cousin's ribs. At least I hope so.'
'And Prince Daeron?' Dunk blurted. 'Did he survive?'
'Once Ser Robyn unhorsed him, he lay where he fell. He may have a broken foot. His own horse trod on him while running loose about the field.'
Dazed and confused as he was, Dunk felt a huge sense of relief. 'His dream was wrong, then. The dead dragon. Unless Aerion died. He didn't though, did he?'
'No,' said Egg. 'You spared him. Don't you remember?'
'I suppose.' Already his memories of the fight were becoming confused and vague. 'One moment I feel drunk. The next it hurts so bad I know I'm dying.'
They made him lie down on his back and talked over him as he gazed up into the roiling grey sky. It seemed to Dunk that it was still morning. He wondered how long the fight had taken.
'Gods be good, the lance point drove the rings deep into his flesh,' he heard Raymun saying. 'It will mortify unless…'
'Get him drunk and pour some boiling oil into it,' someone suggested. 'That's how the maesters do it.'
'Wine.' The voice had a hollow metallic ring to it. 'Not oil, that will kill him, boiling wine. I'll send Maester Yormwell to have a look at him when he's done tending my brother.'
A tall knight stood above him, in black armor dinted and scarred by many blows. Prince Baelor. The scarlet dragon on his helm had lost a head, both wings, and most of its tail. 'Your Grace,' Dunk said, 'I am your man. Please. Your man.'
'My man.' The black knight put a hand on Raymun's shoulder to steady himself. 'I need good men, Ser Duncan. The realm…' His voice sounded oddly slurred. Perhaps he'd bit his tongue.
Dunk was very tired. It was hard to stay awake. 'Your man,' he murmured once more.
The prince moved his head slowly from side to side. 'Ser Raymun… my helm, if you'd be so kind. Visor… visor's cracked, and my fingers… fingers feel like wood.'
'At once, Your Grace.' Raymun took the prince's helm in both hands and grunted. 'Goodman Pate, a hand.'
Steely Pate dragged over a mounting stool. 'It's crushed down at the back, Your Grace, toward the left side. Smashed into the gorget. Good steel, this, to stop such a blow.'
'Brother's mace, most like,' Baelor said thickly. 'He's strong.' He winced. 'That… feels queer, I…'
'Here it comes.' Pate lifted the battered helm away. 'Gods be good. Oh gods oh gods oh gods preserve…'
Dunk saw something red and wet fall out of the helm. Someone was screaming, high and terrible. Against the bleak grey sky swayed a tall tall prince in black armor with only half a skull. He could see red blood and pale bone beneath and something else, something blue-grey and pulpy. A queer troubled look passed across Baelor Breakspear's face, like a cloud passing before a sun. He raised his hand and touched the back of his head with two fingers, oh so lightly. And then he fell.
Dunk caught him. 'Up,' they say he said, just as he had with Thunder in the melee, 'up, up.' But he never remembered that afterward, and the prince did not rise.
Baelor of House Targaryen, Prince of Dragonstone, Hand of the King, Protector of the Realm, and heir apparent to the Iron Throne of the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros, went to the fire in the yard of Ashford Castle on the north bank of River Cockleswent. Other great houses might choose to bury their dead in the dark earth or sink them in the cold green sea, but the Targaryens were the blood of the dragon, and their ends were writ in flame.
He had been the finest knight of his age, and some argued that he should have gone to face the dark clad in mail and plate, a sword in his hand. In the end, though, his royal father's wishes prevailed, and Daeron II had a peaceable nature. When Dunk shuffled past Baelor's bier, the prince wore a black velvet tunic with the three- headed dragon picked out in scarlet thread upon his breast. Around his throat was a heavy gold chain. His sword was sheathed by his side, but he did wear a helm, a thin golden helm with an open visor so men could see his face.
Valarr, the Young Prince, stood vigil at the foot of the bier while his father lay in state. He was a shorter, slimmer, handsomer version of his sire, without the twice-broken nose that had made Baelor seem more human than royal. Valarr's hair was brown, but a bright streak of silver-gold ran through it. The sight of it reminded Dunk of Aerion, but he knew that was not fair. Egg's hair was growing back as bright as his brother's, and Egg was a decent enough lad, for a prince.
When he stopped to offer awkward sympathies, well larded with thanks, Prince Valarr blinked cool blue eyes at him and said, 'My father was only nine-and-thirty. He had it in him to be a great king, the greatest since Aegon the Dragon. Why would the gods take him, and leave you?' He shook his head. 'Begone with you, Ser Duncan. Begone.'
Wordless, Dunk limped from the castle, down to the camp by the green pool. He had no answer for Valarr. Nor for the questions he asked himself. The maesters and the boiling wine had done their work, and his wound was healing cleanly, though there would be a deep puckered scar between his left arm and his nipple. He could not see the wound without thinking of Baelor. He saved me once with his sword, and once with a word, even though he was a dead man as he stood there. The world made no sense when a great prince died so a hedge knight might live. Dunk sat beneath his elm and stared morosely at his foot.
When four guardsmen in the royal livery appeared in his camp late one day, he was sure they had come to kill him after all. Too weak and weary to reach for a sword, he sat with his back to the elm, waiting.
'Our prince begs the favor of a private word.'
'Which prince?' asked Dunk, wary.
'This prince,' a brusque voice said before the captain could answer. Maekar Targaryen walked out from behind the elm.
Dunk got slowly to his feet. What would he have of me now?
Maekar motioned, and the guards vanished as suddenly as they had appeared. The prince studied him a long moment, then turned and paced away from him to stand beside the pool, gazing down at his reflection in the water. 'I have sent Aerion to Lys,' he announced abruptly. 'A few years in the Free Cities may change him for the better.'
Dunk had never been to the Free Cities, so he did not know what to say to that. He was pleased that Aerion was gone from the Seven Kingdoms, and hoped he never came back, but that was not a thing you told a father of his son. He stood silent.
Prince Maekar turned to face him. 'Some men will say I meant to kill my brother. The gods know it is a lie, but I will hear the whispers till the day I die. And it was my mace that dealt the fatal blow, I have no doubt. The only other foes he faced in the melee were three Kingsguard, whose vows forbade them to do any more than defend themselves. So it was me. Strange to say, I do not recall the blow that broke his skull. Is that a mercy or a curse? Some of both, I think.'
From the way he looked at Dunk, it seemed the prince wanted an answer. 'I could not say, Your Grace.' Perhaps he should have hated Maekar, but instead he felt a queer sympathy for the man. 'You swung the mace, m'lord, but it was for me Prince Baelor died. So I killed him too, as much as you.'
'Yes,' the prince admitted. 'You'll hear them whisper as well. The king is old. When he dies, Valarr will climb the Iron Throne in place of his father. Each time a battle is lost or a crop fails, the fools will say, 'Baelor would not have let it happen, but the hedge knight killed him.''
Dunk could see the truth in that. 'If I had not fought, you would have had my hand off. And my foot. Sometimes I sit under that tree there and look at my feet and ask if I couldn't have spared one. How could my foot be worth a prince's life? And the other two as well, the Humfreys, they were good men too.' Ser Humfrey Hardyng had succumbed to his wounds only last night.
'And what answer does your tree give you?'
'None that I can hear. But the old man, Ser Arlan, every day at evenfall he'd say, 'I wonder what the morrow will bring.' He never knew, no more than we do. Well, mighten it be that some morrow will come when I'll have need of that foot? When the realm will need that foot, even more than a prince's life?'
