Chapter Text
Egg had not been bored in a very long time.
Boredom, he had discovered somewhere between the dusty roads of Dorne and the muddy streets of Whitewalls, was a luxury that beggars and hedge knights could not afford. When one's supper depended on the kindness of innkeeps and the next morning's weather might mean the difference between sleeping under a roof or under a hedge, there was simply no room in one's head for the itching emptiness that he now felt pressing against the inside of his skull like a captive bird beating its wings against a cage.
They had been at Summerhall for three moons now, and the walls—though pale and beautiful, though draped in the red-and-black of his House and warmed by the great fires that never seemed to go out even in summer—were beginning to close in around him.
"Three moons," he announced to the empty air of the library, where he had come to escape the oppressive heat of the afternoon and, more pressingly, the oppressive presence of his sister Rhae, who had taken it into her head that morning that he ought to practice his curtsies.
"One could almost call it peaceful," he sighed, and the word tasted like ash in his mouth.
The library at Summerhall was a modest affair compared to the great vaults of the Citadel or even the collection that Maester Pinele had tended at Highgarden, but it had its charms. The windows were tall and arched, letting in great shafts of afternoon light that turned the dust motes into floating specks of gold, and there was a window seat in the eastern tower where a boy could sit with a book on his lap and watch the comings and goings in the yard below without anyone being quite certain whether he was reading or spying.
Today, he was doing neither precisely.
The book, a rather tedious history of the Reach that he had read twice already, lay open and ignored on his knee. His eyes were fixed on the window, and his attention was fixed on the yard, where two figures had just emerged from the stables with the easy, unhurried way of men who had nowhere particular to be and were in no hurry to get there.
The first was his brother Aerion, all in scarlet and gold, his silver-gold hair catching the light as he moved, his laugh carrying across the yard even through the glass. He was gesturing at something, his hands moving in the elaborate, expansive way they did when he was in good humor, which was not as rare as some people thought.
The second was Ser Duncan.
Dunk walked beside Aerion with that specific combination of grace and clumsiness that seemed to define his every movement. Even after all these years—three years of travel, three years of sleeping in ditches and eating hard salt beef and watching Dunk's face grow less boyish and more stern—he still seemed not quite to fit into the spaces that the world provided for him. His shoulders brushed against the doorframes of Summerhall; his head came perilously close to the chandeliers in the red hall.
They were laughing about something. Dunk's laugh was a rumble, low and warm, the kind of sound that seemed to come from somewhere deep in his chest and spread outward like heat from a hearth. Aerion's laugh was something else entirely; a glittering thing, sharp-edged, the kind of laugh that could cut as easily as it could charm.
Egg watched them cross the yard, watched Dunk duck his head to hear something Aerion said, the way his brother reached up to clap the big knight on the shoulder with a familiarity that would have surprised anyone who only knew Aerion Brightflame from reputation.
He watched, and he thought about the question that had been nibbling at the edges of his consciousness for weeks now, like a mouse at the corner of a tapestry.
When did that start?
The thing about Aerion, Egg had long since learned, was that he was impossible to ignore.
This was not merely a matter of his presence, though that was considerable—there was a weight to him, a density, as though the air itself grew heavier when he entered a room—but of his effect. Aerion passed through a doorway and the very nature of the space changed. Conversations faltered, or grew louder, depending on his mood. Eyes followed him, could not help but follow him, drawn by something that was not quite beauty and not quite menace, but some third thing that contained both. He was like a flame in a dark sept: you could turn away, you could press your face to the cold stone and pray, but you always knew where it was, always felt the heat of it on the back of your neck.
Egg had spent most of his life watching Aerion. This was, he had found, a matter of survival. When one had a brother who could turn from charming to vicious in the space between one breath and the next—who could compliment your new tunic in one moment and, in the next, explain with great patience and considerable detail how he intended to improve it by setting it on fire while you were still wearing it—one learned to keep one's eyes open and one's mouth shut.
Egg remembered the incident with Daeron's horse, when Aerion was twelve. Daeron had been given a white mare for his nameday, a creature of such surpassing beauty that Aerion had coveted it from the moment he saw it. Daeron, unwisely, had refused to give it to him. The next morning, the mare was found in her stall, her throat cut from ear to ear, her blood still steaming in the cold air. Aerion had been questioned. He had looked at his father with eyes as clear and innocent as a winter sky and said, "I was only showing her how sharp my knife was. I did not mean to kill her. I am sorry, Father. Truly." And Maekar, who wanted so badly to believe that his son was not what he appeared to be, had believed him.
That was the other thing about Aerion: he could make you believe. He could turn the full force of his charm upon you, and you would feel it like sunlight on your face, warm and golden and impossible to resist. He could make you laugh at his jokes, forgive his cruelties, forget the things you had seen him do. He was, Egg had come to understand, a master of the art of being forgiven. He would do something terrible, and then he would smile, and the smile was so bright, so entirely without remorse, that you found yourself wondering if perhaps you had misunderstood. Perhaps it had been an accident. Perhaps you were being too harsh. Perhaps he was not the monster you thought he was.
This was how Aerion had survived as long as he had. If Aerion had been born a horse, Egg often thought, he would have been the kind that bit the stableboy and kicked the farrier and looked so magnificent doing it that everyone agreed it was worth the occasional missing finger. This was the secret, the one that kept him alive, the one that had made King's Landing fall in love with him despite—or perhaps because of—the way he smiled when he said something that should not be smiled at.
The court had adored him. They had watched him charm the ladies and terrify the lords and set fire to a knight's pavilion for the crime of being boring, and they had called it passion. They had watched him laugh when the flames caught, had watched the light play across that beautiful, terrible face, and they had thought: what a prince. What a prince indeed. What a prince who could make you forget, in the space between one heartbeat and the next, that his hands had just been holding a torch.
There was the time Aerion had convinced Aemon that their father meant to send him to the Citadel to become a maester—which was true, as it happened, but Aemon had not known it yet, and the three days of terror before the announcement were a masterpiece of sustained cruelty that Egg still admired despite himself.The serving girl who had smiled at Daeron was another matter entirely. Egg had found her in the kitchen before dawn, her head wrapped in a cloth, her hands shaking so badly she could not hold the ladle she was trying to lift. Her hair lay in a soft pile beside her, the sheared ends catching the candlelight, and when he asked her what had happened, she had looked at him with eyes that held nothing at all. He had not asked again. And Egg still could not think about the wasps without his skin crawling, which was, he supposed, the point.
And yet, for all of this, Aerion was also the one who had taught Egg to ride. Not kindly—nothing Aerion did was ever kind—but thoroughly, with an intensity that bordered on obsession. He had stood in the yard for hours, shouting corrections, yanking Egg from the saddle when his form was wrong, pushing him back up again and again until his legs shook with exhaustion and his hands were raw from the reins.
"You will not shame us," Aerion had said, and there was something in his voice that Egg, years later, would come to recognize as fear. "You will not give them anything to laugh at."
Them. He had been small when Aerion first spoke it, small enough to believe that them meant something specific, that could be named and confronted and perhaps, with enough courage, defeated. Now he knew that them was the mirror he saw every morning when he washed his face, the face that looked back at him from the water, the one that had been looked at for two hundred years by people who had already decided what it meant. Them was the history that lived in his blood, the story that had been told about his family before any of them were born.
Aerion had been trying to protect him, in his way. The same way a wolf protects its cubs, perhaps, or a dragon guards its hoard; with teeth and fire that did not distinguish between friend and foe. Egg had not thanked him. One did not thank Aerion for anything, because to thank him was to acknowledge a debt, and Aerion's debts were always, eventually, called due. But he had remembered.
The other side that Egg had seen only rarely, and never when Aerion knew he was watching. Once, when Egg was very small, he had crept into the stable late at night, unable to sleep, and found Aerion there, alone, sitting in the straw with a foal that had been born too weak to stand. Aerion had not known he was there. He had been speaking to the foal in a voice Egg had never heard him use, soft and low, almost a whisper, and there had been tears on his face. He had been crying. Aerion, who never cried, who laughed when others cried, who had thrown a cat in a well and watched it drown—he had been crying over a foal that was going to die.
Egg had crept away without being seen. He had never told anyone what he had seen. It was the first secret he had ever kept, and it had sat inside him for years, a small, hard thing, like a stone that he could not swallow and could not spit out.
He had attempted to fit the two Aerions into a single coherent structure. He had taken the brother who wept over the foal and the brother who snapped the puppet girl's fingers, and he had held them up to the light, turned them this way and that, searched for the hidden join that would reveal how one became the other. The brother who whispered comfort to dying things and the brother who watched them die with that terrible smile—surely, Egg had thought, there must be a mechanism, a gear train, some sort of internal logic that would make the whole dreadful contraption make sense. He found none. The pieces lay in his mind like two halves of a broken pot, each one perfectly shaped, neither one fitting the other, and the space between them was where understanding was supposed to go. So he had stopped trying to fill it. He had simply placed the two halves side by side and learned to live with the gap.
This new watching had begun about three weeks after they had returned to Summerhall.
It had started almost by accident. He had been in the yard—not training, because Ser Duncan had declared that his sword arm needed rest and that if he saw another practice blade before supper he would go mad—and he had found himself with nothing to do and nowhere to be. So he had sat on the wall, his legs dangling, his chin in his hands, and he had watched.
At first, he had watched Dunk. Dunk was always worth watching, not for the flash and dazzle of his movements—there was nothing flashy about Ser Duncan the Tall, whose style of fighting was as straightforward and solid as the man himself—but for the certainty of him. In a world of shifting allegiances and half-truths, of words that meant one thing and then another depending on who was speaking them, Dunk was a fixed point. What you saw was what you got: a man who was exactly as large and exactly as good as he appeared to be.
Dunk had not, unfortunately, been alone. Aerion had positioned himself against the quintain with the casual arrogance of a man who had never once in his life wondered whether he was welcome, a cup of wine dangling from his fingers and that particular expression on his face—the one that occupied the same semantic space as a coin spinning in the air, the outcome of which would determine whether the next words out of his mouth would be charming enough to make a septa blush or cutting enough to make a grown man weep.
He had been talking to Dunk. Not that Egg was listening to the words. Egg had ceased to hear them the moment he saw the way Aerion leaned in—that slow, predatory tilt of the body, the kind of movement that precedes either a kiss or a kill. His brother's eyes tracked the big knight's every gesture with an attention that was almost violent in its intensity, the attention of a man who has found something he has been hunting for a very long time and cannot quite believe it has stopped running. Egg watched those restless hands go still. Aerion's hands were never still. They were the part of him that moved fastest, that struck first, that reached for what he wanted before his mind had fully formed the wanting. But now they lay motionless at his sides, and in that stillness Egg saw something he had never seen before: his brother, uncertain. His brother, looking at another man as though that man held something he had not known he needed to survive. Dunk was looking back, and his face was open, the face of a man who had never learned to protect himself from what he loved. Egg wanted to step between them, to wrap himself around Dunk like a shield, to say, He will consume you. He will take everything you are and make it his, and there will be nothing left.
And then Dunk had laughed at something—some joke, some observation, some piece of the ordinary nonsense that made up the texture of his days—and Aerion's face had changed.
Egg had always assumed that Aerion’s face was built to do one thing: look down on people. It was a good face for it; disdainful, constructed from angles that suggested the world was a disappointing spectacle. Now something had gone wrong with the mechanism.The disdain had slipped, the angles had softened, and underneath was something that looked like a person, which was frankly disturbing because Egg had not been aware there was a person under there. He had assumed the fire and the cruelty went straight through, no hidden chambers. It was tender, that thing, and fragile, and it looked at the hedge knight with an ache that made Egg’s chest tighten. He thought of his mother’s hands, of the way she had held things she was afraid to break. This, he realised, was the same: his brother, holding something he had never learned to hold.
Egg had blinked. He gave it a good few seconds, let his eyes do their job, but the image wasn't shifting. His brother did not do vulnerable.Vulnerable was the kind of thing you expected from normal people, not from Aerion fucking Brightflame, who had about as much business looking vulnerable as a dragon had asking for a cuddle.
When he looked again, the expression was gone, replaced by Aerion's usual mask of sardonic amusement.
And that, he thought now, leaning his forehead against the cool glass of the window, was when it had begun.
The next few weeks had been, in retrospect, an education.
Egg had always considered himself a perceptive observer of human nature. It was a skill he had cultivated out of necessity, first in the treacherous waters of the Red Keep—where a wrong word could cost you more than your pride, and the most dangerous thing in any room was usually the person smiling the widest—and later on the road with Dunk, where the wrong judgment about a man's character could cost you your purse, your horse, or your life. He could tell when a merchant was lying about the quality of his goods, when an innkeep was charging twice what a room was worth, when a fellow traveler was looking at his purse with more than casual interest.
So when he turned his attention to the interactions between his brother and his knight, what he saw was both illuminating and deeply, profoundly alarming.
The alarming part, and there were several alarming parts, each worse than the last, was that Aerion was interested.
Not in the way Aerion was interested in new horses, which was the interest of a collector examining a potential acquisition, cataloging its points and flaws with a cold, appraising eye. Not even in the way he was interested in the intricate strategies of Cyvasse, which was the interest of a tactician studying the board, calculating moves and countermoves, always three steps ahead of his opponent.Those were interests of a certain kind—predatory interests, the interests of a cat watching a mouse, of a falcon circling above its prey, of a man who had never learned to want something without wanting to own it, control it, consume it.
This was different. And the difference was what made Egg's blood run cold every time he saw them together.
He had seen Aerion court before, if the word court could be applied to the desultory, half-hearted way he did anything that did not directly serve his own amusement. There had been the ash-haired daughter of a Reach lord, a perfectly pleasant young woman who had made the fundamental error of existing within Aerion's sightline during a period when he was mildly bored. She had pursued him with the desperate enthusiasm of a moth that had mistaken a bonfire for a candle, and Aerion had permitted this pursuit with the gracious condescension of a dragon allowing a persistent peasant to admire its scales from a safe distance. He had tossed her smiles like alms for the poor, compliments like crumbs to a begging bird, and she had blushed and stammered and generally behaved as though the sun had decided to shine exclusively on her. The whole business had lasted a month—the length of time it took Aerion to exhaust the entertainment value of someone who agreed with everything he said—after which he had moved on to the next diversion. The singer from Lys had been a more substantial project: a golden creature with a voice like honey and a face that would have launched a modest fleet, whom Aerion had kept tethered to his side for an entire summer, feeding him sweets and calling him my treasure with the easy insincerity of a man trying out a new coat. The end had come without warning, as these things always did: a purse of silver, a laugh like breaking glass, a warning never to return that was delivered with the same tone one might use to dismiss a servant who had tracked mud across a clean floor.
There had been others, Egg knew—a handful of beautiful things that Aerion had collected and discarded with the same casual acquisitiveness with which he might acquire a new falcon or a new horse.
This wasn't Aerion hunting. There was no calculation, none of that particular tension that meant he was working out how to make someone hurt. He was just... going over there. To talk. To be there. For no reason except that Dunk was there and Aerion wanted to be where Dunk was. It was so ordinary it was almost frightening,
Aerion choosing to sit beside the big knight at supper, even when there were better seats available, closer to the fire, closer to the wine. Aerion, who had been known to rearrange entire dining halls to suit his convenience, voluntarily settling for a seat that was not the best seat? It was the kind of thing that made you check the sky for falling pigs.
Aerion walking with him in the gardens, even though he had nowhere particular to go, but simply to walk beside him, to match his stride to Dunk's longer one, to listen to the big knight talk about the horses or his travels or the proper way to sharpen a sword. This was the sort of behavior that, if displayed by anyone else, would be described as "courtship." Displayed by Aerion, it was the sort of behavior that made Egg want to hide under the table and wait for the world to make sense again.
His brother arguing with Dunk —arguing with him!—about the best route through the Prince's Pass, about the virtues of Dornish wine over Arbor gold, about whether it was better to face a charging boar with a spear or a sword, and laughing when Dunk would not concede the point. Aerion, who had once set a man's hand on fire for disagreeing with him, laughing at a disagreement. His brother did not laugh when people disagreed with him. Aerion punished people who disagreed with him.
It was, Egg thought with a kind of desperate bewilderment, like watching a wolf decide to become a sheepdog. The essential wolfiness remained—the sharp teeth, the hungry eyes, the coiled tension in the limbs that suggested at any moment it might remember what it was and tear something apart—but the purpose had changed. The wolf was no longer looking for something to hunt. The wolf was looking for something to guard. Or perhaps, Egg thought, looking for something to belong to.
And Dunk, for his part, seemed entirely oblivious.
Which was not, Egg had to admit, surprising. Dunk had many virtues: loyalty, courage, a stubborn sense of honor that had seen them through more scrapes than Egg cared to count, and a heart that was, as far as Egg could tell, entirely without guile.
What Dunk did not have was any sort of discernment when it came to the subtle signals that other people sent. He could not tell when a woman was flirting with him—Egg had watched serving girls at three different inns bat their eyelashes at the hedge knight until their eyelids must have been ready to fall off, had watched them lean close to him, touch his arm, laugh at his terrible jokes, and Dunk had responded to each with the same puzzled courtesy, as if they were asking him to pass the bread. He could not tell when a man was lying to him—though to be fair, this had improved somewhat in the years they had traveled together, mostly because Dunk had learned that Egg could tell, and had developed the habit of looking to him for guidance when his own instincts failed him. And he certainly could not tell when Aerion Targaryen, of all people, was developing what could only be described as a tendre.
Which brought Egg to the second part of his discovery, the part that he had been turning over in his mind for days now, trying to find some interpretation that would make it less than what it appeared to be. Dunk, he was increasingly sure, returned the interest.
Oh, Egg thought now, watching through the window as Dunk held the stable door open for Aerion with a courtesy that was as natural to him as breathing, as Aerion passed through with a nod that was almost a bow, as their shoulders brushed in the narrow doorway and neither of them moved away. Oh no.
He sat on the window seat, the book forgotten in his lap, and he watched his brother and his knight disappear into the stable together.He watched the world go on around him, the servants crossing the yard, the guards changing shift, the endless, ordinary business of the castle continuing as if nothing had changed.
The stable door opened. Dunk came out first, leading Aerion's horse, a beautiful grey stallion that had been brought up from the Reach the month before. Aerion followed, and something passed between them—a word, a look, something too quick for Egg to catch—and Aerion grined.
Egg watched them go. He watched Dunk hold the stallion's head while Aerion mounted, watched the way Aerion's hand lingered on Dunk's shoulder for a moment longer than necessary, watched Dunk looked up at him.
──────────────────────
"Something is troubling you."
Daeron's voice floated across the small table in the solar that Egg had commandeered for their afternoon gatherings.
Egg had been pacing. He stopped now, arrested mid-stride, and looked at his eldest brother with an expression he hoped conveyed innocence and which he suspected conveyed exactly the opposite.
"Nothing is troubling me."
"You have worn a path in the carpet," Daeron observed mildly. "It is a beautiful carpet. I would hate to see it ruined."
Egg looked down at his feet. He had, indeed, been walking back and forth across the same stretch of floor for some time. The pattern of the carpet was beginning to look a little blurred under his boots.
He sat down, heavily, in the chair opposite Daeron, and glared at the window as though it had personally offended him.
"What do you know," he said, "about the matter of—" He stopped. The sentence, he realized, had nowhere to go. He could not say Aerion and Dunk without inviting questions he was not prepared to answer. He could not say our brother without giving away that something was happening, and once Daeron knew something was happening, he would want to know what, and then—
"I know many things," Daeron said, when the silence had stretched long enough to become uncomfortable. He set his book aside—Egg caught a glimpse of the title, some ponderous tome about the history of the Stormlands that Egg had rejected four days ago as too tedious even for his purposes—and gave his full attention to his younger brother. "I know, for instance, that you have been watching Aerion and Ser Duncan."
Egg's face went hot. "I have not."
"You have also been mumbling to yourself, which is a habit you developed on the road and you would do well to break before someone overhears something you would rather keep private." Daeron's voice was mild, almost gentle, but there was a knowing glint in his eye that Egg did not like at all. "I have heard you say, on three separate occasions in the past fortnight, the phrase 'but why would he look at him like that.'"
Egg buried his face in his hands.
"I hate you," he said, muffled.
"No, you don't."
"No," Egg admitted. He lifted his head and stared at his brother with what he hoped was a suitably tragic expression. "But I might, if you do not help me."
"I am listening," Daeron said, and the way he said it suggested that listening was a great favor he was bestowing upon his younger brother, a favor that might be revoked at any moment if the conversation proved insufficiently interesting.
Egg took a breath. Then another. He had, he realized, been standing again in the middle of the solar for about three minutes without actually saying anything of substance, and if he did not begin soon, his brother would lose patience and begin reading again, and then the whole thing would have to be postponed until tomorrow, and tomorrow he would lose his nerve entirely.
"You know how Dunk is," he began.
"I know Ser Duncan the Tall possesses the unshakeable moral clarity of a man who has never had a thought he did not immediately speak aloud." He let out a short breath, something between a laugh and a sigh. "It is, I suppose, a quality."
"That is—" Egg paused. He had been about to defend Dunk, to say that Dunk was not simple, merely honest, that honesty was a virtue and not a failing. But Daeron was not wrong. "He is also, I have come to realize, somewhat blind."
Daeron's eyebrows rose. This was, Egg knew, a significant event. Daeron's eyebrows were among the most expressive parts of his person, which was saying something for a man whose entire face seemed designed to convey a sort of permanent, amused detachment from the world. When they went up this high, it meant he was genuinely engaged in something that he also found deeply amusing.
"His eyes seem to work well enough," Daeron observed. "He read that letter from Winterfell to you just last week, and I recall he was able to find his way from the stables to the great hall without incident. Unless he has developed some new affliction of which I am unaware."
"Not that kind of blind." Egg waved his hand impatiently, a gesture that was perhaps more expansive than the situation required. He forced his hands to his sides. "Blind to things. To people. To—" He stopped again, the words lodging in his throat like a fishbone that had no intention of moving.
Daeron waited. He had the patience of a man who had spent his life reading books that other people found tedious, and who had discovered, somewhere along the way, that the best things came to those who did not rush. It was, Egg thought, a very annoying trait in a brother.
"You have noticed," Egg said carefully, "that Aerion spends a great deal of time with him."
"I have noticed that Aerion spends a great deal of time antagonizing everyone in the castle, Ser Duncan included, yes." Daeron picked up his wine cup, examined its contents as though they might contain the answers to questions he had not yet thought to ask, and set it down again. "It is, I believe, his primary form of recreation."
"No, not—" Egg made a frustrated noise. It was the noise of a man who was trying to explain something very simple to someone who was being deliberately obtuse, and who suspected that the obtuseness was not accidental. "He does not antagonize him. Not really. He argues with him, yes, but—do you remember how he used to argue with Father? How he would push and push, just to see how far he could go before Father snapped?"
Daeron's face had gone still. The amusement drained out of it. "I remember."
"That is not what this is. This is different." Egg began to pace again. The solar was not large, and his pacing took him from the window to the door and back again, a distance of perhaps ten feet. He made the journey six times before he continued. "He seeks him out, Daeron. He looks for him. He finds reasons to be where Dunk is. He walks with him in the gardens. He—" He stopped, mid-pace, and turned to face his brother. "He laughs at his jokes. Dunk's jokes. Dunk's jokes, which are not, I think you would agree, particularly funny."
Daeron considered this. "His jokes are not funny, no. They are, in fact, the opposite of funny." He paused. "And Aerion laughs at them."
"Every time."
"Every time."
"Every single time," Egg said, and the weight of it settled over him like a blanket. "He laughs. He laughs, and he remembers things Dunk says, and he brings them up days later, as though he has been thinking about them. As though he has been—" He stopped, because the words were too strange to say aloud.
Daeron regarded him with an expression in which curiosity had given way to a species of dawning comprehension that promised no pleasure to either party. "What," he said, in a voice that suggested he already knew the answer and wished to lodge a complaint, "are you saying?"
Egg opened his mouth, thought better of it, and tried again with no more success. The problem was his brain had gone walkabout the moment the thought arrived, because how in the name of everything reasonable was he supposed to shape his lips around Aerion and love in the same breath without the words catching fire? He had prepared himself for many disasters in his life, but his brother developing feelings for another human being had not made the list.
"I am saying," he managed, "that I think Aerion is fond of Dunk."
The silence that followed was the longest of Egg's life. Egg could hear everything—the fire cracking like bones, the wind having a go at the trees, some poor servant dropping what sounded like a full set of pots in the corridor, and his own heart doing a drum solo that suggested it was preparing for a funeral. Above all this, he could hear Daeron breathing, and more damningly, he could hear the tiny catch in it that meant his brother was fighting the good fight against the overwhelming urge to piss himself laughing. Egg wanted to slap him.
Daeron reached for his wine cup, took a measured sip, and set it down again with exquisite care. The cup made a small sound against the wood of the table.
"You think," Daeron said, "that Aerion, who once wanted to cut a man's tongue for disagreeing with him about the proper way to address a prince—"
"It was a very sensitive topic for him," Egg interjected.
"—who has called Ser Duncan 'the lunk' to his face on no fewer than a dozen occasions that I have witnessed personally—"
"He calls everyone names."
"—who has, on multiple occasions, expressed the opinion that the only good thing about hedge knights is that they are easily replaced—"
"He was being dramatic."
"—you think that this Aerion has developed a fondness for Ser Duncan." Daeron's voice was perfectly level. His face was perfectly composed. His eyes were bright with something that might have been tears or might have been suppressed laughter, and Egg could not tell which.
"I know," Egg said miserably. "It sounds absurd when you say it like that."
"It sounds absurd when anyone says it." Daeron pinched the bridge of his nose, a gesture he had picked up from their father and which he employed when he was trying very hard not to say something regrettable. "You are certain of this."
"Almost entirely."
"Almost."
"There is a possibility," Egg admitted, "that I am misreading the situation. I have been wrong before."
"You are not equipped to see romance."
"I have not been wrong about everything."
"Name one."
Egg thought about the time he had been so certain, that the innkeep at Stoney Sept was a secret agent of the Iron Bank, sent to assassinate them with a poisoned meat pie. He had spent an entire evening watching the man's hands, noting how they trembled (from age, it turned out, not treachery), how he glanced at their table too often (because they were the only customers who had not paid yet), how he lingered by the door (to catch the breeze, not to signal accomplices). The pie had been excellent. The innkeep had been sixty-three years old and utterly unremarkable. The only thing assassinated had been Egg's pride.
Then there was the Dornish merchant's daughter, who Egg had been convinced—absolutely, positively, without a shred of doubt—was desperately in love with Dunk. He had spent three days arranging meetings, contriving reasons for Dunk to visit her father's stall, engineering conversations that would allow her glorious passion to finally declare itself. She had been in love, it transpired, with the rival merchant's son, a young man with a lazy eye and a talent for lute-playing. Dunk had not noticed either of them. Egg had not noticed the lute-playing son at all, despite the fact that the young man had been serenading the object of his affections from across the market square every afternoon, directly in Egg's line of sight.
And the white hart. The white hart. He had seen the flash of pale fur in the kingswood and had known, that this was a sign from the gods, a portent, a message meant for them alone. Four days they had chased it through the undergrowth, Dunk patient as always, Egg convinced with every snapping branch that the gods were leading them toward something momentous. The gods had led them toward a very tired horse, a cold camp, and the discovery that white harts, when glimpsed through leaves at dusk, looked remarkably like a common doe with a patch of light-colored fur.
Certainty, he reflected, was like a bad wine: it went to your head quickly and left you with a headache in the morning. The only thing he had ever been certain about that turned out to be true was that his father loved their mother.
"I do not recall precisely," he said, "but I am assured that it has happened."
Daeron made a sound that was somewhere between a laugh and a sigh. It was the sound of a man who had spent his life watching his younger siblings make terrible decisions and had long since given up trying to stop them. "And Ser Duncan? How does he feel about this... fondness?"
Egg looked at his hands. They were, he noticed, gripping the arms of his chair rather tightly. He made a conscious effort to relax them. He thought about the way Dunk had said I like being with you, and the way he had said it like it was the simplest thing in the world.
"That," he said, "is the other thing."
Daeron waited.
"I think," he said, and his voice was very small, "that he might be fond of him too."
His brother was silent for a space that might have been measured in epochs or merely in the time it took to lose patience with the world entirely. Daeron's hand went to his wine cup, lifted it halfway to his lips, then set it back down as though the wine had turned to vinegar while he wasn't looking.
"Well," Daeron said finally. "That is inconvenient."
Egg stared at him, his voice rising to a pitch that would have embarrassed him if he had any room left for embarrassment. "That is all you have to say? My brother—your brother—the most dangerous creature in all the Seven Kingdoms, has gone and tumbled headfirst into love with a hedge knight who couldn't lie to save his life, and the hedge knight may be halfway down the same hole, and all you can say is that it is inconvenient?"
Daeron considered this. "It is also, perhaps, a little bit funny."
"It is not funny," Egg said, and he was surprised to find that his voice was shaking. "It is not funny at all. It’s a fucking catastrophe.” He watched Daeron’s face, looking for the crack, the panic, anything that mirrored the screaming void opening up in his own chest. There was nothing. Just that calm, analytical sheen. “He’ll kill him, Daeron. Or he’ll have him killed. Or worse, he’ll… he’ll keep him. He’ll make him a pet. That’s what Aerion does.”
"Or," Daeron suggested, "Ser Duncan will knock him on his arse again, and Aerion will like it even more."
"So what do we do?" Egg demanded, the question a raw scrape in his throat. "Just let it happen? Watch him court Ser Duncan like some lovesick goose?"
"It is not your situation to do something about."
"I know that."
"Do you?"
Daeron reached across the table and put his hand on Egg's arm. His grip was light, but it was there.
"It is the heart," Daeron said, and his voice lost its habitual irony, softening into something sincere. "It wants what it wants. It has always wanted what it wants. To argue with it is a folly; to reason with it, a bore. No, the heart is a tyrant more absolute than any king, and its only law is its own desire. So there is nothing to be done.There is only—" His hand tightened, just for a moment."There is only waiting to see what it does."
Egg sat very still. He thought about the way a field looks after the harvest, when the stalks have been cut down and the earth turned over and there is nothing left but the dark soil waiting for the winter. All the things that grow in that soil, the old things, the deep-rooted things that pushed up through the loam whether a man willed it or not, stubborn as curses, patient as kings. His mother had been such a thing, planting her love in the stony field of his father's heart, seeing a tenderness there where others saw only the hard, unyielding granite. That foolish love had borne fruit: six children, a tangle of roots and branches from the same gnarled tree, their fates intertwined so tightly that to cut one was to bleed the others.
He thought about Dunk, who had come from Flea Bottom, from the sour earth that grew nothing but hunger and the sort of boys who died young with empty bellies. Yet somehow he had found his way to Aerion, and there, against all sense, he had put down roots. It was a strange thing, Egg noted, that a man born of Flea Bottom's filth could take root in the heart of a prince. Stranger still that the prince, for once, had not set it ablaze.
He wondered if love was always this—a patient, foolish planting of yourself where nothing ought to grow, a waiting for fruit that might never come, or might come only when it was too late. And the fruit of that particular tree was going to be something between a miracle and a disaster, depending entirely on which part of it you bit into. He was not certain he wanted to be standing underneath when it fell.
His brain spun like a mill wheel while his mouth stayed firmly clamped shut—a wise decision, given that opening it would have released a scream and probably some words about the grim jest of watching your cruelest brother become someone worth loving.
Daeron's hand fell away. He picked up his wine cup, drained it, and set it down with a sound that was final.
"Come," he said. "Let us find something to eat. I find that I am hungry, and you look as though you could use something stronger than wine."
Egg looked at him. "That is all? We are going to eat?"
"A good, solid meal. None of this picking-at-bread nonsense. Something that requires chewing. Roast fowl, perhaps." Daeron announced, as though he had just solved the riddle of the century. "A man cannot worry himself sick on an empty belly; the sickness comes faster, and then where are you? Supine and useless, that’s where. So we eat, and then we wait. And we offer up a prayer that whatever our brother does can be blamed on a misunderstanding, or a sudden fit of madness that passes before father reaches for his sword."
Daeron did not wait. One moment he was there, the next he was gone, his boots striking the flagstones with a rhythm that spoke of decisions already made. Egg scrambled after him."Daeron—Daeron, you cannot just walk off."
Daeron did not slow. His voice floated back over his shoulder, maddeningly calm. "Cannot? That is a curious word. It implies some impediment—a locked door, perhaps, or a missing limb, or a sudden act of the gods. I have all my parts, the door is open, and the gods have better things to do than concern themselves with my walking habits."
"You know what I mean."
"I know what you said. The words were plain enough." He turned the corner without breaking stride.
Egg swore under his breath and hurried after him, his voice rising. "You are going to talk to Aerion."
"A fine deduction. You should have been a maester."
"He will not listen to you."
"Then I shall have the exquisite satisfaction of telling him exactly what I think of him before he does not listen. There is pleasure in that, little brother. You ought to try it sometime."
"He will—"
Daeron stopped so abruptly that Egg nearly planted his face in his brother’s back. He turned, and for a moment his face was still set in that hard, weary line. "We are going to wait," Daeron said, and the sound of it was so foreign to Egg’s ears that he nearly flinched. An accidental kindness that seemed to embarrass them both by its very simplicity.
Egg wanted to argue. He wanted to point out that waiting was, statistically speaking, the least effective strategy for achieving any desired outcome, and that the history of the Seven Kingdoms was littered with the corpses of people who had waited when they should have acted.
Egg's first mistake was looking. His second mistake was continuing to look after he had seen what was there, because once you have seen something like that—hope, on Daeron's face, hope like a man who has been dead for years suddenly sitting up and asking what's for breakfast—there is no unseeing it. His arguments, which had been lined up neatly in his head like soldiers before a battle, suddenly found themselves without a commander. They shuffled their feet, looked at each other, and quietly disbanded.
So Egg just nodded as they walked down the corridor together.
──────────────────────
Egg sat on the low stone wall at the edge of the yard, his thin frame folded into itself like a piece of parchment left too long in the sun, and watched his sister Daella descend the steps from the keep with the measured dignity of a queen descending to greet her subjects.
She was, he reflected, rather too good at that sort of thing.
"Egg," she called, and her voice was warm, amused, carrying a note of conspiracy that made him sit up straighter despite himself. "I've been looking for you everywhere."
"Then you didn't look very hard," he said, because he was a younger brother and it was his sacred duty to be irritating. "I've been here all afternoon. Quite deliberately. It's the only place where nobody expects me to do anything useful, because the sun is trying to murder us all."
Daella laughed—a light, musical thing that made two passing servants smile despite themselves. Her dark hair falling past her shoulders in a cascade that no heat could seem to tarnish, and she had, Egg often thought, the singular misfortune of being both beautiful and aware of it, which made her insufferable on good days and unbearable on bad.
Today, however, there was something in her face beyond the usual serene satisfaction. A smile that kept threatening to break into something larger.
Her dress was new. Egg could tell because it had that particular quality of newness that old dresses, by a process of elimination, did not possess. It was the color of a cloudy sky just before rain, or possibly the color of a dove's wing if one were being poetical. Silver threads ran through it, catching the light in a way that suggested someone had spent a great deal of time and a considerable amount of money ensuring that the dress did not remain merely grey but became, instead, the sort of grey that made people say things like "what a lovely dress" rather than "why are you wearing that old thing." Their father, who could stare down rebellious lords and foreign ambassadors and the combined might of the Iron Throne when it suited him, had never in his life been able to look at Daella and say no.
"You've been to the village," Egg observed. "You have got a new dress."
"How clever you are, little brother. How observant." Daella settled herself beside him on the wall, arranging her skirts with ease. Up close, he could see the flush on her cheeks, the slight damp at her temples, the excitement she was trying—and failing—to contain. "Yes. I went to see the seamstress. The one Duncan mentioned."
Egg's eyebrows rose. "Duncan mentioned a seamstress?"
"Mentioned her? Mentioned her?" Daella's composure cracked, and she laughed again, louder this time, drawing a curious look from a guardsman on the far wall. "Egg, dear heart, Duncan has mentioned her constantly. He hasn't stopped mentioning her since we went down to the village three weeks ago. Do you remember? When he needed that new cloak?"
Egg remembered. He remembered because he had been the one to suggest they go to the village, desperate as he was for any excuse to escape the suffocating weight of Summerhall's walls, and Duncan had come along with a look of vague, amiable confusion that meant he was thinking about something else entirely. They had walked through the market together, Egg talking, Duncan nodding, until they passed a small shop with bolts of colored fabric visible through the window.
Duncan had stopped in the middle of the street, causing a cart full of onions to swerve around him and a woman with a basket of eels to curse his parentage.
And then he had said, very quietly, "That's where she works."
He had said it the way some men might say "That's where the treasure is buried." Or "That's where I left my heart."
Egg had peered through the window, curious despite himself. Inside, bent over a length of pale blue silk, a girl had been working. She was small, dark-haired, intent on her stitching, and she had looked up at exactly the wrong moment, or the right one, depending on how one viewed such things, and met Duncan's gaze through the dusty glass.
The big man had gone red as a beet. His ears, his neck, his cheeks, the tips of his fingers where they gripped his belt—all of him had flushed with a sudden, violent embarrassment that Egg found absolutely fascinating.
"Who is she?" Egg had asked.
"She sews," Duncan had said, which was not an answer at all. "She's very good. The best. That cloak you bought in Saltpans? The one with the—the seams? She could have done better. Much better. She—" And he had stopped, apparently realizing he was talking about seams, and the color had deepened impossibly.
Egg had let the matter drop. This was, he reflected now, maybe the seventeenth-worst decision he had made in his life, ranking somewhere between "let's take the shortcut through the swamp" and "I'm sure that innkeeper seems trustworthy." At the time, he had been too tired to press further, too worn down by the sheer exhausting business of being Aegon Targaryen in a world that seemed determined to make things complicated.
"The seamstress," he repeated.
"The one with the golden needle painted on her sign." Daella's eyes were shining. "The one Ser Duncan has been visiting."
"He has been visiting the seamstress?"
"Four times, Egg. Four times. I have counted. He takes me to the market, and we look at the silks and the ribbons and the combs, and then—" She paused, savoring the moment. "And then he finds a reason to stop at her stall. He asks about her work, about the patterns she has been making, about whether she has received any new silks from the east. He stands there for ages, Egg, and he talks to her, and his face goes all red, and he cannot seem to look at her directly, and he—" She stopped, breathless. "He is in love with her. I am certain of it."
Egg stared at his sister. He stared at the garden, at the roses climbing the trellis, at the bees making their slow way from flower to flower, and he did not know what to think. The heat of the afternoon pressed against his skin like a fever dream, and the scent of the roses filled his lungs with something that might have been sweetness or might have been decay.
He asked again, because his ears were playing tricks on him, because the relief that flooded through him was so vast and sudden that he could not trust it. "You are certain."
Daella nodded, her silver threads catching the light, her face bright with the pleasure of being the one to tell him. "Completely. He blushes, Egg. Our great and glorious Ser Duncan, who has faced down the stronget knights and walked away with his bones intact, who has stood before kings and lords and the combined might of the Lannister army without so much as a tremor in his sword hand—this man turns the color of a ripe tomato when she speaks to him. It is, I assure you, a spectacle."
Egg, who had been hoping against hope that this conversation might take a different turn, found himself unable to process this. "Ser Duncan would not—"
"Ser Duncan stammers. He shuffles. He looks at her, and his face goes through about twelve different expressions in the space of three heartbeats, none of which I would describe as 'composed.' It is, in its way, rather touching. Like watching a castle attempt to curtsy."
"You are enjoying this."
"He brings her things, you know. Bread from the kitchens. A knife he found somewhere, which he thought she might need for her work. She accepts these offerings with the gravity they deserve, which is to say she does not laugh at him, though I think she wants to. She is kind, our seamstress. Patient. The sort of person who waits for a man to find his words without making him feel foolish for losing them. Which is, I suppose, why he blushes in the first place."
Egg didn't know what to say.
"She loves him," Daella gushed. "She loves him, and he loves her, and they are both too polite to do anything about it. It is, if you think about it, the most Ser Duncan thing that has ever happened."
Egg sat with that for a moment. "Well," he said, and his voice came out steadier than he felt. "It seems our knight has finally found someone worth blushing for."
Daella smiled. "It seems he has."
"A seamstress," He said it to himself, to the part of him that had been so sure.
"Yes," Daella confirmed. “With black hair. Or perhaps dark brown. I cannot quite remember. Hair does not—”
Egg laughed. The sound escaped him before he could summon the proper restraint that etiquette demanded.
Daella’s eyes narrowed. "What's wrong," she asked, and there was suspicion in her voice, the suspicion of a person who had been laughed at before and had formed a strong opinion about it. "Why are you laughing?"
"I am not laughing," Egg said, and the words came out in a strangled wheeze.
"What is so amusing? You always laugh at me when I tell you important things."
"I am laughing at—" He stopped. The words caught in his throat, because he was not entirely certain what he was laughing at. Or rather, he was laughing at so many things that he could not choose among them.
He was laughing at himself, first and foremost. At the weeks of careful observation, the time spent watching Dunk's face for signs of love, the knot of dread that had tightened in his chest every time he saw his brother's eyes follow the big knight across the yard. He had been so certain. He had built an entire castle of suspicion on a foundation of nothing, and he had lived in it like a king, and now the walls were falling down around him and he had never been so relieved to be homeless.
He was laughing because he had been wrong. Gloriously, magnificently wrong. Dunk did not love Aerion. Dunk had never loved Aerion.
Daella was staring at him. "Egg?"
He waved a hand, still laughing. "I am fine. I am better than fine. I am—" He took a breath, forcing the laughter down.
Daella was watching him with an expression that had shifted from suspicion to hurt. "This is a matter of the utmost seriousness. You do not believe me."
"I believe you," Egg said, and he was surprised to find that he meant it. "I believe you, truly." He wiped his eyes. His hands were shaking. He was, he decided, the happiest fool in the Seven Kingdoms.
Daella's face cleared. "You do believe me."
"I do."
"Then why are you laughing?"
"Daella, I don’t say this lightly, but you are my absolute favorite sister."
“You have only two sisters.”
"Then sibling,” Egg corrected quickly. "My favorite sibling. Of all the brothers and sisters the gods have seen fit to burden me with, you are the one I would choose to keep, if keeping were required."
"Aerion is our brother."
“I’m trying to be nice."
"Are you going mad? Should I fetch the maester."
Egg ignored her. The question was not worthy of an answer, and besides, he was too content right now.. "I'm just happy because Dunk is happy. For once, the poor oaf has found someone who doesn't want to rob, stab, or marry him for his nonexistent lands."
"So the standard is simply ‘does not want him dead or destitute.’ How romantic."
"It’s a higher bar than you'd think," Egg said.
"He is not himself, Egg. You must have seen it. So quiet, always quiet. I told myself it was worry. Father's wars. Your safety.” She exhaled, and some of the tension went out of her. "But it was her. He is thinking of her. Only of her."
Egg nodded slowly. He was, he reflected, doing rather a lot of nodding lately.
"He asked me, the last time we went, whether I thought she would like it if he brought her flowers." Daella's voice dropped to the kind of whisper that was meant to convey great secrecy but was, in fact, audible to anyone within a fifty-foot radius. "Flowers, Egg. From the market. He wanted to know what kind she would prefer, and whether it was proper for a knight to give gifts to a woman he was not—" Her cheeks pinked, the colour rising in two neat circles that made her look, for a moment, like a girl of twelve rather than a woman of nineteen. "To a woman he was not courting."
Thank the gods, the Seven, and whatever minor deity presided over narrow escapes, he had asked Daella. Dunk possessed a romantic sensibility roughly equivalent to a brick. A brick, Egg reflected, might at least have the decency to be dropped on someone’s head and thus achieve something. Dunk, by contrast, merely stood there when women smiled.
"And what did you tell him?" he asked, because he liked seeing his sister so delighted.
“I told him that a woman who worked with her hands all day might value something that did not demand more work of her. Flowers are lovely, but they wither. Something she could keep, I said. Something to remind her of him.” Her voice dipped low, as though the memory had stolen into her chest and taken up residence there. “He looked so wounded. As if my words had been a blow instead of a kindness. And then he said—he said he had never been clever with gifts. That he had chosen one once, a very long time ago, and—” Her brow furrowed, a shadow passing over her face. “He only shook his head. Said it did not matter. Would not speak another word of it. For the rest of the afternoon he sat in silence, and I could not draw him out again.”
Egg had been on the road with Dunk for years. He had seen Dunk do many things: fight, ride, train, sleep, eat, talk, laugh, frown, worry, hope. He had seen Dunk give gifts, too—a copper to a beggar child, an apple to a horse, a kind word to a innkeep who had been shouted at by a knight. But a gift chosen with care, saved for, planned for? A gift that had cost something, that had meant something, that had been wrapped in hope and presented with trembling hands?
He searched his memory, and he found nothing. Egg had been there, had he not? He had been at Dunk's side for all of it, through all the long miles, all the cold nights, all the small moments that made up the fabric of their life together. If Dunk had chosen a gift for someone, Egg would have noticed.
Perhaps it had been chosen in the time before Egg, the time when Dunk had been alone, the time he did not speak of. Perhaps it had been chosen for someone Egg had never met, someone who existed only in the space between Dunk's silences. He did not know.
"Was that before he came to Summerhall?"
Daella shrugged. "I do not know. He did not want to talk about it. I could tell." Her gaze met his."So I did not ask."
Egg stared at her. "You did not ask."
"No."
"You—Daella, you had a mystery dangling before you like a ripe peach, and you simply… walked past it?"
"And you, I suppose, would have pried it out of him with a pair of pliers and a burning torch?"
"I would have been subtle."
"You once asked him, to his face, if his mother had been a whore."
"That was curiosity. A long time ago!"
"It was four moons ago."
"He forgave me."
"He forgives everyone. That is not a testament to your subtlety. That is a testament to his sainthood."
Egg crossed his arms. "You could have asked me to ask him."
"So you could blunder through it like a cart horse through a garden? No, thank you."
"You simply do not wish to admit that you could not perform it."
Daella smiled—a slow, dangerous smile that she had learned from their father and deployed only when she was about to win. "I did not ask," she said, "because I already know more than you."
"What? What do you know?"
"Ask me."
"Daella."
"Ask me nicely."
"Daella."
"That was not nice."
He closed his eyes, drew a breath, and opened them again with the strained patience of a septon addressing a stubborn mule. "Dearest sister, light of my life, jewel of House Targaryen, what do you know?"
"Nothing."
"You made that up to torment me."
"Or perhaps I am protecting a wounded man:s heart. You will never know."
How could he have been so blind? The question burned through Egg like a brand held too long to flesh, for the truth had been there all along, sitting in plain sight like a sword on a table he had walked past a hundred times. Dunk had counted his silver for weeks—Egg remembered the candlelight, the furrowed brow, the lips that moved soundlessly over sums the knight had never quite mastered. And Egg had thought nothing of it. Nothing. The silver was for the seamstress, a commission, a gift that would cost Dunk not only coin but the courage to walk through her door and offer it.
He must have sat there in silence too long, because when Egg finally surfaced from the swamp of his own stupidity, Daella was giving him a concerned look.
"You've gone white as milk. What is it?"
Egg shook himself. "We should go to the village soon. All of us. You and me and Dunk. I want to see this seamstress for myself."
Daella's face lit up like a lantern at sundown. "Yes, brother, yes we should. That woman has got a gift, Egg. The dragons she sews—I tell you, the scales catch the light so you'd swear they was fixing to leap off the cloth and bite somebody. Ser Duncan stood there gawping at it like a calf at a new gate. Said he'd never laid eyes on anything to match it. Said it was the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen."
Egg permitted himself a smile, though it did not reach his eyes. This new information had just torched everything he’d been telling himself, and now he was standing in the smoking ruin of what had seemed, ten minutes ago, like a simple truth. Mere coincidence, surely—for who did not delight in dragons, in the fine labor of skilled hands? Those were not harbingers. They were ordinary pleasures. "She sounds very talented."
“She is,” Daella agreed. "She made a cloak for Lady Erleen last moon. The whole thing worked in green thread, with roses climbing up from the hem. It took her two weeks, and she did not sleep for the last three nights, but she finished it. Lady Erleen was so pleased she paid her double."
"That is generous."
Egg gave it a fair shake—listened, nodded, even made the occasional sound that might, to the kind observer, be mistaken for thoughtful engagement. He really did. But a man can only push a horse so far before the beast decides it has had quite enough of his nonsense and lies down to die, and Egg’s attention had expired somewhere around the second mention of thread counts, leaving only the hollow shell of a boy who looked like he was listening while his mind fled the premises entirely.
The trouble was this: Ser Duncan the Tall had never, in all the years Egg had known him, given a single damn about dragons. You could talk until your voice gave out about Vhagar and Vermithor, about Meraxes and Balerion and all the rest of that fiery menagerie his ancestors had ridden into glory, and Dunk would nod along with the polite enthusiasm of a man being instructed on the proper way to muck out a stable. It was not that he was rude; he simply did not see the relevance. Dragons were dead, horses were alive, and horses needed shoeing. That was the sum of his interest.
Egg did not wish to analyze what it signified that Dunk now found himself suddenly fascinated by dragons. Not one little bit. Some doors, once opened, let out things you could not stuff back in, and he had no intention of being the fool to turn the key. Instead he latched onto his sister's theory. The seamstress. That was it. Dunk had been bitten by the love-bug, not the dragon-bug. It was a whole lot more sensible, a whole lot more pleasant to think about, and Egg made up his mind to believe it with all the stubbornness his family was famous for.
He would believe it if it killed him. And given the way his stomach had been twisting itself into knots these past few weeks, he was beginning to think it might.