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“…All men, in their way, wish only for your help or your head.” The knight tilts his head, crown of antlers swinging, dark brows drawing low over bright eyes made brighter in the candlelight. “You’ve come for my head, then?”
“What? No. No!”
“Then why the fuck are you in my tent?”
If Dunk had his sword, he could bull his way back from the head table, through the feasters and the singers and the bells chanting high and sweet out of time with the dancers. If he had his armor – if he had any armor – he would need not fear any blade. If he had a surname known to a man like Lyonel Baratheon, or any name besides Dunk, rhymes with lunk, he could stand to his full height even in a tent not his own. He has nothing but the half-eaten pastry in his hand and the searching blue gaze of the lord on his face. He holds up the pastry. It’s topped with sweet summer fruits, glazed in honey and flaking on the tongue, and it had been the best thing Dunk had ever eaten before Ser Lyonel’s man beckoned him over despite his slouch.
“…Supper?” Dunk offers, after a long pause presents him with nothing cleverer than the truth.
The bards saw tunelessly on their viols. The dancers stomp to the beat of a different song. Fire flickers off Lyonel Baratheon’s teeth as he laughs.
“Alright. Actually makes sense. What’s your name, man?”
“Dunk – Ser Dunk.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
It is, a little, but Dunk can’t think of a response. Ser Lyonel grins at him with all of those fine white teeth and asks: “Do you like to dance, Ser Dunk?”
“Doesn’t everyone?”
With no further ceremony the crown of horns is plunked atop the nearest head Lyonel can reach. He seems even shorter without it, the top of his curly silver-streaked head level with Dunk’s eyes, but that makes no difference when he seizes Dunk by the arm and all but throws him into the mass of spinning, stomping bodies.
Well-born maids in silver circlets and lowborn maids in roughspun aprons trod so lightly on top of Dunk’s feet that he feels the weight of them no more than the silken brush of their long loose hair against his wrists. Fiddles yawn and sing and finally settle into time. There’s clapping, jeering, cheering. Men in bright silk doublets, the smug cunt Lord Cafferen among them, hoot and howl when Dunk lifts one wisp of a lady up so high that she crosses her ankles and shrieks with laughter until he’s passed her to the arms of a young knight dressed in the same colors as she. An old man with hair as white as Ser Arlan’s had been links his elbow with Dunk’s and leads him through the next leap.
Lyonel Baratheon hops from table to table. Black satin sleeves and golden braces flash in the candlelight as he claps. When his eyes meet Dunk’s he tips his head back and bays like a hound, dark curls falling back from his face.
He must be drunk, more drunk than Dunk, but there is an elegance to his movement even as he dips and staggers. A doughty fighter, Dunk judges, watching the crowd part for the knight when he stumbles down from his tables. It would be a short tourney indeed for Dunk if he were to face Ser Lyonel too soon in the joust. He should wait for the third day to enter the lists and hope he comes up lucky with his first opponent.
Imagine the poor farmer charging down Lyonel Baratheon in the lists, the master of the games had cackled.
A hundred golden dragons to the man, beast, or god who sticks me best, Ser Lyonel himself had promised during the second course. If Dunk were to do more than win a single tilt – if he were to face Ser Lyonel, to ride well and aim true, then even if he lost, a hundred dragons would surely be enough to ransom back the horses from a man wealthy enough to spit at the likes of Thunder and Sweetfoot—
Dunk nearly spins right into the knight. His feet catch him just before he trips. By some miracle, so do Ser Lyonel’s. He smells like wine, sour and dark above the hot spiced scent of his perfume, and when he smiles up at Dunk the look on his face is darker and more savage than a true knight’s should be. He moves like the Dornish girl’s puppets. The thrashing of his body is wild and fluid, just barely contained in a storm of movement, bending and spinning and heels striking the floor as he claps and goads, his feet in their fine calfskin boots stomping just beyond Dunk’s reach again and again.
A battle, Dunk realizes, a melee. His chance to prove his worth. The steps come more easily after that. Ser Arlan’s lessons may not win him the joust, but they guide him well through the knight’s dance. Swordplay without a sword, riding without a horse, a give-and-take of strength and speed and raw honed reflex. Dunk is too tall and clumsy to manage it with the ease of the noble knights, but he makes the space his own, and they take note.
Lyonel Baratheon seizes him by the shoulders and spins him, laughing open-mouthed, the golden skirts of his tunic flaring as he circles Dunk. A crowned stag dangles from the hoop of gold in his ear. The tiny gilt crest winks as its master goads Dunk through the steps of the storm knights’ hopping-dance. He stomps on Dunk’s foot hard enough to make him bite his tongue.
Not very knightly, Dunk thinks. His head swims from the smoke and the wine and the heat. Lyonel hops back, cackling – he earned his name – and there’s nothing Dunk can do but give chase. The silk tunic brushes against his sun-faded breeches. The wooden boards shake under his heels. Quick as a dagger Lyonel evades him once, twice, thrice until Dunk slams down on the fine black calfskin with all his great weight and all his great strength, and the man doubles over.
The world seems to slow. A sticky, feverish haze settles over the pavilion as Lyonel crumples. He grabs out at the nearest thing to keep himself standing; the old knight on the side hollers in delight; a ringed hand settles on Dunk’s hip; and Dunk remembers all at once that Lyonel Baratheon is the heir to Storm’s End. With one hand he braces him by the chest and with the other he hauls him upright, fearing for the anger he will see on the lord’s face. It’s a dance, a game, he meant no true harm—
Ser Lyonel staggers upright with his hair hiding his expression. His nose is inches from Dunk’s. His breath is a heaving bellows in his chest. He shakes black-and-grey curls from his eyes, finds Dunk’s wide gaze, and winks.
Dunk shoves him backwards. He careens off in circles, jaw lax and strange wild noises bubbling out of his throat. He’s still smiling. Dunk has somehow won the melee.
The wine and the music draw them through another three dances. Between one song and the next, Dunk gets Ser Lyonel’s antlered crown placed on his head and Ser Lyonel draped over his front, reluctant to be moved.
“Ser—”
“They’re too dunk to miss us, Drunk,” slurs the storm knight. “C’mere, lad, careful you don’t hit your head on the chandeliers, you’ll burn all your hair off and be bald as an egg. You’re too handsome for that, even if you are a hedge knight.”
Dunk is so occupied with hunching away from the candles that Lyonel manages to dance them towards the back of the tent over the slumped, snoring bodies of his men. Dunk marvels again at how well the man manages to hold his wine. He seemed to have been drunk already when Dunk arrived for supper, flushed in the face and laughing freely as only drunk men seem to do, but a dozen goblets later and he’s still nimble enough to make Dunk feel like a great lumbering aurochs next to him.
Dunk has never been so steady after drinking so much in his life. He was not raised in a fortress with a wine cellar. Navigating the dizziness seems second nature to Ser Lyonel, who leads him out of the pavilion up the slope of the quiet dark hillock behind it. There are no revelers here, no ladies, no musicians, no whores, no vendors, no knights. If Dunk focuses on the press of Lyonel’s rings into his skin he can forget there is anything but the two of them.
“Meaning no disrespect,” Dunk gets out, trying to think through the strange fog of warmth spreading through his body from the point where Lyonel is touching him, “but why are we back here, ser?”
That gets him an arched look. “Have you never lain with a man before?”
Dunk has never even lain with a woman before. He doesn’t get the chance to admit to it. Lyonel seems to read it from his blush. He presses Dunk down onto the grassy hillside and pours himself into his lap.
“Ser.”
Dunk’s tongue feels heavy in his mouth. The old man taught him sword and lance and horse, not how to speak prettily, not what to say to a lord who has wrapped himself around you like a chainmail hauberk, only closer and warmer and nicer-smelling.
“Ser,” Lyonel throws back at him with a laugh. The earring snares the light again.
Does he laugh to mock me, or because he is happy, or because he is drunk? Dunk has little time to wonder before Lyonel’s mouth is on his, and they’re kissing.
Dunk knows how to kiss. A tavern girl in Lannisport taught him, a year or so back at the beginning of spring. She’d been so short that she’d had to sit on a table to fit their mouths together. Dunk had half feared to touch her, small and slim as she was against the bulk of him.
It is not a fear he could have with Lyonel, who has a knight’s height and power and solidity. He kisses with more hunger than the tavern girl. His mouth is not as soft. His hands are larger and stronger where they come to knead at Dunk’s shoulders. His beard scratches at Dunk’s jaw, rubbing fire against his skin and raising gooseflesh down his throat and chest. Dunk feels hot-faced and light-headed, as though the taste of good strong summerwine lingering on Lyonel’s tongue is enough in itself to get him drunk.
More drunk.
He recalls the red-haired whores, how their breasts had sat under their dresses, the clink of their jewelry and the way they’d smiled at him as women smile at dogs and children. Unbidden his hands rise to the unfastened ties of Ser Lyonel’s doublet. The fabric of his shirt is fine as water under Dunk’s fingers. The collar has been unlaced; it gapes open around a triangle of skin. When he dares to touch, just to feel the warmth of Lyonel’s body without a barrier of cloth separating them, the knight makes another one of his animal noises into Dunk’s mouth. His chest is covered in a coarse layer of hair that snags at Dunk’s sword calluses. He’d glimpsed it back in the tent, in the firelight; black as wire and dusted with grey, like his beard.
I could die in my first tilt, Dunk thinks wildly. Lyonel’s teeth scrape against his lip, and one wool-clad leg slips between his to press against his groin. Tourneys are dangerous, deadly on occasion, and any wrongly-placed lance would mean Dunk’s end. It could be the Laughing Storm’s own lance to catch him in the chest, the throat, the face, to punch through his armor as though it were paper, to pierce Thunder’s heart and throw him to the ground to be crushed by the warhorse’s death throes. The old man warned him that such things happened often enough. Sometimes by accident; sometimes by cruelty dismissed as accident; sometimes by the sword arm of a knight who has seen too much war to remember, in the rush of pounding hooves and clashing steel, that jousts are not battlefields.
The doublet comes apart too easily under Dunk’s hands. The long golden tunic underneath is laced, not buttoned, and it takes a brief negotiation of position before that too is undone. Dunk pulls back for air, and his ears burn at the sight of the grand lord’s costume hanging from Lyonel’s shoulders. It makes him look rakish, half-devoured. Dunk’s face feels all the hotter when the breeze tickles his own bare chest and he realizes his own linen shirt has been lost somewhere. Then Lyonel’s hand is trailing down his chest, down to his breeches, under his breeches, and Dunk quite forgets to feel anything but the knight’s long quick fingers plucking his laces apart.
The fingers wrap around his manhood and his mind goes utterly blank. Distantly he hears Lyonel’s voice, some comment about Dunk’s sword, but all he feels is heat in his belly, seething and building at the slow drag of skin along his shaft.
“—the size of you, boy,” Lyonel is saying, “put that monstrosity the Tarlys call an heirloom to shame – not enough oil in the seven kingdoms to try it. Not enough wine in me to try it. Oh, gods.”
He shifts his weight, slots their hips together until he can guide Dunk between his thighs. He spits into his hand. For a long, tantalizing moment Dunk stares entranced at the weak gleam of moonlight on his slick fingers.
Lyonel reaches back down to take him in hand. Dunk nearly reaches his limit in that moment. It’s different than when he’s touched himself before – the close heat of skin, the tug of unfamiliar sword calluses, just enough wetness from saliva and his own drooling cock to make each movement glide. The noises he hears himself make are noises he never knew a man could make, bestial and urgent, but above him Ser Lyonel doesn’t seem to mind. Each stroke is slightly faster and heavier until the motion of Lyonel’s wrist steals the air from Dunk’s chest. His hips jerk upwards. He’s helpless to mind his own strength, thrusting into the space between the knight’s furred thighs, heart dropping into his stomach and stomach pulled up and out and atop him Lyonel’s head is dropped, shoulders shaking, rolling his pelvis down in the same sloppy tempo—
Dunk became a knight under the eye of a dying man with a tree and a songbird as his witnesses. He becomes a man in the embrace of Lyonel Baratheon on a grassy knoll in the wee hours of the night, a stone’s throw from a gold silk pavilion filled with lords and ladies and the greatest knights of the realm.
Ser Lyonel lays atop him for a time afterwards, telling some story or another as the mess between them cools and Dunk’s legs recall their function. He was at sea, on a boat, in a storm, facing his own death as countless other Stormlanders had before. He meanders, gesturing at everything and nothing, pausing to gather his thoughts and his clothes where they were scattered in the mad, lustful frenzy that had seemed so inescapable. The black and yellow silks are stained with spend.
Dunk makes an effort to dress as swiftly as he can, but his muscles don’t quite remember how to hold him steady and upright and his face won’t stop burning. Ser Lyonel laughs at him, naturally. He snatches up the antlered crown that had fallen off at some point and sets it crooked atop his head.
“Don’t start cowering again now,” he warns Dunk. There’s only a dim wash of light from the sky and distant torches, but Dunk can make out Lyonel’s brow and nose and the shape of his face. He’s a handsome man, pleasing to look at, quick with his smiles even now. He gives Dunk a smile, a quick flash of teeth in the darkness. “The gods gave you more blessings than just your tallness, ser. Don’t be so afraid to use them.”
He says ser without a trace of mockery, and when he begins to snicker again Dunk feels himself smile.
“But, ah, maybe not so freely.”
Over the points of the antlers, the stars are bright. The knight claps Dunk on the shoulder, drags him down to kiss him, misses his mouth and gets his nose instead, and stumbles off to do whatever heirs do when they’re not fooling around with hedge knights.
Dunk raises his sleeve to his face. It carries the mingled scents of wine, grass, and hotly-spiced perfume.