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The first pages are all written in the clear, flowing hand of Ser Roland, whose father’s maester had switched into him the importance of his letters. The deeds curl over the vellum between the elm shield and the white, true as Duncan had been able to recall them, true as he had been able to bear as record in the Book of the Brothers.
Ser Duncan the Tall, it all begins, and a widened gap between that sentence and the next where Ser Duncan has no forebear of note to be listed. Served as squire to Ser Arlan of Pennytree. Knighted by Ser Arlan in his twenty-fourth year after a decade of leal service. At the tourney of Ashford, accused of striking Prince Aerion Brightflame of House Targaryen and kidnapping Prince Aegon Targaryen. Declared innocent in trial by seven. Took Prince Aegon to squire and swore his sword to the hedges. Slew Ser Lucas Inchfield, castellan of Coldmoat, in trial by combat whilst in service at Standfast. Unhorsed by Ser Uthor Underleaf in the wedding tourney at Whitewalls. Slew Ser Tommard Heddle in the sept at Whitewalls after an attempt to seize Prince Aegon…
There is more, of Winterfell and Pennytree and Storm’s End and Tyrosh, the Third Blackfyre Rebellion, the wedding at Summerhall, the wedding at Storm’s End, the tourneys. King Maekar’s death at Starpike, King Aegon’s coronation in King’s Landing, the white cloak Egg had threatened to give to the next person he saw if Dunk refused to take it for his own. Tourneys. The Fourth Blackfyre Rebellion. Midway through the fourth page, the writing becomes Dunk’s own. He had been nearly thirty by the time Egg beat the trick of it into his thick head, and his hand is thick and heavy below Ser Roland’s.
In his fifty-fourth year, after Prince Duncan Targaryen broke his betrothal to Lord Lyonel Baratheon’s daughter by taking to wife Jenny of Oldstones, succeeded Ser Roland Crakehall as Lord Commander after the Battle of Southwend.
“Are you finished yet?” the king’s voice calls from somewhere behind him.
“Be patient,” Duncan snaps, “or else come and write this yourself. You’ve younger eyes.”
“I could never, ser. It is my Lord Commander who must update the entries in the White Book.”
The quill almost snaps when he brings it to the page. Served as King Aegon’s champion in trial by combat against Lord Lyonel, he writes in tall shaking letters, and drops the quill like a hot coal. Years ago it would have made him sick to think about. Now there is only a cold and curious weight in the pit of his stomach. The first light of dawn is grey and pink through the windows. Somewhere in the black cells, Egg’s gaolers are striking off Lyonel’s irons and strapping him into his armor. Egg waits to do the same for Duncan – It has not been so long that I do not remember how, the king had said, and what is a Kingsguard who disobeys his king?
Across the city looms the Dragonpit, waiting.
The armor is the only thing holding him together. He knows it as clearly as he knows the boundaries of his own self. It is the leather tie that binds his mind to the scar and silver of his body. As soon as it is loosed from him he will cease to, to, to be, in any sense that a man can be, in any sense that he is a man is a knight is alive.
The sky whirls below him. It spins and melds into the earth above. He fights to find his feet. He fights to find his face. He can taste hot salt weeping down his face from no worldly wound.
Where am I?
Cold is the burn of the Chequy Water in his chest and the current lashing his open cuts. Hot is the burn of the knife where its blade kisses his cheek. Soft the cries of the baby in his arms, small and slick as a moth from its cocoon, a hatchling from its shell, black-haired as his mother. Dragons spit fire above his head; dragons spit teeth under his hand; a maiden spits fire from her palm. He gropes for his shield to discover it missing. His sword, too, is gone.
He has known too much of death to remember anything else, and when he does, it is of the wretchedness. Not what evil has left the world by his hand, though surely some must have, sometime, surely, but the snuffed glow of life, brown eyes and violet, cruel men who died well and good men who died cruelly. When he remembers it, is of the taste of it, the smell of it, the old perfume of battlefield and gutter that has lulled him to sleep since boyhood. Shit, iron, salt, water. Such great things are even great men made from. When their life leaves them, their pretensions leave with it, and all that remains is the same mud and bone that carries Duncan, shambling, from one morning to the next.
Some squire, too dark-haired to be his, pulls him from corpse to shadow as a warhorse is pulled to water. Hands slip at the steel of his skin where it holds in place the boneless fleshy mass of him, sweat-hot and blood-wet. He shrugs them off. He shrugs off the noises, senseless warbles of speech like some songbird trilling for the sun, and tips his head back until the copper slides down his throat. His eyes are shut. His eyes are gone. He dares not go in search of them. When he tries the world spins doubled around him, sprite lights dancing in colors unreal. It hurts less, the blackness. The pain is a drum. The pain is his heartbeat. The pain rings round his skull as does a knell, echoing through the odd emptiness where there should be substance. Head, he thinks, confused by the runaway spin of his own thoughts from the now to the then and back again. There is blood on his gauntlets. There was blood on his mail. There was a stomach-twisting emptiness where there should have been the dark proud crown of the prince’s head, where instead there was blood and air, and there is no air now, or if there is his body does not remember how to breathe it.
The sun is in his eyes. His feet take him in circles, leading his head from east to west to light to shadow until the stabbing brightness has dimmed enough for him to make out a molten slurry of shape and color. There the dragon’s black, the Kingsguard white, the rust splattered up his gauntlets like some creeping copper sickness. There a flash of silver-gold, the dark smoke of Egg’s robes swirling about his legs as he crosses the pockmarked earth. Ser Duncan!
Across the ground, the milling shapes about a wealth of yellowed steel, so many flies on a corpse.
It is finished, ser. Remove your helm.
Above, the blue, liquid and shifting, the corona of Duncan’s eyes spilling through his lashes into the sky, the pennants snapping bone snapping as though stirred by wind. There is no wind no breath no stirring of air that he can feel even through the rent shell split skin of his armor.
Do you hear me, ser? Ser Duncan?
The ground swims under his feet; a robin sings for springtime; death reeks slick in the catches of the armor that is the knight that is Duncan, and he wants nothing more than the cool green hold of his elm.
There is something missing. He had not noticed it was gone, but as soon as he does he knows it has been for a very long time. Or perhaps he has been aware, and he has simply forgotten. Perhaps he has let himself be convinced it was otherwise. He does not know. He does not even know what it is that he lacks. He is convinced only of the absence of it; something he can feel, deep inside him, probing for it as a tongue probes the empty space left by a lost tooth. No milk-tooth, neither, nothing that can be recovered or regrown. Nothing he would know how to search for.
In sleep, the ringing of his head is the ringing of a bell. The sept. The bells of Baelor’s Sept sound in celebration and in summons and in mourning. The world inside Duncan’s closed eyes is black. The world outside it is awake with the noise, the big bells as deep as an earthquake, the little bells soaring like prayer. As a boy – when was that, again, the dusty filthy boyhood he can only just recall? – as a boy he knew they sang out for the old king’s death and the new king’s crowning, princes’ births and bastards’ murders. Once for the death of a Kingsguard knight, though he had never known that until the day the cloak the shroud became his own.
He is not dead. It hurts too much to be death. He has come close enough often enough throughout his life to know that the nearer he gets the sweeter it feels. To lose enough blood is to die of cold, not of violence. It is the tiredness, bone-deep, leeching at the pain of life until all that remains is the shadow where the life was once. A body leeched of strength. I used to be strong. Strong as an aurochs. Other things, too. Perhaps it is for the better, the drifting. He turns away from the bitter edge of recollection and lets the clangor of Baelor’s great bells fill him down to his bones. I knew a Baelor once. Did they ring the bells for King Daeron’s son? He was meant to be king. He had seemed so tall in the young prince’s armor. Dunk had been taller even then. He had known little of princes and kings and dragons but what was sung in ballads and whispered in taverns. He had known little enough of the world to favor the ballads over the whispers. Thick as a castle wall.
Boom-BOOM, cry the bells, boom-BOOM. If gods had voices they would speak like that. If gods had hands they might reach down and pluck the sound from Duncan’s head, rattling from the base of his skull to the roots of his back teeth. If he knew how, he would pray, but the words slip through his mind like water through his fingers, there only long enough for him to taste the sound of them and gone before he can master his tongue to give them voice. Boom-BOOM.
He lets the black press down and around and above. He sinks.
He wakes to dazzling whiteness. Heartbeats pass before his eyes recall the trick of seeing and the egg-pale shell of the world resolves into a room. A white room with whitewashed walls hung with white hangings; white sheets within white draperies; white without, a clouded leaded sky through the narrow leaded windows; a deep white quiet filling the air, scented herbal and deathly and bitter. The bells have stopped.
The Lord Commander’s rooms are spacious but sparse, and empty of all life but the Lord Commander himself. When he throws back his blankets, white, he sees the bandages, white. It takes longer than he thinks it should to place each of his pains to the wounds he finds. He is so pale now, pale and old and silvered from his beard to his scars to the hair on his chest. His only color is the bruising, black and red blooming lurid on his chest and stomach. He presses his thumb into the edge of one staining him up his shoulder. The phantom ache of touch spreads under his skin. Sword, he remembers dimly, and shudders at the shriek of steel on steel that rises in his head with the pain in his breast. The sound dies when he pulls away.
He dresses simply, slowly. The whole time, his neck prickles with a queer sense of being watched. Thrice he turns around, certain of some intruder, and thrice he sees nothing but the accusing blankness of the white rooms. They are not clean so much as naked, stripped of dirt and personal touch. Even Dunk’s fleas would have been frightened to stain a place like this.
The stairwell is worn by the footfalls of Roland Crakehall, who had been Lord Commander before Duncan. Thirty-eight years he served as a Sworn Brother, long enough for his hair to go as white as his cloak. He had known Dunk as well as Duncan. Before him it was Ser Donnel of the crabs, and before him—
He pauses on the stair. There have been some two hundred years of Lords Commander. He cannot possibly remember them all, but he should remember – was he a Hightower or a Darry? Tall or short? Handsome or ugly? Dark-haired or fair? Highborn, bastard, or gutter-blooded as Dunk of Flea Bottom? The curving slope of the stairwell is white, the drapes here are white, even the torches burn white, white, white, and in the dizzy dancing lick of the colorless shadows upon the walls he sees the fire red, the fire green, the fire gold and dragon-silver. What am I doing here? Two centuries of Lords Commander, their names and deeds filling the pages of the three-stone book in the Round Room below, thirty hands recording the names and deeds of every man made clean and noble by the Kingsguard’s white. What am I doing here? Some eight years is the average, he knows, though where he had learned that he could not recall. The appointment is for life, and the life of a knight is the body of a knight is a thing both strong and fragile. Six moons ago Roland Crakehall had been as hale and canny a swordsman as any man in the winter of his years, still more than most decades younger. He trained twice as hard as the rest of us to prove his iron had not gone to rust. Five months ago he had taken a wound in the war – the rebellion – but which one? – and though it had not killed him, it good as crippled him.
It had been Duncan he called to him for the Sworn Brother’s last rites. The appointment is for life. The life must end, sooner or later, and when a knight of the Kingsguard is no longer fit to serve—
What am I doing here?
The White Book records that when Gwayne Corbray took that last and terrible wound in the war that came for his lifetime, it had been his brothers Ser Donnel and Ser Roland who took him from the Redgrass Field to the clean white tomb of his chambers. It had been Donnel and Roland who cleaned him gently, so he would not feel the pain of his injuries, who called for the septa to anoint him with the seven oils, who sang over the snick of knife on oilstone and kept singing as they did their duty, so that the blind young knight would hear that he was not alone in the final breaths before the white blade was drawn across his throat.
There had been no song for Ser Roland. There had been no dreamwine nor milk of the poppy. It is not their way to shrink from pain, even in their last living moments.
The sound of breathing carries oddly through the tower. Duncan’s brothers, such that they are, are no doubt sleeping for their watches to come. He does not see another waking soul, but underneath the whitewashing, he can hear the dead knights murmuring in the brickwork, seven after seven after seven of them watching him pick his way to the ground like he is eighty instead of fifty, twenty, however old he is. His hands are an old man’s, weak and shaking. He forces one foot down and the other after it. It takes the greater portion of his focus merely to walk. With the rest he casts his mind back. His head feels riddled with holes like a moth-eaten cloak. It only falls into place when he at last reaches the Round Room at the bottom of the stairs. There is a man there, waiting for him, standing behind the Lord Commander’s chair at the head of the weirwood shield. He is bright-haired as a dragon, bright-eyed as a dragon, dressed in somber blacks and reds that break the shocking white of his surroundings. Like sour-faced Prince Maekar in his royal widow’s weeds, those days and years ago at Ashford Meadow.
There had been a trial. That is a certainty, as much a truth of the world as the color of the sky. Dunk remembers the weight of the armor – not Steely Pate’s mail, but plate, lighter and stronger and pale as dragonfire, white like bone and wax-skinned death. The shield, he wants to ask, where is my shield, but when he musters the strength to open his mouth the dumb thick sounds that spill out of him resemble no human speech. The shield, the prince, the maiden. What has become of the trial? What shall become of him?
“Sit,” says the king who is not Daeron. His voice is soft, not so deep as Dunk once thought a king’s should be, and he takes Duncan’s arm over his slim shoulders and leads him to his chair. “You should not be walking yet, ser.”
“I…” Speech tastes of copper and bile. “I…have had worse.” Ghosts from a thousand thousand agonies flash through him in a heartbeat, skull-thigh-palm-cheek-skull-rib-back-skull-shoulder-ankle-skull-eye-skull-skull-jaw-skull-skull. “Nothing yet enough to kill me.” No divine favor, living. His head aches so fiercely he wonders if this is how an egg feels before it hatches, or before it’s cooked. Divine mockery.
“Grand Maester Walys thought you would not wake. Your…injuries are severe. Your head, especially, concerned him.”
“It hurts,” Duncan agrees. That is the truth of it in the simplest words he can manage. Spittle pools under his tongue, and he forces out: “Beg – beg pardons, Your Prince.” Not the right word, and the dragon knows it, violet eyes pinched in a frown. “Grace. Your Grace.” He swallows. “Your Grace. Beg…” He sounds drunk. He doesn’t feel drunk, but queer nevertheless, the walls moving up and down and all around him like it is the room that is alive instead of him.
“Ser?” Ser?
This has happened before.
Ser Duncan!
Why can he not remember?
Get up, Ser Duncan! Ser Glendon, help me – maester – help him—
—get up—
If he could dream, he might dream of being young again. He might dream of his woven starlight surcoat and his dark-haired lover. He might dream of the linseed scent of paint on the puppet girl’s fingers, the pollen clinging sweet to her neck; the wine-bitter rasp of a beard against his face and a thunderclap laugh.
If he could dream, he might dream of being young again. He might dream of the prince in his black armor. The prince in his red armor. The prince in his son’s armor. The prince dark-haired, bright-haired. The prince whose hair clung in thin curls of silver down to his forearms as he scraped the knife over his head. The prince – the ringing – the coronation bells – the funeral bells. The taste of bile in his gorge.
If he could dream—
But he cannot. Perhaps that is what is missing. Perhaps the thing that is missing is the part of him that makes the dreams. Perhaps it is the part of him that remembers them.
Dunk opens his eyes to the white and to black: the pale man from before, a tall dark woman at his side, a maester in dark robes with a chain nearly to his knees. Speech comes to him, and recognition with it.
“Egg,” he croaks. His mouth is dry and tastes of corpse. “When did you get old?”
The boy who is king does not smile. Even bald-headed and clad in rags his smiles were rare and fleeting things, more often sly cuts of the mouth than a child’s honest joy, stained even then by the shadow of his House. Dunk had nearly wept to see them brightened by Lord Blackwood’s second most beautiful daughter. Dunk could weep now if his eyes would recall how, but his body seems half-asleep even though his mind has finally woken.
“Ser Duncan may be disoriented for some time,” the maester tells the king and queen. “The last blow to his head—”
“I recall,” says Aegon, Fifth of His Name. “I was there.”
Dunk feels as though he was not. It comes back to him in flashes, little silver fish flickering through the thick dark mud inside his skull. Egg had been there – or had it been the Prince of Dragonstone? The Prince of Dragonflies? A dark-haired maid with sad blue eyes wearing orange, wearing yellow. The clangor of metal on metal. There had been a trial. His foe yielded. Bloody was the skin of Maekar’s second son, his face bruised and swollen like a plum, red the dragon’s teeth and bright the dragon’s tears. Yield, he had whispered, and Dunk flung his broken body before Lord Ashford like a carcass for the fire. It would not have been knightly to kill him; Dunk had not, though the fierceness with which he wanted to makes him sick even now, days after.
There was a trial. His foe yielded. Bloody was Lyonel’s beard, near full white but for the last traces of black at his mustache and temples, face lined from the years of his temper and his mirth. White was his hair. He’s so old now. White as snow and stars and seafoam, though his eyes are dark still. Yield, he had murmured in a voice so small Dunk had not recognized it as belonging to the Laughing Storm, and Dunk…
“Where,” he tries to say, though his tongue forgets to obey him and it comes out as whahh. He swallows down the bile and summons Ser Duncan. “Where is Lyonel?”
Lord Baratheon had raised his banners sulfur sunlight earring-gold, but it had been Lyonel who stepped out into the ruin of the Dragonpit, smiling without humor. It had been Lyonel’s sword that painted Duncan all in bruises. He feels the throbbing head to toe. He feels it coming back to him. Yellow banners and yellow steel, Lord Baratheon’s longsword biting kissing again and again and again, Duncan forgetting for a moment that he is not Dunk and the knight is not Lyonel, who had danced with him at Ashford and whose eyes were dark and soft. It had been Lyonel who drew first blood, the line of fire Dunk can feel curving over his shoulder like a brand like a touch. It had been Lyonel who yielded, on his back on the salted earth, salted curls a pale dusty crown all around his head.
“You do not remember?” Egg asks, so softly.
It feels like another man’s life. Dunk sees it unravel behind his eyelids like his own memory, though one he could not fathom. Lyonel’s craggy laugh-lined face split jaw to hairline, blood matting dark in his storm-pale hair, blood in his bright white teeth as he grins his final grin. A second where he does not breathe, where Dunk does not breathe, studying the contrast of him, the well-worn memory of Ser Lyonel at Ashford thin and yellowed against the withered old stag beneath him. The black fan of Lyonel’s lashes over his cheeks. A hand big enough to be Dunk’s, clad in the milky gauntlet, spreading white across the cut of Lyonel’s jaw before tightening about his chin and twisting his head to the side so swiftly the snap of his neck rings in the inside of Dunk’s skull like a peal of thunder like a knell.
He cannot breathe. He cannot taste the blood, only the acid of his own terror, the cold cloudy paleness that had stolen across the dead man’s deep dark eyes, the sound of his young squire’s voice saying, “Peace, ser, peace before this madness takes you too.”
It already has. Lyonel’s spine cracks over and over and over in the echo of his memory, snap, snap, snap until it drowns out the ghostly ring of Baelor’s great bells. All the ills before it come flooding back to him clear as day. Every time his hands shook too fiercely for him to take up his sword. Every time he needed the squires’ help in dressing where he had never needed it before. Every time he barked at them when his temper flared without cause or reason. He can feel himself, Duncan, Dunk, and there alongside him is the shape – the shapelessness – of the other thing, the anger and the clumsiness and the ringing in his ears. The other thing, which lived in his body and slept in his head and woke, sometimes, when he slept, which had killed Lyonel only because it could. Only because of how old and frail and splendid he had looked with Duncan’s hand at his throat, the great white hart brought down at last. I thought I loved him, once. I did love him, once, if only for an hour.
Do great knights die without their swords in hand, necks broken like rats caught by dogs? Dogs are capable of as much madness as any man; more, even, for the maesters say it runs in their slaver, and a bite may sow the seeds. Dunk had known one such mutt in the back alleys of Flea Bottom. The goldcloaks were called to cut its head off, and afterwards the skull and carcass both were carted off for the charnel pits.
He blinks. When did he close his eyes? The maester is gone, and Betha is at the door. Prince Duncan has her eyes, dark and sad. She dips her head to him, and then she is gone as well, and only Egg remains.
Dunk casts his gaze up to his white, white ceiling. Are there heavens up there? “What will happen now?”
Egg tells him of all that has occurred since the trial: the stormlords present in King’s Landing have pledged their fealty to the Iron Throne and Jaehaerys as Prince of Dragonstone. Ravens have been sent south to Storm’s End, Blackhaven, Bronzegate, Evenfall. Prince Duncan and his wife are riding north to visit Betha’s kin at Raventree Hall. Little Rhaelle is betrothed to Lyonel’s grandson, a boy of twelve who Dunk has never met. Newly-knighted Ser Harlan Grandison will go with her as her guard. A great honor for a young man of twenty-one, spurs still gleaming in their newness and white cloak hardly settled on his shoulders, but it is Egg’s wish, and his Kingsguard obeys. Ser Glendon Ball acts as Lord Commander whilst Dunk is in his convalescence.
The same man I would have chosen. As fine a sword as I ever was, twice the lance, and more suited for the duty. That is some relief, if there is any to be had. Dunk has known Glendon twenty-eight years and been grateful every minute of them. If not him, then who? “Your Grace?”
“It’s only us, ser. You needn’t call me that when no one else is around.”
“I need to speak with Ser Glendon.” The king frowns, and Dunk says, “Urgently.”
“What matter is this? With Ser Harlan gone and you abed, surely he can manage four other knights.”
It is not about the Kingsguard. It is only about the Kingsguard. Dunk must have been raised to the station too late in his life not to dread it, but he has fled and shirked and ruined so much else. Snap. He cannot – not if it means Egg and Betha and the children – Egg’s bald-headed babes who had been so small and precious in his hands when he held them for the first time—
It is not about the Kingsguard. It is not about the king or the prince or the lord, but in the white space around the ringing Dunk can feel them watching him. Tall Prince Baelor with his twice-broken nose, Lyonel young and handsome and grinning like a wolf, Egg with his eyes so wide he looks a boy again, that skinny little boy who had no one but Dunk. What is a knight but a sword, a warhorse, a dog?
“Egg,” Dunk says, “I need to speak with Ser Glendon.”
No one has ever called Egg stupid. He looks almost like his father when he sets his jaw. “No.”
“Egg, please.”
“Do you order me, ser? I am not your squire anymore. You will not.”
“Egg…”
“I don’t want him to,” the king bursts out, words spilling all over each other. Haven’t heard him like that in years. Time has made of Egg a man both wise and kind, but when he throws his weight over Dunk he might well be nine again for the petulance in his voice. “I shan’t allow it. I will send for the maester, and you will rest, and—”
“Write to Aemon if you like. Even maesters have but one treatment for a horse with broken legs.”
“You’re not a horse,” Egg shouts at him. “You’re Ser Duncan! You’re my ser, you can’t—” His voice sticks in his throat, and Dunk reaches for his shoulder. “You can’t – you can’t. You’re bruised, is all, and I’ve seen you worse. I’m not leaving you. It’s cruel and savage even to think about. I should not have looked away when Ser Roland took his wound. I—”
“You are the king,” Dunk tells him. The words come easily; they are shared among the brothers like bread and salt, the Kingsguard’s prayer and line of purpose. Dunk makes a poor Kingsguard, but he has never lacked in care for Egg. He was a good lad, he was a good squire, and he’s not so bad a king, Baratheons be damned. “The realm needs you, and you need good men. Strong of body and sound of mind.”
“I need you, ser.”
“I will not ask for Glendon if you do it.”
The water in the king’s eyes dims the violet of them into deep night-blue, glossed with stars. One slips down his face into the palm of Dunk’s hand. Luck to hold, fallen too late to be of use to either of them. A good sharp knife would be better. The look on Egg’s face cuts as deep as any.
On the cot in kingswood, Ser Roland had spun his life backwards. There were tales he had not recorded in the White Book that he thought Duncan ought to hear; there were tales in its pages that he thought Duncan ought to know in the light of fuller truth. By the end when his breath was leaving him and the memories of his boyhood left his pale cheeks damp, he looked at Dunk and seemed to see him. I do not know if you have been the greatest of us or the least, he had murmured, not looking at the sword Dunk was drawing from his sheath. It must suffice to say that you have been the tallest. Stand, ser. Stand before these others after you have sent me off. Be tall.
Be tall. Be tall, another knight had told him once.
It is a gift for a man to know which words will be his last, so he might choose them carefully, but words have rarely been kind to Dunk, in the giving or the hearing. He opens his mouth, remembering what a good lad Egg had been. The words catch and crumble in his throat, and he rasps: “I want to sleep.”
The wretched hopelessness that steals across Egg’s face makes Dunk feel the most monstrous he ever has. “Then go to sleep. Sleep and wake and get up again, ser. Please.”
“Under a tree somewhere,” he makes himself continue. Great knights could be buried by roadsides just the same as hedges. “Facing…” There’s a proper way to face. It’s important. “…Facing…west. A green tree. A good tall tree. Be a good lad and do that for me, will you? I don’t want to be ashes.”
At the bottom of Ser Duncan’s fourth page, a new hand appears, this crisp and fine and royal.
Slew Lord Lyonel Baratheon in the trial grounds at the Dragonpit. Died shortly afterwards of wounds sustained in battle.