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Baelor Breakspear comes to him first at the Ashford Meadow, under the elm tree. Dunk wakes with a start, his head splintering at the seams, and his chest feels heavy, bruised and wet on the inside, as if filled with mud from the lists. His prince is standing before him, tall, tall and black and red.
“Your Grace”, Dunk wheezes, “Your Grace…”
“No need to rise, ser Duncan.” He can’t make out his prince’s face in the dark, but the wet memory of it comes on its own, stark and bloody. Dunk closes his one good eye not to weep, but the other, swollen shut, seeps with something still.
“You’re dead, Your Grace”, he tries to say, but his tongue feels useless in his mouth.
“All men die, ser Duncan, sooner or later. You’re big enough to know that.” By the tone of his voice it would seem that His Grace were smiling, but Dunk is at a loss for why. Dunk the lunk. His head feels full with burning coal and pig iron, and for once he would prefer it be stuffed with rotten straw, as people say it is sometimes.
“Am I dying, Your Grace?”. There would be a relief. What use is a sword without a prince to guard?
“Close to it, but I’d wager there’s still more fight left in you, ser.” There’s that smile again, creeping up from where Dunk can’t bear to look.
“What’s the point, Your Grace? They say I killed you. They’re right in saying so.” Tears well up unbidden and Dunks scrunches his face to will them to stop, but the pain of it makes them spill forth in earnest.
“I’ve made my own choice, ser Duncan. Don’t deny it to me. I’ve little left besides.” The prince sounds sadder now, and Dunk would double over and crawl at His Grace’s feet to try to apologize, only he can’t move at all.
“We must live with our own choices, it is the only way to live at all. You are a knight brave and true, and you’ve a bright future ahead of you, I have no doubt. But for that future, you must rise first from under the elm tree, else the cold kills you. I hear it in your chest.”
“I can’t for the life of me see the point in doing that, Your Grace.” Dunk is tilting slowly to the side to lie down. He’s tired of sitting and hopes that the cold mud will help his head.
Cool hands wrap around him and put him back upright. The prince is much closer to him now, and Dunk can see his face, lined with worry, and his mismatched eyes. His head quiets, as if submerged in a cool summer spring.
“You’ve taken my nephew as your squire. You’ve a duty to him, and to my brother. I would ask you to not renege on it.”
“They wouldn’t want me after all that’s happened, you know that, your Grace. Your brother…”
“I would think I know my brother a little better that you, ser Duncan. And I say there is hope. The boy loves you, besides, and you love him just as much. I would not have you die here, ser Duncan the Tall, so up you go. Up! Up!”
And up he goes.
***
The prince visits him sometimes for a brief moment of despair, but doesn’t say much. The second time he comes in earnest is when Dunk is laid out on a bed in Coldmoat, after the fight in the Chequy Water. His Grace is sat on an old chair by his bedside and is reading through some dusty old tome. Dunk can’t make out the letters, but it must be some book on healing herbs (what else would they have in the infirmary?).
“You’ve drowned, ser Duncan.” The prince puts his book aside and it’s gone as if it never were here in the first place. “Did you know?”
Dunk figures it must be so. He remembers Lucas the Longinch twisting in the dark murky water, and a slender white fish, and two voices: Get up, ser Duncan, get up!
“Egg helped haul you back to shore. If not for him, and the local maester, you would be gone for good.”
The prince’s face is a funeral mask, white on black, and Dunk wonders if he’s not hot in his long black coat and a travelling cloak in this heat.
“The dead are always cold, I fear. My pyre warmed me up for the last time and that was that.” The prince is not unkind in his speech, but Dunk’s heart twists all the same.
“I’m sorry, Your Grace”, he whispers hoarsely, “I never meant for this, I swear I never did.”
The prince smiles a faint sad smile that is so far away it must be somewhere in King’s Landing.
“It’s been two years by now, ser Duncan. You must let me go. It seems that oath you swore to me makes you wish to follow me into an early grave. The dead can’t hold you to account, ser, for we are dead.”
And gone, and ash, Dunk wants to add. Ashes for Ashford. What on earth made you come there, with your dragon dreams that always end in blood?
“Your Grace, forgive me…”, Dunk starts, but there’s a lump in his throat. “prince Daeron dreamed you dead. Why come to Ashford at all?”
The prince looks at him, bone-weary and impossibly kind.
“The boy had always been troubled with visions, ever since he was a child. There’s dreams, and there’s dreams. Some he learned never to share.”
Dunk feels exhausted, and when tears come to his eyes he has no strength left to hold them back.
“Why me, Your Grace?” he chokes, wiping furiously at his face, “why not go to your brother in Summerhall? He must miss you more than I do.”
“Who’s to say I’m not there? You’ve been hit on your head an awful lot lately, ser, and it must needs be you rest. When you wake I will not be here, and I pray we won’t meet again.”
There’s that cool hand once more on Dunk’s burning forehead.
“Get your rest, ser. And swear to me that your love of the living dragon shall matter more to you than your oath to the dead one.”
Dunk can’t swear anything for he is fast asleep already.