his boots, the river-pale silt of the eastern ford. Thirty years, a white cloak, the king’s own trust worn like a second skin—and underneath all of it, still just Dunk.
Still the boy who slouched when he didn’t want to be noticed.
“Duncan.” His own voice came out rougher than he intended. He wanted so badly to scream. “You could have been killed. You could have been taken. You’re Lord Commander—”
“I know what I am.”
“—wearing no white, carrying no sword—”
“I know.” Still patient. Still waiting, those big scarred hands resting open on his knees. “I came anyway.”
Lyonel looked at him.
The brazier had gone mostly to embers. The light from it reached nothing. Only warmth, from a distance. The lamp between them did the work instead. In it, Dunk’s face was half-light, half-shadow, the scarring catching the edge of the flame. His hair, whiter with each year, shone like the moon in the dark. His eyes—the sunlit sea.
The thought arrived the way such thoughts always did—before conscience had time to bar the door, quick and quiet. Insidious.
Lyonel was a king. He had an army camped outside and a man sitting across from him who belonged—when the ledgers were tallied—to the king on the other side of this war. He could end it here. He could put Dunk in chains and send a raven before dawn. And whatever this war had cost him, the tide would be his. The storm would be his.
As king, as conqueror—Lyonel Baratheon could reach across the table and finally, irrevocably, have.
His wayward heart, forever straying past the horizon.
The thought lasted perhaps a breath.
He knew, even as it passed, what made it monstrous: not the politics, not the dishonor. He could have lived with both. Had lived with both, as he made choices required of a lord and not a knight. It was the face he couldn’t live with. Dunk’s face, after. Lyonel had spent half his life memorizing that face in every version it came in. He did not want that one. He could barely handle the one now.
He looked at Dunk’s arms instead. The scarred knuckles. The old blood on the linen. The stillness of a man who had decided what he would accept, whatever fate he was given. Whatever Lyonel would give him.
“As helpless as a candle in a rainstorm, are you?” Lyonel said it carefully. As carefully as he was not thinking about how much that roused him. “So you want to talk.”
This man. This impossible, infuriating headache of a man.
“Then talk.”