Chapter Text
Daeron scrambled upright, his face detaching from the sticky tabletop with some effort, and fell backwards over the bench he’d been resting on.
“Where is he?” Daeron demanded.
The innkeeper looked down at his crumpled position, a puzzled expression on her round face.
“Who, milord?”
“The-”
The tree…the dragon..it falls, like a shadow - the dragon, dead, and the tree -
Daeron shuffled to his feet, hair clinging uncomfortably to the side of his face. He didn’t finish his sentence, too busy trying to catch his breath beneath the terror sinking its claws into him.
The tree, casting its shade, and the dragon dead-
It was not Daeron’s first time dreaming of dead dragons. He’d wager that his dreams had led him to see more dragons than any other Targaryen who yet lived, and each time they were dead. But the dread was new, or perhaps it was more pronounced now, digging itself into the very marrow of his bones, and it was this dread that forced him forward.
“Milord?”
Ah. The innkeeper. He’d nearly forgotten about her - her face blurred before his eyes, familiar and foreign at once. Something about it pulled at him.
Daeron drug a hand up from his side to pull the wine-stained hair out of his face. The blond strands tangled themselves into knots around his fingers, the pain from pulling at them sharp enough to bite through his haze for a moment.
“The boy?” he managed to ask.
“Saw ‘im slip outside earlier, milord.”
Daeron cursed and listed toward the door himself. A sad picture he must make. A sad dragon. But not a dead one. He wavered for a moment, swaying in his efforts to pull a coin from his purse for his meal and his wine. His fingers were clumsy from drink and it clattered to the floor, shining gold amid the dust. Bright. Daeron tore his eyes away and stumbled for the doorway. The door was opened just as he made to step through it and Daeron was forced to look up to meet the eyes of the man obstructing his way. And up.
The tree. Death. He falls, and what follows-
“You!” The accusation punched its way past Daeron’s lips in a near breathless shout and was met only with a pair of wavering, wide blue eyes.
“Me, ser?”
“I - I dreamed of you. Stay clear of me,” Daeron commanded and rushed to clear out from the man’s space, not awaiting a response. All of a sudden there was no thing more important than getting away. The world swum around him as he cast his eyes about for Aegon. Egg. His second-most favourite brother. Not much of a competition, with Aerion there bound to take the bottom-most spot, but - Egg was young, such a bright thing. Can’t let the shadow take him. A dead dragon - and the tree is already there, ready to take him. Not Egg. Not him, please-
“Aegon!” he called. “Where are you?”
“Daeron?” his brother's voice answered him from somewhere within the stables. Daeron moved toward there with uncertain steps. Aegon’s bald head poked out of the stable, lantern light glinting of the bald surface. Daeron traced a finger across the soft skin only to be met with a quizzical glance. Hells, but that had been a funny idea, the notion of fathers face when he saw alone enough to sustain him. Aegon really did look like an egg now. Eggs crack, don’t they? Will this one hatch - a dragon, perhaps, but no. A crown. A dead dragon and a crown and a tree-
“Daeron!”
“We must leave,” Daeron demanded, urgency returned to him.
“Why must we?” Aegon replied in a familiar quizzical lilt. “You and Aerion both like to say a prince must do nothing.”
Before Daeron had a chance to fully process the idea of being categorised together with Aerion in any matter, Aegon continued. “Besides, our horses are rubbed down and sleeping. I don’t believe they’d like to be woken before noon tomorrow.”
Indeed their horses - chosen especially from the royal stables for their plodding, stubbornly steady attitude in order to make an escape the like of which they’d performed earlier that day harder to pull off - had seemed unlikely to move again when they’d dismounted earlier. But Daeron’s back was cold with sweat, his gut tight with a heaviness that had abated only somewhat at having Egg safely within his sight, the need to flee his terror still itching at his gums. He cast his eyes about, alighting on a likely set of steeds in the neighbouring box.
“Those horses are still saddled. We will take them,” he decided. He could not find the words to realise the dread sitting across his shoulders. Not without sending Aegon skittering, practical creature that he was. Only -
“Let us be away.”
—
Dunk shivered as he stepped back out into the night, trying to draw his cloak tighter against the cold - to little avail, given as the fabric was worn all over. The innkeep had offered a room for the night, distracted as she’d been, but Dunk could hardly afford the coin to spend on such a luxury when a tree would serve just as well. He reckoned the horses would be little pleased with his decision. Dunk only hoped that the stableboy had been as good as his word and given them their feed already.
The stable, however, was empty. Not just of the boy. There was a smattering of his armour pieces and other belongings between Sweetfoots anxiously shuffling hooves, the glint of something golden beneath the straw - but Storm and Chestnut were both gone, alongside their tack. Dunk went round the back of the stable, in case the boy was pulling a prank that’d see his ears boxed, but the shed and its surroundings only yielded two tired nags in the next box over, no sight of Dunk’s horses.
The worry was accompanied by a solid helping of guilt. Ser Arlan was dead not even a full day, and Dunk’d managed to lose two of his three prized horses already. Had gotten them stolen.
“The old man…” Dunk muttered, but found himself unable to complete the sentence. The imagined wisdom of Ser Arlan came up empty even in his mind, for the man would’ve never allowed himself to get into such a situation.
Then he remembered - the boy. He’d taken the horse's leads, led Sweetfoot right to the box in which she still stood. Dunk made to go back inside. Catching the innkeepers eye from where she was wiping down a table, Dunk gestured. He tried not to feel too much like a lumbering ochs as he did it, and mostly failed.
“Your boy - he took my horses!”
That had the innkeeper whipping down her rag in determination and stepping closer.
“Ser, what are you talking about?”
“The horses are gone!”
The innkeep stormed out right behind him, following him to the stable and inspecting it as though that may make the horses reappear.
“There’s one right there.”
“But there were three - and now two are gone, and the boy along them.”
“He’s a lout and a layabout, alright, but my boy ain’t no thief,” the woman returned, incensed.
“But it was your boy who took my horse from me!”
“Aye? You’re certain.”
“Aye, I’m certain! Ain’t an abundance of bald kids around even in these parts, I reckon.”
The woman stepped back, some of the colour fading from her cheeks.
“Bald? My son’s not bald. The bald boy belonged with that fancy lord, him who was here just ‘fore you left.”
“That weren’t your boy?” Dunk asked. The boy’d seemed happy enough to be addressed as a stableboy.
“My boy? Hah! Mine’s a head taller, and like as not to be loitering near the tourney grounds.”
“So you’re saying some lord stole my horses? Or his squire did?” Dunk asked.
The notion seemed too strange to credit; thievery was the domain of bandits and Flea Bottom rabble. Lords were men of honor, not - not horse thieves.
“I’m saying if you gave your horses to the bald one and now they’re gone, it ain’t my boy who did it.”
Dunk dropped his head. The lord had been dressed expensively, even if he’d stunk like the bottom of a barrel. Not someone who’d need to resort to horse thievery, certainly? Most like it’d just been a misunderstanding, although Dunk couldn’t reckon what sort of misunderstanding made one take another man's horses.
“What was the lord's name?” he asked.
“Don’t rightly know. He and the boy were only here an afternoon,” the innkeep shrugged, “he paid well.”
“Didn’t pay for the horses,” Dunk retorted glumly. Not the innkeeper's boy. That left him little enough to go on. The roads were dry and far too dusty to carry prints - it’d make figuring which way they’d ridden from here difficult at best. And yet Dunk needed to try.
Those three horses were all he had left in the world, and losing them felt near as heavy a blow as losing his Ser.
He bent down to pick up the scattered pieces of his belongings on the floor - the chainmail, what there was of it, and his vest. His fingers brushed against something else, and Dunk picked up a coin with no small amount of irritation. There was another beside it; one for each horse.
“What kind of thief leaves a payment?” Dunk asked. Sweetfoot only nickered in reply, although the innkeeper looked more curious. She seemed much reconciled to Dunk, now that her boy was no longer accused of theft. The two coins were sitting in the palm of his hand sadly. They looked small there.
“Poor price for a horse, that.”
Dunk could only nod.
“But mayhap no thief. Those horses over there belonged were theirs; might’ve been they just took your horses to have fresh ones, or been confused on which were theirs.”
The first option still sounded like thievery to Dunk, and the second incomprehensible - not recognise one’s own horse? - but the woman just seemed resigned.
“Mayhap,” Dunk agreed, “Where’d they go, you reckon?”
The inn was at a crossroad, and there were four paths that stretched away from it, each as likely as the other.
“He’ll have gone to the tourney - it’s where all the knights are going these past days,” the woman returned. Dunk wasn’t sure how wise it’d be of a horse thief to seek a tourney, but - a misunderstanding. That ought to be it. In any case, one direction was as good as another.
“I thank you,” Dunk nodded toward the woman. He felt some guilt for suspecting her son, even as he tried to push it back. Of course she could still be involved, somehow - it seemed like a trick they’d have pulled, years and years ago, if they dared - but the entire situation was strange. Why take two horses, and not three? Why leave the other horses and their expensive tack? Why the payment?
Strangeness, in Dunk's experience, was the domain of lords rather than smallfolk.
“And apologies.”
“You ought take those other horses,” the woman said.
“I can’t just-”
“So you can trade them once you’ve found them at the tourney.”
The idea still seemed wrong, like it’d make Dunk as much of a thief as the other men.
“I can hardly keep them with no one paying for their feed.” she finished.
Dunk looked over at the other box and the horses in it, black coats gleaming even as they rested after their exertion. Their tack was off to the side, all dark fabric and perfectly gleaming leather. There was a sense of wrongness to it even as it made sense, but Dunk could only shrug.
“I suppose.”