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"Your hair is longer."
The summer is kind this morn. The air is fresh and free, and the soil does not weep with sky tears. This year's storms had been a ruthless war waged on their heads. Fortunate for the farmers, discarded by the highborns in their homely grandeur, and cursed by the hedge knight and his squire.
Today is gentle, such are the fingers weaving through Dunk's hair. The nails of them scratch leisurely at his skull and he knows the boy best be up by now tending to the horses, but this moment hangs like a baited hook before the foolish trout. The truth of it, what lies beyond, is nothing short of agony. The boy can sleep, and Dunk thinks he'd like to stay here beneath this tree until his days have run dry and the earth claimed him.
"Is that a bad thing?" Dunk doesn't open his eyes, but he feels lips ghost against his forehead.
"No," She plays at the roots. He can hear the smile in her words, he can see it in his mind. He had never stopped seeing it. Elaera kisses his temple, and there is a yearning bellow in his bones to crane his neck so that she may kiss his lips instead. He doesn't dare.
She chuckles, and it is joy itself in Duncan’s heart. "I wouldn't deny you."
Dunk's fingers curl into his tunic in synchronicity with the aching cavern between his ribs. He can almost feel the bones cave flush with his heart. Elaera pets her fingers in drawn out strides along his cheek. Skin is now prickled in stubble that shines in the sun. Egg himself has grown the first few sprouts.
The boy is ten and five now, and he stands at Duncan's shoulders. He'd scolded Egg for it, as though his growing was of his own will. Truth was, Dunk didn't rightly take to the dawning reality of Eggs maturing. It made him feel as though his feet fought for their grip upon salt spray and waves on a ship deck.
"Parenting is grief in and of itself," Elaera says.
"I'm not his father." Dunk deflects. Elaera snorts. Such a noise would be declared improper coming from a princess. Dunk only wishes to hear it again.
"You gainsay what is clear as the sun is bright in the eyes of anyone."
Dunk does not speak of dreams. Be it for the sake of the boy, and his family's curse of them, or for the sake of his own hide he does not know and he does not let his own linger. Sometimes, though, he will let the desperately held together cracks take in the light of day. To allow himself the thought of a girl stood high as his shin by three years of age, with the dark hair of Dorne with perhaps a shock of white hair, and eyes of blue sea. His own or Elaera's, he does not know. Perhaps the breeding of both, or perhaps neither and the girl would have shared Baelor and Valarr's mismatched colors.
He liked that thought, Duncan decided suddenly. A tie between granddaughter and niece, grandfather, and uncle. Elaera had great love for her brothers and father, it would make all the sense if such a grand thing was shown in—
Duncan clears his throat at the jump. The silks whisper like phantoms against the back of his skull as he shifts where it lays in her lap. The thought of daughter and the claim of ours sits heavy upon him. He thinks now of two different colored eyes, blue and brown, father and son. He thinks of the youngest, Matarys, with eyes of green from Lady Jena. Or so Dunk would like to think as Elaera thought beautifully of her mother. So would he, then. (He was the only one who might remain to do so.) Duncan had the tragedy and privilege of meeting Matarys only once before— well.
The cracks of his sorrows only cling to the light, and for the briefest of moments Duncan thinks of the hand in his hair with a ring on its left finger– the one meant to be wedded– placed with his own vows and his eyes snap open. He blinks against the sun. The sparrow in the branches sings. Elaera smiles, Duncan blinks. His hand rests at the hollow of her neck and he half expects something foul and exposed to rest against his palm when it drifts to the back of her skull.
He feels only waves of dark tresses. He rubs them between his fingers.
"You will catch flies," Elaera murmurs in the light. She is the light. Dunks brows pinch, and her index taps at the fat of his bottom lip. He feels his drying tongue then, and snaps his jaw shut promptly. Always the fool in her presence.
"Your fool." Dunk rasps before he can stop it. Something familiar climbs into his throat, a cry he'd wept many times since smoke and ash took to the sky and much before then. He thinks of a tourney field, and mud. The terror and grief of a father undeserving of what had come upon him, and a hedge knight feeling his will bleeding through his fingers despite the last taken breaths that day not being his own. Elaera smiles, again. She's done it much beneath this tree. It's how Dunk cherishes to think of her in her embodiment of embracing solace.
"My knight." She corrects tenderly.
"Yours," Duncan weeps, and her touch is a ghost on his skin with the memory of warmth like dragon fire. His brow is soothed down onto her collarbone, and her hand lays at the nape of his neck. He clutches onto her as though she is a light in the prowling dark, as though she is his.
She could have been.
She was, something whispers.
"I love you." She whispers against the shell of his ear, and Dunk can smell the rain and feel the soiled earth beneath their feet. He can see her: hair of deep Martell brown and Targaryen white plastered to her forehead with the rain, body soaked to the bone. It was nowhere for a princess, to be in the rain for a hedge knight. But she, then, had not been a princess nor he a knight. They were a man and woman with tied souls and synchronized hearts, and her vow was made to protect the sanctity of his life and her fate was sealed under the clouds.
She hadn't said it, hadn't dared to in the morose hours before the Seven would have his life at their feet, and still Duncan had never felt it more deeply in his bones. He wishes he would have said it anyway.
He'd wished much when he'd woken to a world where a woman worthy of anything and everything was dead, and her man was alive with half of his heart in her chest. He'd wished it was him, so that he did not have to bear witness to Prince Baelor Targaryen sitting vigil at his daughter's side after the Silent Sisters had taken her. Baelor had not been bid to follow, looking upon the dead was unbecoming of the order. Still he followed, and no one had been keen to stop him.
Dunk hadn't known if it was mercy or punishment, when the prince summoned him. It was neither, he'd come to realize, but an understanding of shared grief. Baelor hadn't let them wrap Elaera's body yet. He had allowed Duncan a moment he would never have again. A moment to cradle a memory in his clutches and vow to perish before allowing something to take it. From the shape of her nose to the curve of her lips, he would remember. In that regard, never would she be truly gone.
"Perhaps it would be best, your grace, to..." Dunk had swallowed. He remembers how rotten he had felt in that room. "To leave her to rest,"
Baelor had finally looked at him, then. Dunk had expected to see the breaking of the Soul of Chivalry to make room for rage in the cracks. Agony is a far worse thing to have been faced with, Duncan came to see, and had assumed; because it is the only descriptor he could fathom when he had looked into Baelor's eyes. But the word was as empty a meaning in the moment as a prayer at a dead woman's feet, because there was something lost within the prince that would never return.
Dunk had cast his eyes away, to sunkissed skin against alabaster flesh. A cold hand that had held his own once, and never would again. Baelor would not wound the boy with his stare for long, and having torn his eyes away from Elaera's body was something too painstaking to bear any longer. Baelor's tongue had been led in his mouth and he thought it a good thing, because otherwise he would have screamed.
"I'd thought I was born with purpose. I thought," His words moved the quiet of that dark sanctum. His fingers, with nails dirtied in a blood he could not will himself to rinse, twisted a ring on Elaera's finger. "my duty as a reason for life. To cherish my breaths because I had duties to the realm,"
Something light had flitted across his face, something that tugged lazily at the corners of his mouth. "Then, I found my Jena, and I'd realized quickly how lonely I had been. We married without my father and mothers blessing during my Royal Progress for a suitor in my youth, and it was the most life I had lived in only a weeks time,"
Dunk recalls Baelor staring at the face of his daughter, but his mind was far off to a home he could never return to again. "And then we were told Jena was with child. I had never felt fear as I felt it that day. I realized that I would burn the realm I'd sworn my life to for a child I hadn't known existed hours prior,"
The air had been stolen from the chambers with but a sentence spoken from a grieving fathers lips. "And now she is dead," His eyes lifted to Duncan's once again that night and it had seemed to take all of his will. "My daughter is dead, Ser Duncan. She is my purpose, she gifted it to me, and I will fulfill it only when I draw my last breath. I was the first thing she saw entering this world, I was the last thing her eyes saw before she fell, and so will I be the last one to protect her until she is on that pyre in the morrow."
Dunk had found himself in company with the Hand of the King for a final time when paths led solemnly to Kings Landing and their bellies had gone hungry, and Egg willed himself to convince Dunk that facing the opposite side of his coin was better than starving.
"My daughter gave her life for you, Duncan," Baelor had said when Dunk would not meet his eyes within the fire glow in the prince's solar. "I would not dare dishonor my girl in hatred for you, because her sacrifice for your life said everything she did not. Do not bear it in grief nor in guilt, Ser. Carry it with honor."
They had left in the morrow, and Baelor had smiled in their parting. Something had been lighter in him, and it was cast upon Dunk like the first rays of sun in the wake of Spring after Winter.
They would hear of the Great Spring Sickness while leagues away, across the sea. Dunk would never see Baelor again.
"You've woken up late, Ser," Egg would say, when he'd shaken a hand on Dunk's chest to rouse him. "Not woken at all, actually, I've done it for you. If it were me I'd have been offered a clout in the ear and you'd not have done it as you so like to threaten you will, but I'd be scolded all the same."
Egg would stoke the fire and speak of breakfast. Dunk would only sit with the tree at his back, and lose himself in thoughts of silk draped knees.
"What kept you, Ser Duncan? Did you have trouble finding rest?" Egg would concern himself, even as he wolfed down a plate of wheat bread and last night's pheasant in his teenaged appetite.
"I was dreaming." Duncan would say, and that would be that. The sun would grace their backs for that day in kind rays, and the breeze would soothe their reddened skin. Dunk would thank a woman who he knew could not hear it, but the wind danced at his feet and swept his hair when the thought came. A warm hand, and the soothing scratch of nails.
A dragon forever protecting her loyal elm.