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Dunk’s head was splitting. There was a great throbbing, ringing pain right at his temple which seemed to build with movement and only subsided when he stayed very, very still. The problem was, of course, that he had a list of things to do before the tourney as long as his arm and neither the thick, sour taste on his tongue nor the uncomfortable sheen of sweat on his back ought to get in the way.
With that in mind, he headed for the river. It had been good to him the day before, and now the cool water provided a balm which cleared his head somewhat. He still felt slow and heavy, but he no longer felt like he was halfway to crawling out of his own skin. He soaped himself up roughly with the palm of his hand, up one leg and down the other, with a bar found in one of Ser Arlan’s bags. Washing the whole of his back was an impossibility, but he could twist to reach most of it, managing up his hip and –
It was the colour, rather than the shape, which caught his eye. The mark, twisting and curling as it was, had been there for as long as he could remember, arching over his hipbone and dipping down beyond where he could see to his arse. It didn’t even merit a pause anymore; he had traced his fingers along it so many times, picturing what it might look like on someone else’s skin.
But the colour, that was new. Very new. A bright, golden yellow which met and merged with a deep, leafy green.
Dunk swallowed. His thoughts ran away with him, spinning far beyond what he was able to keep up with. He had met his soulmate. Not just met – touched. He had touched his soulmate, and he didn’t even remember it.
He didn’t even wait to stop dripping before he was thrusting his clothing over his head, the worn fabric chafing against his damp skin. Inside, he was trying to compose a list of all the people he had so much as brushed hands with the night before. His memory was spotty, just flashes of moments between long, black stretches. There was the Fossoway boy, leading him to a tent where ale flowed like water from a fountain. Mountains of food, rows of folk on benches to either side of him filling their plates, content in the knowledge that they were not footing the bill. Then, music. Dancing. His body too big, as it ever was, to be led – though someone was there cheering him on, as though he wasn’t making a bloody big fool of himself.
Lyonel Baratheon. The Laughing Storm.
He had been the host, he had been the one grinning benevolently across the pavilion. Dunk had watched him make an introduction, slip one hand into another with a knowing quirk of his eyebrows at the newly-formed pairing, slipping his way through crowds of people who he greeted by name.
If anyone was going to have an idea of who else might have gotten their colours last night, it was him.
Dunk was crossing the town of tents on Ashford’s green in long, loping strides when his name was called. He drew up short, squinting for the source against the morning sun.
“Bloody good night, wasn’t it, Ser?” Raymun Fossoway grinned as he caught up with Dunk, throwing an easy, familiar arm around his shoulders in greeting. “My head’s pounding. Always say I won’t drink like that again, but I never stick to it.” He shrugged without a single sign of the self-censure which ought to accompany such a statement.
Dunk tried to picture fingers against Raymun’s skin. There wasn't even a flicker of remembrance there. “Yeah.” He agreed with forced enthusiasm that rang with distraction. “You haven’t seen Baratheon this morning, have you?”
Raymun had pulled a shiny green apple from a pocket and was rubbing it against his sleeve. “No, he’s probably sleeping the worst of it off. The two of you made a good run at that red he produced, surprised you’re upright at all.” He held out the apple. “Here, I brought a load of them with me. Why are you looking for him?”
“I need to talk to him.” Dunk accepted the apple, though the thought of eating made his stomach churn. “Thank you.”
“Eat it. It’ll help.” Raymun promised, already turning to return to the grouping of tents ruled over by his cousin. “Bet you all my apples you’ll find him in his bed and you won’t be able to rouse him. Drank like a Dornish man, he did.”
Dunk nodded, biting into the apple obediently as he waved his goodbye. The juice, fresh across his parched tongue, did help.
On arriving at the group of tents adorned by black and gold flags, he found that it was, indeed, quiet. There was a squire sat on a low stool beside a firepit, poking listlessly at the smoking embers with a stick. He looked to be suffering about as much as Dunk himself.
“Your master?” Dunk asked him.
The boy didn’t seem surprised, nor did he question Dunk at all on the request. He lifted one hand and gestured towards the pavilion which had housed the revelries of the evening before. “In there, ser.”
Dunk had to duck to pass under the entranceway. The sounds of morning from outside were smothered by the thick, embellished fabric of the tent, which tinged the morning light a warm, honey-gold. Every surface bore the evidence of the evening before; half-empty tankards, overturned bottles, abandoned platters, belongings left behind by those too deep in their cups to care. There were also people, sleeping and stirring, laid out on benches and the richly-carpeted ground.
“Ser Duncan!” The voice was too loud and far too jaunty for a man who could barely stand up, just a few hours early. “I hadn’t expected your return so soon. On the hunt for some breakfast? I’m afraid you’ll be sorely disappointed, my servants seem to have all simultaneously succumbed to some sort of dreadful illness.” Lyonel was half-dressed, a linen undershirt and a pair of dark breeches. His hair was as wild and untamed as it had been the night before, falling into his face in a tangle of curls.
“No. No, ser. I was just looking for you.” Dunk stumbled through the words.
“Then it is my lucky day.” Lyonel grinned, snagging a wineskin off the table where he had been seated the night before. “Hair of the dog.” He explained before taking a swig.
“You do seem remarkably hale, milord, if you don’t mind me saying.” The idea of wine made Dunk’s gorge rise.
“It’s practice, that’s all. I am just grateful I do not need to mount my horse this morning.” Lyonel made as though to sit, but found that the bench he had been aiming for was taken by a scantily-dressed sleeping woman. “Ah. Well. What can I help you with, good ser?”
Dunk shuffled, hand ghosting across his hip. “I have a few questions, about last night. It’s all a bit…” He hesitated, looking for words which not risk offending the man whose food he had dined on the night before. “Hazy, milord.”
Lyonel laughed. “Hazy indeed. Perhaps we ought to step outside, lest we continue to disturb our sleeping friends.” He cupped Dunk’s elbow in fingers strengthened by shield and sword, and guided him back out into the morning sun. “Who was it that caught your eye?” Lyonel was used to playing this role. His tourney feasts – a tradition he had started – were infamous as the root cause of innumerable ill-advised liaisons, and he often navigated the aftermath with an unlikely diplomacy.
“No, no. It’s not that, ser. Well, not exactly.” Dunk raised a hand to the half-sleeping squire as they passed, an acknowledgement of the knowledge he had shared which had led to Lyonel’s successful location. “I just was hoping… has anyone been here asking any questions this morning?”
Lyonel laughed. “No, you are my very first visitor of the morning. In fact, I would have been quite annoyed to have been disturbed if I hadn’t woken earlier, needing to piss badly enough to rouse a dead man.”
Dunk’s heart sank. His hope had been that someone would have, similar to himself, woken to find their mark dancing with colour and asked Lyonel for his assistance with identifying the culprit. If they hadn’t… Well, it was a not uncommon tale for someone to miss their soulmate entirely in such a way. Ser Arlan himself, with the mark that darkened half of his face, never knew who his was. He had taken off his helmet to find his skin alight with colour after a battle in the Stormlands.
Raymun, clearly keen for any distraction from whatever task he had been told to turn his hand to, roused Dunk from his thoughts. “Damn you, you tall bastard! How d’you get him out of bed?” He called with a grin that didn’t carry the anger the words implied.
Lyonel raised an eyebrow inquisitively.
Dunk grimaced at the way the squire’s words sounded. “He bet me that you would be sleeping.” He offered in a half-baked explanation, throwing Raymun a look that was half-apologetic for not responding to the taunt as he continued to lead a laughing Lyonel by.
His tree was rising up in front of them before he realised where he was taking the lord and he cursed himself silently. His camp couldn’t even stand up to the title. There was the remains of an attempt at a fire, started last night and abandoned in his drunken exhaustion, the horses hobbled and tethered to the tree, and the bedroll he had left untidied that morning in his eagerness to bathe.
Lyonel didn’t seem to be bothered about the clear evidence of Dunk’s station – or lack thereof. He sat himself down under the tree without invitation and leaned against the trunk, a sigh of relief escaping him. Maybe he wasn’t as unscathed by the night before as he had been claiming to be. “Tell me, Ser Dunk. What sort of questions are you hoping someone would be asking the night after my feast?”
Dunk was still holding the core of his apple in one hand and he held it to Sweetfoot’s lips, hoping she would eat it quietly enough that the others wouldn’t notice. It didn’t work, of course, and Thunder was soon nosing against his pockets in search of something for himself. “Sorry, boy.” He murmured to him, stroking the point between his eyes where he liked to be scratched. Then, he turned to Lyonel and the question he had asked. “It’s a sensitive subject, ser.” Soulmates weren’t exactly private – many married theirs, and that was not something to be hidden – but they also weren’t something you discussed with just anyone. Dunk only knew about Ser Arlan’s because the man loved to tell a tragic story when he was drunk.
“I’m a sensitive man.” Lyonel responded with a magnanimous wave of his hand. “Besides, I like to think we bared enough of ourselves last night not to talk as strangers.”
That make Dunk wince, the question of what, exactly, he had shared nagging at him. But Lyonel didn’t seem offended and he hadn’t sought to have Dunk removed from the camp entirely. Perhaps it was mortifying, but he had not said anything dangerous. “As you wish, milord. I just…” Dunk hesitated, and then moved to sit on the moss-covered roots of the tree, propped against the trunk next to Lyonel. It was a delaying tactic, as he searched for the words to continue. “I woke up this morning, and bathed in the river, and my mark’s all lit up with colour where it wasn’t before.” The explanation came out in a rush in the end, one word chasing the next as though getting it over with would make the process easier.
“I see.” Lyonel’s voice was unusually soft. “And where is it?”
Dunk’s hand went to his hip in illustration. “It’s like… part of a tree, with all the parts that branch off it.” He splayed his fingers, tracing the air in front of him as if to make the shapes.
“That’s funny.” Lyonel replied after a moment of silence, tipping his head back against the trunk behind him. “I saw it more as an antler.”
Dunk lifted his head, looking at the man beside him. “You saw it? When were you looking at my arse?” It didn’t occur to him in that moment to censure his language. Ser Arlan would have his head for using a word like ‘arse’ in front of a minor lord, nevermind the heir to the Storm’s End.
“Not your arse.” Lyonel held the wineskin out to Dunk and, when he took it, levered himself forward into his knees. For a moment, Dunk watched in confusion as Lyonel worked his undershirt out of the waistband of his breeches. “I had my suspicions that the Gods had something in store for us, but I can’t claim that this is what I had in mind.”
“I don’t understand.” Dunk had spoken too quickly; as soon as his gaze fell back from Lyonel’s face to his hands, busy at his hip, realisation drew in like the tide.
There, on Lyonel’s skin, ran rivers of a golden yellow, merging with a deep, leafy green. It curved over the top of his breeches at his hip and then disappeared underneath it again, down towards his arse. “Well, fuck me.” Lyonel spoke outloud, though he didn’t seem upset by the revelation. If anything, he was on the verge of laughter, living up to his name in spirit and practice.
“I don’t understand.” Dunk repeated – though he did, at the very core of his being, he did – and his hand, the one unburdened by Lyonel’s wineskin, was already reaching out towards the shorter man’s skin. He stopped short on realising what he was doing, until Lyonel himself closed the distance with guiding fingers around Dunk’s wrist, placing his hand directly on the bare skin of his mark. For a moment, they were both silent, Dunk tracing the colours with a slow reverence that cloaked his racing thoughts.
“So it is as I suspected. We are a match.” Lyonel’s fingers were still on Dunk’s wrist, and he squeezed it in a way which seemed almost like a greeting.
“We are a match.” Dunk echoed, eyes flickering up to Lyonel’s face to find the shorter man looking at him. “There must be a mistake, milord.”
Lyonel’s forehead creased, the slight uptick at the corners of his mouth disappearing. Doubt did not sit easily on him - he was not raised to rejection - but nonetheless he felt the threat of it in that moment. “What makes you say that?”
Dunk retreated all of a sudden, backing up on his haunches, away. His fingertips, where he had traced the lines on Lyonel’s skin, burned with the heat of the contact. “You’re a Lord. The heir to Storm’s End, we can’t…” He rubbed his hands over his face, through his wheaten hair. “I’m a hedge knight, ser. A bastard and an orphan from Fleabottom. We can’t be a match.” Highborn people matched with highborn people, low with low. That was the way it worked. These links, between those born to castles and those to the gutter, were the stuff of the songs players saved for the end of the night, when drunkeness was working on replacing revelry with melancholy.
“You’re approaching blasphemy, dear ser.” Lyonel told him, good humour returning as Dunk’s reasons for protesting caught up with him. This doubt was something he could deal with. It was not a rejection of him, the man, but of their standings, and those could change in the blink of an eye. “The Gods don’t make mistakes.”
“Won’t it make things harder for you?” Dunk’s gaze was on his hands, large and roughened by a lifetime of work. “Won’t people have things to say?”
Lyonel did laugh then, throwing his head back. “Show me the cunt who dares and I will unburden him of his stones.” He reached out, covering Dunk’s hands with one of his own. Lyonel's was smaller, yes, but no less work-worn, the callouses of a lifetime of training with sword and shield, of riding and hunting, shaping his fingers. His palm settled against the hedge knight’s, thumb slipping into place underneath. With that grasp, he pulled him forward gently, closing the space Dunk had created between them. Lyonel was still on his knees, undershirt half-untucked from baring his mark, making up some of the heigh difference there usually would be between them. From there, he could tilt his face upwards and claim the hedge knight’s lips. It was just the barest brush, but it set the Dunk’s breath to dancing. “Besides, my dear ser, you will no longer be a hedge knight once you have sworn to serve at Storm’s End. Then, no-one will be able to say a damned thing.”
Dunk took several moments to catch up, eyes dancing between Lyonel’s mouth and a space somewhere over his shoulder. “I’ve got… Need to find someone to vouch for me first. Someone who remembers Ser Arlan.” He pulled his bottom lip into his mouth for a moment and finally met Lyonel’s gaze again.
Lyonel grinned. That was not a refusal of his invitation. “I doubt I would be taken at my word if I were to do it now.” The Baratheon could see where Dunk’s thoughts were spinning, but if he were to vouch for him and their bond were to become common knowledge, it would cast doubt on whether Lyonel had known this Ser Arlan of Pennytree at all – doubt which would be, of course, entirely valid. “But the day is yet young and there are knights aplenty you have not interrogated on the matter, I am sure.”
Dunk nodded, pushing himself up onto his feet. The entirely world had shifted around him, anchored to a new point, but he did still have things to do. “You’re right, of course, milord.” He said, holding out his hand to help Lyonel up from the ground.
“Lyonel.” The shorter man corrected, gripping Dunk’s hand and letting him haul him to his feet. “We are soulmates. I think it is past time you drop the formalities.”
“Lyonel.” Dunk agreed, retaining his grip on Lyonel’s hand longer than strictly necessary once the man was upright. The contact was warm and welcome and echoed with a deep familiarity.
“So.” Lyonel brushed off his breeches as they turned back towards the camp. “Does this mean I get to see your arse?”