Chapter Text
The airport seat was objectively, one of the least comfortable surfaces Emma Kennedy had ever attempted to sit on in her seventeen years of life.
And yet.
Her neck was at an angle that would haunt a chiropractor, her backpack was wedged between her head and the plastic armrest like a very lumpy, very expensive pillow, and the departures board had been blinking DELAYED next to her flight for the past two hours.
She had eaten an overpriced sandwich. She had scrolled through her phone until her eyes dried. She had reorganized her carry on twice.
Sleep, then. Sleep was a reasonable response to all of this.
Her last coherent thought, drifting downward into the particular blankness of airport terminal unconsciousness, was something she'd been idly turning over since her mother had helped her drag the suitcase onto the scale at check in, both of them watching the numbers climb with the grim satisfaction of generals watching a siege conclude.
Honestly, Emma thought, if I had all of this in medieval times — the cute hand mirrors, the ramen and the pasta — I'd be a queen. An actual queen. People would build temples to the girl who showed up with ten pounds of pasta and a solar-powered portable charger that turned sun light into magic thunder? Forget Queen, she’d be a god with the capital G.
She smiled faintly.
She slept.
She did not wake up to a boarding announcement.
The first thing Emma became aware of was that the ground beneath her was soft in a way that airport terminals emphatically were not — soft and faintly damp, smelling of earth and pine resin and something green and alive that had absolutely no business being in a departure lounge. The second thing she became aware of was birdsong. Real birdsong. The kind made by actual birds, not a relaxation playlist.
She opened one eye.
Trees.
She opened the other eye.
More trees.
Emma sat up very slowly, the way one does when the brain is still trying to decide if this is a dream or a medical emergency, and looked around. Her backpack slid off the side of her head and landed in the moss beside her with a soft thud. Her guitar case was propped against a root nearby, its clasps intact, which was —honestly, in the face of everything else— the detail that kept her from fully panicking. Somewhere behind her, she could hear the faint complaint of wheels that wanted to be on smooth linoleum: her suitcase, tilted at an angle, handle still extended like it was waiting for her.
The trees were old. Not park-old. Old old. They pressed in from every side in a way that suggested they had been there for centuries and had opinions about it.
Emma stood up. She brushed moss off her blue cardigan. Her charm bracelet clinked softly against her wrist — a small, familiar sound in an entirely unfamiliar place.
She was not at the airport.
She turned in a slow circle and arrived at this conclusion several more times before she was willing to accept it.
"Okay," she said aloud, because saying things out loud made them feel more manageable, a technique she had developed over years of difficult exams and family dinners. Just talk to yourself like you’re in a sitcom and everything will be fine. "Okay. This is... fine. This is something."
She hadn't been drinking. She didn't drink; it smelled like disappointment and she had enough of that from standardized testing. She hadn't taken anything. She didn't have a headache, which ruled out the more exciting pharmaceutical explanations. She felt entirely, frustratingly normal, if one bracketed out the forest and the vanished airport and the soft medieval-ish light filtering through leaves that were just beginning to bud with spring.
Medieval-ish.
That word arrived in her brain uninvited and stayed there, looking smug. Because there was, now that she looked, a road. Or-not-a-road, exactly. Roads had asphalt. Roads had painted lines and occasional roadkill and the echo of someone's music from three lanes over and obnoxious assholes who said woman can’t drive . This was a dirt track worn smooth by boots and hooves and cart wheels, threading between the trees like it had simply grown there. It was the idea of a road. A road's rustic ancestor.
That can't be a road, Emma thought. That's what roads looked like before people invented roads. Sure, she didn’t want to wake up at the side of a ten lane Texas highway but that didn’t mean she wanted to wake up in a dirt road going to nowhere.
She stood at the edge of it for a long moment then promptly sneezed, wishing plants could be sexually shamed. What do you mean I’m allergic to plants making love, she asked herself incredulously looking for a napkin in her bag pack.
She threw her napkin into the bag pack because no road meant no people meant no garbage.
Yuck, she thought zipping the bag up again.
She dug into her pocket, took her phone out, opened WhatsApp and took a pic of herself to let her friends know she was touching grass… only to realise that the pic wasn’t being sent. She quickly switched to the other apps. “Okay… Okay. don’t panic. This happens. Fuck. Phone call? SMS? Maps? Will something work for fuck’s sake.”
They didn’t, not for her or for fuck’s sake. But she remembered of an app’s existence that her father showed her because he was a camping-outdoorsy-hiking person who loved shit like this— the Compass app that no one ever used.
And lo and behold— it worked! She didn’t know where she was going but she’ll know which way she’ll be going.
Then she pulled her backpack on carefully, adjusted the straps, redistributed the weight the way her father had taught her on that hiking trip that had ended in a twisted ankle and a very instructive argument — grabbed the handle of her suitcase, picked up her guitar case, and looked left. Then right.
Then left again.
Left had a slight downward slope, which meant probably water, which usually meant probably people. Her father had taught her that too, on a different and arguably less catastrophic occasion.
Left it was.
She put her headphones on after the first five minutes, because the silence was the kind that sat on your shoulders, and because Midnight Sun was, objectively, the correct song for walking through an ancient forest in a maxi skirt that kept catching on absolutely everything. The melody filled the space behind her eyes and she walked, dragging the suitcase over roots and stones with the grim determination of someone who had paid overweight fees for this luggage and was therefore committedto it.
The trees thinned. The road widened, marginally. The light changed, grew warmer, and through a gap in the canopy she caught a glimpse of sky — properly blue, the kind of blue that existed before air pollution, seventy’s hair sprey and cars thought it was the main character. She turned her face up to it for a moment.
Okay, she thought. So it's pretty. That's something.
She was making a private inventory — soup packs, some buldak that she begged her mother to buy, a quantity of dried pasta that her mother had described as "just in case," two jars of peanut butter, salt, sugar, pepper, a portable water filter her mother had thrown in at the last moment with the energy of someone who had read too many survival blogs with her dad, underwear, clothes, two shoes, sewing kit because she and her friends got into being offline, crochet kit, cute little handbags (she’d crocheted one herself), make up, many a jewel from expensive to cheap. Since her dorm mate moved and got the cookware in the divorce she had also a few glass kitchenware her mom bought because. She also had in her person, her guitar, her laptop, her charger, (allegedly) a solar powered power bank (she never tried), approximately forty hair ties, and enough stationary to open a modest store — and thinking about the medieval-queen hypothetical she'd been half-asleep about at the airport, when she came around a long bend in the road and saw it.
A building. Low, sprawling, with a thatch roof and smoke curling from a chimney in a friendly, domestic way. A sign she couldn't read from here hung over a door. There was a yard, and a stable, and the smell of horse on the breeze.
An inn. Almost certainly an inn.
"Okay," Emma said softly, to herself and to whatever was listening. "Okay. That's — that's good. That's a person-shaped situation. That's something I can work with."
She started toward it.
She was making reasonable progress — the suitcase wheels were not built for packed dirt, a design oversight she was currently renegotiating her relationship with — when she heard hoofbeats, and looked up to see a man on a road horse leading two others by their reins, coming from the direction of the inn, heading toward her at an easy walk.
He was tall. Very tall, in the way that made you recalibrate your sense of scale — broad in the shoulder, long in the leg, with the kind of sun-browned, wind-roughened look of someone who had spent most of their life outdoors. He was young, she registered — probably older than her, but not by much, or not by the amount that his size suggested — and he was looking at her with an expression she couldn't quite read beneath the wariness, he must be pretty scared of neon eyeliners.
He stopped his horse a few feet away and said something.
She had no idea what he said, because the song playing was at a frankly triumphant moment in the bridge, and the Glitter Gel Pen playlist did not care about external developments.
Emma held up one finger — one second — and double-tapped her headphone. The music cut out, mid-soar.
The world came back in. Birdsong. Wind. The soft stamp of a horse's hoof.
She looked up at the very tall young man looking down at her from his very tall horse.
"I'm sorry," she said, in the pleasant, carefully-neutral tone she used when she needed to make a good first impression despite everything. "I couldn't hear you. Could you repeat that?"
There was a pause. He looked at her headphones — she could see him look at them, trying to determine what, exactly, they were — and then he looked at her face, and then his gaze moved, almost involuntarily, to the rest of her, in the way that people's eyes moved when they encountered something they couldn't categorize.
She was, she admitted, possibly a lot to take in. She did wear a cute outfit despite her mom’s protests because there were too many cute people at airports! Sue her! And what if she ran into a celebrity? She couldn’t possibly wear sweatpants.
The blue plaid of her maxi skirt moved in the breeze. Her cardigan was nice, she thought; she'd chosen it specifically because it was the kind of soft, worn blue that went with everything. The chunky belt sat at her waist like a reasonable structural decision. Her hair — which she'd worn down today, loose over her shoulders — caught the light in several colors at once, the natural pale blonde threaded through with strands she'd had done all by herself: a shock of neon pink near her left temple, a streak of electric blue at the right, threads of red and purple and a particularly cheerful green that her mother said made her look like a tropical fish and Emma said made her look interesting.
Her hoop earrings swayed. Her rings caught the sun — she had six of them today, which was a moderate day, all things considered. Her necklaces layered down her front, chains of different lengths, and her charm bracelet chimed softly when she shifted the weight of her guitar case.
The man stared.
Then, apparently deciding that staring was not going to resolve anything, he dismounted. He was even taller on the ground. He had the look of someone who was used to people staring at him for different reasons, and was perhaps, cautiously, relieved to be the less remarkable person in a conversation for once.
He repeated what he'd said.
Emma tipped her head slightly, listening hard, because there was something — not quite wrong, exactly, but distant about it, like English heard through water, like the difference between the way her grandmother spoke and the way she did, stretched across more time and distance than that.
Whar be ye headin', lass, or something like it. The shape of it. The question of it.
She blinked.
Oh, she thought.
Oh, this is going to be interesting.
She looked at the inn behind him, smoke still curling peacefully from its chimney. She looked at the horses, patient and unconcerned. She looked at the road — the dirt track, the ancestor of roads — stretching back through the trees she'd come from.
Then she looked up at the very tall, very serious young man in front of her, who was waiting for an answer with the careful patience of someone who had decided, against some internal evidence, to give this strange encounter the benefit of the doubt.
Emma Kennedy took a breath.
"The inn," she said, clearly and carefully, pointing past him toward the building. "I'm heading to the inn." She held up her suitcase — this great wheeled monument to her mother's love and her own inability to pack lightly — with a sort of resigned, explanatory gesture. "And I have a lot of questions."
The inn was not far now.
Dunk could see the smoke from its chimney above the treeline, and the sight of it settled something in his chest that had been coiled tight since morning. A roof. A meal that wasn't dried beef and hard bread eaten in a saddle. Perhaps a straw pallet if the innkeep was charitable, or at least a spot in the stable that the horses wouldn't begrudge him.
He had three of them now — Thunder, Sweetfoot and Chestnut. They were decent animals, not destriers, nothing that would turn a lord's head, but they were his, and that still felt strange in a way he hadn't quite gotten used to yet. Strange in a good way. The way a sword felt strange the first few times you held one that actually fit your hand.
He was thinking about the road ahead, about which way he'd go after the inn, about whether the tourney really be worth it, when Thunder's ears went forward.
Dunk looked up.
There was a girl on the road.
His first thought was that she was lost. She had the look of someone who had arrived somewhere unexpected and was working very hard not to show it — chin up, shoulders back, moving with the careful deliberate stride of a person who had decided that forward was the only reasonable direction. That much he recognised. He'd worn that same look himself, more times than he could count, in more places than he cared to remember.
His second thought was that something was deeply, profoundly wrong with what he was seeing, though it took him a moment longer to put his finger on why.
She was dragging something behind her. That was the first thing — a great rectangular very bright pink chest like thing on small wheels, enormous, taller than her hip, and it rolled across the packed dirt of the road with a sound he'd never heard before, a low rumble that didn't match any cart or barrow he knew. It had a sack of sorts bound to where she was holding the… wheeled chest. She was also carrying a flat, hard-sided case in her other hand, long and narrow, and she had a pack on her back that sat high and square with the orderly weight of something very carefully loaded.
He could have written off the bags or sacks.
Travellers carried strange things.
It was the rest of her that stopped him.
Her hair was — he didn't have a word for it, exactly. Pale as flax, the way some people were just pale, which was ordinary enough, but it wasn't ordinary, because running through it, catching the light in a way that made him wonder briefly if he was feverish, were colours. Not the subtle colours of a dye that had bled or faded. Colours that had no right to be in anyone's hair — a bright, almost painful pink near her temple, a blue that matched a summer sky, threads of red and something purple and a cheerful, ridiculous green that reminded him of new leaves after rain.
She was wearing a skirt that swept the road and a short blue coat belted at the waist, which was sensible enough, he supposed, but every other thing about her was not sensible at all. There were rings on her fingers — many rings, more than he'd seen on women at court events he'd glimpsed from a distance. Chains around her neck, layered one atop another. Loops of metal hanging from her ears, swaying when she moved. A bracelet that clinked and chimed with a dozen small metal shapes he couldn't identify from here.
She looked, Dunk thought, like someone had taken a market stall and a travelling minstrel and a noble's daughter and somehow produced a single person from the three of them.
And there was something on her ears. Not the hoops — something else, sitting over them, large and purple and curved, connected by a band that went over the top of her head. He had absolutely no idea what it was, maybe a circlet of sorts?
She hadn't looked up yet. She was navigating a rut in the road where the dirt had dried uneven, maneuvering that impossible wheeled box around it with the focused irritation of someone who had done this before and resented every moment of it.
Dunk drew up beside her.
She still didn't look up.
He tried again, louder this time, the way you spoke to someone who was either deaf or very distracted. "Girl. Where are you bound?"
Nothing. Not even a flicker.
He stared at the thing on her ears. The band over her head. From it — faintly, and this was the moment he decided he might actually be feverish — he thought he could hear music. Thin and small and coming from nowhere, like a bard had been shrunk down to the size of a beetle and tucked behind her ears.
She hadn't heard him. That was it. That was the explanation. The thing on her ears was — somehow — making music, and she couldn't hear him over it.
He was still deciding how he felt about that when she finally looked up at him.
She raised one finger — a single, calm, unbothered finger, the gesture of someone who dealt with interruptions regularly and had developed a system for it — and then touched the side of the thing on her ears twice in quick succession. The faint music stopped.
She looked up at him properly.
Her eyes were lined with those crazy colors but beautiful nonetheless. Grey, light grey, the colour of a sky before rain, and they were very steady for someone standing in a road in the middle of nowhere, dragging half a market's worth of goods behind her, with colours in her hair that couldn't exist anywhere in the world. She didn't look frightened. She looked, if anything, like she was being patient.
"I'm sorry," she said. "I couldn't hear you. Could you repeat that?"
Her voice was strange too. Not threatening strange — just different. She spoke the Common Tongue clearly enough that he could understand her, but there was something off about the shape of the words, an accent unlike any he'd heard in King's Landing or the Stormlands or anywhere he'd travelled, and he'd done enough travelling. The words came out fast and clipped and rounded in wrong places, like the language had been pressed into a different mould.
With the colours and everything, he assumed she must’ve been a wealthy Tyroshi man’s daughter. He repeated what he'd said, respectfully.
Thick as a castle wall, he thought. She obviously wasn’t just a girl.
She looked at him steadily for a moment. Then past him, at the inn. Then at him again.
He became uncomfortably aware that he was staring. He'd been staring since he first saw her on the road, and he was a man people stared at — for his size, mostly, or because they were trying to decide if he was dangerous — and he generally thought staring was rude. He tried to arrange his face into something more neutral.
She looked up at him with those rain-grey eyes and he noticed, for the first time, that she didn't look frightened of him either. He was a big man. He'd been told he was an intimidating man, by people who said it the way you'd say something was true whether you liked it or not. He'd made grown men step back without meaning to, just by standing near them. This girl, who was young — not much older than him, if he was any judge, and he wasn't always a good judge of these things — was looking up at him from approximately his chest height and showed no particular signs of concern.
She pointed past him, toward the inn.
"The inn," she said clearly, in her impossible accent. "I'm heading to the inn." And then she lifted the great wheeled box with one hand, briefly, in a gesture that seemed to be trying to explain something. Explain herself, maybe. Or explain the box. Or explain everything, all at once, with insufficient materials.
"And I have a lot of questions."
Dunk looked at her.
He looked at the box on its wheels. At the flat hard case. At the pack on her back, methodically loaded. At the colours in her hair and the rings on her fingers and the thing that made music sitting on her ears.
He thought about Ser Arlan, and the things the old man used to say about the road, and strange turns, and the Seven moving in directions a man couldn't always follow.
Then he looked back at the inn, where there would be a roof and a meal and a straw pallet, and where he'd intended to go anyway.
"Aye," Dunk said slowly. "The inn."
He turned Thunder back toward it, leading the other two horses, and did not quite look over his shoulder to see if she was following. He told himself this was because it was none of his business. He told himself that a hedge knight had no cause to involve himself in whatever this was. He told himself that the sensible thing, the Ser Arlan thing, the thing that kept a man from trouble, was to get to the inn, pay for a meal, sleep, and be gone before whatever strange wind had blown this girl out of — wherever she'd come from — could blow any further in his direction.
He heard the wheel-box trundling along behind him on the dirt road.
He turned around. He had a feeling it was going to be a very long evening.
"I—uh, my name is Emma. Emma Kennedy. And you?" The strange woman asked when he met her painted eyes again.
"I am Dunk." The words were out before he could dress them properly. He felt the back of his neck go warm. Ser Arlan had drilled it into him — a knight gives his title, boy, not just his name like some stablehand — and here he was, forgetting it in front of a girl on a dirt road. "Ser Dunk. I am a knight. I'm travelling to the tourney at Ashford Meadow."
He watched her face when he said it.
He'd expected nothing, really — a nod, maybe, the polite blankness of someone who didn't know him and had no reason to, which was most people, which was fine. What he got instead was something far stranger. Her grey eyes went very wide. Something moved through them — fast, like a cloud shadow crossing a field — something that looked almost like recognition, which made absolutely no sense because he had never seen this girl before in his life.
She blinked it away quickly. She was good at that, he noticed — at smoothing her face back to something manageable. But he'd seen it.
He said nothing. He waited.
She smiled at him. It was a very bright smile, and it was doing a great deal of work.
"Oh," she said. "A hedge knight." She said the word like she knew it, like it meant something specific to her, and then — before he could decide what to make of that — she said, "How lucky I am."
Dunk's eyes narrowed. Slightly. He'd been called many things. Lucky was not generally among them.
"Ser Duncan—"
He opened his mouth.
Closed it.
She'd called him Duncan. Not Dunk — Duncan. He'd told her Dunk, same as he told everyone, same as he'd been called since he was small enough to be called things by people bigger than him, which had not lasted especially long. Duncan sounded like a lordling’s name or a proper knight’s. The girl probably hadn’t met many knights from Flea Bottom so she must’ve just assumed…
It had a nice ring to it though, he thought. Ser Duncan.
"—Ser Dunk," she corrected, not very smoothly. "Would you perhaps accept my jewellery as payment for—" she paused, and he could see her arranging the words carefully, "—for protecting me?"
He looked at the jewellery in question. There was quite a lot of it.
"I have no money," she went on, and the brightness in her voice had dropped slightly, replaced with something more earnest underneath, something that sounded considerably more like actual worry than the performance of it. "I was planning to perform at Ashford, at the tourney, and sell my—my things for some coin, but a woman alone on the road is, well..." She gestured vaguely. "A little less safe than most everyone, I fear. I swear I'll pay you. I can play at the inn tonight as well, if you require immediate payment. That ought to get me some coins, if there are people around." A breath. "Please? Just until the tourney grounds at least?"
Dunk looked at her for a long moment.
He thought about saying no. The sensible thing — the thing that kept a hedge knight from complications and entanglements and situations that multiplied themselves without warning — was to say no politely, wish her well on the road, and continue being the only strange thing in his own story.
He thought about the road between here and Ashford, and what it held. He thought about what happened to women alone on roads, and he was not a boy. Ser Arlan had never been the sort of knight who looked away from an uncomfortable truth just because it was uncomfortable.
He looked at the girl — Emma, she'd said, Emma Kennedy, a name from nowhere he recognised — standing in the road with her impossible luggage and her coloured hair and her too-bright smile doing its level best to cover the fact that her hands had tightened on the handle of that wheeled box. She was frightened. Not of him, maybe, or not only of him — but the fear was there underneath the composure, the way cold is there under a hearthrug.
She had nothing. He could believe that much. No coin, no escort, no horse, nothing but the things she carried, which were many and strange and presumably hers.
He scratched the back of his neck.
The jewellery was considerable, as payment went. He could see that even from here —real metal, not tin, the weight of it visible in the way it hung. A lord's steward might have raised an eyebrow; a hedge knight with two horses he'd just bought and a long road ahead had no particular grounds to be proud about it.
"You play?" he said.
"Yes." No hesitation there.
"What instrument?"
She reached down and touched the long flat case at her side. He still didn't know what was in it. He didn't know what most of what she had was, if he was being honest with himself, and he was usually honest with himself because there was no one else to be honest with.
"A very good one," she said, and something genuine slipped into her voice then — warm and certain, the first thing she'd said that didn't feel like it was being carefully constructed. "I promise you, the inn will be glad of it and you as well."
Dunk turned this over.
A girl alone. Ashford. The same road he was already taking. Jewellery that looked to be worth — he wasn't a jeweller, he wasn't a lord, he'd never owned anything more valuable than the sword at his hip — worth something, anyway. More than nothing.
He looked at Thunder, then at the two spare horses he was already leading, and felt faintly ridiculous about how quickly this particular thought arrived.
"You can ride?" he asked.
She looked at the horses with an expression he couldn't interpret. Not quite fear. Not quite confidence. Something in between, negotiating with itself in real time.
"I can learn," she said carefully.
Dunk almost smiled. He didn't, quite, but it was a near thing.
He reached down and unhooked one of the spare horses' reins from his hand, and held it a little to the side — not offering it yet, just making it available, making it a question.
"We'll reach the inn before dark if we move," he said. "You can play tonight. Anything you make is yours." He paused. "One of the rings. That's all I want. Something to show I had cause to guard you, if anyone asks."
He was fairly certain Ser Arlan was somewhere watching this, he would’ve liked Emma. He liked songs and strange things and the conversation wouldn’t be as awkward if he’d been here.
He was fairly certain Ser Arlan, old as he was and rough as he'd been, would never once in his life ridden past a maid on a road who needed help.
"Well?" Dunk said.
The breath she let out was long enough that Dunk wondered, distantly, how long she'd actually been holding it. Her shoulders dropped all at once, the careful composure she'd been wearing like armour since he'd first seen her on the road going slack with something that looked a great deal like pure, unguarded relief.
And then she smiled.
Not the bright, brittle smile she'd been using to negotiate with him. Not the careful thing she'd been constructing sentence by sentence since she'd silenced the music out of her ears.
This was different.
This was the kind of smile that didn't ask permission — it simply arrived, wide and warm and entirely unguarded, and it hit Dunk somewhere in the chest region with the blunt force of something he was wholly unprepared for.
He was, abruptly, very aware of his hands.
This turned out to be prescient, because she stepped forward and took them.
Both of them.
His great scarred, road-rough hands, wrapped in both of hers — she had rings on most of her fingers and he could feel the cool metal of them, and her hands were warm, and she was looking up at him with that blinding smile like he had done something remarkable, when all he had done was agree to ride in the same direction he was already riding.
"Oh, thank you so much, Ser, you have no idea how scared I've been."
Dunk stood very still. He was reasonably experienced with being large and accidental in small spaces, but this was a different variety of the same problem, and he had not been issued any instructions for it.
"Thank you! Thank you! I promise I'll pay you back and I won't be a burden to you!"
He looked down at her.
He looked at their hands.
He looked, briefly and involuntarily, at Thunder, who looked back at him with the profound incuriosity of a horse who had seen worse and had opinions about none of it.
Dunk cleared his throat.
He was a man who was easily made to feel clumsy. He was large, yes, and he knew it, and he'd spent enough years learning to exist inside his own considerable dimensions that he didn't generally trip over himself anymore, not literally and not otherwise. But there was something about being thanked like this— with both hands and a smile that seemed to contain more warmth than most hearth fires he'd sat beside — that made him feel approximately fifteen years old and roughly the size of a barn.
"Aye," he said.
That was all he managed.
She didn't seem to notice, or if she did, she was charitable enough not to remark on it. She released his hands after a moment — he noticed the moment she did, which he also had no instructions for — and turned back toward her luggage with the brisk efficiency of someone who had already moved on to the next problem.
"Right," she said, eyeing the spare horse with the focused expression of someone taking inventory of a situation. Then she looked at her suitcase. Then at the horse again. Then at the suitcase. Her mouth pressed sideways.
"How does the..." she gestured at the wheeled box. "How does that work, with the horse?”
Dunk considered the wheeled box. He had been considering it, on and off, since he'd first seen it trundling across the packed dirt of the road, and he was no closer to a satisfying answer about what it was than he'd been at the start. It was too large to sling across a saddle. Too rigid to fold. It had a handle that telescoped — he'd seen her extend and collapse it, which was its own particular marvel — and the small wheels at its base were the wrong sort entirely for anything but a very smooth road or a floor.
"We tie it," he said, because that was what you did with things that needed to go somewhere on a horse.
She looked at him.
He looked at the box.
"Somehow," he added.
The corner of her mouth twitched. It wasn't quite a smile, but it was in the same family.
"Somehow," she agreed, with a seriousness that suggested she found this funnier than she was showing.
It took longer than it should have. The box was awkward and its shape was wrong for the ropes he had, and it kept wanting to tip, and the spare horse — a patient animal, generally — had thoughts about the whole arrangement that it expressed through a series of meaningful sidesteps. Emma stood at the horse's head during this process and spoke to it in a low, steady stream that Dunk couldn't entirely make out, and the horse, inexplicably, appeared to listen. By the end of it the animal was standing still and the box was secured in an arrangement that was more creative than elegant but would hold until the inn.
The flat case — the instrument case, he reminded himself — she would not be parted from. She slung it over her back alongside her pack, which he offered to take and she politely declined, and then she looked at the horse from the ground with the expression of someone who had committed to a course of action and was now confronting its practical implications.
"Show me," she said. Not a question.
Dunk showed her. She watched with the full, focused attention of someone who was memorising rather than simply observing, and she asked two questions, both of which were good questions, and then she put her foot in the stirrup and pulled herself up with more determination than grace and landed in the saddle with a small grunt and an expression of triumph so unself-conscious that Dunk looked away on instinct, the way you looked away from something private.
"Right," Emma said from the saddle, a little breathlessly, settling herself with more care than a seasoned rider but more confidence than someone who had never sat a horse. She gathered the reins the way he'd shown her, knuckles a little tight. "Right. I can do this."
He was fairly sure she was talking to herself.
He mounted Thunder, took the lead rope of the packed horse, and turned toward the inn. The smoke was closer now, the smell of it warm and familiar, and the light was going amber at the edges of the sky the way it did in the hour before full evening.
He was three strides ahead when he heard her horse fall into step behind him, the soft rhythmic thud of hooves on packed dirt, and underneath it — faint and familiar already, after barely half an hour — the soft chiming of her bracelet.
He had agreed to one ring.
He had a feeling, not for the first time since he'd come around that bend in the road, that he had agreed to considerably more than that without quite meaning to.
Ahead, the inn's sign swayed in the evening breeze.