Chapter Text
It was a few years on from Ashford. Through the Spring and all its sickness, aye, and the drought, and the deaths—deaths by bucketful, by shipful, deaths so plenty that in the Crownlands they had to bring out wildfire to burn all their dead.
In the Stormlands, Lyonel watched them pile their dead high as the fucking lighthouse and wait for lightning to strike dry. It was one of many sights of violence he’d never forget, he reckoned, in the way that remembering was made up of both recollection and reflection. Lyonel would be an old greybeard, senile and trembling, and he would still remember the crackle of lightning, the smell of burnt flesh; the churned mud of Ashford; the two Blackfyre boys cold and dead at the Redgrass.
But that was all very grim. It was a few years on from Ashford, and he had the fair maid herself as his lady wife: she was young and feisty and had brought his people the grain of the Reach, which made up for the fact that she was a fucking infant and exhausted him when she wasn’t being charming.
She was fat with child, the poor cunt, but had still insisted on riding out to Highgarden with him. Lyonel had thought she’d be right sick of tourneys for the rest of her life, with how that Targaryen cunt had ruined her nameday, but she didn’t mind the tourneytowns and didn’t care about the blood overmuch so long as it wasn’t a no-holds-barred beatdown.
Gwin was in the Baratheon pavillion, decked out in orange and gold, suns and stags, and holding court as only a much-beloved girl of sixteen summers could; Lyonel was jeering at Longthorn as he trained, the way a courteous guest ought, when he spotted him—well over six feet tall, towering head and shoulders over the rest of the crowd.
Cunt. Lyonel’s blood boiled at the sight of him.
“Pick up your fucking knees, you lazy—Leo, darling, I’ll be back.”
Lyonel barely waved goodbye before he was cutting through the crowd. Ser Duncan the Tall, in the flesh, wearing humble flax linen with a shooting star picked out across the breast, his perfidious bald squire dancing around his feet.
He wanted to punch him, he wanted to kiss him, he wanted to wring his giant stupid aurochs’ neck, he wanted to knight him for true (the bloody liar), he wanted to throw an arm around his broad shoulders and promise to name his firstborn after him.
The crowds parted for him. Lyonel was not a small man, and he was determined besides. He was smiling despite himself, teeth bared, half-wild. Yes, he would do it all: clap a hand on Duncan’s shoulder, and kiss the side of his head, and tell him that he hated him, and forgave him, and would name the babe for him—the man who felled a dragon!
Surely Gwin would love the idea, too, she was as fond of him as Lyonel was.
He was nearly there, so close he could hear it through the throng and cries: Aegon’s chatting, and Dunk laughing, and the voice of the apple boy who had fought with them in Ashford, the one Lyonel knighted because Ser Duncan couldn’t, who was there with that whore of Manfred’s he’d married.
“Dunk,” he was saying, smiling so wide that dimples pierced his apple-red cheeks, a fat, red-haired toddler in his arms, “Meet wee Duncan!”
Ser Dunk gasped, and the squire squealed, and Lyonel narrowed his eyes, glaring daggers at the lad in his little knitted green cap. It had a stem and a leaf on it, because the Fossoways thought themselves funny.
Lyonel, who hadn’t dreamed of having children of his own until they were forced on him, and who hadn’t imagined naming them after anyone except perhaps his father, out of tradition, until less than a minute ago, glowered at both father and son.
I’ll get my own back for this, he vowed, and then charged into the scene: a hand on Duncan’s shoulder, and another on Ser Raymun’s, draping himself between them even as the child was dropped into Duncan’s over-large arms.
“Well isn’t this a lovely little reunion?” he crowed.
“Ser Lyonel!” both of his knights and the squire exclaimed, green boys the lot of them, delighted to see him, guileless.
In the hedge knight’s arms, wee Duncan started to cry.