Measure of Dragons (Aerys, son of Daeron SI)

[Sakumo]

On the way to Ashford, 209 A.C.:

The old man had not wanted to stop, but the fever had other plans.

Ser Arlan of Pennytree swayed in the saddle for the better part of the morning, and Dunk had ridden close beside him on Chestnut, one hand hovering near the old knight's belt should he need to catch him. By midday, when they reached the shade of a broad oak growing alone beside the road, Ser Arlan finally allowed that perhaps they might rest a while.

He did not get up again.

"It is only a chill, boy," the old man had said the night before, though his teeth had chattered even beneath three blankets and the heat of the fire. "I have had worse on the Dornish marches. A day's rest and I'll be fit to break lances again." His voice had been thin as parchment, and Dunk had wanted very badly to believe him.

Ser Arlan of Pennytree had never been a large man, not the way Dunk had grown to be large, but he had always seemed sturdy — knotted and weathered like old oak, a man who had outlasted two kings and more wars than he cared to count, who had taught a barefoot boy from Flea Bottom which end of a lance to hold and how to fall from a horse without breaking his neck. He had seemed, to Dunk at least, like the kind of man the world simply could not do without.

The world, it seemed, thought otherwise.

By the time the sun stood high over the oak tree, the old knight's breath had gone shallow and rattling, and his eyes, when they opened at all, no longer seemed to know where they were.

"Dunk," he rasped once, gripping the boy's wrist with a strength that startled him. "Dunk, lad. You'll go on to Ashford. The tourney. I still owe fees to the innkeep at—" A cough took the rest of the sentence from him.

"I know the way, ser," Dunk said, though his voice cracked like a boy's, not a man grown of six-and-ten who stood a head taller than most grown knights. "You've shown me the way many a time, ser."

The old man's eyes found his, clear for just a moment, the way a candle flares brightest just before it gutters. "Aye," he whispered. "That I have." His hand loosened. "Bring me... under a tree, lad. Someplace with shade. I have had my fill of dust and open road." A ghost of the old dry humor touched his cracked lips. "I mean to rest a while."

He said nothing more after that.

Dunk sat with him through the long silence that followed, beneath the oak that would, before evening, become a grave. He did not weep — Ser Arlan had never had patience for tears, not even when Dunk had broken his arm falling from Chestnut as a boy — but something in him, some soft, unguarded place, closed over like a fist.

When at last the old knight's chest ceased its shallow rise and fall, Dunk rose, fetched the second-best of Ser Arlan's two shovels from behind Thunder's saddle, and began to dig.

He was still digging, sweat-soaked and hollow-eyed, when he heard horses on the road and looked up to see a column of riders rounding the bend. At their head rode an old man absorbed in a book, indifferent to the world around him — until he raised his eyes and found Dunk, and something in his face sharpened into fascination.

He was thin and spindly, his long hair mostly hidden beneath a hood, his robes plain beside a lord's finery but far better than any smallfolk's, a dagger at his belt. It was the eyes that held Dunk's attention: red-rimmed, and of a color he had never seen on a man before.

Perhaps he is a lord, Dunk thought. The stranger studied him with open curiosity, the forgotten book still open in one hand, while four armed men flanked him with the wary, watchful look of men paid to be wary and watchful.

"What business have you over the hill, my good man?" There was an authority in the voice that needed no crown to back it, and Dunk knew at once he was speaking to someone who mattered.

"Pardon, m'lord." Dunk bowed as deep as the shovel in his hands allowed. "I'm burying my master, Ser Arlan of Pennytree. He knighted me before he died."

"I am no lord, ser." The stranger's laugh was soft, almost apologetic, and he raised both hands as if to prove he meant no harm by the correction. "Only an academic. I collect facts the way other men collect coin; a habit from my days at the Citadel."

Dunk's eyes went to the chain half-hidden beneath the man's collar, a maester's chain, unless he missed his guess. "You're a maester, then?"

"I cannot confirm nor deny the accusation, Ser," was the confusing reply given to him. "But you may call me Rys if you so wish. I would also like to be your acquaintance Ser…?"

"Dunk," he replied. 'That is no name of a knight,' a voice inside of him say. "Duncan, I mean. Duncan the Tall."

"Well met, Ser Duncan." Rys turned in the saddle, a small gesture that set the column moving again around him. "These are my liege's men, here for my protection, though I've never once needed it. And that lad skulking behind the others is my scribe, Gerrick."

He wasn't sure how to respond to that, so Dunk just gave a short nod to the maester's five companions as the voice of Rys called out to him again. "Come, let us bury this Ser Arlan of yours and we must bury him well."

"You needn't—" Dunk started.

"A body left too long in the sun breeds disease, Ser Duncan, and fouls the air besides. I've buried men before in my time in Oldtown learning the human body. Allow me the exercise. Many a man, including my liege, tell me I get too little of it." He was already turning dirt, his fine sleeves darkening with soil, and something in the brisk, matter-of-fact way he said it closed off any further argument.

While Dunk would've rather be left alone to say a few words to Ser Arlan, he did not begrudge the kind offer the learned man, who insisted on shoveling, making his clothes dusty.

"If you would like to say a few words to your former master, Ser Duncan, you may do so," Maester Rys replied, stepping backwards to rejoin his guards. "We shall wait for you here."

"You are very kind, Maester," Duncan told the man, "but if you have a journey to go, you might be late."

"Oh no Ser," says the man. "My liege allows me the laxities of someone of my considerable experience. I would not be reprimanded by something as trivial as punctuality." Dunk felt that Rys was thoroughly amused, however. "And considering I have been travelling with men as stiff as wood, a man such as yourself might be able to provide good company and conversation for me."

Having no reason to deny the man's offer, Dunk nodded his head before looking to Ser Arlan's grave.

"I'd leave your sword, but it would rust in the ground," he said at last, apologetic. "The gods will give you a new one, I guess. I wish you didn't die, ser." He paused, uncertain what else needed to be said. He didn't know any prayers, not all the way through; the old man had never been much for praying."

"You were a true knight, and you never beat me when I didn't deserve it," he finally managed, "except that one time in Maidenpool. It was the inn boy who ate the widow woman's pie, not me, I told you. It don't matter now. The gods keep you, ser." He kicked dirt in the hole, then began to fill it methodically, never looking at the thing at the bottom. He had a long life, Dunk thought. He must have been closer to sixty than to fifty, and how many men can say that? At least he had lived to see another spring.

When it was done he rose, gathered Sweetfoot, Chestnut, and Ser Arlan's old warhorse Thunder, and did not look back at the oak again.

"Where are you bound, ser?" Rys asked as Dunk led the horses to the road.

"I suppose I should continue going to Ashford," he revealed. "Me and Ser Arlan travelled here in the Reach as he would compete in a tourney."

"A stroke of luck then, for my liege is also at Ashford to attend the tourney," Rys said. "We shall keep each other company in the meantime then. What are your plans once you reach the tourney? Will you join the Archery? Perhaps the melee? Or are you setting your sights to join the jousts?"

It wasn't so much a question as it is an answer, Dunk thought privately. "I would join the lists, then suppose if I become a champion and do well, perhaps a Lord, or even a powerful landed knight would notice me and offer me a place among their household."

Rys looked at Dunk from top to bottom, before nodding his head. "I assume you are good with a sword and a lance, Ser Duncan? I will caution you that there are as many hedge knights as there are hedges. You will compete against skilled tourney knights, well-trained lords and heir, and even hedge knights that are far more experienced than yourself."

"Ser Arlan taught me the ways of the sword and lance, and how to ride a horse," Dunk proclaimed. 'But perhaps not enough,' the same voice inside him spoke again.

Instead of laughing, Maester Rys gripped his saddle and spoke, "Then welcome to your first steps as a Knight, Ser Duncan the Tall. May the beginner's fortune favor you in your first tourney. Now, we have a tourney awaits us."
​

---

"We can stay at this inn, Ser Duncan," Maester Rys's voice pulled Duncan back to his thoughts as he didn't even realize it was getting late. They have been travelling for hours, and the sun has already set.

Maester Rys was indeed an intelligent man, Dunk thought with a newfound appreciation to his scholarly companion. While the other men in Rys's retinue did not speak unless spoken to by the Maester, Rys himself proved to be an excellent storyteller, and a man who shares his knowledge freely. He first thought that a journey with a maester would frankly be a bore, Duncan found himself in good conversation, with Rys's tales spanning from the centuries-old histories, to the Blackfyre Rebellion just ten-and-three years ago, to how the Citadel taught him alchemy and arithmetic.

"Aye," Dunk agreed. "We can stay here, I hope it would be a cheap stay."

"Nonsense, the coin my liege provided is ample enough to give us the best accommodations here," the maester said with a dismissive tone.

The inn stood where Rys had said it would, a tall daub-and-timber building set beside a narrow stream, its windows spilling warm yellow light across the yard. Dunk had ridden past enough such places with Ser Arlan to know a decent one from a poor one, and this looked decent enough — better than decent, if Rys meant to pay for it. His stomach, which had been a hollow, aching thing since midday, gave an eager growl at the smell of woodsmoke and roasting meat drifting out to meet them.

At the stream's edge, a boy was wading out of the shallows dripping and bare as his name day, drying himself on a roughspun brown cloak. He could not have seen more than eight or nine namedays, pale and thin as a whittled stick, his bare feet black to the ankle with mud. What struck Dunk was his head. He had no hair on it at all, not so much as a fuzz, and in the last light it seemed to catch a strange gleam, as if it had been oiled.

One of Rys's guardsmen reined up beside Dunk. "That'll be the stableboy," he said, not unkindly. "Small little thing, isn't he."

The maester, still ahorse, was watching the boy with an odd stillness that Dunk did not understand before Rys dismounted from his steed and passed it to his guards. If the boy noticed the column of armed riders drawing rein outside his master's inn, he gave no sign of it — his eyes had gone straight to Dunk, or rather to Thunder, the warhorse Dunk led on a lead rope, and stayed there with the frank, assessing stare of a boy who loved horses more than he feared strangers.

"I'll want my palfrey rubbed down. And oats for all three. Can you tend to them?," Dunk asked.

The boy looked at him brazenly. "I could, if I wanted to."

Dunk almost gave a snort and wished he could clout the boy in the ear. "None of that, disobedience. I am a knight, I'll have you know."

"You don't look to be a knight," came the disbelieving squawk.

"Well, do all knights look the same then?"

"No, but they don't look like you either," the bald boy confessed. "Your sword belt is made of rope."

Dunk frowned at the insolence. He was never that bad when Ser Arlan took him in, wasn't he? ""So long as it holds my scabbard, it serves. Now see to my horses. You'll get a copper if you do well, and a clout in the ear if you don't." He did not wait to see how the stableboy took that, but turned away and shouldered through the door. It took him a moment to think that the boy didn't so much glance at Rys's finery or the guards, which passed him as strange. Most stableboys he had known would have gawked. This one seemed to care for being hardheaded and little else.

The common room, when they came into it, was near empty for the hour — only a stout, whey-faced woman bustling between kitchen and hearth, and a young lordling slumped at a table by the window, his fine damask mantle stained dark down the front, snoring softly into a puddle of spilled wine. The woman's eyes went wide and round as saucer-plates at the sight of Rys's guards filling her doorway, and wider still when Rys himself stepped down from his horse, his white hair catching the firelight, his chain glinting faintly beneath his plain grey robes.

"M'lord," she said, bowing as gracefully as she could "Good sers."

"Only a traveler, and a handful of guards, goodwife, and a hungry one," Rys said, with that same soothing laugh he had given Dunk beside the oak tree. "My companion here is the knight" — a nod toward Dunk — "and has ridden farther while also have eaten less. See him fed first, and generously. I shall want a room for myself, another for Ser Duncan, and my men will want the loft, or the stable, whichever suits them best. Coin is no trouble."

The woman's eyes flicked from the maester's chain to his soldiers to Dunk's rope belt and back again, as a woman does sums in her head. "As you say, m'lord, that is, maester. Sit, sit, both of you. There's lamb, and duck my son shot down this morning, and bread not an hour from the oven."

"Both if you please," said Rys, settling himself at a table with the unhurried ease of a man who grew up clearly surrounded by wealth and comfort.

Dunk took the chair across from him, near the window, well away from the sleeping lordling. He had not eaten at an inn in half a year or better, not since Ser Arlan's purse had grown thin outside Stoney Sept, and the smell of the roasting meat was near enough to make his mouth water shamefully.

"As you say," the woman complied easily enough.

"How much further from here to Ashford," Dunk asked, his voice quiet and uncertain. He was looking at the innkeeper, but perhaps Rys could know as well.

"A day's ride. Bear north when the road forks at the burned mill. Is my boy seeing to your horses, or has he run off again?"

"No, he's there," said Dunk. "You seem to have no custom, goodwife."

"That is to be expected, Ser Duncan," Rys murmured in a patient tone. "When a lord hosts a tourney, a crowd is to be expected and visitors all over the Realm will converge. No doubt, once we reach Ashford, we will see colorful pavilions and many lodgings from those that wished to participate."

"Aye, what he said is true," the innkeep agreed. "Half the town's gone to see the tourney. My own would as well, if I allowed it. They'll have this inn when I go, but the boy would sooner swagger about with soldiers, and the girl turns to sighs and giggles every time a knight rides by. I swear I couldn't tell you why. Knights are built the same as other men, and I never knew a joust to change the price of eggs." She eyed Rys and his men; all of them looking prim and proper, then at Dunk curiously; his sword and shield told her one thing, his rope belt and roughspun tunic quite another. "You lot are bound for the tourney yourselves?"

He took a sip of the ale before he answered. A nut brown color it was, and thick on the tongue, the way he liked it. "Aye," he said. "I mean to be a champion."

"Do you, now?" the innkeep answered, polite enough before checking the food outside.

"You are strangely muted, Ser Duncan," Rys observed, pouring himself a cup of the water the woman had left. "A man does not bury his master and ride the better part of a day without some thoughts pressing on him.

"I was thinking on the tourney, Maester," Dunk lied, though in truth he had been thinking of Ser Arlan's grave, and the oak, and whether the wolves in these parts dug where they oughtn't.

Rys studied him a moment with those pale, clever eyes, as if he knew the lie for what it was and chose, out of some private courtesy, not to say so. "The dead do not begrudge us our appetites," he said instead, gently. "Eat, ser. Grief keeps better on a full stomach than an empty one. I have found that true of most things."

It was then that the lordling at the window stirred.

He raised his head from the wine puddle with a groan, his face sallow and unhealthy beneath a rat's nest of sandy hair, days of pale stubble crusting his chin. He blinked blearily about the room, at the woman, at the fire, at Dunk, and his bleary stare caught, and held, and would not let go.

"I dreamed of you," the lordling said thickly, and something in his slurred voice had gone taut with fear. He lurched half up from his chair, one hand splayed on the table to keep from toppling. "You. Stay away from me, do you hear? You keep well away—"

"My lord?" said Dunk, bewildered, for he had never laid eyes on the man in his life. From the corners of the room, he can see Maester Rys's guards were now alert, weapons drawn.

The lordling's eyes then wandered wildly before his stare had slid past Dunk's shoulder to where Rys sat with his water cup half raised, and all the color that drink had left him seemed to drain away at once, until he was pale as the tallow candles guttering on the mantel.

"Uncle," the lordling said, in a voice gone suddenly, horribly sober. He was on his feet now, swaying, and then, to Dunk's astonishment, he was on his knees on the rush-strewn floor, wine sloshing from the cup still clutched forgotten in his hand. "Uncle, forgive me, I did not know, I did not think you rode this road, I would never have—"

"Get up, boy," said Rys, and there was no laughter left in his voice now, nor any of the mild, dismissive humor Dunk had grown used to on the long road from the oak tree. It was a different voice entirely, quiet and cold as still water, the kind of voice that did not need to be raised to be obeyed. "You are making a spectacle of yourself before strangers. Again. What would your lord father say to you if he saw you in this sorry state?"

Dunk looked from the kneeling lordling to themaester and felt something cold settle in his belly that had nothing to do with hunger. The guards at the door had gone very still but they have yet to sheathe their weapons. The whey-faced innkeep had frozen with a platter of bread halfway to the table, her mouth open and no sound coming out of it.

"Maester Rys," Dunk repeated slowly, as if turning the word over might make it mean something other than what it plainly meant. "You said your name was."

"I said you might call me Rys," he corrected gently, setting down his water cup with great care, as though the moment required steadiness of hand. "I never said it was the whole of it."

He turned back to the lordling still huddled at his feet, and his voice softened, though only a little. "Up I say, Daeron, before you shame our House further than the wine already has. Where is your brother? I did not come all this way to find one Targaryen boy drowning himself in a wine puddle while the other hides in a stream like some smallfolk's brat."

As if the words themselves had summoned him, the common room door banged open, and the bald boy from the stream came tumbling through it, breathless, a curry comb still in one muddy fist, his borrowed roughspun cloak flapping about his thin shoulders. He skidded to a halt at the sight of the kneeling lordling, the armed men, and Rys at the table, and his quick, clever eyes went round with a boy's dawning understanding.

He did not run. He did not gawk long, either. He went down on one knee beside his brother, quick and neat as if he had drilled the motion a hundred times and hated every one of them.

"Prince Aerys," the boy said. "We didn't know you'd come to Ashford, Uncle."

The name struck the common room like a dropped sword. Dunk sat very still, his spoon halfway to his mouth, the lamb and duck and hot bread all at once forgotten, and stared at the man who had shoveled Ser Arlan's grave with his own soft, ink-stained hands not six hours past.

"Prince Aerys," Dunk said, very carefully, his heart pounding and his mouth quickly drying.

Aerys, his voice wondered dangerously, like the King's son?

His scholarly companion turned that same fascinated, faintly amused look on Dunk that he had worn beside the oak tree, as if the whole world and everyone in it were a book he had not quite finished reading.

"I did tell you, Ser Duncan," Prince Aerys said, "that I could neither confirm nor deny the accusation." He gestured, almost kindly, at the empty bench beside him. "Sit, both of you," he told his nephews. "And someone find that fool boy a fresh cup of wine that isn't watered with his own tears. We have a great deal to discuss before Ashford, it seems — and I find I have grown rather fond of surprises today."​