A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms Read online

  A hedge knight must hold tight to his pride. Without it, he was no more than a sellsword. I must earn my place in that company. If I fight well, some lord may take me into his household. I will ride in noble company then, and eat fresh meat every night in a castle hall, and raise my own pavilion at tourneys. But first I must do well. Reluctantly, he turned his back on the tourney grounds and led his horses into the trees.

  On the outskirts of the great meadow, a good half mile from town and castle, he found a place where a bend in a brook had formed a deep pool. Reeds grew thick along its edge, and a tall, leafy elm presided over all. The spring grass there was as green as any knight’s banner and soft to the touch. It was a pretty spot, and no one had yet laid claim to it. This will be my pavilion, Dunk told himself, a pavilion roofed with leaves, greener even than the banners of the Tyrells and the Estermonts.

  His horses came first. After they had been tended, he stripped and waded into the pool to wash away the dust of travel. “A true knight is cleanly as well as godly,” the old man always said, insisting that they wash themselves head to heels every time the moon turned, whether they smelled sour or not. Now that he was a knight, Dunk vowed he would do the same.

  He sat naked under the elm while he dried, enjoying the warmth of the spring air on his skin as he watched a dragonfly move lazily amongst the reeds. Why would they name it a dragonfly? he wondered. It looks nothing like a dragon. Not that Dunk had ever seen a dragon. The old man had, though. Dunk had heard the story half a hundred times, how Ser Arlan had been just a little boy when his grandfather had taken him to King’s Landing, and how they’d seen the last dragon there the year before it died. She’d been a green female, small and stunted, her wings withered. None of her eggs had ever hatched. “Some say King Aegon poisoned her,” the old man would tell. “The third Aegon that would be, not King Daeron’s father, but the one they named Dragonbane, or Aegon the Unlucky. He was afraid of dragons, for he’d seen his uncle’s beast devour his own mother. The summers have been shorter since the last dragon died, and the winters longer and crueler.”

  The air began to cool as the sun dipped below the tops of the trees. When Dunk felt gooseflesh prickling his arms, he beat his tunic and breeches against the trunk of the elm to knock off the worst of the dirt and donned them once again. On the morrow he could seek out the master of the games and enroll his name, but he had other matters he ought to look into tonight if he hoped to challenge.

  He did not need to study his reflection in the water to know that he did not look much a knight, so he slung Ser Arlan’s shield across his back to display the sigil. Hobbling the horses, Dunk left them to crop the thick green grass beneath the elm as he set out on foot for the tourney grounds.

  In normal times the meadow served as a commons for the folk of Ashford town across the river, but now it was transformed. A second town had sprung up overnight, a town of silk instead of stone, larger and fairer than its elder sister. Dozens of merchants had erected their stalls along the edge of the field, selling felts and fruits, belts and boots, hides and hawks, earthenware, gemstones, pewterwork, spices, feathers, and all manner of other goods. Jugglers, puppeteers, and magicians wandered amongst the crowds plying their trades…as did the whores and cutpurses. Dunk kept a wary hand on his coin.

  When he caught the smell of sausages sizzling over a smoky fire, his mouth began to water. He bought one with a copper from his pouch and a horn of ale to wash it down. As he ate he watched a painted wooden knight battle a painted wooden dragon. The puppeteer who worked the dragon was good to watch too; a tall drink of water, with the olive skin and black hair of Dorne. She was slim as a lance with no breasts to speak of, but Dunk liked her face and the way her fingers made the dragon snap and slither at the end of its strings. He would have tossed the girl a copper if he’d had one to spare, but just now he needed every coin.

  There were armorers amongst the merchants, as he had hoped. A Tyroshi with a forked blue beard was selling ornate helms, gorgeous fantastical things wrought in the shapes of birds and beasts and chased with gold and silver. Elsewhere he found a swordmaker hawking cheap steel blades, and another whose work was much finer, but it was not a sword he lacked.

  The man he needed was all the way down at the end of the row, a shirt of fine chain mail and a pair of lobstered steel gauntlets displayed on the table before him. Dunk inspected them closely. “You do good work,” he said.

  “None better.” A stumpy man, the smith was no more than five feet tall, yet wide as Dunk about the chest and arms. He had a black beard, huge hands, and no trace of humility.

  “I need armor for the tourney,” Dunk told him. “A suit of good mail, with gorget, greaves, and greathelm.” The old man’s halfhelm would fit his head, but he wanted more protection for his face than a nasal bar alone could provide.

  The armorer looked him up and down. “You’re a big one, but I’ve armored bigger.” He came out from behind the table. “Kneel, I want to measure those shoulders. Aye, and that thick neck o’ yours.” Dunk knelt. The armorer laid a length of knotted rawhide along his shoulders, grunted, slipped it about his throat, grunted again. “Lift your arm. No, the right.” He grunted a third time. “Now you can stand.” The inside of a leg, the thickness of his calf, and the size of his waist elicited further grunts. “I have some pieces in me wagon that might do for you,” the man said when he was done. “Nothing prettied up with gold or silver, mind you, just good steel, strong and plain. I make helms that look like helms, not winged pigs and queer foreign fruits, but mine will serve you better if you take a lance in the face.”

  “That’s all I want,” said Dunk. “How much?”

  “Eight hundred stags, for I’m feeling kindly.”

  “Eight hundred?” It was more than he had expected. “I…I could trade you some old armor, made for a smaller man…a halfhelm, a mail hauberk…”

  “Steely Pate sells only his own work,” the man declared, “but it might be I could make use of the metal. If it’s not too rusted, I’ll take it and armor you for six hundred.”

  Dunk could beseech Pate to give him the armor on trust, but he knew what sort of answer that request would likely get. He had traveled with the old man long enough to learn that merchants were notoriously mistrustful of hedge knights, some of whom were little better than robbers. “I’ll give you two silvers now, and the armor and the rest of the coin on the morrow.”

  The armorer studied him a moment. “Two silvers buys you a day. After that, I sell me work to the next man.”

  Dunk scooped the stags out of his pouch and placed them in the armorer’s callused hand. “You’ll get it all. I mean to be a champion here.”

  “Do you?” Pate bit one of the coins. “And these others, I suppose they all came just to cheer you on?”

  The moon was well up by the time he turned his steps back toward his elm. Behind him, Ashford Meadow was ablaze with torchlight. The sounds of song and laughter drifted across the grass, but his own mood was somber. He could think of only one way to raise the coin for his armor. And if he should be defeated…“One victory is all I need,” he muttered aloud. “That’s not so much to hope for.”

  Even so, the old man would never have hoped for it. Ser Arlan had not ridden a tilt since the day he had been unhorsed by the Prince of Dragonstone in a tourney at Storm’s End, many years before. “It is not every man who can boast that he broke seven lances against the finest knight in the Seven Kingdoms,” he would say. “I could never hope to do better, so why should I try?”

  Dunk had suspected that Ser Arlan’s age had more to do with it than the Prince of Dragonstone did, but he never dared say as much. The old man had his pride, even at the last. I am quick and strong, he always said so, what was true for him need not be true for me, he told himself stubbornly.

  He was moving through a patch of weed, chewing over his chances in his head, when he saw the flicker of firelight through the bushes. What is this? Dunk did not stop to think. Suddenly his swo
rd was in his hand and he was crashing through the grass.

  He burst out roaring and cursing, only to jerk to a sudden halt at the sight of the boy beside the campfire. “You!” He lowered the sword. “What are you doing here?”

  “Cooking a fish,” said the bald boy. “Do you want some?”

  “I meant, how did you get here? Did you steal a horse?”

  “I rode in the back of a cart, with a man who was bringing some lambs to the castle for my lord of Ashford’s table.”

  “Well, you’d best see if he’s gone yet, or find another cart. I won’t have you here.”

  “You can’t make me go,” the boy said, impertinent. “I’d had enough of that inn.”

  “I’ll have no more insolence from you,” Dunk warned. “I should throw you over my horse right now and take you home.”

  “You’d need to ride all the way to King’s Landing,” said the boy. “You’d miss the tourney.”

  King’s Landing. For a moment Dunk wondered if he was being mocked, but the boy had no way of knowing that he had been born in King’s Landing as well. Another wretch from Flea Bottom, like as not, and who can blame him for wanting out of that place?

  He felt foolish standing there with sword in hand over an eight-year-old orphan. He sheathed it, glowering so the boy would see that he would suffer no nonsense. I ought to give him a good beating at the least, he thought, but the child looked so pitiful he could not bring himself to hit him. He glanced around the camp. The fire was burning merrily within a neat circle of rocks. The horses had been brushed, and clothes were hanging from the elm, drying above the flames. “What are those doing there?”

  “I washed them,” the boy said. “And I groomed the horses, made the fire, and caught this fish. I would have raised your pavilion, but I couldn’t find one.”

  “There’s my pavilion.” Dunk swept a hand above his head, at the branches of the tall elm that loomed above them.

  “That’s a tree,” the boy said, unimpressed.

  “It’s all the pavilion a true knight needs. I would sooner sleep under the stars than in some smoky tent.”

  “What if it rains?”

  “The tree will shelter me.”

  “Trees leak.”

  Dunk laughed. “So they do. Well, if truth be told, I lack the coin for a pavilion. And you’d best turn that fish, or it will be burned on the bottom and raw on the top. You’d never make a kitchen boy.”

  “I would if I wanted,” the boy said, but he turned the fish.

  “What happened to your hair?” Dunk asked of him.

  “The maesters shaved it off.” Suddenly self-conscious, the boy pulled up the hood of his dark brown cloak, covering his head.

  Dunk had heard that they did that sometimes, to treat lice or rootworms or certain sicknesses. “Are you ill?”

  “No,” said the boy. “What’s your name?”

  “Dunk,” he said.

  The wretched boy laughed aloud, as if that was the funniest thing he’d ever heard. “Dunk?” he said. “Ser Dunk? That’s no name for a knight. Is it short for Duncan?”

  Was it? The old man had called him just Dunk for as long as he could recall, and he did not remember much of his life before. “Duncan, yes,” he said. “Ser Duncan of…” Dunk had no other name, nor any house; Ser Arlan had found him living wild in the stews and alleys of Flea Bottom. He had never known his father or mother. What was he to say? “Ser Duncan of Flea Bottom” did not sound very knightly. He could take Pennytree, but what if they asked him where it was? Dunk had never been to Pennytree, nor had the old man talked much about it. He frowned for a moment, then blurted out, “Ser Duncan the Tall.” He was tall, no one could dispute that, and it sounded puissant.

  Though the little sneak did not seem to think so. “I have never heard of any Ser Duncan the Tall.”

  “Do you know every knight in the Seven Kingdoms, then?”

  The boy looked at him boldly. “The good ones.”

  “I’m as good as any. After the tourney, they’ll all know that. Do you have a name, thief?”

  The boy hesitated. “Egg,” he said.

  Dunk did not laugh. His head does look like an egg. Small boys can be cruel, and grown men as well. “Egg,” he said, “I should beat you bloody and send you on your way, but the truth is, I have no pavilion and I have no squire either. If you’ll swear to do as you’re told, I’ll let you serve me for the tourney. After that, well, we’ll see. If I decide you’re worth your keep, you’ll have clothes on your back and food in your belly. The clothes might be roughspun and the food salt beef and salt fish, and maybe some venison from time to time where there are no foresters about, but you won’t go hungry. And I promise not to beat you except when you deserve it.”

  Egg smiled. “Yes, my lord.”

  “Ser,” Dunk corrected. “I am only a hedge knight.” He wondered if the old man was looking down on him. I will teach him the arts of battle, the same as you taught me, ser. He seems a likely lad, might be one day he’ll make a knight.

  The fish was still a little raw on the inside when they ate it, and the boy had not removed all the bones, but it still tasted a world better than hard salt beef.

  Egg soon fell asleep beside the dying fire. Dunk lay on his back nearby, his big hands behind his head, gazing up at the night sky. He could hear distant music from the tourney grounds half a mile away. The stars were everywhere, thousands and thousands of them. One fell as he was watching, a bright green streak that flashed across the black, then was gone.

  A falling star brings luck to him who sees it, Dunk thought. But the rest of them are all in their pavilions by now, staring up at silk instead of sky. So the luck is mine alone.

  In the morning he woke to the sound of a cock crowing. Egg was still there, curled up beneath the old man’s second-best cloak. Well, the boy did not run off during the night, that’s a start. He prodded him awake with his foot. “Up. There’s work to do.” The boy rose quick enough, rubbing his eyes. “Help me saddle Sweetfoot,” Dunk told him.

  “What about breakfast?”

  “There’s salt beef. After we’re done.”

  “I’d sooner eat the horse,” Egg said. “Ser.”

  “You’ll eat my fist if you don’t do as you’re told. Get the brushes. They’re in the saddle sack. Yes, that one.”

  Together they brushed out the palfrey’s sorrel coat, hefted Ser Arlan’s best saddle over her back, and cinched it tight. Egg was a good worker once he put his mind to it, Dunk saw.

  “I expect I’ll be gone most of the day,” he told the boy as he mounted. “You’re to stay here and put the camp in order. Make sure no other thieves come nosing about.”

  “Can I have a sword to run them off with?” Egg asked. He had blue eyes, Dunk saw, very dark, almost purple. His bald head made them seem huge, somehow.

  “No,” said Dunk. “A knife’s enough. And you had best be here when I come back, do you hear me? Rob me and run off, and I’ll hunt you down, I swear I will. With dogs.”

  “You don’t have any dogs,” Egg pointed out.

  “I’ll get some,” said Dunk. “Just for you.” He turned Sweetfoot’s head toward the meadow and moved off at a brisk trot, hoping the threat would be enough to keep the boy honest. Save for the clothes on his back, the armor in his sack, and the horse beneath him, everything Dunk owned in the world was back at that camp. I am a great fool to trust the boy so far, but it is no more than the old man did for me, he reflected. The Mother must have sent him to me so that I could pay my debt.

  As he crossed the field, he heard the ring of hammers from the riverside, where carpenters were nailing together jousting barriers and raising a lofty viewing stand. A few new pavilions were going up as well, while the knights who had come earlier slept off last night’s revels or sat to break their fasts. Dunk could smell woodsmoke, and bacon as well.

  To the north of the meadow flowed the river Cockleswent, a vassal stream to the mighty Mander. Beyond the shallow ford lay t
own and castle. Dunk had seen many a market town during his journeys with the old man. This was prettier than most; the whitewashed houses with their thatched roofs had an inviting aspect to them. When he was smaller, he used to wonder what it would be like to live in such a place; to sleep every night with a roof over your head and wake every morning with the same walls wrapped around you. It may be that soon I’ll know. Aye, and Egg too. It could happen. Stranger things happened every day.

  Ashford Castle was a stone structure built in the shape of a triangle, with round towers rising thirty feet tall at each point and thick, crenellated walls running between. Orange banners flew from its battlements, displaying the white sun-and-chevron sigil of its lord. Men-at-arms in orange-and-white livery stood outside the gates with halberds, watching people come and go, seemingly more intent on joking with a pretty milkmaid than in keeping anyone out. Dunk reined up in front of the short, bearded man he took for their captain and asked for the master of the games.

  “It’s Plummer you want, he’s steward here. I’ll show you.”

  Inside the yard, a stableboy took Sweetfoot for him. Dunk slung Ser Arlan’s battered shield over a shoulder and followed the guards captain back of the stables to a turret built into an angle of the curtain wall. Steep stone steps led up to the wallwalk. “Come to enter your master’s name for the lists?” the captain asked, as they climbed.

  “It’s my own name I’ll be putting in.”

  “Is it now?” Was the man smirking? Dunk was not certain. “That door there. I’ll leave you to it and get back to my post.”