kay

The man pierced with Dunk’s iron says his mother’s name. It comes out thin and astonished, as though he had expected to die louder. Duncan hears it over the din. He watches the man’s eyes go queer in his face—film creeping over them, the pupils dulling, the whole wet look turning flat, the way dead fish do when they rise in poisoned water and the sun gets at their bellies.

An apology pushes up hard against Duncan’s teeth. He keeps it there. There is something mean in begging pardon of a man you have already run through. It makes him answer for your sorrow besides his own death. When the body sags and quits at last, Duncan braces a hand to the fellow’s shoulder, eases him off the blade, and lowers him onto his back with what care he can manage in a field full of screaming men. Then he pulls his sword free and breathes.

The stream is only a little way off. Sun has had all morning to work on his armour. The plates burn through his surcoat. The mail at his throat rubs raw and holds the heat there. Under it, the blood trapped in the quilted cloth has already begun to turn.

He knows he ought to go back. He knows the work is not done. His knees strike the bank before the thought is finished. He drags off one glove and then the other, drops them in the grass, and thrusts both hands into the current so fast the cold hurts. Water ropes round his fingers and under his nails and takes the blood by threads at first, then by clouds, until the stream runs pink, then weak as watered wine, then clear again as though the thing had never happened anywhere but inside his own skull.

He bows his head over it. His breath goes in rough through the nose and leaves slower. For a moment he can do nothing but look at his hands—broad things, nicked over the knuckles. Then he cups water to his face. The shock of it lifts the worst of the heat. He does it again. Lets it run from his brow and nose and mouth. Somewhere behind him men are still shouting. Steel still rings out, thin with distance now.

Duncan shuts his eyes. He has never been much for prayer, nor for finding the right words for it, but there are not many disbelievers in a foxhole. He opens his mouth.

“Mother, take him. He called your name. Forgive me for it. Mind his mother, too.” Breath shudders out of him. “Warrior, make me brave enough. Keep my hand true.”

Beyond the bank where the water deepens and the weeds grow long as hair, something has gone perfectly still to watch him.

When you see him kill your heart flutters strangely. Clean slice, straight for the heart. Merciful and cold in the same breath.

You know violence as the sharp white turn of a fish’s belly before your teeth close round it. The panic-kick of things that fit in your hands and things that do not, the times your own blood has gone stringing loose in the water because something bigger thought to make a meal of you first. Death below the surface is ugly, but it serves. Something eats. Something lives another day. Here, men spill one another open for reasons that do not end in hunger. The body falls in the grass and feeds no one. The waste of it catches at your mind.

Yet the great one uses his strength well. Joyless, he puts the blade where it must go and gets it done. Warrior, your thoughts supply at once, though he is younger than the word makes him sound.

Then, he stays. Only for a breath long enough to ease the dead man down from his sword and keep him from crumpling into the dirt like a sack split at the seams, but it is enough to draw you closer under the current. Almost as if he cannot bear for the man to go wholly alone. Almost as if being the hand that kills makes him answerable for that last small stretch between breath and none.

You slip nearer the bank, slow as weed-drift, and brace your fingers between the stones. The stream is clear here. It lets you see him drop to his knees. Lets you see him strip off his gloves with hands gone clumsy from heat. Blood clouds into the water when he thrusts his fingers in. He bends and sluices his face.

Your tail gives a hard, involuntary twitch. Until now he has been iron and leather and bright mail and the broad set of shoulders that belong to grown creatures who know their force. Then the water takes the blood and the grime from him and what rises from beneath it stills your breath clean out of you.

A boy. A beautiful boy. Young in the face despite the size of him. Wet lashes spiked dark. Mouth parted. Water running from brow to cheek to jaw, then slipping under the collar at his throat and down his neck. Your nails bite into the stones. Your gills flare wide and fast. You drag in more water through them without meaning to, as if the stream has suddenly thinned and left you short.

He opens his mouth and your eyes shut. The shouting from the field dulls. Stream keeps on at your shoulders. Wind moves somewhere high in the crowns of the trees. All of it goes faint around the shape of his voice. It reaches you blurred by distance, scant and earnest, with none of the grand sound men use when they want the world to think them holy. He asks for the dead man first. For the mother of the dead man. Forgiveness for what his own hand has done. Then he asks for bravery enough to return and do more of other men’s bidding before the sun goes down.

Nothing for himself. No glory. No protection. No rich spoil. Not even life.

Your grip slips and tightens again. Something deep in you, old as tide-pull, gives way. You have seen handsome things before. Fast things. Dangerous things. You have wanted and hunted and fed.

This is worse. This is a hurt that blooms sweet through the middle of you. By the time he lowers his head and the last of his prayer leaves his mouth and goes nowhere you can see, you love him so completely it feels less like being struck and more like sinking.

He rises and leaves, and the place he was at is empty as if it were bitten. The bank looks wrong without him on it. The water goes on over the stones as though nothing has happened. Your heart has no such manners. It follows him at once, crude and greedy, as though wanting were a hand with fingers on it. You part your lips with half a mind to call after him. Men can be called. Men can be coaxed to the water with the right note laid soft over the surface. You know how to turn the voice sweet enough to draw a neck forward, a foot wrong, a whole body into your keeping. The sound gathers under your tongue and dies there. To put a spell on him feels foul. It seems to you that a creature like that ought to come of his own will, or not at all.

You do not know by what rules men choose their maidens. You know only the old shapes from song and tale, the women with hair to their waists and wreaths at their throats, the ones led from halls by the hand, kissed before witnesses, warmed by fires built on dry land. Even the plainest of them has what you have not.

Legs.

By the time the sun tilts lower you are stern in the mind and weak in the heart, which is a poor way to go to a witch and the only way you have.

You gather what seems dear. Round pebbles from the streambed, the ones worn smooth as eggs. A white one with a milk-pale seam through the middle. A twist of yarrow and sage stolen from the bank where the roots drink deep. A handful of hazelnuts, though you have never eaten one and do not know if witches do. Three rowan berries bright as pinpricks of blood. One swan feather gone loose among the rushes.

Childish things, perhaps. Bride-things from the mind of a fool. You keep them all the same, tucked close in the fold of weed and river-grass you knot for carrying. Then you force yourself into one of the narrow runs that leaves the stream and threads the dark places inland. Mud slicks your sides. Roots comb your hair. The water grows warm and still and brown. It narrows to veins and then opens without warning into the bog pool, black at the middle, with a hut crouched on the shore as if it had grown there meanly from the peat.

You wait a long while with only your eyes above the weed. Nothing stirs but a gnat-cloud and the slow shake of sedge in the wind. At last you take one of the little stones from your hoard and throw it. It clicks against the wooden door. The sound is small; it still seems to carry everywhere. You sink lower, heart drumming hard, and hide among the pondweed with the offerings clutched to your breast, as if the right gifts and a brave face might yet make you into something a beautiful boy could love.

The door opens. The woman who steps out is bent nowhere and old everywhere. Her hair hangs in ropes the colour of drowned straw. Her shift is the grey of mushroom flesh. She peers toward the water as if she has smelt you already.

“Well,” she says. “What pretty thing noses at my threshold?”

You rise through the skin of water and push the bundle of gifts towards her. “I brought—”

“Did you.” She stoops and takes it between two fingers, as if it is something small and dead. “Then speak. A wish is no good to me till it has a mouth.”

You blink at her. Try to find the words for something prettier than a blunt girly whim, but they come out as they are. “I want legs.”

The witch looks at you for a moment. Then, she laughs. “That is not what you want.”

Mud stirs under your tail with the force of your annoyance. You dig the tip of it down into the black silt.

“Ah,” she coos, seeing it. “There is no shame in wanting, child. Only folly in pretending. You want a lad to love you.” You remain silent long enough for her eyes narrow with delight. “No. Not a lad.” She leans closer over the bank, and her smile turns terrible with it. “A knight.”

The scales along the back of your tail prickle. “Can you help me?”

“Likely.” She reaches down without warning, crooks one finger beneath your chin, and turns your face first one way, then the other. “You are fair enough for mortal work. Fairer than many that walk on two feet and think well of themselves besides. Why not sing to him? Why not call him into the water? Earth has given you gifts enough. Why do you not use them?”

You pull away from her hand. “I do not wish to lure him.”

Her mouth rounds. “Oh.” The sound is soft, but curdles your stomach all the same. “It is true love, then,” she says. “Pure as springwater. You would not stain your dear knight with a spell.” Her voice thins to a hiss. “What do you think you are doing here, if not spell-work?”

“The spell is not for him,” you say, and hear the weakness in it. “It is for me. I only need legs.”

“A spell is a spell all the same.”

She turns your bundle and lets the things fall. The pebbles, the berries, the herbs, the feather—all of it drops into the bog with a series of small, insulting plops. One hazelnut floats a moment before the water takes it.

“You may keep your trinkets,” she says. “I am not a hedge-wife to be bought with rowan and sage.”

Heat rises through you against the coldness of the bog. “Then why hear me?”

“Because I am curious.” She smiles again. “And because I can give you what you want. Under a condition,” she says.

Of course. Again, you keep still and say nothing. She seems to like that better than if you had begged.

“I will give you legs, and all that comes with them. You will wake with feet to stand on and knees to bend. You will go where he goes if you can keep pace. You will have three nights to win what you came for.”

The reeds whisper in the wind. Somewhere behind her hut a bird cries once and stops.

“If by the third night the knight loves you, the bargain is spent. If not, a soul is owed me.”

Your fingers tighten on the mud-bank. “Mine?”

“If you are dull enough.” The witch reaches into the fold of her garment and brings out a dagger. It is old and grisly, with a hilt of dark wood worn smooth by long handling. The blade is dark as well, but moonlight catches on it in a thin wet line. It looks hungry. “Or his.”

You stare at it.

“He may be given in your stead,” she says mildly. “A thrust under the rib. Upward, if you are weak in the arm. Bring him to me warm and I shall count us square.”

“Why would I do that?”

She lifts one shoulder. “Because hearts turn vicious when they do not get their fill. Because death is easier than longing for some creatures. Because on the third night you may find you love yourself a little more than him. I make room for all outcomes.”

The dagger gleams in her hand. You cannot stop looking at it. At last you whisper, “How shall I know if he loves me?”

The witch’s brows rise. “Were you not certain of it a moment ago?”

A pout blooms on your face unbidden.

She crouches at the bank then, bringing her face close to yours. Her breath smells of peat and old roots.

“When mortal men love their maidens,” she says, almost kindly, “they do not keep their hands to themselves. They part those fine legs you hunger after. They open the flesh between and put themselves there.”

A cold shiver runs the length of you.

Her smile returns, pleased and wicked. “There. That is plain enough even for a love-addled little fish.” She straightens. “Well? Do you accept?”

The word catches in your mouth. You sweep the dagger, the dark bog, the hut with your eyes. Then, her face, which has no mercy in it and no patience either. Because you have already loved him enough to come here, you say, “Yes.”

“Of course you do.” She puts the dagger down on the bank within your reach, then slips her hand somewhere inside her sleeve, deeper than the cloth ought to allow. When she draws it out again there is an egg in her palm, black-speckled and oddly warm.

You frown at it.

“Eat.”

“What is it?”

“An egg,” she says. “Do not go witless on me now.”

You take it from her. The shell is warm indeed, almost hot. “And then?”

“Then you sleep. Then you wake altered. It need not trouble you beyond that.”

It turns in your hand. “Raw?”

The witch gives you a look of withering contempt. “No, child. Put it in a silver cup and take it with honey.” She bares her teeth. “Yes, raw.”

Your eyes lower, ashamed of the question. The shell cracks easily. The inside slides thick and strange over your tongue. You swallow twice to get it down. The witch watches every motion.

When it is done, you wipe your mouth with the back of your hand and say, “How shall I find him?”

At that, something shifts in her face. Too rotten to be kindness, but it is the brief look of someone hearing a tune they know well.

“His blood is in the water,” she says.

Then she steps back, pulls the door open, and goes inside. It shuts between one blink and the next, leaving you in the bog with the dagger on the bank and the taste of the egg still clinging at the back of your throat.

You swim the way you came slowly. Moonlight makes the water mean and every root below look like a hand with the shape of something waiting. Above, the moon itself has thinned to a sickle near fine enough to seem a cut laid across the sky. It tells you that on the night of your judgement it will be gone altogether. You will hear it in the dark. His blood is in the water, the witch had said, and the current takes you at her word, carrying you through the narrow runs and back toward the broader stream where you first saw him kneel.

By the time you reach it, the bank is empty. You keep to the deeper part and let yourself drift there, belly turned uneasy by the egg, heart sore with a want that has already learned absence.

Sleep comes badly. Even so, it comes. The river rocks you. In the first fold of dreaming he leans over the bank again, all shadow and wet lashes, and this time when he opens his mouth it is not prayer that leaves it but your name. He reaches for you with a careful hand and thumb wedging under your chin. He bends and kisses you as though he has been thinking on nothing else.

Then the dream turns. Above you, something vast opens. The eye of god, grey and pale and lidless, hanging in the dark where the moon had been. Its patience is so complete the age of it exceeds the feeling of pity. Below, a pair of shears glints, iron-black and long as oars. The water thickens around you into a fat-like jelly, holds you fiercely, as the blades close with a sound no louder than a crab-shell snapping, and fire races you clean through. 

Scale after scale dulls and loosens. Webbing parts. Bone groans as if gripped and wrung by unseen hands. Your tail splits where no living thing ought to split and your flesh draws apart. New joints wrench themselves into being with a wet internal crack that never seems to finish. You open your mouth to scream and swallow black water instead. Heat tears through you from spine to hip to the new-made lengths of you, all the way to ten small, useless ends where your body has never ended before. Hair roots burn. Teeth ache. Even your fingertips feel changed, as though the whole of you has been dragged through too narrow an opening and forced to come out other.

You wake choking while dawn creeps into the sky. Half on the bank, half in the wash of the stream, naked to the chill, with the dagger clutched to your breast. Air rasps into you thinly through mouth and nose, making panic strike at once. You paw at your ribs and find only smooth skin where your gills ought to flare. Sealed. Gone. You drag another breath and another, each one scant enough to frighten. The water at your side offers no help. It laps your hip stupidly, as if it does not know you.

When you look down, you see them. Legs.

Two of them, long and bare and wrong as peeled roots. Knees knuckled sharp. Feet splayed in the mud with their blunt little toes. They belong to you no more than the moon belongs to the bog. The sight turns your stomach. You put a hand to one thigh. The skin there is soft and strange, without scale or sheen or the strength of a tail built to drive through current. When you try to draw the limb in, the knee folds with a hideous ease and the whole thing jerks sideways. It feels loose. Breakable. Made badly.

Still, you have asked for them. You plant both palms in the earth and try to rise and pain bites through your middle. Your legs buckle, each seeming to choose a different direction. One foot slides out from under you. The other catches on nothing and twists. You go down hard on your hands, palms full of mud. For a while you can do nothing but crouch there trembling, hair hanging round your face, breath coming sharp and ugly through a body that no longer knows its own shape.

Morning hones itself as you kneel in it. The scent of his blood has thinned almost to nothing. In its place comes the rest: men everywhere, dead and living both. Sweat gone sour in gambesons. Split guts, horse piss, iron and smoke. The field beyond the trees breathes out ruin by the lungful.

You have three days. Three days to find the knight, make him love you, and keep your soul out of a witch’s hand. You cannot even stand. Water clouds your vision and you laugh bitterly at how it won’t let you go entirely.

On the morrow, Dunk sweeps through the edges of the battlefield after the worst of it, checking for men still breathing whose bodies might be saved or those who need a merciful hand to help them pass. His side aches badly where someone slashed him, one ear hears less than it did before the fight, and one of his sockets throbs with excess blood, but at least he’s not the one gasping his last. He keeps his eyes peeled for movement, yet when he notices a particular creature trembling at the very shore where his inept prayers were heard, he stills.

A girl. Mud-caked, naked, and—Gods—crying.

He hauls the reins on Sweetfoot at once, dulling an instinct to charge forward and holding her in a rushed trot instead. “M’lady!” he calls from horseback. “M’lady, be not afraid!”

Your eyes lift, but the rest of you dwindles immediately. Arms come to cover your head and Duncan notices you’re stricken with grime wrists to elbows as if you were trying to make your way uphill on all fours. He dismounts with a small grunt and hunches on instinct. His arms spread wide and gentle, and before he knows it he’s murmuring as he would to a skittish thing. “Easy now,” he whispers. “Easy. I vow this to you—I am no threat. My name is… Ser D-Duncan The Tall. I won't hurt you.”

The title sits oddly in his mouth when he’s half-shrunken and on bent legs. As he comes closer, his cheeks begin hoarding warmth despite him, for the shape of you is visible and evident even at this angle. Breasts plastered to your thighs billow with each frightened breath. Your belly creases in the middle and clay tears and crumbles off your knees when you shudder. He sees nothing else, but in his chest an unbearable instinct to cradle you almost overcomes him.

His head turns to the side, so he watches you only with his eye’s corner. When he’s close enough, he undoes his cape, spreads it gently over your back and lets it fall over you. He has a fleeting thought on what kind of smell it must carry and whether that matters.

Only then does he see the dagger. It is clutched in your fist, half-hidden by mud and the hunch of your body, but iron is iron. His hand stills on the edge of the wool. For a breath he says nothing. A crying maid with a blade is still a maid with a blade, and fear can make a body quicker than training.

“Easy,” he says again, lower. “You needn’t use that on me.”

You stop trembling enough to lift your face. The blade drops. Then all at once you are on him, hands closing round his waist with such force Dunk rocks back on his heels. Something reaches him through wool and shaking breath. Unintelligible mutter. Then—found me. And again, softer, urgent with respite. Knew you would. Knew you’d find me.

For a moment he does nothing but stand there with his own arms half-raised, startled clean through. Then they come round you, shy and boyish. One hand settles between your shoulders. He rubs once, then again, broad and slow, as though you are a frightened colt and his hand might smooth you into sense. “There now,” he says, because it is what comes. “There now.”

Beneath the mud and the cold reek of the stream there is a smell to you he cannot place. Something green. Something sweet. It cuts strangely through blood and horse and churned earth. 

He lets you cling till your breathing eases enough to stop catching. When it eases, he gives your shoulders one careful squeeze and tries to look at your face without looking full at your face.

“M’lady,” he says. “Have you been hurt?” You shake your head against him. He swallows. “And your clothes—were you robbed?” There is a pause to that. Then you nod.

“Ah.” Dunk shuts his mouth on all the things that might follow that and does not ask them. “Well. I’ll take you to the village,” he says. “We’ll find something to put on your back, and someone to look you over.”

You do not let go, and he finds he does not much mind that. By now he is holding most of your weight besides. He means to set you back a little then, only enough to walk you to Sweetfoot, but the moment he loosens his hold your legs betray you. They fold queerly with the loose, witless give of limbs that do not know their own business. Dunk catches you fast under the arms before your knees can strike earth. 

Some hurt in the low back, he thinks. Or the spine knocked wrong. He has seen men go slack in the limbs from less.

“Easy,” he says again, lower now. “I’ve you.”

Your head comes up. There is mud on your cheek, tears dried in bright tracks through it. Up close the sight of you lands worse on him than it did before. Such beauty in such a place. Such beauty at all. If someone asked him later, he would have no better answer than that.

“May I carry you?” he asks.

You nod.

He gathers the cape tight first, fingers making poor work of it. Then he crouches so you may put your arms round his neck. When you do, your face comes so near he feels the warmth of your breath on his mouth. His own has gone dry. “I will lift you now,” he says, for want of anything wiser.

One arm behind your back, the other under your knees. He brings you up. The pull in his side is vicious enough to whiten his sight for a blink, but he only grunts and holds you the tighter for it. You are light to him. Light should not be so difficult.

Sweetfoot turns her head and blows at the sight of you in Dunk’s arms. “Mind yourself,” Dunk mutters, and means the horse, and himself, and perhaps the day entire.

Getting you into the saddle proves ugly work. There is no good way to manage a naked maid wrapped in a cloak when one hand is wanted for decency, the other for balance, and his side seems set on parting company with him. He stands a moment with his jaw shut hard, then does it the only way such things ever get done—awkwardly.

“M’lady,” he says, hot-faced, “I must set you before me.” You only look at him with those wide, strange eyes and make no complaint.

He gets one boot to stirrup, hauls himself up enough to raise you after, and nearly fumbles you when the cloak slips and his forearm feels the bare warmth of your back through the wool. Heat runs through him so fast it feels wrong. He gets you right the second time by sheer stubbornness, settles you before the saddle-bow, then adjusts behind with a grunt he prays sounds like effort.

It does not improve matters.

There is no room worth speaking of. You sit before him with your hair damp and knees thrown to one side, and Dunk must put an arm round your middle the moment Sweetfoot moves or see you slide clean off. He has no notion what one does with a girl in such a fix. Horses, boys, wounds, armour, hard roads, those he understands. A maiden fair as vision and shaky in the limbs, is another matter. He finds himself hoping there is some widow in the village with a stern face and capable hands who might take one look at you and know everything he does not. Then he may ride on to Riverrun with peace in his mind.

The thought sits well enough till you lean back. A little more weight at each step, whether from weariness or trust he cannot tell. Soon your back is to his chest and your hair keeps straying under his chin. He has to look somewhere, so he looks at your hands on Sweetfoot’s neck.

Mud is dried in the lines of your palms and packed black beneath your nails. The nails themselves are pale in a way he mislikes. A drowned sort of blandness, as though the blood had only lately remembered to leave them. His hand closes harder on the reins.

What befell you? Robbed, you had said—no, nodded. Robbed of clothes and the strength in your legs. Robbed near of your wits, to be found bare and weeping on the skirts of slaughter. His mind offers up answers and every one of them is ugly.

“You are safe enough for now,” he says, because the words come and because he wants them said. “We’ll have you among decent folk directly.”

You say nothing. Perhaps doze. Perhaps you only listen. When Sweetfoot steps through a rut, your head tips back against him for an instant, and Dunk’s arm goes firmer round your waist.

Riverrun can wait an hour. Even a day, if it must. First the village. Clothes. Food. A woman to tend you. Then he will know what ought be done.

He keeps his eyes ahead and rides. When the road begins to thicken with huts and kitchen smoke he turns Sweetfoot toward the first cottage with a swept patch of yard and washing strung on a line. A hen darts from underhoof squawking. Dunk reins in, slides down, and reaches up for you.

The door opens before he can knock. A broad woman with red wrists and a face like a hatchet stands in the threshold, takes in Dunk, the horse, the cloak-wrapped girl in his arms, and narrows her eyes. “I can explain,” Dunk says, which is a poor beginning and sounds like one besides.

“Can you?” she says.

Heat climbs his neck. “I found her by the stream yonder. She’s been robbed, I think. She’s got no clothes, and her legs are none too steady. I thought—” He falters, then tries again. “I thought a woman might better see to her.”

The woman looks past him to your face. Something in hers shifts, not softer exactly, but less sharp. “Well, I am a woman,” she says. “Bring her in, then, you great oaf, and stand there bleeding on my threshold no longer.”

Dunk ducks his head and does as he’s bid. The cottage is low-ceilinged and close with the smell of onions and wool. He sets you down where the woman tells him, though not without trouble, for your legs go queer under you again and your hand catches in his sleeve with sudden force. “You are safe,” he says under his breath.

Your fingers tighten. “Please,” you whisper. “Do not leave.”

That near aches him more than the clinging had. “I’ll be just outside,” he says, for the woman is already flapping a hand at him to get out and because there is no fitting place for him in a room where a maid must be dressed. “Only outside. I vow it.”

A beat. Then, you let go. The door shuts on him. Dunk stands in the yard with a hand pressed to his side. Through the wall come the dim sounds of women’s voices, yours low and strange, the older one brisk and practical. Once there is a clatter. Once a silence long enough to make him straighten from the fence-post he had leaned on. He is thinking whether it would be madness to knock when the woman steps out at last, wiping her hands on her apron.

“Well?” Dunk asks.

“Well, nothing’s broke,” she says. “No fever that I can feel, no wound worth speaking of. She’s frightened half witless and weak in the legs, that’s all. Hungry, too, I’d say. May be she took some knock to the head. May be she was born a little moon-touched. Hard to say.”

Dunk blinks at her. “She knows her own name?” he asks.

The woman gives him a look. “She knows enough.”

That does not answer much, but before he can find a better question the door opens and you come out.

The clothes hang on you as they would on a child dressed from a dead woman’s chest: a coarse shift, a faded gown, sleeves a touch too short, hem uncertain, boots big enough to host toes twice as long as yours. Your hair has been pushed back from your face with damp hands. Your legs still look unsure of themselves. Dunk moves before thinking and takes you by the elbows when you waver on the step. “There now,” he murmurs. “Steady.”

You look up at him with such plain relief that his grip gentles.

The woman snorts softly behind you. “Take her home, then.”

Dunk clears his throat. “Aye. That is—” He looks down at you. “Where is your home, m’lady?”

Your hand comes up and closes over his forearm. “There is nothing for me there,” you say. Your fingers tighten. “Please.”

He opens his mouth, then shuts it. “I am bound for Riverrun,” he says at last. “I’ve business there. I cannot—”

“That is where I am going,” you say quickly. “The last place where I have anything. Please. Take me with you.”

Dunk stares. It may be nonsense. It may be the plain truth. It may be only the talk of a girl too frightened to be left among strangers. He cannot tell. What he can tell is the feel of your hand on his arm, the look of you trying not to sway where you stand, and the knowledge that if he leaves you here, he will think on it all the road to Riverrun and probably every road after.

The woman folds her arms and watches him make a misery of the choice. “Well?” she says.

Dunk lets out a breath. “I can take you as far as Riverrun,” he says, still looking at you. “No farther promised than that.”

Your smile is answer enough. Later, when doubt gets into him, it will be one of the things he reaches back for.

Soon after the village, Duncan finds himself about a number of tasks he had not meant to take on. He accepts the pity bundle of more garments from the woman, all of them light. He lifts you to the saddle, then goes back for Chestnut and Thunder. He loses the mark of his back, gathers his scant belongings, counts them, and thinks of the trouble of one bedroll. Riverrun lies four nights off, and his purse is too light for inns along the way. He shifts the saddle on Chestnut till it will hold you steady enough, then goes through the poor store of cloth he owns to see whether there is anything fit to spare you. At last he finds a blanket little better than rough army issue and ties it round your shoulders with a length of string.

When he is done, he steps back to look at you and nearly laughs for the misery of it. A strange girl with no place to go, less worldly goods than he has, a queer way of speaking, and legs that seem only half-convinced by land—and here he is, setting his road to her pace as though this were a sensible thing. Duncan knows well enough what sort of fool he is. Dunk the Lunk, thick as a castle wall, slow as an aurochs. Still, his mouth pulls into a shy half-smile.

“Ready?” he asks.

The world of men continues to bewilder. They kill each other relentlessly and let the bodies rot out in the fields until crows find them. They speak oddly. They wear clothes. Rough things that scratch the skin round armpits and knees, and make their beasts wear clothes too. They walk on two imbalanced legs that have less sense to them than you would ever think they have, which end with feeble little things that need the most woeful instrument imaginable to stay protected—shoes.

The pain comes on you late. At first everything is so strange that the cuts in your feet barely matter. Then, just as you get the first grasp on how to walk on those fleshy stilts, an old woman gives you a shift, a skirt that wedges itself between your thighs, stockings that roll beneath your knees, and a pair of disgusting animal-skin things that make the wound across your sole press and bleed, press and bleed. You could fit another set of those ugly little toes into them and still they’d knock your ankles raw. Duncan seems to think your wits were rumbled sideways by whatever befell you, and sighs through his nose each time you try a few wobbling steps before giving up and tossing you from one place to another. From doorstep to horseback. From horseback to ground. From ground back to horseback again. Then, the horse takes over the carrying.

None of this matters greatly. None of it rubs you wrong in any way, because your knight has found you and agreed to take you to Riverrun, of which you know only that it is overrun with rivers and mean spirits, and you want nothing to do with either. You want everything to do with him, though, so you let the beast called Chestnut carry you toward it and knock your newly acquired arse against the hard leather of her saddle.

You glance at him often, only to make certain you were right to choose him, but Duncan proves worth every bruise on your buttocks. He is prettier close by. Washed of blood, his face goes almost holy at moments—too open and clean in the look of it—then a shift of shade will catch under the brow and jaw and make a man of him again so suddenly it gives you pause. His arms are strong enough to carry a girl like you. His heart, plainly, is soft enough to help one and trust one within the space of a single hesitant breath.

That softness lives in him in sly places. Not only in the face, though the face does its share. In the stammer that catches him when he is too aware of himself. In the way he asks leave before he touches you, as though a thing may be both necessary and solemn. In how he handles even his own size like it might alarm somebody if set down too hard. You begin to see that the boyishness in him is not only a matter of smooth cheeks and dark lashes and that honest mouth. It lives deeper. Some tender piece of him has made it to his great age uncrushed.

You have no notion what he knows of love. His lips look unkissed, which strikes you at once as improbable and agreeable. Kissable all the same. So are his cheeks, if it comes to that, and the hollows under his eyes look made for the brushing of thumbs in acts of pity or fondness or whatever human girls do when they mean to soothe a man. You think, in the stupid way of girls, that it may be just as well if he knows nothing. You know very little yourself. The males of your kind are greedy, quarrelsome creatures who would bite the shine off a scale if they thought it theirs by right. The tenderest kiss you have ever given in all your life was to a trout, and that was mostly because it was dying.

Still, you know enough to know this: there is something dear in a creature so large keeping such a breakable heart inside him. Duncan feels safe to you in the way deep water once did. Not because he could not drown you if he wished, but because every part of him seems arranged against wishing it.

The road, of course, is another matter. It goes on and on, pale and hard beneath the horses, made by men for reasons men must have found clever. When there is no canopy the sun comes down bare and mean, scorching your face, your scalp, the tender tops of your hands. Dust lifts and settles in your throat. The saddle knocks under you with a steady, sour persistence, and after a while even wonder thins into boredom. You cannot understand why anyone would choose such a path. Roads have no give. They hold the day’s heat. They are full of stones and wheel-ruts and the old droppings of beasts. Water, at least, takes your shape when it carries you.

But then, toward evening, the land alters. Light begins to bleed richer colours over everything. It gathers in the grasses and tips the hedges. It slicks itself along the backs of flies until the air is full of brief, burning specks. The trunks of trees grow black on one side and warm on the other, and the far fields seem to have been brushed by something molten and low. From the height of Chestnut’s back, you see land from its own heart for the first time: furrow, ditch, thorn, moss, little stones shining in the road, the long back of the world lifting itself toward dark.

The dying sun finds Duncan too. It catches in his hair until the auburn of it wakes with red-gold hidden under it, banked fire stirred by a stick. All of him brightens: cheek, ear, the blunt line of his nose, the great slope of shoulder under travel-stained cloth. When the sun begins to go, his colours come alive. It seems unfair that a thing may grow more beautiful just when the light is going, as if it was never meant to be kept.

“M’lady?” His voice pulls you from the sky. You turn your head and find him watching you from Sweetfoot’s back. “Are you tired?”

You consider this. “Tired of what?”

He blinks.

“Sitting on a beast?” you ask.

A sound leaves him then, low and huffed through his nose. “Aye. Riding can weary a body. We should make camp soon. It will be dark before long.”

You look him over for signs of weariness, but he shows none that you can read. He sits tall enough, broad enough, with the reins easy in one hand and the dust on him as if it has been there all his life. “The road is hard,” you allow. “The beast is delightful.”

At that you lean forward and wrap both arms around Chestnut’s neck. Chestnut blows out a pleased breath and dips her head as if she agrees with you entirely.

Duncan stares for a moment. Then his mouth presses itself into a line and he looks back to the road.

“Do people always choose paths this hard?” you ask.

“This?” he says. “This is no hard road. It’s straight, and flat enough, and there’s no great wind to cut at us. There are harder paths than this.”

You frown. “Why would anyone take a harder path?”

“Sometimes they must.”

You consider that gravely. Men do seem fond of arranging misery into rules and then obeying them.

After another little while, Duncan says, “Keep your eyes peeled for a place to camp, if there is one you like.”

Your hand lifts before he has finished speaking. “There.”

He follows the line of your finger. There is only a thick tangle of trees and bramble ahead, with sun lying through the branches. “There?” he says.

“By the water.”

He looks again, slower this time, as if water may show itself out of courtesy. “There ain’t water there, m’lady.”

“There is.”

His gaze comes back to you. It is a look you dislike before you understand it. Careful. Mild. The look given to a creature who has said something foolish and might be frightened if the foolishness is named aloud. Pity sits in it, thinly covered.

Heat pinches under your ribs. “Beyond those trees,” you say. “Where the sun takes aim. There is water.”

Duncan shifts in the saddle. For a moment it seems he means to answer. Instead he only draws a breath and turns Sweetfoot’s head. “All right, then.”

The gentleness of it makes the pinch in you flare hotter. The males of your own kind speak so when they wish to make you small. Little thing, pretty thing, witless thing. They forget how quickly a little thing can open a throat when she has teeth and a mind to use them. How a male may reach for you in the weeds, grinning, and only know himself dead when his fingers will no longer close because all the blood has run out of them.

You say nothing. Chestnut follows Sweetfoot off the road and into the green press, Thunder trots close behind with all of the belongings clinking at his sides.

Branches drag over your shoulders. Leaves brush your face and catch in your hair. The ground grows softer almost immediately, darkening underhoof. You hear it before he does, of course: the low, glassy talk of water over stone, hidden under bird-call and the rasp of insects. A moment later Duncan hears it too. His head lifts. Sweetfoot’s ears prick forward. He urges her on a little faster without looking back.

The trees thin, and beyond them lies a small bed of grass pressed close to a clear stream running lazy under evening light. A willow grows at the bank with its long hair fallen into the water, making a green chamber beneath it. The surface holds the last of the sun in broken pieces and lets them go again.

Duncan reins in. At first, he only looks. “Well,” he says at last, quiet and baffled. “Gods be good.” You sit straighter on Chestnut’s back when he turns to you. “How did you know?”

Your chin lifts, because even though he has no right to know, you are a proud creature. “I am not so witless as you think me, knight.”

At that his face changes. The bafflement stays, but something troubled comes into it too. “I never thought you witless,” he says.

Instead of dignifying that with a response, you begin getting off Chestnut. It seems simple enough. One leg must go somewhere, then the other after it, and the ground waits below with its usual bad intentions. You slide halfway down the saddle and there the business collapses. Your skirt catches, one foot finds nothing. Your hands clutch at leather and mane, and you are left hanging from the side of the beast in a deeply humiliating fashion, breathing hard through your nose.

Duncan is there before you make a fool of yourself entire. His hands span your waist through the shift, large and warm and terribly sure. He lifts you down as if the effort costs him nothing, though you have seen the way his side catches sometimes when he thinks you are looking elsewhere.

“I only meant,” he says, setting you on the grass with more care than the world deserves, “you keep surprising me.”

You say nothing to that. Only look at him from close by, and shamelessly so. He is shy for a lad this big. It pleases and worries you in equal measure. It makes you wonder, briefly and without comfort, whether he will know what to do with you at all. Whether he knows how men put themselves between the legs of women who want them so dearly. Whether, third night from this one, the witch will have the soul she grinned for.

Before you can ask, Duncan looks away. “You may bathe, if you like,” he says. “Under the willow there. I’ll start a fire. See to some food. Water the horses after.” Then he turns from you with the haste of a sailor escaping a sinking ship.

The first thing you lose is the shoes. You wrench them off and drop them in the grass with hatred. The cut across your sole still presses when your foot meets earth, but at least it is no longer trapped against leather, forced to bleed and bleed in its own little prison. The stockings go next, or try to. They roll and cling beneath your knees like pale eels. Then, the blanket. You tug at the ties and laces and strings, cross with their stubbornness, then only angrier. Human clothes are full of tricks and no kindness. At last, with a tired grunt, you pull the shift up over your head.

Behind you, wood clatters. You look round.

Duncan stands a few feet away with firewood scattered at his boots. His mouth has parted. For one suspended moment he simply gapes. Then flush climbs fiercely round his ears, up his neck, into his face, and he drops into a crouch to gather the sticks as if they have become suddenly precious.

“M-m’lady,” he says, strangled. “You oughtn’t—Seven save me—you oughtn’t undress before a man you scarce know.”

You stare at him.

“I thought you meant to go beneath the willow,” he goes on, still looking hard at the twigs. “Out of sight. I thought—what are you doing? Have you never been on the road? Or near men? Or near folk at all?”

An instinct pinches you, strange and unwelcome, to cover your chest. You do, though slowly, and with no clear idea why. He looks as if you have done him some harm. “It is only flesh,” you say. “You have flesh too. What is so wicked about mine that you cannot look?”

He makes a small, suffering sound and bends lower over the firewood. “My flesh is—” He stops. Swallows. Tries again. “It is different.”

You glance down at yourself, then at him. “How?”

His hand closes on a stick so tightly the bark cracks. “M’lady, I beg you.”

“For what?”

“For pity,” he says, so miserably that your brows lift. “It is improper, is all. A maid shouldn’t—And I don’t mean to have you think I’m that sort of man. I am trying to do good by you.”

He sounds so nervous your annoyance falters. Only for a moment.

You pick up the shift and hold it to your chest, then begin toward the bank. Walking still feels like being made to argue with the earth. Each step must be planned, lowered, endured. Too much pressure and the pain flares white-hot. Too little and your knee goes soft. Your feet seem stupidly far away from the rest of you, little traitors sent ahead to ruin your dignity.

You stop beside him. Duncan bows his head even lower, as though your bare ankle might strike him blind.

“Do you dislike women’s bodies?” you ask.

The sound he makes then is very nearly a whine. “Please, m’lady. Spare me. I am only a hedge knight. I am trying—please.”

You huff at him. “Forgive me for tormenting you with some skin.” Then you limp on beneath the willow’s hanging hair.

There, hidden by the long green fall of it, you strip with more temper than grace and lower yourself toward the stream. This is going poorly. Your knight does not seem at all like the men you have watched from the shallows, those shore-men who seize their lovers round the waist and press them down laughing in the dark, bodies gleaming, mouths so sinful your tail once twitched hard enough to stir silt. Duncan behaves as though the sight of you is a trial set by cruel gods.

At least there is water.

The stream receives you kindly, though changed skin and sealed ribs make even kindness strange. You lie back over its cool sheet and drift where it is deep enough to hold you, looking up through the willow leaves as they sieve the last gold from the sky. The current slips beneath your new body, uncertain around the parts it no longer knows, and you let it carry what little of you it still can.

Duncan remains crouched over the scattered firewood long after you limp beneath the tree, ears burning as though someone has boxed them both. The stream talks quietly behind him. The horses crop at the grass.

He has no answer for what has just happened. None he likes, anyway.

You are strange. Stranger than any girl he has known, though known is too large a word for the few girls that ever had cause to look twice at him. Your face is strange too, in how open it is. He has not seen one so plain and easy to read since he was a boy looking down into still puddles and finding his own there. He can tell when you are baffled. When you are tired. When you are pleased. When you are angry.

Now you are angry. Likely under the willow still wearing that fierce little frown, cross with him because he turned his eyes away. That is the oddest part. Most maids, he thinks, would be angry with a man for gaping. You seem wounded that he did not gape longer.

He did gape. Only a heartbeat, maybe, before sense struck him like a thrown stone, but a heartbeat can be a mean long while when a girl stands bare in afternoon light. He saw the lift of your breasts before your arms came up, full where the borrowed shift had hidden them, and prickling with river-cool air. He saw the narrow give of your belly, the line where ribs fell into waist, the dark crease of shadow beneath. Enough. More than enough. Too much for a man meant to be gathering sticks and doing honourable things with his hands.

You asked how your flesh was different from his. The terrible thing is he would only need to stand up to show you.

That thought near makes him groan aloud. He jams another stick into the small pit he has scraped clear with his boot and starts arranging kindling with far more care than kindling deserves. Fire. Food. Horses. Bedroll. Those are proper troubles. Those can be solved with hands and a bit of sense.

The bedroll is the worst of them. Four nights to Riverrun. A purse too light for inns unless he means to arrive there hungry and horseless. He pokes at the kindling and gives himself over to a hard, practical anguish.

When the fire catches, he goes to see to the horses. Sweetfoot accepts his hand with her usual calm. Chestnut, traitor that she is, blows warm air straight into his face and tosses her head toward the willow.

“Oh, have you a new favourite?” Duncan mutters. Chestnut chews at nothing, looking pleased with herself. “Aye. Good. All of you against me, then.”

He returns to the fire with what food he has: one mangy rabbit still fit for roasting, a clutch of withered potatoes that have begun trying to become more potatoes, and bread gone hard enough to argue with a knife. He has had worse meals. Many worse. Still, he finds himself worrying whether it will be enough for a tender-mouthed creature like you, whether you are used to finer things, softer things, things served by hands that have never been black with battlefield mud.

The whole day sits oddly in his skull. Morning had found him still full of war. Blood from the day before. The sour stink of men opened for no good reason. Boys felled in the grass with their eyes gone milky and their mothers’ names drying on their tongues. He had been angry then, in a slow thick way, at killing and lords and banners and all the great heavy wheels that roll over little bodies until no one can tell what shape they had.

Then he found you by the stream, naked, half-wild with fear, concussed or close enough, begging him without quite begging to take you with him. Now you are angry because he would not stand there and leer at your tits.

Duncan understands horses better than people. Dogs too. Even mules, ugly-hearted beasts though they can be. A horse gives warning before it kicks. A dog shows teeth before it bites. People smile, weep, lie, ask strange questions, go hurt in places a man cannot see. You escape even the small customs he has managed to learn.

He lifts his eyes from the rabbit just as the wind moves the willow’s hanging hair aside. Through the green gaps, he sees you.

You are floating on your back where the stream broadens under the tree, arms spread loose on either side, legs moving slowly beneath the skin of the water. The last light scatters over you in pieces. A knee and a hip. The small rise of your belly. Water darkens and brightens as it crosses you, breaking your shape and making it whole again. Your hair fans out around your head. Your eyes are closed, mouth parted, and the stream slips between your lips as though you have invited it.

Duncan ought to look away, but the boy he is, he doesn't.

There is enough of you on display to shame a septa dead in her robes. Breasts, thighs, the place between them blurred and shown by water in turns. Yet your face holds him worst. The peace of it, the ease of it. Stripped of cloth and terror and all the hard rules that seem to trouble you, you look newly made and older than the earth together. Not human, he thinks. Then he feels wicked for it, because you are a girl, and hurt, and under his protection.

Still, you look like one of those goddesses men carved in old stones before the Seven came, the kind Duncan knows nothing about except that a wiser man would kneel or run. You look pleased to have the world off your skin. No wonder you shed clothing like a snare.

The willow falls back into place. Green covers you again. Duncan looks down at the rabbit, jaw tight, and turns it over the flame before it can make it to coal. He scolds himself too, keeps muttering Ser Arlan's little knightly preachings to tear his mind away from what boys think about, and back to what sworn swords should think about.

The stream sloshes and plops with the sound of a body being dragged out of it. There, Dunk wonders what exactly to do, because he knows well enough you are no good at walking yet, but finds himself in the grip of a strange preference. He would rather let the stumble happen and rush to help than prevent it outright, if prevention means enduring another comparison of flesh.

Soon enough, he catches you limping from the corner of his eye to the heart of his vision. You come to sit beside him much too close for his peace. The cold of the river comes off you plainly, running against the heat of his shoulder where yours nearly touches. Damp has darkened your hair and set loose drops along your neck. Before he can shift away without making it an insult, you arrange yourself with great importance and announce, “There. Modest.”

Dunk looks. Stupidly, but he does. He has never known cloth to be a thing worthy of praise. Cloth is only cloth. A courtesy. A barrier. A way for decent folk to go about the world without setting fire to one another’s ears. Yet in his want to tell you that you have done well, he stabs his own foot clean through.

The linen has clung to you everywhere it ought to have had the manners to hang loose. Breast, belly, the small inward draw of your waist—all made plainer by water and the thinness of the shift. The blanket lies in a heap too near the fire, abandoned as though wool has somehow offended you.

He holds the lump in his throat from becoming a sound. Then he reaches for the blanket, shakes the worst of the grass from it, and puts it over your shoulders with as much solemn care as if he were robing a queen. He draws it close beneath your throat and tucks one edge over the other.

“You’ve not dried yourself off,” he says. “Cold, aren’t ye?”

You look at him for a moment. Then, there's a nod, and, thank the Seven, your hands take over the keeping of the blanket at your breastbone. The lump in Dunk's throat loosens.

He busies himself with the food. The rabbit has given what it can to the pot, which is less than a rabbit ought to give and more than nothing. The potatoes have softened. The bread will have to be chewed with conviction. He ladles the thin pottage into one of his wooden bowls and passes it to you.

You take it in both hands and eye it with open suspicion. “What is this?”

“Supper,” he says.

You smell it.

“It ain’t much,” Dunk goes on, because the look on your face begins to trouble him. “Only rabbit and some potatoes, and the bread’s gone hard. Still, you ought to eat. There’s a day on the road ahead, and you’ve had naught in you since—” He stops, because he does not know since when. “A while, I’d wager.”

He expects disappointment, perhaps. Revulsion, if you are some lord’s daughter after all, though what lord’s daughter finds herself naked and half-drowned by a stream is beyond him.

Instead, you look bewildered. “You made this?”

Dunk blinks. “A-aye, m’lady.”

You dip your fingers in before he can offer a spoon. The first bite goes into your mouth carefully, as though supper may have sharp bits within it. Then your face changes.

It is a small thing, merely a lifting of brows and mouth pausing round the taste. Then you take another bit, and another, hotter than is wise, huffing through it and laughing once under your breath as though the whole notion of cooked rabbit has played some clever trick on you. Grease shines at the corner of your mouth. You lick it away with no shame at all.

“This is good,” you say, and sound surprised by your own gladness. “This is very good.”

Dunk is bewildered. It is one kind of cruelty to tease him and huff at him for trying his best at decency and failing, another to make a jest out of him and his hedge-ridden status. He looks down into his own bowl.

“Must you mock me?”

You stop chewing at once. The mouthful is too large to swallow cleanly, but you do it anyway and wince as it goes down. “Mock you?” you ask. “Why would I?”

“It’s only rabbit,” he mutters. “And mangled potatoes. You needn’t make a show of it.”

The hurt that comes into your face lands in him badly.

“I did not mean to hurt you,” you say. “Forgive me. I only meant—I would not be able to make this.” A pause. “Or start a fire, for that matter.”

Dunk lifts his head. “You do not know how to start a fire?”

You look at him a moment too long, then back into the bowl. “I’ve never needed it.”

That answer is another strange stone set on the growing pile of you. He gives a low hum and scrapes at his own supper with the spoon. “Well,” he says after a moment, rough with regret. “I beg your pardon, then. If you truly enjoy it, I am glad.”

Your eyes lift. “I do. Truly.”

Knowing it is true does something worse than the praise did. It catches him off guard and warms him under the breastbone, soft and dangerous. He leans back on one hand, taking you in. Half-smile, bare feet peeking from beneath the blanket, bowl clutched as though it contains some small wonder.

“So,” he says, because his mouth is safer when it is trying to crack an unresolvable riddle, “you’re a lady who cannot cook, cannot start a fire, and despises garments and shoes, but has some queer prescience when it comes to finding a body of water. Hm?”

Silence only, then a wide-eyed glance.

“Peculiar,” Dunk says.

“I do not understand why men wear so much cloth anyway,” you say, picking at the blanket where it sits under your chin. “What is peculiar is to have skin so feeble—”

There, your voice dies. Dunk has gone very still with his spoon halfway to his mouth. “Men?” he says.

You blink.

“You are people too,” he says, after a beat.

The words are gentle enough, but they come with a puzzled furrow between his brows, as though he is trying to set you in the proper place and cannot find the shelf. He takes another mouthful and chews it slowly. “Have you worn lighter cloth before, then? Before… all this?”

Before the stream, he means. Before the mud. Before the village woman and the borrowed gown. Before whatever thing he has decided happened to you.

Your fingers tighten round the bowl. “Lighter, yes.”

“How light?”

You give him a careful look.

Dunk seems to understand his mistake before you answer. Red returns to his ears with comic speed. “Never mind. You needn’t— That was no question to ask a maid.”

You consider him. “Do you not often see women naked?”

He chokes. It is only a little choke, but enough to make him turn his face and thump one fist against his chest. “Gods,” he says when he has breath again. “M’lady.”

“I am only asking.”

“Aye, well. Some questions ought to be asked with more care.”

“Why?”

“Because they—” He looks at you, then away, then helplessly down to his lap. “Because they put thoughts in a man’s head.”

“What thoughts?”

His mouth opens. Shuts. You lean closer, interested so plainly Dunk near suffocates on air that suddenly feels chewable in his mouth. “Do women’s bodies trouble all men so badly, or only hedge knights?” you ask.

He makes the suffering sound again. Quieter this time, but telling all the same. “I've seen women,” he says, with the grave misery of a fool walking barefoot over hot coals. “Some. A few. In bathhouses, once or twice by mistake. On the road, folk are not always private as they ought be. And, uh—” He clears his throat so hard it sounds painful. “And in places where women are paid to be looked at.”

You stare. “Paid?”

“Aye.”

“To be looked at?”

“Among other things.”

“What other things?”

Dunk puts his bowl down. You wait. He looks into the fire as if the flames might take pity on him and leap high enough to swallow his face. “Things between men and women.”

“What things?”

“Married things,” he says, too quickly.

“Only married people do them?”

His eyes close briefly. “No.”

“Then why call them married things?”

“Because I am trying to keep this talk decent,” Dunk huffs.

You frown into your supper. “Have you done them?” you ask.

It is such a rude and forthright question it strikes bone in him, though somehow it does not quite offend. His face pulls tight. The flush burns hotter, but something under it draws inward, shy and sore and young.

“N-no,” Duncan says, small.

You lean closer, as if trying to match him in secrecy lest his horses suddenly recognise human tongue. “Never?”

“No.”

“Why?”

He gives a small, helpless shrug. “I’ve had no wife.”

“But you said folk do these things without wives.”

“Aye, some do.” He groans then, low and exasperated, dragging one hand over his mouth. “Gods.”

“But you do not.”

“No.”

“Why?”

His thumb moves over the rim of his bowl. There is dirt under the nail, a split at the knuckle, the hand of a man who knows fire and reins and sword-hilts and very little of where to put himself when a girl asks him plain questions in the dusk.

“Seemed wrong, most times,” he says. “Or costly. Or I was too young. Or too big and stupid and slow to know what was wanted till the chance had gone.”

He goes quiet after that, hoping it is enough of a confession to satisfy you. Another part of him wonders what business he has entertaining the whim at all. A puzzle of a girl you are, that is for certain. Strange in your questions, in your frowns, in the careless tilt of your head when you hear a thing you cannot place.

Then a thought comes on him, tender and stupid enough to shame him: is this another chance he cannot recognise while it is being given? He lifts his face to check yours for some sign of what he imagines a lustful glance might be, though he has no real notion what he expects to find there. Heat? Mischief? Some womanly knowledge he would know when he saw it? Before he can make any proper fool’s study of you, you ask another question.

“Do you like kissing?”

You might as well have picked up a knife by the blade. “I—” His throat works. “I suppose I might.”

“You suppose?”

He breathes heavy. His skin surely can’t get any hotter, so he answers, “I have kissed.”

Your eyes brighten at that, keen enough to make him regret the disclosure at once. “How many times?”

Duncan laughs then, though there is little mirth in it. Nerves, mayhaps. Or the pure severity of you sitting there with rabbit grease on your mouth, asking after his kisses as if counting apples in a basket. He has admitted to being green and now sounds greener still. “Seven save me,” he whines.

“How many?”

“Enough to know a man should not count in front of a lady.”

“Was it good?”

The fire pops. Somewhere behind the pair of you one of the horses tears grass with its teeth. Dunk sits in deepening blushing silence.

You eat another bite. Hum, as if the flavours have managed to marry into something more delicious during the interrogation. “At the shore,” you say then, “men kiss women as if they are hungry.”

Dunk’s gaze snaps to you.

“I have seen it,” you add. “They hold them by the waist and put them down in the grass. Sometimes the women laugh. Sometimes they make sounds as if they are being bitten, but they keep their hands in the men’s hair, so I think they must like it.”

Duncan feels himself go past blushing into something worse. Stricken, feverish, and too aware of the place where his belly has kicked tight under your words. He cannot have you thinking him that sort of knight. Cannot sit here in the dark with you speaking of women pressed into grass and let his mind go where it has already begun to go.

“M’lady,” he says, and hears the plea in it himself. “I think we ought to try and get some sleep.”

“It is barely dark,” you say.

“It will be darker soon.”

“That happens whether we sleep or not.”

“Aye,” he says faintly. “So it does.”

You lick a bit of grease from your thumb. His eyes move there and away so fast he prays you miss it. “Do you want more supper?” he asks.

You smile into your bowl. “You are changing the subject.”

He smiles back, weakly. Hopes there is enough begging in it, though judging by your curiosity about every cursed thing under the moon, falling to his knees would only give you more to ask about. “I am… trying to save my soul.”

Your laugh comes out small and surprised, and it spills warm through his chest in a way that has no business being so pleasant.

“Eat,” he says. “Then sleep. There will be more road on the morrow, and you already hate the road.”

“I hate the shoes more,” you tell him.

“Aye. I had gathered.”

“And the stockings.”

“A terrible foe,” Dunk says, standing up.

“And the laces.”

“Cruel little beasts.”

You glance at him, something sharp and pleased on you. It is very difficult to keep thoughts from his head, foul thoughts, when you look like this. His heart softens a notch while the other parts of him harden, and before he is forced back to sitting, Dunk turns and tells you, “I’ll water the horses and prepare the bedroll for us.”

He does so. You follow him soon after, quiet-footed for once, and stop to eye the splay of oilcloth and old wool on the ground as if it is another human custom laid out for judgment.

Dunk clears his throat. “You should lie down. You’ve had a long day.”

That much, at least, you obey. You lower yourself carefully, one knee bending wrong at first, then righting with a frown that makes him look away before fondness can show too plainly on his face. He waits until you are settled, then pulls the blanket up over you and tucks it in at your shoulder. Only a little. Only enough to keep the night air off. His hand stills there for half a heartbeat before he draws it back.

Then he turns, draws his sword, and lays it down between the two sides of the bedroll.

It makes a good enough line. Honest steel. Cold steel. A better man than he is, perhaps, lying straight-backed where honour ought to be.

You watch him do it, and Dunk pretends not to notice.

Getting himself down beside you is less graceful than he would like. He lowers carefully, trying to favour the slash in his side, but the wound pulls anyway and a wince catches him regardless. He settles on his back at last with a breath through his teeth, one arm tucked behind his head, his body held a proper distance from the blade.

For a while there is only the fire. The horses. The soft working of water under the willow. But, of course, you must ask. “What is the sword for?”

Dunk shuts his eyes and opens them again. “For sleeping.”

You turn your face toward him. He can feel it without looking. “Are you afraid of me?”

“No,” he says quickly. “No, m’lady. It is only—” He searches for the words and finds only poor ones. “It is a boundary, like. For your honour.”

“My honour?”

“Aye.”

“Does it need steel?”

Dunk rubs a hand over his brow. “Mayhaps mine does.”

That comes out wrong enough to make him go still. He tries again before you can catch hold of it.

“I mean, it is proper. A man and a maid should not lie close without vows between them. Or kinship. Or—” He thinks of hedge knights, camp followers, drunk squires, road wives, all the world as it is rather than as septons pretend it to be. “Or some understanding.”

You hum. It is only a small sound, but it slips soft through the dark and goes straight into his groin. Pretty. Gods help him, even that is pretty. Your voice has no need of song to work on a man.

Dunk fixes his eyes on the sky. “I do not wish you to think ill of me,” he says, lower. “That is all.”

Another stretch of quiet. The fire clicks and collapses inward on itself.

“Do husbands and wives sleep like this too?”

Dunk's lids squeeze shut so hard they hurt.

He ought to answer. He knows he ought. It is a simple question, mayhaps, though no question of yours has proved simple yet. But he has no answer fit to give without inviting ten more behind it, each worse than the last. His side aches. His head aches. His body is a foe beside a sword that suddenly seems no wider than a blade of grass.

So Dunk lies very still and does his worst pretending to be asleep. After a moment, you hum again, as if you know perfectly well he is awake and have decided to let him keep the lie.

Because you have felt everything these last two weeks with such abhorrent intensity already. Tired enough to resent objects. Always hungry and then disgusted mid-way through the meal. Sick in sly little turns that don’t reach vomiting and therefore cannot even be dramatised properly. Your tits ache. Your stomach goes queer at smells that used to be your own kitchen. On top of all that, you have heard the heartbeat for the first time and nearly climbed into Duncan’s ribs from the force of it, and then scowled a little for how naturally it came.

He took you home. He sat on your floor and worked your feet in those big careful palms until your bones melted. Neither of you said a thing about it, because a gesture like that only stays innocent in the hands of very unawkward people, and you are not those people.

When he draws an actual ring, and one that looks insultingly as though he has thought of you in the choosing of it, you feel too much to sort cleanly.

The thing itself is dear. You would wear it. You might have loved being given such a thing under a different sky. But the frame round it spoils the first astonishment. It comes to you freighted with duty, with fright, with his giant impossible goodness, and you hate yourself for the sharp bright flicker in you that wanted, for one deranged second, to say yes simply because he looked so earnest asking.

You cannot tell him any of that in the moment. If you open your mouth you may cry, or accept, or ask something humiliating like whether he means now or only because of the baby. Some mean little girlish organ inside you had wanted to be chosen and now cannot tell whether this counts—it must be what all this searching has been about. Your body, traitor that it is, chooses for you.

It sends the whole knot of feeling out the wrong door. A laugh comes on you so hard it near doubles you. By the time you clap a hand over your mouth it is too late; another peal gets out, then another, and your eyes are stinging with water. And it doesn’t just come because the whole thing is ridiculous, though God, from one angle it is. You are laughing because it is unbearable and because if you do not laugh you may do something much worse, like take the ring and break your own heart with it.

He sits there on his heels and stares at you like he’s ashamed of existing, so you troubleshoot instead of being honest with anyone in the room. Wipe those tears and ask him if he’s lost his mind. Not because you think so, just to check if the child is going to have two lunatic parents or just one.

You’ve a hunch neither of you is fully sincere or fully at your wits, because how can one be when things are happening this fast and with no pause in sight. He asks if you’re angry, and you tell him no despite being, a little. It is an odd thing to be proposed to and feel as if what’s being offered is the mind’s emergency measure rather than the heart’s own movement; comfort a person produces because they cannot reach the wound itself and so place something useful nearby and hope it helps. Maybe not angry exactly, then, but faintly soured by it. Your mother would laugh herself sick at the whole arrangement, so both the proposal and the baby go straight into the enormous drawer of things you will never tell her.

You answer a half-measure with one of your own and tell him the ring is pretty. Then, because cruelty is sometimes only honesty in shoes, you add that he ought to keep it for an actual wife. At that Duncan looks so gravely stricken you almost take it back, but then you put it on the day being too full of feeling for either of you to know what to do with it, never mind all of it together.

When you linger on the fact that you’ve just been proposed to by a man you know hardly anything about and who knows hardly anything about you beyond what friends of friends know about each other, he says possibly the first true and sensible thing all evening. He asks if you can hang out. And for a great many reasons you are glad. 

It is a good idea not to live estranged. It will be good for the baby, when it finally arrives, to find parents who know something of each other beyond preferred lager and whose turn it is to get the next round. And despite part of you shrinking from the performance of it and all the little consequences that follow—shop girls smiling at the poor doomed pair, strangers deciding what you are to each other, the whole world eager to drape a shape over you before you have made one yourselves—some tiny romantic crumb in you howls at it all the same.

Because there is devotion in Duncan. It lives in his eyes and hands and shoulders, in the slight lop of his mouth when he looks at you now. Even if it is only for the baby, you decide you can live inside it for a while. Better, perhaps, to rent a shabby house than remain homeless.

Silence, for a while. He sits next to you, making the sofa dip so your hips slant with it. The box turns in his fingers. Finally he snaps it shut and pockets the ring. He sighs from somewhere low in himself, tips his head back and says, “I should probably go. Will ye be all right?”

“Mm,” you say. “It’s like living in a perpetual hangover. I’ll be fine.”

He nods to that, then gathers himself off the couch and points vaguely at the door as if he has to persuade himself towards it. There is absolutely no reason for him to stay. You are fully capable of boiling your own kettle and feeling odd in your own flat. He gets as far as the door before you stop him. “Hey, Dunk—”

His head lifts. “Aye?”

“How did you know about pregnancy weeks?”

“Oh.” He shifts a little. “I told—” He swallows, suddenly looking as if this may have been a tactical error. “I told Raymun. Hope that’s all right?”

“I told Rowan,” you say. “I guess we’re even. So?”

That brightens him a little. “Raymun showed me an app.” He is already pulling his phone out. “Look.”

You drift closer while he opens it. He shows you a pastel little diagram with the baby floating in a black oval like a bean in space. “Sweet pea now,” he says, with such fondness it nearly short-circuits you. His thumb taps ahead. “And that’s next week. Then that one.”

You look at the screen, then at him while he doesn’t notice. He is completely engrossed. He starts telling you what vitamins the app says you should take and what it recommends for nausea, and by then you have to snort.

“Okay,” you say. “I’ve seen enough. You can go now.”

He sinks a little at that. “D’ye mind it?”

“No.” You shake your head. “It just feels strange that you’ve been out there with Raymun nailing logistics while I’ve been talking to Rowan about everything except the logistics and trying to figure out how to sell Lyonel’s booze. Not exactly pregnant behaviour.”

Dunk goes solemn with that, the way he does when he thinks he has been handed a job. “I can do the logistics,” he says. “If ye want.”

You stare at him for a beat. It does offer to take something off your back. Then, just as quickly, the other side of it rises: handing him the weight of it all, letting him get practical and useful and necessary, and knowing the arrangement has an end point. Something in that feels wrong. Unfair to him. Unhealthy for you.

So you smile, a bit tight. “I’ll get the app too.”

He studies your face as if checking whether that is a real answer. “Right.”

“But I don’t mind that you’re interested,” you add. “It’s nice.”

That softens him. He nods, pockets the phone, hesitates a moment, then bends and kisses your forehead. “Sleep well, lass.”

You close the door behind him and groan into the empty flat at the whole ridicule of it. At the proposal. At the app. At the forehead kiss. At the fact that you are now painfully aware of how tender he was with your feet, and wonder why in God’s name your brain insists on filing that under some deranged version of an erotic encounter.

With the next appointment scheduled for two weeks from now, you half-ass the promise of hanging out by merely keeping Dunk in the loop. It is mostly texts and short calls. Between work and Rowan, who has fully surrendered to the role of pregnant wife-to-be, it is all you can manage.

You meet her twice for breakfast, partly to compare symptoms and partly for girl talk, though those two things keep bleeding into each other. Pregnancy, you learn, comes in all flavours and tempers, because Rowan is your mirrored opposite in nearly everything. She is fidgeting, restless, forever adjusting in her chair, forever talking, forever midway through choosing flowers or dresses or napkins or whatever fresh circle of hell weddings contain. She has colour in her cheeks and too much life in her limbs. You, meanwhile, are so tired you could put your head down in the jam and sleep there.

“I’m serious,” you tell her over tea and toast on the day of the second appointment. “It’s like my body has decided this body no longer matters. We are now focusing on making a new body, so all my energy goes into this.”

Rowan laughs so hard she nearly snorts tea. “I did read that, actually,” she says. “That it can hit you like that. Rotten luck that it picked you, though.” 

“Cheers,” you mumble through the sore in your throat from all the other things you don’t talk about.

“How are you even managing work?”

You sigh and drag your fork through egg you no longer want. “Well. I suppose Lyonel thinks I’m burning out, because I fell asleep on my hand the other day and he actually looked concerned about something for the first time in his life.”

Rowan blinks. “Hang on—you didn’t tell him?” 

Your face wrinkles. “That I’m pregnant and will most likely go on maternity leave in a few months and suffer the consequences of it? Not yet.”

She gives you a fond, patronising look over the rim of her cup. “You do know you’ll have to stop work at some point, right?”

“Part of me knows it, yes. For now I can’t. And you should be glad, because your future wife status depends on it.”

Rowan scoffs. “One of these days Lyonel’s cologne is going to make you puke on his expensive shoes and he’ll send you away before you get any say in it.” 

You grimace. “Duncan says it passes. That the first few weeks are hard and then it gets a little better.”

She goes still and just blinks at you. “I’m glad you have another pregnant hen to seek advice from.” 

“Fuck off,” you mutter. “He’s just… engaged.” As soon as it leaves your mouth you can hear the irony of it. “As in dedicated,” you correct, a beat too late.

“What was that?”

“Nothing.”

“No, no.” Rowan points at you with a bit of sausage. “That there. What was that?”

You go quiet, shoulders tightening, and pray uselessly into your tea, god no, god no, god no.

She sees it land. Her eyes narrow. “Did Duncan—?”

Playing dumb proves to come with more effort than grace. Still, you try: “Did Duncan what?”

“What did he do?”

There’s no way of saying it without getting berated, so you mutter it into your tea first and have to say it again. “He proposed.”

Rowan freezes, then grabs both your hands off the table and turns them over, inspecting them as if evidence may yet materialise there. “I see no ring here, though,” she says, a little panicked.

“Well,” you say, pulling a face, “I said no.”

That gets you a full scowl. “Why the fuck would you say no? I thought you liked him.” Under her nose, she adds, “You liked him enough to fuck him.”

You scoff and yank one hand back. “I don’t fucking know him. He’s just been… there for two years, and I know nothing beyond what team he cheers for and that he’s friends with Raymun because they met down the fucking pub. That’s it, Rowan.”

Her face softens then, annoyance giving way to something careful. “Hun. I know it’s backwards. I know it’s not ideal. But have you thought this through? Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. He’s a good lad, and he likes you, and—”

“I cannot think of a worse thing than baby-trapping a guy who’ll look back and resent me years on,” you cut in. “Call me a thick-o, but I don’t want to be proposed to because I got accidentally knocked up. I know it’s noble. I know it.” You stare down at your plate. “It’s just… not what I want. Ugh, it’s insane, right?”

Rowan goes solemn at that. For a second she looks as though she is about to tell you she knows a thousand worse fates than this, and you are sure she does. Then, she reins herself in. “It’s not insane,” she says. “And I get it. I’m proud of you, actually.”

You look up.

She shrugs, picking at the handle of her cup. “You’re right. We don’t have to do a thing just because there’s a path worn into the ground for it. It’s only—” Her mouth goes a bit crooked. “I’ve spent half my life being dead set against this sort of carry-on, and now that I’ve gone and done the properly transgressive thing of following the path, it feels disgustingly right. So I forget, sometimes, that not everyone’s built like me.”

“Thanks,” you say, and mean it. Inside, of course, the truth is more embarrassing. You do want it. You just want it with a hundred conditions attached, a whole chain of stupid ‘buts’ clamped round the ankle of it.

Rowan lets the silence sit only a moment before she tilts her head. “Are you all right otherwise? Apart from the obvious.”

You cringe and cover half your face, as if anyone in the café might read your mouth. Then you lean in and whisper, “I’m… weirdly horny.”

She gapes at you. “Don’t piss me off.”

“What?”

“Well, that, for one, I envy.” She sits back with a huff. “I’ve been feeling all sorts of gross about it, and whenever Raymun gets ideas I swat his poor arse off.”

You shrug, self-conscious enough to stare into your tea. “We should maybe swap then.”

“Well, have you thought about Duncan?” Rowan asks. “You’ve already done it once, so—”

“Christ, Rowan.” You drop your hand and stare at her. “How do you imagine this going? Hey, I won’t marry you, but we can fuck, how about that?”

A grin twitches at her mouth. “I can’t imagine him saying no, to be honest.”

“That is not the point.”

“No, but it matters.” She points her fork at you. “You already know you don’t hate sleeping with him. He very clearly didn’t hate sleeping with you. The pair of you have been carrying on like two Victorian widows over one drunken shag, and meanwhile here you are whispering across your breakfast that you’re horny.”

You groan and rub at your forehead. “You make everything sound revolting.”

“I make everything sound exactly as it is.” Rowan chews, swallows, then says, “You don’t have to make it tragic just because it’s awkward.”

“It would be tragic,” you mutter. “He proposed. I said no. That tends to put a dampener on things.”

“Did you say no because you don’t want him?”

You go quiet.

Rowan arches her brows. “Well?”

“No,” you admit. “I said no because I don’t want that version of it.”

“There you are, then.”

“There I am nowhere,” you snap, feeling warm in the neck. “What am I meant to do? Ring him up and ask if he fancies helping me through some sort of hormonal collapse?”

She snorts. “Put like that, maybe not.”

You give her a flat look.

Rowan softens again. “I’m only saying he’s not some random man off the street. And you’re already tied to each other now, whether you marry or not. It’s not wicked to want a bit of comfort from the father of your child.”

You stare at the dregs in your cup. “You say that as if it’s sensible.”

“I say that as if you’re both making this harder than it has to be.”

There is enough truth in that to irritate you properly. You sigh, push your plate away, and mutter, “Maybe I should just reinstall Hinge.”

Rowan laughs from the throat. “Aye, brilliant plan. All the amazing options that start knockin’ once you announce you’re pregnant. Lovely, hope you like oddballs.”

You sigh.

“Wait till you start lactating,” she adds. “That’s when the real ones come out.”

“Oh, shut up,” you groan.

She is still laughing when you glance at your phone and swear. “Bollocks. I’ve got to go back.”

You shove your chair back, gather your bag in a hurry, nearly knock your spoon onto the floor, fix it, then make for the door before doubling back because leaving Rowan with only a wave feels wrong somehow. She is still sat there, one hand over the almost non-existent curve of her stomach in that absent new way of hers, when you bend and wrap your arms round her.

“Thank you for being pregnant at the same time,” you murmur into her hair. “I think I’d go mad without you.”

Rowan squeezes you hard round the ribs. “You’re still mad,” she says, getting a laugh out of you. She tips her head back to catch your eyes. “Go on, then. Before Lyonel sends a search party.”

You kiss her temple. “Love you.”

“Yeah, yeah. Off you fuck.”

You leave smiling, then rush the whole way back to work with your bag slipping off your shoulder and your stomach sloshing tea in protest.

At the office it feels as if Lyonel has taken a bath in musk while you were gone. He gives you a long look the minute you step in, eyes skimming you head to toe with all the tact God forgot to put in him.

“You look a bit sickly,” he says. “Maybe I shouldn’t let you out for lunches.”

You show him your tongue for lack of a better response and drop into the chair opposite his desk.

He only grins and shuffles the mock-ups closer. The cider campaign has spread across the whole surface in glossy disorder: bottle shots, orchard photos, two possible taglines circled in red, one moodboard full of damp gold light and apples split open with their insides showing. Lyonel taps one of the layouts with a ringed finger.

“This one looks like we’re selling grief,” he says. “Which, granted, we often are, but I’d prefer it if the customer only realised that after the second bottle.”

You snort and pull the page nearer. He is happy enough after ten minutes of rearranging copy, swapping a photograph, and vetoing one slogan with the explanation that it sounds ‘like a priest trying to flirt.’ By the time you get him to approve a version, you are almost enjoying yourself.

Then he reaches for the vape. Your tongue clicks against your palate.. He pauses with it halfway to his mouth and looks at you over the top of it. “What?”

“Could you maybe… not smoke that inside?”

His brows lift. “Smoke?”

“You know what I mean.”

He studies you another second, then sets it down. “Touchy.”

“And just reminding you,” you mutter, looking back to your notes, “I need to leave earlier today.”

That earns you another look, sharper this time. Suspicious, interested and irritatingly awake. “Doctor’s visit again?”

You do not look up. “Yeah.”

“Should I be concerned about you?”

“No,” you say. “Why?”

“Well.” He leans back in his chair a little. “You are either being diagnosed with cancer or pregnant, and both options are terrifying.”

Your head comes up so fast your neck nearly cramps. You say nothing. Only stare.

Lyonel’s mouth shifts. Absurdly, horrifyingly knowing. “You think I’m entirely self-absorbed,” he says. “Fair enough. But I do see things.” His voice drops a little. “Are you all right? Honestly.”

You blink at him. “Lyonel.”

“Am I right, then?” He reaches over and lays his hand over yours where it rests on the notes. The gesture is so uncharacteristically gentle it alarms you more than the question. “Am I such a terrible boss,” he asks, “that you’re keeping important things from me?”

You swallow. “These are private things, though.”

“Well, we’re friends too, I’d hope.”

You hesitate, then say, small, “Option B.”

Lyonel goes still. For one second his face is unreadable. He turns it over in his head, all of it, faster than should be possible. Then, his grin breaks wide and sharp.

“Is it with the giant?” he asks. “You are going to have a terrible time pushing that out of you.”

You choke so hard your eyes water. Between denial and laughter, what comes out is, “How the fuck did you know that?”

“Please.” He flicks his fingers. “Let’s say I could smell how wet between the legs he was for you.”

“You are disgusting.”

“And yet correct.”

“I’m reporting you to HR.”

“We have no HR.”

“To the unions, then.”

Lyonel laughs outright at that, all pleased with himself. “Go on. Tell them your decadent employer guessed you got knocked up.”

You cover your face with one hand. “I hate you.”

“No, you don’t.” He tilts his head. “So. Duncan.”

You groan.

“The teacher. The very large one. Earnest eyes. Built like a provincial war memorial.”

“Oh my God.”

“He does have the look of a man who’d apologise to furniture after walking into it.”

“He is a nice person,” you defend, not knowing exactly why.

Lyonel catches that and his grin turns sly. “Ah. There she is.”

You glare at him. “Don’t.”

“Have you told him?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

“And nothing. He knows.”

“Stunning. Riveting. You ought to write fiction.”

You drag in a breath through your nose and let it out slowly. “He’s been decent.”

Lyonel’s face softens by a hair. “That matters.”

You nod.

He toys with the vape without lifting it. “So tell me. Is this good news or bad news?”

You look down at the papers, then at his hand still near yours, then away. “It’s just news,” you say. After a beat, quieter: “And I’m keeping it, so I guess we can tip that toward good.”

Lyonel laces his fingers together and exhales through his nose. “Can’t believe you’ve made me an uncle. I think I’m too young for that.” His hand reaches for the vape again by instinct. You give him a look. “Right,” he says, abandoning it. “Sorry.”

That surprises you almost as much as the earlier concern did.

He folds his arms over his chest and watches you for a moment. “If you need anything, you come to me.”

You huff a laugh, slightly phlegmy. “I’ll remember that when it’s time to change a nappy.”

“I don’t think the daddy would like me doing that, pet.”

Briefly and with some fatigue, you think about correcting both the pet and the easy assumption that there is now some shared domestic future between you and Duncan that other people can see from the roadside. In the end you only say, dryly, “I suppose not.”

He lets you off the hook, at least for now. The work gets finished early as promised, and by the end of it you feel—and likely look—wrung out enough for Lyonel to mutter only, “Good luck,” on your way out, then give you a smile you decide is almost disturbingly sincere.

It is early enough still for the sun to play hide and seek between the clouds. Every time it slips out it goes suddenly warm; every time it vanishes it turns bitch-cold again. You cannot tell whether spring is truly this changeable or if your body has simply gone mad. Your back feels damp under your clothes, in turns hot and clammy, and you hurry to the clinic while trying very hard not to examine the faint butterfly feeling in your stomach at the thought of seeing Duncan.

He is already there when you arrive, and for one idiotic second all you can do is look at him. He is in full P.E. teacher attire: shorts meant to hit a normal man at the knee and which on him land somewhere between above-knee and mid-thigh, a big sweatshirt with some washed-out print across the front, and, as usual, a piece of vision aid that should by all laws of God and man do nothing for you and somehow does. He turns when he spots you and his whole face alters around it.

“Hey,” he says at once. “You all right?”

“Why does everyone keep asking me that?” you mutter.

His mouth twitches. “Well. You look a bit…”

“A bit what?”

He eyes you with care. “Tired.”

You give him a look. “I fucking am. I’m making a child while working and remaining part of society.”

He chuckles, low and warm. You stop then, look him over once more, and narrow your eyes. “Why do you look like you’ve run from school?”

“I did run from school.”

You bark a laugh, and the day improves by a small but measurable margin.

The doctor is the same as last time, only mildly less tense, as if you have all now agreed this is really happening and may as well proceed like adults. He asks a lot of questions, looks through your results, and does another scan. The heart is still there. Still beating far too fast for something the size of a whatever-it-is-now to be allowed such force. This time Duncan is less struck dumb by it. He puts an arm round your shoulders and keeps his mouth pressed to your temple through half of it, like this is normal friends behaviour. You let him.

“Nine, maybe ten weeks,” the doctor says after a while.

Duncan, without missing a beat, goes, “That’s a kumquat, I think.”

You turn your head just enough to stare at him. “A what?”

“A kumquat. Or near enough.”

The doctor laughs. “Your—” he pauses, obviously thinking better of whatever word he was about to use, “—the father has been doing his reading.”

“Clearly,” you mutter.

The doctor talks you through what to expect over the next weeks, confirms the nausea is normal, then stops and looks at you more closely. “Have you a cold?” he asks.

“What?”

“You look a little feverish.”

“Great,” you say. “Another thing to add to all the other things.”

He takes your temperature, peers at your throat, asks a few more questions, then rules that yes, on top of being pregnant, you are also simply ill. You lie there thinking that if the female body is such a miracle of design then the designer ought to be taken out and shot.

You get slightly berated for trying to carry on as normal. Duncan gets visibly worried beside you, which is more annoying than it should be because it lands warm all the same. The doctor prints another picture. This one Duncan takes before you even fully register it exists.

“You can keep that one,” you tell him as you sit up properly again. “We’ll swap. One for one.”

He looks at the printout like it might dissolve from sheer luck. “Aye?”

“Aye.”

That seems to please him so much he goes quiet.

By the end of it all the doctor is writing things down, updating dates, reminding you to rest, and then, with the authority of a man who has decided enough is enough, tells Duncan to take you home. You lift your head. “She’s in the room still.”

The doctor only waves a hand as if this changes nothing.

Duncan nods. “Aye. I’ll take ye. Came by car.”

You turn to him. “Why are you by car?”

“I’ve shopping in the car,” he says.

That is so obviously not the whole truth that you narrow your eyes at him, but he only holds the scan picture carefully by one corner and avoids looking guilty by sheer force of size.

He manages to get you into the car without much trouble, stops by the pharmacy to get paracetamol because by now he knows it is the only relief pregnant women are allowed, and ignores all your whines and huffs about how you are going to be fine and he should not fuss. And it is not that Duncan is cross with you. It is only that, in the two weeks between the last appointment and this one, you have managed to see him exactly zero times, push Raymun’s cider business so far ahead it is nearly on the shelves, and get yourself ill enough that Dunk knew something was up the minute he laid eyes on you.

His own two weeks have not exactly been light either. Half of them he’s spent wondering how much of his presence would count as help and from what point on it would just become foisting himself on you because he likes the idea of being near. The other half has gone on Raymun, who is near frantic over Rowan not wanting much done to her except the rubbing of her back and the fetching of impossible things, and on Egg who says things in that level little voice of his that sit in Dunk’s head for hours after. That Daeron fell asleep in a chair with a cigarette still going. That Aerion told him if he is so clever he can start paying rent, then emptied Egg’s schoolbag out on the floor to see whether there was anything worth selling. That Aemon stopped calling. That their father is due back and everyone in the house is acting like weather before a storm. Egg says all of it with a shrug that is far too old on him, as if he is only reporting on the state of the bins. Duncan keeps having to stand there and answer like a teacher and not like a man who wants, quite badly, to go round and start dragging grown males out by the hair.

So Dunk has been carrying that as well, turning it over with no good answer to show for it. Because if he pushes too hard, Egg will only shut up and look at him with that old little-man face of his. And if he lets it lie, he feels like a coward. It leaves him in a state he knows well by now: worried in three directions, sleeping badly, and making plans for other people because it is easier than admitting he cannot sort the ones already in his hands. 

By the time he pulls up outside your place, he has worked himself into a quiet state about it. As pure rage is alien to him, it lingers in the area of a thick, stubborn worry that sits in his throat and will not shift. He goes round to the back, reaches into the boot, and gathers the bags before following you to the door so naturally it is clear he has decided this part without consulting you. 

You glance back over your shoulder while digging for your keys. “I take it you’re coming inside?”

“Aye,” he says. “And you’re going to bed.”

You frown at him. “It’s four in the afternoon.”

“Which gives you plenty of time to rest.”

Your shoulders go stiff. You fold your arms across yourself. “Do not order me around.”

“I’m askin’ nicely,” Dunk says. Then he adds, “But you know damn well I could pick you up and put you there myself.”

That stalls you for a second. Just enough of one that he almost smiles. Then you unlock the door and let the both of you in.

Inside, he sets the bags down by the kitchen counter. You turn on him with your arms still folded, but there is less heat in it now. “Are you angry with me?”

“No.” He shakes his head. “But I don’t like bein’ away for two weeks and findin’ you like this.”

Your face does something small and crumpled. Your eyes begin their glimmer, and panic goes through him so quick it near makes him breathless. “Ah, shite—no, lass, I didn’t mean—” He comes to you, hands half-lifted. “Sorry. Sorry. Don’t do that.”

You huff a weak laugh that sounds one bad inch from tears. “I’m not doing anything.”

“Aye, well. Stop it anyway.”

Another little breath goes out of you. You rub under one eye and lean your shoulder briefly against the wall. “It’s fine,” you murmur. “Maybe I really am tired.”

Dunk softens straight through. “What d’you need?”

You think on it, then sigh. “I guess bed isn’t the worst idea.”

“There we are. D’you want to eat something first?”

“No,” you say, with the grim conviction of the truly afflicted. “Everything’s disgusting.” A beat. “You could make me tea, though. And for yourself. If you want to stay a bit.”

He nods. “Aye.”

You point vaguely down the hall. “I’ll see you in the bedroom, then.” Then you stop. Turn back, and squint at the bags by the counter. “Dunk?”

“Mm?”

“What’s in those?”

He goes sheepish, and because there is so much of him, it shows everywhere. “Bought some food I read’s good for you,” he says. “And tea. And some…” He glances at the bags. “Baby things. Since you were busy.”

You stare at him. Actually choke a bit on the start of a reply. “That’s… uh—”

His stomach drops. “Too much?”

“No, no.” You shake your head fast. “I just—never mind. What did you get?”

It steadies him some. He crouches by the bags and starts pulling things out with dour practicality. Crackers. Ginger tea. Clementines. Yoghurts with that miserable healthy look food for pregnant women always seems to have. Then the baby things. A packet of little socks. A soft blanket. Three tiny vests. And, with all the certainty of a man unveiling a sound decision, a few bits of clothing in what is, to him, plainly green. 

“It’s because we don’t know what it’s goin’ to be yet,” he explains. “Neutral, see. And I like green.”

You take the little romper from his hand and just stare at it. Your face pulls tight in a way he recognises on the spot. He is about to be roasted. Oddly, he finds he does not mind that at all. In fact he waits for it with a kind of interest.

Instead, you look up and say, “Can I see your glasses for a second?”

Dunk frowns. “Why?”

“Just gimme them.”

He bends down enough for you to pluck them off his face. The room blurs. You put them on and mutter, “Jesus.”

Then, you hold up the romper with theatrical concentration and inspect it. Dunk has to lean back and squint uselessly to see anything at all. You look strange in his glasses. Endearing too, though he wishes very much he could see you properly. The frames are too broad for you and the lenses blow your eyes up enormous. Worse still, you are wearing something of his, however briefly, and that does something ill-advised to the inside of him.

You smack your lips. Sigh. “Nope. It’s not the glasses. Still poo-coloured.”

Dunk blinks at the blur of you. “What?”

“This is not green, you goof. This is shite-coloured.” You hold the thing up between two fingers. “Who makes baby clothes in this shade? Duncan—are you colourblind?”

“It is green.”

“It is absolutely not green.”

“It is.”

You grin so wide he can hear it in your voice. Then you laugh, loud and helpless, and because of course he does, he starts laughing too, though he still feels entirely right. “It’s green,” he insists.

“It’s baby diarrhoea.”

“That’s still under the umbrella of green.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Give us those back,” he says, reaching for you at last because this has gone on long enough.

You dodge half a step, still laughing. “Clearly they don’t help you at all—”

But he gets an arm round your middle anyway and pulls you in. Just enough. Enough that your laugh shortens against him. Enough that his face lands close to yours, too close for his peace and too blurred for his comfort. He can barely make out the shape of you now. Only the warmth of your body, your breath, and the faint line of your mouth.

Then, your hand comes up and settles on the back of his neck. “I love your enthusiasm,” you say, softer now. “But can we go shopping together? I promise I’ll make the time.”

Dunk closes his eyes at that. Just for a second. Lets the touch be there and himself experience the warmth seeping from your skin to his throat. His thumbs move once over your waist as if they have thoughts of their own.

“Mm,” he says after swallowing. “Can I get my glasses back now? I’ll snap my neck without them.”

You huff a laugh and slide them back onto his nose. He feels the familiar weight settle. When he opens his eyes again you are still there. Close enough to punch his nose with the smell of butter and clementine zest.

“Will you be good and go to bed now,” he asks, “or do I’ve to make you?”

You step out of the embrace, roll your fucking eyes, and at this point Dunk hates the way Pavlovian responses work in his own body. Then, you turn, march off toward the bedroom, and despite Duncan knowing this whole evening is going to be quite literally hard for him, the pinch he’s been carrying at the back of his neck loosens one notch.

So he makes the tea. Thinks a great many things about how to survive this without making a complete idiot of himself, and then remembers this is what he wanted. He steps through your flat with the odd sense that your corridor accommodates him better than his own, then finds the bedroom door wide open, the telly on so low it is nearly only light. And you—on your back in bed, over the duvet, lousily half-covered by a throw and still in your clothes, with one shoe on as if you lost the will halfway through the job.

He sets the mugs down on the bedside table and stands there looking at you for a second longer than is useful. Your hair is all over the place. One arm’s flung out. You look less like a person who has gone to bed than one who has been dropped there by invisible force.

Dunk crouches and reaches for the shoe. Your foot twitches in his hand. You stir, make a small sound, and he says, low so as not to startle you, “Look at ye. Didn’t want to go to bed and now you’re near droolin’ into the pillow, hm?”

Your eyes stay shut. “I don’t drool,” you mutter.

The words come out rough with rasp. You hear it too. Your eyes blink open a slit. “Oh my God,” you croak. “Maybe I am sick.”

It is another misfortune to Duncan. He keeps his face straight with effort, thumb still hooked at your heel while his brain trips over the sound of you all husky and wrecked with sleep. “Aye,” he says, a bit too quickly. Then, gentler: “Think maybe ye are, lass.” He gets the shoe off and sets it aside. Sits on the edge of the bed. “D’you want to change?”

You give a tiny, miserable shake of the head. “No. Please don’t make me move.”

A smile pulls at him. “What if I move ye?”

You make a thin, put-upon noise, but let him shift you all the same. Duncan slips an arm behind your back and another under your knees and lifts just enough to get you where you ought to be, then works the blanket and covers around you properly. You are warm through your clothes. Too warm. By the time he has you tucked in, the tea is set by your bed and you are sunk deeper into the pillow with the loose, dazed look of someone whose body has decided the argument is over.

“You’re a saint,” you tell him.

God save him. He wishes he were. Instead he sits there hearing your voice make that shape for him and wonders what other praise would sound like in it. What it would sound like if he had earned it with his fingers. Or his mouth. What it would sound like repeated around a yes because you could not do much else. He sits there wishing for his body to seize all blood circulation, or better yet, for a fucking aneurysm—anything to stop the attention gathering between his hips. 

A swallow he manages to force through comes out loud. He tucks the blanket once more near your shoulder though it needs no tucking. “You gonna sleep?” he asks. “Mind if I take a shower?”

You blink up at him. “Course not.” Your voice catches again and comes out worse. “You don’t even have to stay if you don’t want.”

Dunk clears his throat. “I want to.” You look at him a second, tired enough not to make much of it. He adds, because he has to add something, “Just—been at school all day. Clinic after. Feel a bit grubby, is all.”

“Mm,” you rasp, already halfway gone again. “Help yourself.”

He nods though you have shut your eyes by then. Stands. Looks at you once, then makes himself turn for the bathroom before he does something catastrophically foolish, like climb in beside you just to see if you would let him.

When he closes the door it dawns on him that he’s somehow found his way to the promised land. In this bathroom lives the answer to why on earth would a human girl smell like the inside of a biscuit packet and Duncan’s gonna find it as if his life depends on it. 

So he starts with whatever bottles and jars are lined along the sink and stacked on the shelf. Uncorks the perfume and wedges his nose into the caps because spraying them outright would be difficult to explain to someone who’s got a newly acquired hound dog sense of smell. One of the creams carries a faint scent of biscuit, another of clementine peel and one of the flacons has something soft in it that must live somewhere at the base of your throat and wrists. Bits of you are in all of it, but none of them are exactly right. That makes Dunk think you are the secret ingredient to all of this and do something the products cannot manage on their own.

Resigned, he puts everything back where he found it. Then, he bends to one of the lower cabinets for a clean towel and gets confronted with your laundry basket. He gasps softly.

Some wicked ounce of boyhood, still alive in him despite the years and the schooljob and his giant responsible body, lifts its head and tells him to have no respect for himself. It makes him double-check if he’s closed the door properly. What happens next he will later attempt to class as an accident of momentum and circumstance and weak moral judgement. In one unconscious fit of getting afflicted with dick-for-brains and heart-for-dick, he sends his rational mind on mandatory leave from decision-making and lets himself be tempted by the crumpled knot of lace at the top of the heap. Watches his own hand reach for it like he’s watching someone commit a crime from three feet away, and presses it to his face.

His mouth hangs open. The minute he’s muzzled, all the blood in him remembers. His body gets thrown straight back to that moment when he had his nose buried in it and your pussy was underneath the cloth, and he was drunk and you were too, and there was a heft of your ass between his fingers and your thighs on his shoulders.

He finds it there. Gone darker, closer, headier, with tang at the edges. Slightly overripe, like fruit tipped past perfect and threatening to spoil if nobody is bold enough to get at it in time. It is a note more maddening than what you carry at the throat and Dunk wonders if there is more to a scent than creams and oils and perfume and sweat. He wonders if it’s something truer than heat at the loins and if it’s possible that you’ve made yourself into a complex thing he may spend his life trying to disassemble and inevitably, fail.

Events fold down on him. One second he’s back to the first night so completely he fears the hard-on rising in his pants has all to do with the memory of fucking you. Then, his chest suffers a full-on assault of the smaller things: your hand squeezing his at the clinic, the same hand at his neck, you laughing, you crying, you in his glasses, your forehead glowing with the mild fever and your feet going soft under his fingers and your voice gravelled in a throat that’s sore and from there his name is being croaked out so intimately his body gives a small helpless hitch.

“Christ,” Dunk whispers. He blinks and finds himself breathing you in like a sinner with his cheek nearly brushing the cabinet door and his palm deep beneath the waistband, fingers wrapped round his balls like he’s trying to make the boner go back where it came from. “Fuck—”

Some bastard reasoning in him is winning the argument. The point, supposedly, is to get his body out of the way so he can go back into your room and be decent amongst all the little things you do that are slowly becoming insufferable.

At some point all the merged parts of him begin to work against him and feed him conjured images. When he moves his hand to the base of his cock, in his dick-for-brains it is your hand. He slides the fist down to the tip and near hears you saying you’re doing so well. Humming. Cooing at him in that hoarse voice. Speaking his name, his full name, saying Duncan, calling him yours, giving him a place to belong to, telling him he’ll be a great father and all of that straight to his ear, so close your mouth brushes his earlobe.

He’s got no idea why any of that would happen, because Dunk has never thought of himself as neither heartthrob nor cuntthrob. He’s simply a throb for girls with nice necks and tits that go heavy when the bra falls off and hips that spill over surfaces they are pressed to, and when he thinks of all of this he’s becoming wetter and wetter between the legs. So wet that the shameful act of jerking off with a mouth full of your underwear acquires a sound, and he gags himself tighter.

The effect is him becoming quieter and even more turned on, because between his mouth and palm your knickers warm from his breath and strengthen their hold on his sinuses. Make his toes curl in his socks. He goes faster and faster, and prays for you to let him, at least once, to make love to you again, for you to plow your nails through the meat of muscle on his back when he’s eating you out, to let him wipe under your eyes with his thumbs and play with your hair and grant him the image of your cum face, and then Dunk is fully gone.

He gives in to what his body has wanted all along and what his brain has never let him entertain cleanly. The made-up you at his ear gets bolder, filthier, meaner in all the sweetest ways. He hears you tell him put a baby in me and it is so hot to him his wish for an aneurysm near materialises, only in his cock.

“Jesus—” he chokes into the lace.

He fumbles himself out of his shorts, hissing when the rough fabric catches on the tender head, then sprawls over the cold porcelain of your sink like he’s trying to survive a wound. One hand works him in short frantic strokes while his mouth keeps filling with your knickers and your scent and all the stupid rotten things he has made of both.

Your name spills out first. Then lass. Then please, said to nobody who is there to hear it. Then, Duncan loses the last of whatever little dignity had kept him upright through this. He mutters to you in scraps. Please. Let me. Ah, Christ. Good girl. Little torn-off bits of talk, pathetic enough to shame him if shame were not already queueing up outside the door.

He comes with his face turned into his own forearm, teeth sunk hard into it to stop the cry. The force of it goes through him so sharp his knees near give and he has to catch himself on the sink. For one blind second he can hear nothing but blood and breath and the wet drag of his own hand finishing the job while his cock pulses itself empty under his fist.

When he can see again, the first thing he does is look at your knickers. They are damp with his spit. He stares at them in full mute horror, then jerks his eyes round the room in a panic to check whether he has sprayed anything impossible to clean. Sink, mirror, tiles, floor. He finds spots and deals with them in a rush, yanking toilet roll loose with one hand while the other still shakes with the last of it. Shame keeps punching him like a heavy boulder.

He starts the shower, strips, and thinks only that at least his dick is down now. Under the water he just stands and lets it run hotter than is sensible, hoping the last of the tension will leave him and go down the drain. He uses only the plain bar soap to clean himself because reaching for any of your fancy bottles would be begging to get trapped in here for another round of disgrace if any one of them smells even faintly of you.

When he steps out, he sees the knickers where he left them. That is when he permits himself one more second of possession. He palms them, pushes them deep into his pocket, and spends the whole walk from the bathroom to your bedroom convincing himself he did not do it.

There, he finds you asleep. One arm under the pillow, mouth parted, the blanket kicked low again since your body has elected fever on top of everything else. Dunk smiles to himself. Goes to the free side of the bed and sits, careful not to jostle you. Then, because his own back is one long complaint from the day, he stretches both arms over his head and lets out a slow breath through his nose.

From behind him comes a hoarse little hum. “Biiiiig stretch.”

He chuckles, caught, and turns to look at you. Your eyes are open only a slit. Glassy. Cheeks and forehead shining. But your face has gone calm in sleep, none of the strain from earlier left in it.

“You all right?” he asks.

“Mm,” you say. “You?”

That throws him for half a beat. “Aye. Why wouldn’t I be?”

You blink slowly. “You’ve been brooding since the doctor’s.”

He stares at you in silence, surprised enough that he forgets to hide it.

“I’ve eyes,” you mutter.

Dunk huffs once through his nose. “Do ye.”

“Mm.” You shift a little deeper into the pillow. “You wanna talk about it?”

For one dangerous second he thinks of all the things he could say that have you in the middle of them. The biggest of them is there like a bad tooth: that all of this has him half split open with gratitude and dread, and that a fair bit of the dread comes from the fact that he has never had a family without the word broken nailed to it.

He could tell you that. He could tell you he does not know how to speak of being left without making it sound like a plea for pity, and that the thought of pity from you makes his skin crawl even though it would be yours. He could tell you the whole thing feels so enormous to him because nobody has ever stayed by right, only by accident or habit, and now there is a child in the middle of the future asking to be counted before it has even got limbs to speak of. All of that crowds up and stops at the back of his teeth. Then his mind swerves, thankfully, into ground more fit for human use. “There’s this…” He scrubs a hand over his mouth. “This kid in my school.” 

You nod a little to show you’re listening.

“He’s a good lad,” Dunk says. “Bright. Bit odd, but in the right ways. Small fella. Carries himself like he’s forty.” He glances at you and finds your eyes on him despite how tired you look. “Home’s not… simple for him.”

He picks at a loose thread on the blanket. “He says things. About his brothers. His house. Just drops them in like nothin’. One of them smashed up his schoolbag. One of them shaved his head drunk and nicked him. Their da’s due back and the whole place sounds fit to burst when he talks of it.” He pauses. “But he says it all like he’s listing what’s in the fridge. Then looks at me as if I’m meant to know what to do with it.”

Your hand moves under the blanket and finds his where it rests on the bedspread. He goes quiet.

Then: “I don’t—” Dunk says after a moment. “Know what to do, I mean. Not really. If I push, he shuts up. If I don’t, I feel like I’m lettin’ him down. And he’s only a child.”

You rub his knuckles once with your thumb. “He talks to you,” you say.

“Aye.”

“That’s not nothing.”

He glances down at your hand on his. Small against big. His fingers still a bit rough from gym equipment and steering wheel and all the other ordinary uses of them. “I know,” he says. “Still doesn’t tell me what I’m meant to do.”

“No.” Your voice catches and roughens worse. You clear it with a tiny wince. “Sorry, no, that’s not useful.” You shift a little under the covers. “Can you ask him? Not what happened, I mean—whether he wants you to do anything. Whether he wants you to step in at all.” You pause. “And if you can’t ask him, maybe you measure it by feel? There’s probably a moment where it stops being his business to manage and becomes too much for a kid. Do you feel like it’s there yet?”

A laugh almost gets out of him at that, though not from mockery. More from the shock of finding something solid in what he had thought would be only kindness. “Christ,” he says softly. “Maybe.”

“I know absolutely fuck-all about children,” you add, and his mouth does twitch now. “But I know a bit about people trying to act as if things don’t hurt when they do.”

Dunk turns his head. You are half gone with tiredness, eyes barely open, throat a gravel, and still there is that effort in you, the reaching. More than just to soothe him. To actually think it through on his behalf.

“And maybe talk to the father, if he’s not the source of the problem,” you murmur. “Or someone else in the house. But ask the boy first if you can. Let him have that much.” You blink slow, fight your way back up for one more second. “I don’t know if any of that’s useful.”

He sits with it. “It is,” he says. “Thank you. That does help.”

You nod a little into the pillow. “Dunk, you can tell me things. We’re stuck together, and I keep whining to you about every little thing that happens to me. I don’t want it to be one-sided. Wouldn’t be right.” For a second after that you drift, and he thinks you are gone. Then: “Hm, what’s his name?”

“Aegon.”

One eye opens a bit more. “That’s awful.”

Dunk laughs properly, quiet enough not to shake the bed. “Aye.”

“Poor child.”

“He likes Egg better.”

“I like Egg better too.”

You shut your eyes again. Your hand stays where it is on his for another few breaths before going loose with sleep. Dunk lets it lie there till the weight of it changes. Only then does he ease his own hand free and sit beside you in the low hum of the telly, listening to you breathe and feeling, for the first time that day, a little less trapped inside his own head. He doesn’t even know when it happens so that his body folds on the mattress and cheek touches the pillow.

His legs move without command, and he leans down to set your eyes to his when you reach for him. You bring your thumb quick to your mouth to dampen the pad, he doesn't protest. Just lets you begin smoothing away the rusty soil without any sound.

"Such a mess," you scold ruefully.

Dunk is sure he appears stupidly foolish. Gawking at you with wide, pale blue eyes, lashes blonde and darkening as the last remnants of light feather out from the sky. Staring as if you'll brighten everything anew.

"Aye, but you look after me well," he replies, and his words earn your gaze on his.

"I'm happy to," you tell.

The cool air billows heat suddenly, and his skin is overtaken by pins and needles, surely blooming rose pink.

He allows himself a subtle nudge into your touch, entirely futile to combat. The feel of your thumb sweeping over his cheek sends something soft to the pit of his chest, it settles like honeyed snow and makes him nearly sway on his boots.

"You are my heart," he confesses, and curses himself seven whole times for blurting such a festering, vulnerable admittance.

You blink owlishly and pull your fingers away.

"I am not."

A deep pang rings through his body.

"You are," he insists, and takes your hand in his engulfing hold, and places the flat of your palm atop his chest where the organ beats, crimson and a little too fast. "I swear it, upon my honor."

Again, you blink, and he doesn't know what to do. Your horse rumbles a low sigh from behind your back.

"Have I grown a second head?" He asks.

His throat works with a nervous swallow.

But your expression relaxes, mellowing into fondness, and a blossoming grin unfurls. He's golden everywhere at once. Your hands take his face a final time, between both palms. Delicate as petals of marigold.

"That is very sweet," you giggle. "I'd like to be your heart."

Words are of no use to him, gone completely. He nods feverish and holds at your waist with such vast reverence, keeping himself steady and close. His nose nudges the tip of yours.

"May I, um... could I?" He manages, albeit clumsily.

You beam. He bleeds out a breath of relief.

"You may, you can."

Messy and irrevocably in love, his lips press tenderly to yours. Under a now stark stretch of night above, stars begin to blink alive. A dream it would be, to stay in this moment forever. He can dream on with you.

And then, as you were switching your shoes and getting ready to start your warmups, you noticed Dunk across the gym, tucked into the corner as if anything could hide that bulking frame of his. You caught his eye and smiled, heat blooming in your chest when he smiled back.

From then, you felt like you were having the best gym session you’d had in weeks, maybe months. Everything felt easy, you were increasing weight and increasing reps and noticing Duncan from the corner of your eye every so often, who’d notice your gaze shifting towards him and hurriedly look away. It made you feel better than you should, those little moments where you felt like maybe, perhaps, he might be interested in you too. And it wasn’t that you were trying to make a move or anything, at least that wasn’t your intention from the beginning, he was just the cute guy you saw at the gym, your daydream fuel to propel you through boring sets and treadmill miles that seemed to last forever. 

All that being said, you were feeling rather cocky as you loaded the bar for your last set of exercises, and so you increased your weight just a little. But you’d been feeling so good, and even these bench presses seemed to be flying, and so you went for one more rep. Everything had been going so well, the weight felt like practically nothing, but then your arms were bent and you couldn’t manage to straighten them again. 

Suddenly, you were hit with the realization that this is where you died. Any second now, your arms would give out completely and that barbell would crush your chest and you’d be done for, stuck in a prison of your own making in the most literal sense. Sure, you could call out for help or hope and pray that one of the gym goers near you notices your dilemma, but the more you think about it, the less ideal that seems. 

It’s not as if you’re an Olympic bodybuilder, you know the weight you’d been lifting wouldn’t be impressive to most people who find themselves at the gym everyday. The last thing you want is some gym bro coming to your rescue and lifting the barbell from you like it’s a feather, returning to his lifting buddies and his creatine to snicker at your weakness. Instead, you decide that you’re perfectly fine with being crushed to death by the equipment, to save yourself from the embarrassment. 

Mentally, you’ve prepared for your arms to shake and weaken completely, for the bar to pin you to the bench any second now, but that time never comes. Instead, the bar gets lifted until it slips from your sweaty grasp, and then racked above you. You take in a big gulp of air, the panic finally leaving your body, and then you finally notice the person who decided to take pity on you and save you from your own folly. 

“Thought you might need a hand,” Dunk says, a sheepish smile on his face as if he was the one pinned to the bench by his own cockiness. 

“Thanks,” you reply, hoping your embarrassment doesn’t diminish your sincerity, “I got a little overeager, couldn’t quite manage that last rep.”

“We’ve all been there,” he shrugs, even though you couldn’t imagine Dunk ever failing on a rep like that. Still, you’re grateful that he’s not trying to make you feel worse, but then as you swing your legs off the bench to plant them on the floor and sit up, you notice him taking in the numbers on the plates. Now he’s going to see how much you’d been lifting, and he’s going to laugh in your face. 

Not that you think he’d ever truly do that. You may not know him very well, but from the few conversations you have had that lasted longer than a handful of seconds, you’re sure that he’s not like the other guys who crowd around each other at the gym or make mocking statements about anyone they deem to be wasting space near the equipment. But still, Dunk is tall and strong and he could probably lift your PR without even straining.

He makes a sound that seems close to a laugh, an amused exhale of breath, and you brace yourself for embarrassment. 

“You looked good before, though,” he tells you, not quite meeting your eyes, “your form was impressive.”

You smile, that rush of warmth flooding your body that always seems to come along with being complimented, before you realize what exactly Dunk is telling you. 

“You were watching me?” You ask, voice taking on a teasing tilt. It’s not often that you get to exchange more than a smile with Dunk, and you’re determined to make it last as long as you can. Before he even opens his mouth, a blush spreads across his cheeks and you have your answer. 

“I noticed you, is all.” His eyes keep flitting towards your face and away again, “Seemed like you were having a good lift.”

“I was, ‘till I almost died there,” you say, laughing at yourself just a little, if only to take some of the pressure off of Dunk.

“I woulda got to you before that happened,” he sounds so earnest it makes you chest ache, deep beneath the bones. “Lifting heavy today, huh?”

He asks it as he lifts the plates off of the bar to rack them, letting you take a rest. It makes that warmth come back, even as you scoff at him. 

“For me, maybe.” That self-consciousness comes flooding back, when you remember just how strong Dunk is and where you stand compared to him.

“Well that’s all that matters, isn’t it?” Dunk says as he starts on the other side, sliding the plates from the bar. “Not like we’re here to compete with anyone.”

“Guess not.”

He'd reclined in his usual spot, groaning as he collapsed onto his bedroll that was still unfurled in the grass from that morning. You had set out to the task of boiling water and gathering rags to drop into the pot you'd propped over the fire that had been going since before he'd returned to your camp.

Perched at his side now, knees pressed into the edge of his bedroll just a breath away from his hip, you steadied the cooling pot of water onto the grass. Though he lay beaten boneless beneath you, you had to marvel at his size; his shoulders spanning wider than any one person's rightly should. The length of his body stretching long even with knees knocking east and west to fit the bend of his legs.

You watched him stiffen beneath you, straying knees drawing close as pain sharpened his breathing.

"There's no need, truly," he assured you, tone softening. "I'm more bruised than anything."

"You're bleeding," your hands trembled as you reached for the hem of his tunic, and suddenly you were aware of adrenaline that had been racing through you since you saw the stain—a dark ugly bloom disgracing his abdomen.

He caught your hands in his, then. Steadying. "It's not mine."

You closed your mouth around a sigh, exhaling sharp through your nose. "Please, Ser. Just let me check."

Dunk relented, releasing your hands from his. Wasting no time, you gently pulled at the fabric, easing it taut to break the tunic off from where it stuck to skin. The garment peeled back and exposed his belly.

Catching the faintest glare from you then, he added "Well, not most of it, anyway."

Pale skin gave way to saturated dappling as the new bruises begun to set in, and while there were a few cuts into the plush of his abdomen, none of them required more than simple cleaning and bandaging. The large stain that scared you witless revealed itself to be just that: a stain. Dark and sticky, the blood coated nearly half of his stomach, coloring the hair that swirled toward his navel and trailed down below his trousers.

Relief washed over you then, soothing and sobering, loosening the tension in your body with a single exhale. "Right, let's get you cleaned up." You ghosted a finger over his skin, tracing beside the deepest looking gash. "This one will need bandaging."

Dunk squirmed under your examining gaze, "You needn't trouble yourself, truly."

Hushing him, you reached into the pot to grab a strip of cloth, squeezing out the excess water to drip into the grass below. "You aren't trouble," you said, sliding the fabric along his skin now, attempting to clear away the largest splotch of blood. "Well, you certainly were trouble to the poor bastard who bled all over you. But not to me."

Dunk shuddered, and you halted your scrubbing.

"Sorry, did I hurt you?" Your hand lifted from him.

He was quick to shake his head, "N-no. Sorry."

You nodded, then returned to your work. Attentive and careful with another drag of the cloth, you watched as the pillow of his flesh gave way under the weight of your fingers. The hair of his navel went damp, then kept catching in the weave of the fabric to follow the direction of each careful stroke. Your breath grew heavy in your chest, lungs holding onto each intake of air for just a bit too long.

Now that your panic had lessened, the reality of your proximity to Dunk took its place, giving your pounding heart no reprieve. You'd never touched him for so long at once, and certainly never anywhere so intimate. Your eyes glazed over as they followed the trail of hair that pointed down from his navel before disappearing into his trousers. You wanted to look where it led, to study where the hair grew thickest.

"R-really, I can clean myself up later, just wanted to rest a while before—"

"I will not hear another word of it." You interrupt, mildly startled by him breaking the daze that had fallen over you. What had gotten into you, anyway? Lusting over a man as he lay bleeding beneath you.

"Yes, m'lady." His eyes flicked back and forth between your face and hands before resigning to stare behind you at the fire. His boyish features walked the line of a solemn expression, sending a flash of guilt to your gut.

"Be at ease, Ser. I know I'm certainly no Maester. Or a healer for that matter. And fortunately you're not like to need one. Even so, this shouldn't take me too long." You coaxed, resting your spare hand on his thigh in reassurance. It seemed to do the opposite of soothing, because you felt him jolt under your touch. You dragged a thumb along him in apology before setting back to your task.

You'd finally done away with the worst of the blood left on him, discarding the dirty cloth at your side before grabbing a clean one from the pot of water to tend to the deepest cut.

Dunk sucked in a breath before it caught in his throat. He grunted near imperceptibly at the sting as you worked at the sliced skin low near the waist of his trousers. Your face was hovering so very close as you sought precision in your task. Leaning over the span of his hips, you run the fabric along him, careful not to press into the gash itself, and worked to clear away any further blood or debris from the site.

"I'm almost done with this part," you soothed. "You're doing so well for me. Just a moment longer."

Above you, Dunk's breathing—along with his expression—became anguished.

* * *

Dunk was hoping to the Gods that you'd assume his unsteady breathing was from pain.

He was hurting, sure, but the pain was overshadowed by another ache; brought on by your attentive focus on his body, your concentrated expression and gentle fingers.

Enraptured with your hands on his skin, feeling as you stroked across the expanse of his belly, Dunk wasn't sure of the last time he'd been touched so kindly—if ever—and it set his heart ablaze, but Seven above if he wasn't feeling indecent. Exposed beneath you, at the mercy of your care and command. There was only so much he could do to remain composed with your hands on his stomach, moving lower to his hip, curling a finger under the waist of his trousers to swipe the wet cloth underneath, catching every trace of blood left on him.

What a depraved sod; a man who would grow hard while his wounds were being tended to, he thought to himself. And your kind and soothing words only added fuel to the fire burning hot in him now. Praising, reassuring that this would almost be over.

Gods know he needed this to end. But, help him, he didn't want it to.

There would be more wounds to tend, so long as he didn't scare you off now. He found himself desperately needing to get his eyes off of you and his mind onto something, onto anything, else he would be pitching an awful tent in his trousers.

Dunk knew this would happen, too. Knew he was doomed as soon as you'd seen the state of him and began gathering bandages. In the time you'd been traveling together, he learned he needed to tread carefully. Every stolen touch, casual and innocent as they were, struck him through to the marrow of his bones.

Early in the mornings when the sunlight caught your hair just right, he wondered what you would smell like in the heat of it. If he pressed his nose against the crown of your head where the suns rays spent the most time, or at the base of your skull where your sweat would gather at the nape. How would it differ at dusk, after a long day of hard riding? In the evening, after you'd rinsed the day off in a cool creek, your skin primed to soak in the water, then the wood smoke as you sat across from him? Could he begin edging closer to sit beside you, could he blame it on the way the wind blew the smoke in his face, or was that a trite excuse?

After supper, when you'd share a glance that lingered too long, or let out one of your breathy full-chested laughs, he was left at half mast. He'd excuse himself for his own bath in the creek then, stroking himself at the thought of you, even through the shame of it all. Making half excuses, sometimes his mind would wander farther. To the way your skin would feel under his hands, the way you'd sound if he brought you pleasure, to the way your lips would taste. Or, how the rest of you would taste, if he were ever so bold as to run his mouth along every part of your body.

"Dunk."

He startled, returning his eyes to you then, seeing you with a bandage at the ready, long and gathered between each of your hands.

"Lift a moment for me."

Oh, he won't make it out alive. He knew this now, beyond any shadow of a doubt.

Nodding, Dunk obeyed. Lifted his hips up off his bedroll for you to snake your hands underneath him. You passed the end of the bandage between your hands to wrap it around his torso. The fabric held between your forefinger and middle, the index sliding against his back along the way, dipping to the curve of his spine before grabbing hold of the bandage again with the other hand. Pulling it taut while his hips eased back down to the earth.

Tying the bandage tight, fingers brushing along his skin as you secured each knot. Dunk's heart was pounding in his throat at the sight of himself, now visibly straining against the fabric of his trousers.

* * *

You leaned back to check your work, and Dunk was quick to roll onto his side, facing away from you. But not before you saw the unmistakable swell at the crux of him.

"Dunk," you said, placing your hand on his hip and pulling him gently back down, "lie back before you ruin my hard work."

As you fussed with the bandage, ensuring that it remained securely tied on, Dunk watched in disbelief.

"Is this why you were fighting me so? Why you didn't want my help?" You asked. Your hands stilled.

Dunk's knees drew up, his hands moved to his face to hide from you. "Fuck I'm sorry—Seven save me—I'm so so sorry."

"Hey—hush, now. It's alright." Leaning forward, you caught his wide forearm in your hand, seeking to reveal him again. "Dunk."

His eyes, full of panic, found yours. They held a truth which his mouth refused to express, lips parting only for a peek of his tongue. His heavy lower lip shone wet, and you wanted to pull it between your teeth and test the plush of it. To soften and trace your lips against his in apology. You paused for an agonizing moment, nakedly staring.

Then: "Can I kiss you?"

"What?" The question knocked the wind out of him. He managed to hold your gaze, searching for a reasonable explanation in your face and finding none.

"Can I kiss you?" You asked again.

"I-I don't—I couldn't, that would be… improper. I wouldn't want to be—" Lashes fluttering as he fought himself, Dunk could hardly manage to keep looking at you.

"That is not what I asked, Dunk. Do you want to kiss me?" Your face was a breath from his now.

Sputtering out a ragged sigh, he looked back down at the state of himself. "Gods, yes, of course, but I c—"

At his desperate 'yes', you moved forward, hand laying over his cheek, thumb finding the corner of his mouth, eyes tracing the same path. You paused for the faintest second, silently asking one last time before you placed your lips to his in a single, long kiss; chaste, closed mouths melding together.

Asking permission again without a word, you broke away an inch, foreheads pressed to each other. Dunk's eyes, wide and blue, were even larger this close. Flicking between eyes and lips before his chased yours again.

Falling into an ill-timed, desperate pace with noses knocking and teeth scraping against flesh, you slid your hand down from where it rested against his cheek. Steadying his jaw in your palm to overthrow his pace for your own, you worked your lips against his slowly, open, wet, wanting. He moaned, hedonistic and low, right into your mouth.

Dunk managed to follow your rhythm as the palm on his jaw slid lower, flat over the velvet of his throat on the way to his collar, nails scraping over the hair that peeked from the dip of his tunic.

"This okay?" You whispered against his lips.

He kept nodding until he could conjure a response; soft, uttered in a breath. "Yes."

You kissed a trail from the corner of his mouth to his jaw, murmuring into his ear as you palm found the swell of his chest. "I've been wanting this for so long." Lashes brushing against his cheek, you tilted your head to nuzzle into him, speaking each word onto his skin. "Kiss you. Touch you. Tell you how pretty you are. Fuck, since my first night at your fire."

Dunk's only reply was an agonized sigh, his head lolling away from you as his face tinted pink. Neck exposed, flush extending there too, you took the chance to kiss it as well. Your lips pressed against where a tendon jumped beneath his skin.

You could swear you felt his pulse, thumping and quick as a hare against your palm and mouth, "you want this too?"

"Gods, yes, I just—I shouldn't." Voice tight, wanting.

"According to?" You pulled back a moment then, seeking eye contact. He turned his head back to you but struggled to meet your gaze until you spoke again. "Mine is the only permission you must seek. No God's, no Lord's. Mine. So long as you want this, too."

Your words took hold in him, finding a home next to his heart, nestling beside where his knights oath resided. "Yours." He breathes.

"So, I'll ask again—"

"Yes," he interrupted, breathlessly. "I want this. Want you." The hand closest to you worried at his side, long fingers curling and unfurling before finally laying over your knee, fingertips scarcely sliding in tentative strokes.

You dragged your own hand further down, along his stomach again. "Like this?" And the pads of his fingers squeezed into you, long digits wrapping around your leg.

Dunk nodded, mouth slightly parted, brows pulling close. Taking your time, your hand slid across the same skin as moments before, now unbidden by propriety. Tracing your fingers along the hair at his navel, you dipped your head down to swallow every sigh from his lips. Pace slow, soft, present, but not quite enough to satiate. Your hand ventured lower, fingertips slipping just under the waist of Dunk's trousers to play with the curls that start there.

Whispering onto his mouth, "Can I untie these?"

"Please." More so feeling his reply than hearing it, you covered his mouth again. His hands slid up now, broad, resting over your legs, holding your hips, touching anywhere he could reach. You pressed your mouth against his in earnest, tongue sliding to part his lips beneath yours, licking into him. Your fingers passed over laces, coming down to caress where he pressed against his trousers, then traced up the length of him. He twitched under your light touch.

"Be kind to me." He sounded wrecked as he broke off your mouth, breath hot against your face.

Gods, Dunk was so deliciously sensitive. There was a real temptation to draw this out, to make it torture, but you swung a leg over his hip, straddling his thighs to work at his laces and relieve some pressure. You begun untying the knot at the top, hooking your fingers in the lace before pulling it loose. "You will tell me to stop if you need. At any time." A direction, not a question. He nodded in response, and you halted the fingers at his laces, watching him patiently.

"I will." He agreed, and you pull another set of laces loose.

"Very good." And Seven above, if you didn't relish in the shudder that trembled through his frame at your praise. A ruddy flush followed, creeping along his skin as you finally freed him from where he'd been pressing against the rough spun fabric of his trousers. You found him achingly hard, the tip of him blushing pink and already weeping with need. He winced as you parted the garment to make room for him, your knuckles brushing against his most sensitive skin, featherlight, only adding to his agony.

Wincing turned to a low groan, ragged and dragged from deep in his chest as your palm finally petted along the bare length of him. You pressed him against his own belly as you stroke up, fingertips nudging slightly against the ridge near the peak, then gathered him in your hand on the way down. Dunk busied himself white-knuckling his bedroll, thighs twitching under yours as you explored the heft of him in your hand. Placing the other on the crest of his hip, you leaned your weight upon his frame as you pumped his cock, still soft and slow and slight, scarcely catching the tip of him in the circle of your fingers at every pass.

Dunk sounded wounded, yet he looked up at you like you were made of starlight. Like he needed to commit every angle of you to memory, every dip and curl and plane of your body, of your face. His lids fluttered to a close, head tipped back against the tree as you reached the crown of him, wrist flicking ever so slightly as you twisted to caress him. "F-fuck."

"S'that feel good?" You eased, spare hand now running along his stomach, careful to avoid the places his skin had been scraped or slashed. You traced a finger along the bandage you'd tied, along his darkening bruises, stroking his cock all the while. He watched you, whether in awe or horror you couldn't quite gauge, though the lewd groan that tore through him now hinted at the former. The sound went right between your legs, where you were growing wetter by the moment. "It's dreadful, I know. But Seven save me, Dunk. I wanted to touch you like this—just like this—as soon as I knew you were alright. As soon as I had your skin under my hands. While you were still bleeding beneath me."

"Ohhh fucking hells, love. I, I—" He threw his forearm over the bridge of his nose, "yes, fuck."

His thighs jolted below you, near unseating you as your own legs tightened around him. He was sighing, groaning, letting out so many sounds made just for you. "Thought you'd sound pretty, Dunk, but not like this. Gods, so pretty."

"You'll do me in, you keep talking like that—" He whined out as your thumb slipped over the slit of him, "w-wont last another minute."

"You needn't, love. Just relax." His cock was dripping, length becoming slicker with each downward stroke of your hand. You could hear his feet twitching behind you as they scrambled for purchase on the bedroll, on the grass. The muscles of his legs flexed beneath your thighs with every jerk.

"B-but, Seven fucking hells, I—" His argument fell away, surrendering to the ruined moans that left his mouth in its stead. Grabbing the cleaner corner of the hem of his tunic, you ruck the garment up his body, the heel of your palm brushing along him before you lift the fabric to his mouth.

"Can you bite onto this, for me?" His eyes held a silent plea, but Dunk followed through, shuddering again as you watched him pull the hem between his teeth, the pad of your fingers pressing to his lip before they fell to his now exposed nipple. "This alright?"

He nods with fervor, brows pulling tightly together, whining heartily through the fabric between his teeth. You imagined the only times he'd been asked to bite down on something were followed by painful stitches or cauterized wounds, a depraved part of you enjoying providing their equal opposite. "Ease, it's alright. I have you." You cooed as you pinched softly, increasing pressure while you twisted his flesh between your fingers, your other hand continuing its rhythm on his cock.

The tunic between his teeth did little to muffle his loud whine, the muscles in his pecs and abdomen jumping under the plush of his flesh at your attentions, so sensitive beneath you. Salivating as you played with him, your heartbeat pounded between your legs at every noise he made. Eyes screwing shut now, he nearly jumped out of his skin as your hand left his nipple to catch the very tip of his cock, palm ever so slightly touching before wrapping around it. Working at him with two hands, one thumb pressing in to ride the length along the underside of his cock, the other twisting around him as you increased your pace.

His fight to wrench his eyes open was futile, blown out pupils rolling to the back of his head at the lightening that surged up his spine, white-hot and unforgiving. They squeezed tightly shut again, head rolling side to side against the tree in avoidance. It was too much; he couldn't look at you, he couldn't listen to you, your hands on him, the wet noises they made. Couldn't think about your weight on him, the heat of your thighs around his hips. You set a ruthless pace, squeezing and pulling and twisting and—

"Oh, fuuuuck—" He keened out, tunic sticking, then falling from his lips as he came, twitching while you wrung every drop from his cock, catching his spend in your hand so he wouldn't make a mess of his bandage. His hips strained against you, rocking up as he fucked into your hands through his release. Once he slowed, you stroked both hands down the length of him again, softening and oversensitive now. But his wrecked face, the sounds he made, along with the obscenely wet noise of his cock in your hands, were too irresistible. You continued stroking him until he was nearly kneeing you off his lap, legs spasming from overstimulation. "Ah, love—please. S'too much."

You responded mercifully, easing the pressure of your ministrations before ceasing them entirely. Dunk was a ruined mess beneath you, his eyes sopping wet with admiration as they met yours. You leaned down, humming as you kissed him slowly, messily, completely enamored with him.

"So good t'me, love," he murmured between kisses, petting his palm down your arm, the other resting against the nape of your neck. So chaste; meanwhile your own palms were coated in his release.

You broke from him after a beat, his hands falling down to rest against your knees. You paused, a faint smile playing at your lips as you looked down at him before moving to grab the forgotten pot of water still resting in the grass to Dunk's side. You rinsed off your hands, grabbed the last strip of cloth, wrung it out and cleaned Dunk off for the final time. Tucking and tying him back into his trousers, you wiped up any of the spend that had slipped from your fingers and onto him before easing his tunic back down to cover him. He watched all the while, eyes glossy and chest heaving with the effort to catch his breath.

You gathered each cloth, dropping them back in the pot before covering his frame with yours, hugging your arms under his, head resting against his collar bone. He restrained a pained groan at your weight against his fresh cuts and bruises, but made no complaint as you took a deep inhale. He smelled of sweat, sunshine, creek water, and the leather of his gear, and you couldn't get enough of it. Your nose pressed into the crook where his neck met his shoulder, and you stayed there a moment while his hands skated up and down your back.

Finally, you sat up. Placing a kiss to his forehead, you pushed yourself off of him, gathered the pot, and moved toward the creek to clean up. "Rest here a while. You've had a long day, I'll go get supper started for us… But, you're cooking tomorrow." Dunk looked at you, perplexed, about to argue. As a knight, you knew he was going to hold tight to the ideal of fairness.

As he rightly should.

"But-" his words halted in his throat with just a look from you, then a grin cracked his expression, "alright, love." Your thighs clenched together at his voice, still breathless even minutes later. He looked giddy, sated, yet still a bit of a mess—especially in that damn bloodied tunic.

Pragmatic thoughts merge with the shame of it. So he didn’t pull out—good to know. Given that both of you seem to remember only the basic bones of that night, you give him the benefit of the doubt and decide this would come as the same shock to him as it does for you. The solution to the issue is loud and clear, and the clinic is only a couple of blocks away. The cold, calculating part of your brain whispers that you shouldn’t tell him, if only for the reasons the overwrought part of your brain keeps supplying. That he would be ashamed. Or devastated. Or frightened. Or incredibly awkward and undecided on the matter. Or that he would support you fully and offer to come with you to get the thing done. None of those you can deal with without some part of you dying, so, on the spot, you decide it is a you problem and it’s you that should deal with it alone.

When a weak breath finally gets through the seizure in your throat, your mind seems to leap at the fresh batch of oxygen. It wanders. You see your mother, pouring gin into her coffee. You see her brushing your hair in front of her adult-sized vanity with an ivory brush she kept from her grandmother as both keepsake and souvenir of a life that skipped her generation. You hear her saying vile things in a sweet voice. You are so much prettier than I was at your age, she’d say. But I was pretty too. Pretty girls like us don’t attract good men into their lives. Wait till you become a mother. Pray that you have a son. Daughters steal your beauty.

She’d pull at the hair where it was matted and scold you for not taking good care of what you’d taken away from her. Once, she said, I wonder if I’d have stayed pretty if I’d gotten rid of you.

You realise your eyes are pouring only when the tears overspill and one of them drops onto your wrist. It is absolutely unwise. Fully deranged, because the life you’ve built holds no space for surprises like this. And yet all you can think is: At least I’d have someone who loves me. At least I’d have someone I could love. And I’d love them better than my mother loved me.

The decision blooms in you not from a place of comfort, but utter fear. Of never having another chance. Of being thirty-two with no prospect of a steady relationship, or a man who would leap at such news and maybe cry a little, if you’re being fully delusional. Of staying alone while Rowan and Raymun build their new life together, Lyonel works his way through the waiting list to his bedroom, and Duncan, sooner or later, finds a nice girl and settles down with her too.

There’s someone you need to say it aloud to, if only to hear how it sounds and judge whether hearing it turns your stomach or brings some measure of calm. So you call the one person you know to be a stranger to judgement and well acquainted with the dread of this sort of choice. Rowan.

She picks up on the first signal. “Hey, um… are you free?” You clamp down on your throat hard enough to make your jaw hurt, but a sniffle slips through anyway.

“Are you crying?” Rowan nearly shouts. “What happened? Do you need me to come over?”

Yes, God bless her. You pause to get some of the voice out, but what comes is breathless and weak. “Yeah, that… that would be great.”

“I’m on my way.” You hear movement at once, drawers or cupboards, something being opened with force. Then Rowan, away from the phone: “Raymun! I’m going out. And if that sink is still full when I get back, I’ll have your guts for garters.” A muffled, long-suffering male voice answers, “Aye, my love.” Rowan comes back to you. “Ten minutes. Put water on or don’t... Just open the door when I knock, alright?”

It takes her less than that. You spend the wait curled on the couch, arms wrapped round your middle as if you can hold the whole mess together by pressure. When the second knock comes you open the door and the minute Rowan sees your face hers drains of colour.

“Darling, Christ—” she says, and gathers you straight into her arms.

It does what it’s meant to do. You break open against her shoulder. Rowan rocks you where you stand, one hand between your shoulder blades, the other rubbing up and down your back. “What the fuck happened? You’re freaking me out.”

You pull away enough to look at her, though she keeps both arms banded round you as if you might otherwise crumple to the floor. Wipe under your nose with the heel of your wrist, search wildly for some demure arrangement of words, find none, and after waiting a beat for your throat to permit it, whine, “I’m fucking pregnant,” and promptly start crying harder.

Her face does something strange. “Oh my God, me too!” Rowan squeals. Then, her grip tightens on your arms. “Wait—hold on. You’re seeing someone and you didn’t tell me? Or was I so far up my own arse I missed an entire man?”

You blink at her. “You’re pregnant? Rowan, that’s—” You are still sobbing, trying to force the words through it. A smile pulls at your mouth, crooked and weird, and the tears track down into the dry split of your lips and sting. “That’s so amazing, oh God—I’m so, so happy for you.”

“I’d believe you more if you weren’t crying like a widow at sea,” Rowan mutters, rubbing both your shoulders, and that only makes a fresh wail tear out of you. “Hey. Hey, it’s alright. We can be happy about mine later.” She steers you further inside with both hands and sits you down on the couch before folding in beside you. “So… how? How did this happen? Do you need help with—?”

“I want to keep it,” you say, very fast.

It lands in the room and stays there. You hear it properly for the first time and something in your chest settles around it. When you look up, Rowan is staring at you with her mouth slightly open, confusion all over her face.

“I know, I know. I know how that sounds. I’m not crying because I’m devastated. Okay, I am, a little.” The thoughts are coming too quickly, some meant for Rowan, some only trying to get out of your own head. “And that was my first thought too, but then—” You drag in air. “Then I thought… I don’t know what I thought. I just thought about keeping it and it felt better.”

You look down at your hands and keep going, because once the thing is spoken it wants more speech built around it. You talk about the clinic being close. About how obvious the answer seemed for one minute and then stopped seeming obvious at all. About fear, and the lack of guarantees, and the sick certainty that if you let this go you might spend years listening for the shape of it in the dark. None of it sounds wrong when it leaves your mouth. Reality, apparently, has already made its decision and dragged you after it. The reality now is that you are going to have a baby.

There is a small silence after. Rowan rubs your back, then tugs gently until you give in and let her guide you down, your head pillowed in her lap. Her fingers smooth your hair with long, patient strokes.

“It’s alright, hun,” she says, in the voice one uses on the truly panicked. “You’ve still got a bit of time to decide—”

You turn onto your back to look up at her. “Red, I don’t want to get rid of it,” you say.

You hold her eyes and see the worry in them fighting with that other thing women know how to give each other without instruction: understanding before agreement, tenderness before sense.

Rowan puts a hand to your cheek and wipes away some of the wet. “You sure? Because they’re not so easy to toss once they arrive. I mean, possible, I suppose, but extremely rude.” Your brows climb and she cuts herself off with a small grimace. “Right. Fine. Listen. I’m here, fully. Look at us—pregnant together, lovely, terrifying, very efficient of us. But…” She frowns down at you. “Who? Unless you don’t know, which is also fine. Less administratively tidy, but fine.”

There is a pause then, because of course this is the next gate. Your hands go cold. Your breathing seems to suspend itself on some internal hook. You gulp, loud in the quiet, and say, “It’s… Duncan.”

“WHAT?!”

Her whole body gives a jolt and then goes still with it. You try to cling to your belief that Rowan remains, under all conditions, a stranger to judgement. She starts again, very carefully.

“I thought—I thought you didn’t—I thought you two weren’t—” She makes a face like language has failed her on a structural level. “Ugh. Duncan? How?”

You sit up and catch both her hands in yours. “Are you cross with me?”

“No. No, not at all.” Rowan squeezes back on reflex, still staring. “Just a little bit fucking shocked, to be honest. I never thought you’d actually go through with it.”

“Go through with what?” You let one of her hands go. Your head has started filling with that pale, cottony feeling that comes after a proper crying fit.

Rowan blinks at you. “I mean—the goo-goo eyes. Obviously. Every now and then. From both of you.” Her face sharpens. “Wait. Is that why it was so fucking stiff at the pub the other night? Oh, you pair of absolute—”

“Aye,” you say, wincing. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry, I can’t even remember the better part of it. It was the night at the Storm, we just—we got so fucking wasted, Red.” It all comes out easier now that you are already ruined. “It was just once, and I don’t think he remembers much either. Or he doesn’t want to. We’re good, I promise. We talked a bit and it’s fine, it’s just—” You drag in breath. “I should tell him, right?”

“Oh, hun.” Rowan’s expression does a complicated thing then—pity, disbelief, fond exasperation, all elbowing for space. “I know you think that man’s a bit simple, but there’s no hiding an entire pregnant belly from him.”

“Hey, I don’t think he’s simple,” you say. “We’re just not a good fit, is all.”

“Mhm.” Rowan gives you a look so noncommittal it practically has bangles on. “You absolutely have to tell him. Like urgently. I’m sure he’ll be decent about it.”

“I know he will be.” That part comes too fast to deny. “I just don’t want to—I don’t know—baby-trap him.”

“What?” Rowan says, and it comes out odd. Like she has had to stop herself very quickly from saying something else.

You catch it anyway. “What is that face?”

“Nothing. Nothing, I promise.” She rubs at her mouth with her thumb, thinking. “I can’t say much, because it isn’t my place. But trust me on this one: Duncan will be decent, and he’ll most likely…” She pauses, chooses. “He’ll most likely take it better than you’re imagining. Just give him a minute if he goes quiet. He’s not great with shock.”

You let that sit. Look at her. Feel, against all expectation, a little calmer for having brought the thing into air where someone else can hold a corner of it.

Then you lean in, wrap an arm round her shoulders, and kiss her temple. “So we’re pregnant together, huh? Is that why you were in such a rush to get married?”

Rowan punches you lightly in the ribs. “Fuck off, you cunt,” she says, and laughs. “You’d have known sooner if you weren’t so busy causing trouble. I was drinking pissy non-alcohol lager that Thursday and every one of you was so busy yapping nobody noticed.”

You bark a damp little laugh. “That’s dreadful. I’m sorry. Congratulations on your celebratory cup of piss.”

“Oh, fuck you,” she says affectionately, settling into your side. “It wasn’t that bad.”

“It sounds horrific.”

“It was citrus.”

“That is worse.”

Rowan laughs again, proper this time, and relaxes further. After a moment she murmurs, “Why do you always have to parrot everything I do?”

You smile into her hair. “Because you’re my role model.”

“God help you, then.”

She takes one of your hands and starts idly playing with your fingers, turning your rings, flattening your palm, folding it shut again. Then, in the thoughtful tone of somebody asking a legitimate administrative question, she says, “If our kids get together, would that be incest?”

You snort so hard it knocks a laugh clean out of you. “You’re insane.”

“I’m serious!”

“You are absolutely not.”

“I’m just thinking ahead.”

“Well stop. They’re embryos, not Regency cousins.”

Rowan hums. “Still. Best to have policy in place.”

“You need help.”

“And yet here I am, your chosen first call.”

“That was clearly a lapse in judgement.”

“Mm. Keep lipping off and I’ll tell your child about this exact hairstyle you’re wearing now.”

You gasp weakly. “That is vile. I’m vulnerable.”

“You’re hideous,” Rowan says fondly, and squeezes your hand. Then the humour softens out of her a little. “We’ll sort it. One thing at a time, alright?”

A nod. “One thing at a time,” you echo.

When Rowan leaves you feel judged only in the areas that solidify friendships, and supported where things were about to crumble. Riding that high of momentary tranquility, you text Duncan. Could we meet? I’d like to talk to you. Then you try, with all your might, to not just stare at the screen until he replies.

His phone buzzes against his thigh halfway round the park and Dunk nearly ignores it on principle. He only ever checks mid-run if it might be Raymun, or one of the teachers from school saying some child has broken an arm in a creative new fashion. He slows, fishes the thing out one-handed, glances down—

Could we meet? I’d like to talk to you.

And promptly catches the edge of a raised paving stone with the toe of his trainer.

He lurches hard, windmills once, nearly goes down in full view of a woman walking a terrier in a little yellow coat, recovers with all the grace available to a man his size, which is none. The dog startles. The woman startles. Duncan keeps moving two steps out of momentum alone, then stops dead and stares at the screen as if the words might rearrange into something less capable of stopping his heart.

He types fast. sometjing happenwd? Sees it, swears, retypes, and sends a proofread version straight after: Something happened? Then, before you can answer that either: Yes of course. And then, because apparently he has decided to just lean fully into panic:

When d’you want to meet? Where are you? Are you all right?

It is as if the two weeks of withheld contact living in Duncan’s fingers have grown fully fed up with their prison and decided on a jailbreak. Every other evening he’s found himself stuck scrolling through nonsense, drifting into your thread, typing how you? and then deleting it. At some point he stopped deleting and simply kept adding question marks. Three days ago he forced himself to man up and backspaced it so hard his phone froze, and that seemed to settle it. Things would get back to normal sooner or later, because they had to. He stayed at school longer than he ought to, then pestered Raymun into working out with him. Raymun came out once, nearly passed out at the outdoor park gym, and Dunk felt bad for it. 

Dunk apologised, but Raymun waved it off and said no worries, he was only knackered. Rowan had been having insane cravings in the middle of the night and Raymun, wanting to do right by her, kept dragging himself out to buy whatever strange thing she’d latched onto this time—ice cream, pickles, Marmite, though Rowan had never liked Marmite in her life and apparently did now. That was how Dunk learned she was pregnant. Joy flooded him fiercely at the news, followed close by some odd little pang of dread, a sense of being left behind. Before he could give it voice, Raymun went white, swore under his breath, made Dunk vow he would not tell Rowan he knew, then laughed loud, clasped both hands to Dunk’s shoulders, and told him the kid was blessed already, because they were going to have the best godfather in the world.

And this is something Dunk’s great at, being a parent figure that’s not a parent exactly, so he doesn’t know why he’s felt partly full and partly empty hearing the news. All in all he’s happy for Raymun and has once again stopped himself from saying something that would ruin the moment. This time, it would be asking if that’s why the engagement went from an idea to a mission so fast. They didn’t drink that night, but they hugged about it tightly and Raymun’s eyes got red from it.

His heart is racing because he’s just run and nearly split his head on the pavement, and for no other reason at all, when finally you text back. I’m ok, just don’t want to talk over the phone or text. My place? 7?

When Dunk checks the time it is only three in the afternoon, and he wonders how he is meant to survive the next four hours in this state of near-cardiac event. The heartburn is back in full. But if there is one thing he knows for certain about you—and in fairness, the inventory of things he knows is not large, some of it plainly filled in by hope—it is that you do not like being pushed. So he sends a thumbs-up and walks home instead of running, because he does not want to die before learning what it is you mean to tell him.

At home he tries, first, to behave as though the evening is not bearing down on him with its hands out. He showers. Puts water on for tea. Forgets about it until the kettle has long since clicked off and the kitchen has gone quiet around it. He opens the fridge and stares in with the grave concentration of someone hoping cold air might contain counsel. There is a yogurt two days from turning. Half a jar of pesto. Eggs. A lonely pepper going soft at the shoulder. He shuts the door again.

He sits. Gets back up. Turns the telly on low and keeps finding, a minute later, that he has not taken in a single word of whatever is playing. His phone stays in his hand too much. At one point he realises he has opened your message thread without knowing he has done it, just staring at My place? 7? as if more might appear beneath it if he waits reverently enough.

Then comes the matter of what to wear, which makes him feel simple in a way that is almost rude. He changes his shirt, then changes it again. Looks at himself in the mirror and sees a man apparently dressing for a firing squad or good news, and since no one in the history of speech has ever said we need to talk to deliver a pleasant surprise, he tells himself to stop acting the gom. For one miserable stretch of thought he becomes convinced you are about to tell him he has given you something. An STI, maybe. He stands there trying to reason through it. He has not slept with anyone in the past year. Logically, if anything has been passed between you, the odds tilt the other way. Dunk refuses, on instinct, to believe such a thing of you. The refusal comes so fast and whole it irritates him. He has no problem imagining himself as the source of badness. You remain, in his head, curiously exempt.

By half six he cannot bear the flat another minute. He leaves too early and knows it. Tries to correct for it by taking the longer route, which is not really a route at all but him wandering the paths around the park near your place, adding distance in pathetic little loops. Children are still out, shrieking over a ball. A dog drags a woman through the grass with its nose down and full conviction. Somebody is eating chips on a bench. Dunk walks past all of it with the feeling that his skin has been pulled half an inch too tight over his frame.

On the second lap round the pond he wonders whether he should have brought something. Flowers feel insane. Drink, worse. Food assumes too much. He pictures himself turning up on your doorstep with a bag of oranges or a packet of biscuits and nearly wants to lie down in the mud. By ten to seven he has run out of places to waste time without looking suspicious even to himself.

So he goes to your building, climbs the stairs with his pulse all wrong, and, at ten to seven exactly, lifts his hand and knocks.

You open after a little while, and the sight of you unmans him some.

Dunk knows the look of somebody who has cried for hours and come out the other side of it. He sees versions of it at school often enough—children convulsed by some grief enormous to them, a lost favourite object, a cruel word, the wrong partner in a game, and then, once the crying has spent itself, the face goes soft and warm with exhaustion, the tragedy reduced to a size that can be survived and sometimes even laughed at. On you it sits badly in him. Because if he is reading the room right, the reason for all that crying and the reason he has been summoned here share too much ground.

“Hey,” you say, and smile at him weakly. “You’re early.”

“Am I?” he says, making a show of looking uncertain. “Should I—?” His thumb points vaguely back down the hall, as though he has even a shred of intention to leave and return in ten minutes.

Then, something unfortunate happens. You roll your eyes at him, and the quick flash of white sends him straight back into bed with you—buried in heat and sweat and the memory of your face breaking apart around pleasure, though the look now has nothing to do with that one. Even so, his body does not care for distinctions this fine. He feels the blood rise hot in his cheeks and hopes, with some urgency, that his ears are not joining in.

“No, come on,” you say. “It’s fine. Tea?”

“Aye,” he says, aching for an ordinary thing. “Tea’d be grand.”

He steps inside with the care of entering somewhere familiar under entirely unfamiliar terms. You move ahead of him towards the kitchen and he follows, too aware of his own size, of his shoes, of where his hands are hanging, of the fact that he has brought none of the things a decent person might bring to a difficult conversation and is now arriving empty-handed and broad as a wardrobe.

The living room tells on the day a little. Tissues on the couch. A blanket half dragged to the floor. In the kitchen there are cups in the sink, abandoned at different stages of usefulness. The kettle appears to have been at work for hours. You do not even need to switch it on, only reach for fresh mugs and teabags with the dull speed of body moving ahead of your mind.

You pour milk into the cups and the bottle knocks lightly against one rim. A little spills over and runs under the bottoms, leaving white rings on the counter.

“Shite,” you mutter, and he realises you are nervous.

Something in Dunk drops and braces at the same time. Up till now some small, stubborn corner of him has been making up harmless reasons for this meeting. They all die when he sees the spill and the way you stare at it for a second too long, like the milk has presented you with a problem of impossible complexity.

He moves before thinking too hard about it. Reaches past you for the dishcloth by the sink, slow enough not to startle, and wipes the counter clean in two broad swipes. “It’s only milk,” he says quietly.

His voice comes out gentle. He sets the cloth down. Looks at your hands, then at your face. “You don’t have to do the tea if y’don’t want,” he says. “I’m not here for the tea.”

“I know,” you say, and point at the cups. “Well, it’s ready. Just a bit messy. C’mon, I think I need you to sit.”

Dunk braces a hand on the counter. “Freakin’ me out a bit there, lass,” he says. “What is it?”

You stare at him for a second, then look down. “I just…” you mutter, small. “I just gotta tell you something, is all.”

He takes a step forward and, with everything in him, does not reach for your shoulders. “Well, then?”

You scratch at your hairline and huff a breath. “Uh, Christ, this is harder than I expected.” Your arms fold round yourself and you wince. “Gimme a second, okay?”

“Somethin’ bad happen?”

“No,” you say, fast. “I mean yes, something happened, but if it’s good or bad, you can decide.” You sigh. Shake both hands in the air like that might loosen the words. Then you turn, hold your sides, and look up at the ceiling. “Okay, fuck—”

Anxiety makes the blood go loud in his ears. He tries to breathe through his nose and fails. To cover the sound of it, he asks, “Did I… hurt ye? Did I—”

“No, God no—”

“Y’gonna tell me I’ve got somethin’ on me now, then?” he asks and regrets it instantly.

“What?” you snap. “No, Jesus, Dunk—”

“Then what is it, luv?”

You stop fidgeting. Just pull in one thin, startled breath and look at him.

“I’m… I’m pregnant, and—”

One word and the rest of you goes muffled, as if you are talking to him through wool. Duncan’s heart seems to stop. His breathing too. There are tears in your eyes again.

“And it’s yours for sure, and I wanted to tell you before anything—and, and I t-thought about it and I just—”

In that moment Duncan’s biggest dream or nightmare might as well come true. He blinks through the potential calcifying into fact. It is a long blink. He may become the figure he has mourned quietly his entire life. Somewhere in the back of his mind lingers the knowledge he has passively absorbed from reels about mental health and substitution and trying to patch one absence with another. He knows well enough that this would not do that. But because the missing bits are missing all the same, his heart is a simple creature and leaps at the possibility. Another part of him sinks a little, because one version of this has you telling him only because such things must be told, and then taking the seed of that joy away. I’m going to be a dad rings louder in him than I’ve fucked up. He waits to see if his head is wedged under the guillotine when the blade falls.

“I think I’d like to keep it,” you say, and let him keep his head after all.

Dunk wonders whether this sort of thing is meant to happen to men who are thirty or thirty-two. His papers say thirty-two, but the papers came after, and after is where people start guessing. The story of him turning up at the orphanage lived in a dozen mouths, but he believes Uncle Arlan’s version because Arlan never saw the use in lies when the truth caused enough bother on its own.

He told Dunk he’d been left there with no documents and already big enough that they took one look at him and put him down older than he likely was. For a while some of them thought there was something wrong with him for other reasons too—that he was slow where he should not be, wrong in the head, late to things other boys managed easy. Then the years went on and bits started evening out, except for the size, which only kept making fools of everybody’s estimates. So thirty-two may be true. Thirty-one might be truer. Thirty, even. Dunk has never known for certain. Standing there with your words still warm in the air, he decides he must be younger after all, because this feels too large and round to happen to a man on a crooked number. 

“Dunk?” you say. “Are you with me?”

You look scared. Your hand is wrapped around the cup you are not drinking from. Shoulders drawn up, brows pulled together, you seem to be waiting for him to blink or breathe or do anything at all. But the joy that floods him now is even fiercer than what he felt when Raymun told him Rowan was pregnant, and he is too astounded to speak. So instead of speaking, Dunk closes the distance, plucks the cup from your hands, sets it on the counter, and gathers you in tight. Only then can he breathe.

“Thank you,” he says into your hair. “Jesus, thank you.” His voice comes rough with it. “Thank you for tellin’ me. Thank you for—” He swallows and starts over, because there are too many things at the same time and none of them fit through cleanly. “I’m here, aye? I’m here.”

At first you stand like a log and just let him hold you, giving nothing back. Then, slowly, your hands climb until they rest on his back, and there is the lightest brush of your fingers there. “You’re happy?”

“Happy? God—” He breathes you in. You smell the same. “Aye, I’m happy,” he says. “I am. I’m so happy I think I might be a bit thick with it. You?”

“Mostly terrified,” you mumble. “But… yeah. Something happy-adjacent.”

Dunk pulls back enough to look at you. He smiles. “Happy-adjacent?”

“Don’t take the piss.”

“I’m not. I like it.”

You sigh, and your eyes water a bit. “Ideally, this would be happening with someone I’m actually with, but I suppose there are worse fates than having a baby with a friend who’s a good person.”

“Mm.” He only hums to that, and you look at him again, waiting. “Sorry,” he says. “I’m just still—”

“Dunk.” You run your hands on his arms. “Look, I don’t need you to… I don’t know, bend over backwards or do anything that would change your life a lot. But if you want to be present, you know…” You swallow. “I’d love that. If you don’t that’s alright too, but I’m guessing you do based on—”

“Hush, girl. Hush now,” he says, cutting in, and pulls you back into him. “I’ll be present. I want to.”

Silence for a while. He just rocks you, then rests his chin on the top of your head.

“We can make it work, right?” you ask.

Yes. Dunk will die if he does not make it work.

You said this is not ideal, and under any other circumstance he might have had enough blood in his brain to let that land where offence is kept. But this is too large and too bright for offence. Where you are only happy-adjacent, Dunk has somehow stumbled into family-adjacent, and that is enough to make him the happiest he has ever been in his life.

He is going to have a baby with his beautiful friend. He is going to be somebody’s father, with you.

If he came from normal people, maybe there would be some higher standard stored in him somewhere. Some polished version of how these things ought to begin. Flowers. Planning. A house already chosen. The proper order of it all, learned by watching it happen around him. But Dunk has never lived by examples like that. He counts family differently. Whoever wedges themselves into his life and stays, he keeps. Whoever loves him long enough to become a fixture, he builds around.

So yes, this begins in chaos. Yes, the pair of you are standing here because of a one-night stand and a spectacular lapse in judgement. He knows that. Knows it fully. Still, all he feels is warmth.

You will work it out. Somehow. Somehow is plenty.

“Aye,” he says. “We’ll make it work.”

You had been right, of course. Right when you said to buy more long-lasting supplies. Right when you said there might be no inn for miles and miles, and the last bed and fair meal in your bellies were already fading from memory. Right when you said to walk around the woods instead of cutting through, because no one could see the stars under crowns grown so thick, and this particular forest had looked queer even from the road.

It had unsettled him too, if he is honest. The trees stood too close together. The path under them seemed less like a path than an invitation made by something with poor intentions. But Duncan had wanted, badly, to be the sort of man who knew the way.

He had said the coin purse was too light for the inn. He had said north was north. He had said the road through was straight enough, and if you kept going you would come out three days sooner than if you went around. He had said Ser Arlan taught him to read land and wind and moss on bark.

You had only looked at the forest and said, “Moss grows where it pleases in a place like that.”

And now moss grows everywhere. On stones, on roots, on the wrong sides of trees. It slicks the ground under his boots and makes a fool of every scrap of road-wisdom he dragged out to defend himself. The sky has been gone for two days. The trees keep swallowing the light. Little ways open ahead of you and close behind you without sound.

Worst of all, you have stopped telling him you were right. That is how Duncan knows you are truly angry, and it is the last thing he wants. Everything he does is to show you how dear you are to him. When you are only cross, you sharpen yourself on him. When there is still play in it, you peck and prod and make sport of his solemn face until he either laughs or thinks hard about putting his head through a tree. Now you walk ahead in silence with your cloak hem dark from mud, one hand pressed to your empty stomach when you think he cannot see. But he sees.

With the ache in his legs he can't decide whether it is a new punishment from the Gods, or merely a top up of his ongoing one. Being doomed to spend all his time around creature who smells of woodsmoke and crushed green things, whose laugh comes out meaner for hunger yet makes something in him lift like a hound hearing its name, whose hands can bind a cut with such brisk mercy he feels forgiven before the knot is tied, then cuff him round the arm a breath later for moving too soon.

Those hands trouble him. The gentleness of them troubles him worse. The little sharp swats you give him when he says something thick-headed trouble him worst of all, because Duncan is a boy beneath the height and mail and borrowed vows, and boys think where they are forbidden; boys wonder how the same hand might fall in privacy, in play, in anger sweetened by permission.

He cannot have you. That is the root and rot of it. So he keeps you where a hedge knight may keep what is precious and impossible: in his head, in his heart, and, when he strays furthest from the knightly path, in those low, shameful devotions that take him half-awake before dawn, hand gone traitor under the blanket while you sleep near enough to unman him, face softened by the pale morning, mouth parted and begrudgingly unkissed.

A rock hits the tree bark, and a grunt follows. The same crow that has yelled at the pair of you twice already flies off with a menacing cackle, and Duncan sees you standing there with your shoulders drawn and anger practically fuming off your neck.

“If we kill it, we can eat it,” you announce grimly.

“You cannot eat a crow,” he tells you. “It’s a bad omen.”

It is much too quiet. Much too calm, and matches your mood not at all, for you are beyond livid and looking for something to punch outright.

“Oh?” you quip. “Worse than dying of hunger in the middle of the meanest fucking forest I’ve ever been to?” There, you stomp your foot hard enough to feel the impact travel thighwards and spread a vile ache. Your boot sinks into the moss.

Duncan gapes at you, clearly frightened. “We’ll find something soon enough,” he says, taking a few steps forward. His hands fist the belt of the satchel nervously. When you give him nothing but a death stare, he bows his head and mumbles, “Forgive me, I—”

It makes you explode. “Stop this! We’ve found nothing for two days except for disgusting birds!” you yell at him. Or rather, your stomach yells at him, and there is a lot of space within it to draw air from. “We’ve passed the same split ash twice, and there’s no sky in here. Where is your north now, hm?” You move in, throwing your hands around. When he says nothing, you press on: “I told you we should’ve stayed at the inn. I told you we should’ve walked round, but you never listen. Ser Arlan this, Ser Arlan that, I’m sick of listening to the wisdom of that old fart! And quit standing there looking like I should pity you, it’s infuriating!”

His eyes jerk around, but his head doesn’t. “A-aye,” he stammers. Walks right past you. “As you wish.”

“Duncan, I’m—”

“Keep moving.” He cuts you off. Hurt. “Start marking the trees, and perhaps we will stop walking in circles.”

You know damn well you’ve hurt him, regret it dearly, and get only more cross about it. Stupid boys with their stupid I-can-do-this attitudes. Stupid Duncan with his stupid we-can-make-it every time you offer an easier solution. You are well aware of how light your shared purse is, but there are ways around things. You could’ve charmed the innkeeper. Could’ve haggled with the grain seller. Could’ve hunted small game on your way around the woods, and at least there would be some stars above your heads. At least the air would be fresh and not rotten-smelling and damp all the way. Stupid Duncan with his stupid frowned mouth that wouldn’t even show you his endearing teeth or the way his eyes wrinkle when he laughs.

There are moments when you let yourself be deluded into thinking he has a kinder eye on you than merely a companion’s. He looks longingly whenever a larger patch of your body shows, and blushes furiously when he gets caught looking. Always makes you eat your ration first and pretends he’s well fed while his stomach could obviously host yours and his, and he’d still be hungry. He helps you into and out of the tall places, walks first through suspicious lands, and hides you with his broadness whenever someone ill-looking crosses your path. Often you find him staring at you in the mornings. He misliked the idea of you flirting your way into a warm bed so much the door rattled behind him when he stormed out of the inn. Went ahead guilty-looking and pulled at his brows as if it was some sort of personal betrayal.

You were very close to telling him that if you shared a bed you might be able to afford it, but something in you told you no. The same voice that acts as a constant apologist for all the deceptions of a girlish heart. It yearns for his lashes to tickle your cheeks when he kisses you and for his hands to smooth down your thighs, while the mind, still steadfast, screeches at you that he is a knight. A man honourable enough to apply all those gestures selflessly, out of duty and his soul’s purity. So you keep those little fits of unbearable pining to yourself, and only let them boil over from frustration in situations like this one. When the threat of closeness becomes so grand, you end up in the middle of nowhere instead, with no provisions, wineskin empty and body so hungry it feels as if it has started feasting on itself.

Watching him try to be competent while exhausted makes you furious in an oddly specific way. So much so that it takes an additional ounce of effort to look away from what it attempts to disguise. You insisted because food and shelter are sensible, yes, but underneath that: you are tired of him deciding what hardships both of you will nobly endure. You are tired of him being far away all the time. You are tired of him being able to admit a mistake exactly never, because he has some ridiculous fear of failing you.

So you drag yourself behind him, silent, functionally hostile, letting him mark the trees while your eyes remain fixed on the forest’s groundcover. For a long time there is nothing but moss and decomposing bark. Then, a little pale congregation shows itself under the lip of a fallen trunk.

You stop so quickly your knees almost forget the arrangement. Mushrooms. A whole clutch of them, bunched close in the wet dark, caps the colour of old cream and bruised grey at the edges, stems thin and stubborn where they push up through the rot. They look indecently alive in a forest that has offered no berries, no nuts, no rabbit flashing white under a bush, no squirrel rude enough to be killed, no clean water except what one might wring from the moss like from an old rag. You crouch and pick one. The stem gives with a soft little snap. It smells damp, earthy, faintly sweet in a way that makes your stomach fold in on itself with need.

You turn it over. Gills. Fine ones, packed tight underneath, pale as milk. You try to summon every scrap of sense you own about things growing wild and free: what colour means death, what smell means bellyache, what little skirts and bulbs and stains should send a person praying. The knowledge arrives in tatters. Old women muttering by cookfires. A girl you once knew who swore the brown ones were safest, until another girl swore the same about the white. You split the cap with your thumb and watch it bruise darker where you have hurt it.

The forest holds its breath. That is what Duncan notices first. The lack of you behind him. Muttered complaints, boots dragging and hungry little curses aimed at roots, birds, Gods, or him, cease entirely. He turns and finds you knelt in the moss bed, hunched over your own lap as if you have discovered treasure or a corpse.

“What is it?” he asks.

“Mushrooms,” you tell him, eyes fixed on whatever's before you.

He goes still. “Put them down.”

“They seem good enough.”

“Put them down,” he says again, and this time it lands as command. “You do not know what they are.”

Your mouth sets. Oh, there it is. The last rotten twig laid on the pile. You are hungry enough to feel hollowed with a spoon. Cross enough to bite the next thing that comes near your mouth. Cross with him for the inn, for the road, for the woods, for treating you as if you are some soft lady to be carried through hardship rather than the companion sharing it. Cross with him for touching you only when duty gives him permission. Cross with him for staring with those huge blue eyes full of thoughts he never once has the courage to drag into words. Cross with him for standing over you now as if he gets to decide this too.

You gather two fistfuls from the moss and sit back on your heels.

“Don’t,” Duncan says.

So you stuff the first handful into your mouth.

It is a dreadful decision immediately. They are wet and cold and spongy between your teeth, tasting of soil, pepper, old leaves, and something almost buttery enough to coil nerves. You chew with the wild-eyed conviction of a person proving a point no sensible man asked you to prove.

Duncan runs. For a man so large, he hits the ground beside you with shocking speed. “Stop that! Spit them out!” His hand catches your chin, thumb at one side, fingers at the other, trying to turn your face up. True fear has made him clumsy. “Spit them out, I said. Seven hells, are you mad?”

You clamp your jaw shut.

“Open your mouth.”

You shake your head with such force his grip slips. He catches you again, gentler and worse for it, because all that concern is going straight through your skin where his fingers hold you. He is stronger, of course he is, but strength has poor purchase against a mouth sealed by spite. You make a muffled, triumphant sound through the chewed mess of shroom flesh, and Duncan looks one breath away from prying your lips open with both hands.

“D'you want to die?” he snaps. “Is that it? You want to make a corpse of yourself because I told you no?”

It is enough to tip your anger over. You surge up into him with the second fistful crushed in your palm. He jerks back too late. Your hand smears over his mouth, damp caps and broken stems mashed against his lips, and for one glorious, idiotic heartbeat you have him pinned in sheer surprise, your other hand shoved hard against his jaw to keep him from throwing you off.

Then, he does throw you off. You land in the moss with a graceless thump while Duncan spits, coughs, spits again, one hand braced on the ground and the other scraping at his mouth as if he has kissed plague. “Fuck,” he chokes, which would be deeply satisfying under finer circumstances. “Fuck—”

You lie there with your chest heaving, ground cold under your back, and watch him retch up a sorry fleck of pale cap. “You ain’t dead yet,” you tell him.

Laughter bubbles out of you. Thin, cracked, half-starved, ugly with deranged little triumph. It keeps going because his face is appalled, because he has mushroom pulp on his chin, because the whole thing is so childish and awful that laughter is the only shape your body can make around the shame of it.

Then, you see his eyes and the humour dies.

Duncan wipes his mouth with the back of his wrist. Spits once more into the moss. When he looks at you, he is furious, yes, but beneath it something scared sits bare and wounded. “That was foolish,” he says, low and rough. “Cruel foolish.”

You push up on one elbow. “Duncan—”

“No.” He stands too quickly, sways, and pretends he has not. “Enough of this childish nonsense. Get up. Keep walking before we drop dead in this place and the ground eats what is left of us.”

You get up because staying on the ground would mean staying beside the shape of your own idiocy. There is no victory in your belly. The mushrooms sit there damp and useless, offering neither meal nor death nor apology. Your stomach remains hollowed. Your tongue finds some last shred of cap stuck against a tooth and you swallow it down because spitting now would feel too much like agreeing with him.

So you follow Duncan who walks ahead with his shoulders drawn hard, nicking the trees with more force than the trees deserve. Each cut shows pale through the bark. A poor little wound, then another, then another. You keep your eyes on them because looking at the back of his neck seems unwise. Because there is shame in you now, a hot coal of it under the hunger, and because the whole matter will surely sort itself out once there is road underfoot again. Road, sky, a stream, some village woman with a pot over the fire and enough mercy to sell you both porridge on credit.

The more you walk in dead silence, the more odd everything grows. First, the green deepens. Moss goes dark and bruises emerald where your boots press it flat, then almost black around the roots. The rot in fallen trunks shows itself in bands: brown, rust, yellowed cream, a wet red near the heartwood that makes you look twice. Beads of damp shine on bark like threaded glass. The world has somehow grown a skin and every part of it is tender.

Your eyes roll themselves to look ahead, to check whether up matches the down, and something unfeasible happens: Duncan's hair catches auburn where there is no sun to put it there. You blink hard, but it is still in place. Burning copper, warm at the roots, as if late summer has claimed him and crowned him its ruler.

He is ten paces ahead, fully clothed, filthy at the hem, angry with you in every line of him, and still something in the sight of his back opens a door you have spent months pretending was only a crack in the wall. His shoulders shift under the cloth. His rope-belt rides where his stride pulls it. One hand hangs near his thigh, broad and scraped at the knuckles, fingers flexing now and then as if he is still trying to close them around his temper.

And you can smell him. From there. From too far. Wool and old sweat. Iron, leather, green bark crushed fresh under his boots. The sour-sweet human warmth gathered at his throat after two days beneath the same clothes. It comes into you with the air and sits in your mouth, intimate as a thumb pressed on the tongue.

Your face goes hot. “Duncan,” you say before you mean to.

He stops, and turns only half-way. “What?”

Nothing. Everything. You have no answer fit for speech, only the sudden, humiliating perception of him through distance, moving among the trees like the forest made room grudgingly and only because it had to.

“I—” You swallow. The hollow in your stomach twists, and lowers into a stranger ache. “Nothing.”

He looks over his shoulder then. Only for a moment. His eyes are still angry. Still hurt. Something else beneath. The blue of them near takes the knees out from under you.

The white of your shift under the cloak flashes blinding to him. For a vile moment he knows the body beneath the cloth with alarming accuracy. The curve and press of it. The warm hidden places where fabric clings. The space between your thighs where his fingers would fit if his hand twitched one inch further into sin. He blinks, and once his lids lower he can feel the forest pulsing around him. Trees throb from root to crown, or so he thinks. Leaves shiver high above, though there is no wind he can hear. Only you.

Your breath comes from behind him, fine and close, though he knows you are several paces back. The small draw of it, the break and the swallow after. If he stays inside the sound too long, his head fills with images that shame him: blood moving thick and slow through veins, mouths parting in the dark, the slick red place behind your teeth. It comes again, and this time he hears the scrape of teeth over your lower lip. Hears your tongue shift when you swallow. Hears the wet click of it like a secret told directly into his ear.

He turns away hard and starts walking before his face can betray him. The ground gives strangely under his boots. Too soft to carry him, or too willing. Moss takes his weight and keeps the shape of it. Roots, slick and glossy, groan like sleeping limbs. Behind him your steps begin to sound coloured. Brown-black when you tread on earth. Pale when you crush dry leaves. Red when you stumble and curse at the tree that caught your sleeve.

Duncan scratches at his wrist. The itch has started there, under the cuff, a mean little needling. Then the other wrist. Then the side of his neck, just beneath the hair. His skin feels wrong on him, pulled too tight over bone, and the collar of his tunic rasps his throat with each breath. He hooks one finger under it and drags, angry with the cloth, the nature and his own flesh for having the gall in a time like this.

He stops at the next tree and lifts the knife. The mark comes crooked. His hand is less steady than he thought. Bark peels under the blade, wan tissue showing beneath, and when he braces his palm against the trunk the taste of it goes through his skin. Warm resin and bitter green. Something cloying and golden underneath, thick enough to coat the tongue.

For one dreadful breath, he wants to put his mouth to it. Then, he snatches his hand back.

You catch up while he stands there, staring at the tree as though it has whispered something incredulous to him. Your shoulder comes near his arm. Near enough that your warmth finds him through sleeve and cloak and all his ruined good intentions. He employs every nerve in an effort of not looking down. Looking down would show him your mouth, and he already hears too much of it.

Duncan sucks in a breath and regrets it at once, because it tastes like your laughter. "D'you feel—"

"N-no," you snap, visibly clawing at your sleeve.

The itching has gone worse now that you are close to him. You try to look everywhere but at his face and still it pushes itself into vision. More gorgeous than ever, which is a terrible thing to discover about a man who has just called you cruel foolish and looked as though you had stuck a knife between his ribs. His mouth sits soft even in anger, upper lip fine and nearly secretive, lower lip fuller, tenderly made, the whole of it held in that slight crookedness that makes him look as if a smile has once lived there and left its shape behind. Kissable enough to seem wet with sweetness. Near dripping, like split fruit. You can almost tell what it would taste of: salt, hunger, the warm copper of his bitten cheek, some grave and boyish mercy he keeps trying to spend on everyone but himself.

Beneath it, when his lips part around another breath, you catch the heart-wrenching disorder of his teeth. Crooked and ivory, youthful enough to undo the rest of his solemn, knightly face. His canines show for one bare second and something in you folds toward them with such obedient stupidity you want to laugh again, or bite your own hand. You would let them hurt you. You would lick over the uneven enamel just to learn the shape of him there too. His cheeks are freckled under the dirt, and the little mark high on the left one sits like a sign left by some indecently helpful god: here. Peck him here. His eyes are so blue they have no right to be warm, and yet they are, even scared, even angry, even with the pupils blown strange in the forest’s dim. His lashes would shame half the women in Westeros. His throat shows above his collar, working hard, begging for hands to circle it lovingly and feel the swallow pass under the thumbs.

It is the whole complex architecture of him that shreds you. The way his face moves before he can command it. Wrinkles with laughter. Saddens openly, no matter how quickly he ducks his head. Sets in anger he throttles inside himself until his jaw looks pained with it. He is a book flung open so wide the spine must be creaking, and still he behaves as if no one can read him. You want that face in your hands. At your neck. Bowed over you in the dark. You want that mouth at your breast, licking sweat from skin, lower too, in places the hunger in you has grown too proud to give it a name. He is a young man made, in this instant, to be loved down to the bone and back again, and you cannot understand why he will not simply let you.

“I feel… something,” you say after a moment, small and ashamed, and Dunk’s head snaps to the side to glare at you properly.

“I told you.” His voice comes out sharp, and he scrapes a hand over his mouth as if he can wipe the tremor from it. “I told you not to eat them.”

He looks worse now, which is a cruel way of saying better. Sweated through at the temples. Lips parted. The anger in him has gone twitchy, pulled tight, and every part of him seems brighter for it, as if fever has decided to make a feast of him first.

You ignore the fit because looking at him too long makes the ground loosen under your feet. “Do you feel it too?”

“I feel…” He stops.

The words plainly fail him. His jaw shifts. His hands open and close at his sides, large and helpless, missing something they have no right to know the shape of yet. There are knightly words for pain, for hunger, for wounds taken cleanly, for fear swallowed and carried forward. There are no words decent enough for this kind of yearning. No chivalric term for a cock so hard it makes thought limp and useless. No sweet, courtly account of his tongue feeling parched as old leather, as if only the salt of your skin could wet it. His whole body has turned want into a task. His hands want your flesh, specifically, under them. His mouth wants sweat. His chest wants weight. Even his bones seem to ache in your direction.

“Sick,” he says at last.

That throws you off enough to cool your face by one degree. “Sick how?”

His eyes shut briefly. “Wicked-sick.”

“Duncan.”

“Below the gut,” he grits out. “Aching.”

You move without thinking. One step, then another, drawn by the sound of him admitting anything at all. Your hand lifts near his chest, not touching yet, though the heat of him rises through the little space between you. “Well then—”

“No.” He backs away so quickly his spine hits the marked tree. Bark shudders behind him. For one absurd moment you think the forest gives a pleased little pulse. “No,” he says again, weaker. “I will not. I cannot throw all we have away for one witchcraft misery.”

A frown pulls at your mouth. You swallow, and Duncan feels it as if the working of your throat has passed through his own. His eyes drop there and jerk back up, pained.

“But we’ve got nothing but each other,” you say.

It comes out bewildered. Worse than that, wet at the edges. The tears mortify you the instant they gather, because you are hungry and furious and lit up from the inside by some vile little mushroom, and still the part of you that hurts most is the old part. The standing outside him part. The watching him lock himself away with all his goodness like a miser with coin.

“Duncan,” you mumble, and step in again.

He makes a sound under his breath. Almost your name, but more a plea with its back broken.

Then both his hands come down on your shoulders. Firm, but not harsh. Even now, with his face ruined and his arms trembling from the work of resisting it, he holds you as if you are something flammable he must keep from the fire. His fingers bite only as much as they need to. He keeps you at arm’s length, and the distance feels tormentuous, heartending and warm all the same.

“Sit,” he says.

You stare at him.

“Please,” he adds, and that does worse things to you than any command could.

With absolute pain written into every muscle, Duncan guides you back from him and down onto a mossy rise between two roots. He waits until you are seated, then pulls his hands away as if touch itself is thorned. He goes several paces off, too damn far, and lowers himself heavily to the ground with his back to another tree.

“We wait,” he says, breathing hard through his nose. “That is all. We wait it through.”

You hate the idea, but keep sitting where he put you because your head confuses the command for beguilement. The first few hauls of air almost convince you it might work. Your hands are folded badly in your lap, nails pressed into meat below the thumbs. He stays with his knees drawn up, head bowed and eyes closed. Looks as if he means to endure his own body by refusing to believe in it.

The distance should help; it does the opposite. It makes you want to scream. Whatever lives in your blood follows him across the ground and brings him back whole. His smell grows stronger with space, more exact, meaner for being denied. Salt has gathered at his hairline, and the place beneath his jaw where a mouth could fit grows warmer. You shift on the moss and the moss answers too softly, sinking under your hips with a sympathy you resent.

Across from you, Duncan’s hand closes around a fistful of earth and your own palm burns with it. His fingers dig in. Soil packs under his nails. A root bends against the heel of his hand, and your skin reports the pressure as if the soil has confused you for him.

He hears something. His head turns a fraction when you breathe through your mouth. Sweat slides down the side of your neck, slow as an insect. His lashes lift. His eyes go there with such naked soreness that your throat tightens around nothing.

“Stop listening to me,” you say.

His mouth twitches into a strained smile. “I am tryin'.”

“You look like you are praying.”

“I am tryin' that too.”

A stupid, tender ache opens in your chest and gets swallowed by the lower one. You drag your sleeve over your neck; it makes the itching worse. Cloth rasps over skin and the sound of it seems to pass through Duncan’s teeth; he winces and shifts, hard, then stills with both hands flat on the moss.

There is no hiding it. The line of him under his breeches is plain enough even in the dim. Angry, trapped, dragging each breath out of him by force. You look before you can tell yourself not to. Then you cannot look away quickly enough to make it innocent, and, begrudgingly, Duncan notices.

His face goes the most painful red. One hand flies down to cover himself, and the pressure makes him give a low, broken sound through his teeth. He jerks his hand away again, humiliated nearly past bearing, and turns his face aside. “Do not,” he says.

You should feel triumphant. Some sour little part of you tries, but it dies quickly. He looks wretched with it, sweating and rigid, punished by the very thing you have been imagining for months with all your private, girlish cruelty. Your own body answers him with a deep pull that leaves your thighs weak. Nothing shows on you so simply. That feels unfair too. You are suffering just as stupidly, only your suffering has the manners to hide under skirts.

“Dunk,” you say, softer.

His shoulders climb.

“We could help each other—”

“No,” he grits.

“You did not even let me finish.”

“I heard enough.”

“You heard what you wanted.”

“I heard what I feared.” He swallows, and the sound arrives in you wet and close. “And I said no.”

He feels your stare on him. His hands go into fists again, punishing the green because the green will not bruise like the body would. He is picturing it now, Gods help him. How wet you must be under all that cloth. He does not know much, but he has learned enough to know girls do that when they start looking like you look now: flushed and wounded and angry with wanting. He thinks of putting his hand there and near loses the thread of his own breathing. Thinks of the heat of you opening under his fingers. Thinks of being allowed the taste of it, then the taste of your mouth after, and in the state he is in now he cannot help wondering whether that too would have colour, or sound, or smell. Whether kissing you would ring gold in his teeth. Whether your breath would taste the way your laughter does. The sweetness of permission feels so distant it turns appalling, and Dunk sits there starved with the effort of keeping those pictures caged.

“It would be wrong,” he says.

“Why?”

“Because we are half mad.”

“We were half mad before.”

“This is different.”

“You mean easier.”

His eyes cut to you. The look makes heat climb under your ribs. There he is, the part of him that can be stern when forced to it, that can stand between you and ill-looking men on the road with all that height suddenly gathered into threat. It should warn you away, but instead it scrapes through the need and brightens it.

“I would not have you come back to yourself and curse me for it,” he says.

The words land too near the old fear. That miserable little thought that perhaps his whole pain is honour fighting witchcraft, while yours is only the truth made louder. You breathe through a phlegmy laugh. “Curse you.”

His brow knots.

You are about to leave it be. To sit through it, wait through it, whatever is a brilliant solution that Duncan has thought of. Your hips shift on the ground, and make you mutter, inadvertently, “I wanted you before I ate the bloody things.”

Duncan stares. Truly stares. The blue of his eyes has gone strange again, wide and dark at the centre, his face emptied of everything save for shock. “W-wha—what?”

You lick your lips. His gaze drops there and returns with visible effort. “Y-yeah,” you say, now that it is out and steaming on the groundcover. “That.”

He blinks. Your courage begins to thin immediately, because why wouldn't it. It was never courage, only fever with a mouth on it. You pull your knees closer, as if there is still some arrangement of limbs that could restore dignity.

“I mean—” Your voice catches. You hate it. “Never mind. I know you are trying to do right by me. I know. We can wait it through. Forget I said anything.”

Duncan’s chest rises, and the forest seems to rise with it. He breathes out your name, barely shaped. His hands have opened, the dirt clings to them. He looks frightened still, painfully so, but the fear has changed its direction. Some part of him has stepped to the edge and found ground there after all.

“Say it again,” he says.

Your heart gives a foolish, violent knock. “What?”

His throat moves. “What you just said."

You stare at him. “Duncan—”

“Please.”

It takes more from you than the mushroom, that one word. You sit there with your skin singing and your mouth swollen around the truth, while he waits as if you have a blade to his neck and every intention of mercy.

“I wanted you before,” you say.

His eyes close, and his face changes direction so fast you nearly miss it. It seems to not be able to settle between hurt and then hurt getting alleviated, then the rest of locked places opening at different speeds. A bewildered, boyish joy gets smothered so quickly by hunger that your hands twitch in your lap.

“I thought—” he chokes. “I thought it was only me.”

A smile, toothy and horrible, pulls your mouth and it suddenly makes sense what one old woman has said to you about smiles: that they are deceitful, that creatures bare their teeth in fear and pain mostly. “Idiot,” you say, laughing, because the shake it gives to your shoulders at least loosens something up.

“Aye,” Duncan says. For the first time in days his mouth tips upward. "I might be."

You nearly cry then. Properly. From fury, from tenderness, from the unfairness of him sitting there all this time with the same wound as yours hidden better than yours. Your lips part to tell him that waiting is fine, that you can both be noble and miserable and half-dead until the mushrooms spend themselves, that he need not come closer, that you are sorry for making it worse, when he lifts his head and rasps, "C'mere. C'mere, girl."

He manages to stand, but only just. Poor thing limps for the ballast between his legs, face drawn tight with the effort of making his body obey him. You find no such strength in yourself, so you crawl on all fours, getting fistfuls of moss between your fingers, knees drowning, cloak slipping off one shoulder as you go to him with whatever dignity hunger and witchcraft have left you.

When he gets close enough, he falls to his knees and into you. His arms come round you, pulling you in, the both of you stumbling with it. He sinks your back into the ground and his mouth onto yours. Groans loudly for it. The sound goes through you before the kiss does, and then the kiss is there too, wet and hard and poorly aimed for the first starving second while his mouth is learning yours by error.

Duncan feels like a hundred fists that have been holding each joint of his spine let go in the same instant. Suddenly he can bow deeper, go at it harder. Get more of himself over you, around you, as if he means to wrap you into himself. Your body tastes like absolution through his palms and covers him in its odd soot. It gets into the lines of his hands, beneath the nails, under the skin, and he does not know whether to pray over it or lick it off.

His cock presses to your thigh, and it is worse and better somehow than it has ever been. Worse because there is cloth between you and still the pressure nearly blinds him. Better because it is you, actually you, warm and shifting, making a place for him with your legs and your hands and your open, foolish mouth.

Into his mouth, you are laughing. He is kissing you and you are laughing, giggling so saccharine you might be made of sweet things. The laughter itself has a taste in Duncan’s ears, the sound of it melts on his tongue, enters the bloodstream through all the grooves in it, and when he pictures licking your neck, he wonders: would your skin giggle too?

His hands find your collar because the thought has nowhere else to go. He pulls at the laces with none of the skill he has for knots, fingers too large, too eager, too angry with cloth for existing. The shift gives under them, opening enough for air to touch the skin below your throat, and he lets his lips slide from yours.

It goes badly for him. Your jaw is slick from his own mouth. Lower, it goes open and wet and panting, tongue rolling out as if he has forgotten any courtly use for it. He licks down the side of your throat to the collarbone to find out whether laughter lives there, and learns it gives him praise instead. All of you tenses beneath him. Your legs jerk. Your nails go hard into his back through tunic, and the pain comes through bright enough to make his hips grind down.

“Duncan—”

“Yes—” he mumbles into your skin, uselessly. Then, because he's gone foolish: “You taste—Gods—like being let in. Like rain after I thought there’d be none. I don't know—”

He tries again with his tongue since words make a poor account of the matter. His weight settles over you, heavy and shaking, and you answer by wrapping your legs round his hips. The cradle of it, the permission of it, make his head dizzy. His cock settles where it most wants to be, when you take his face in both hands.

Duncan stills, or tries to. Your palms press his cheeks, thumbs push under his upper lip with such strange, fond boldness that his breath stops. You bare his teeth yourself, exposing the crooked row of them while he looks down at you, broken and burning, too far gone to be ashamed quickly enough.

Then you crane up and lick across them, and a slide of flesh on enamel rings in his bones like a bell. A sound leaves him that has no knightly ancestor.

“You’re so pretty I could kill you,” you say.

He makes another sound, worse than the first, and you press your face to his before he can hide from it. Rub your cheek against his, nose dragging clumsily along the dirt and wet of him as if looking is suddenly insufficient, as if you must take the shape of his face by touch too.

“Undress me,” you breathe against him. Your hands clutch at his collar next, less patient than his. “And you. Take it off. I want to see you. Undress us.”

"A-all of it?" he asks dimly. The only thing he gets is a nod. A glint in the eyes that have gone so dark Dunk has to squint to recognise the ring of remaining colour in them. His mind is still considering it, while the body has taken to obeying briskly: he undoes the rope and tosses it into moss, gets his hand under the hem of the tunic, drags everything over his head and for a moment blinds himself in linen.

When he comes free his hair is rucked up and the sight of him near bends you with affection. He looks younger like this. Exposed by acquiescence before he is exposed by skin.

“Boots,” you tell him, because he has gone still under your looking.

“Aye. Boots.”

He nearly tangles himself in the work of them, kicking one free, then the other, cursing when the heel catches in wet. His breeches follow with even less dignity, shoved down and worked off in an ugly struggle of knees and hips and breath held through his teeth. He is too large for haste. Too flustered for grace. Beautiful in the middle of both.

Then, his hands come back to you and change. Shaking terribly and clumsy as ever, but tender in a way that seizes your throat. He unlaces you as if he's wronged the ties and has to make amends. His knuckles drag against your breastbone, and he looks at your face like he still expects rebuke.

"Duncan," you say. "You can touch me."

"I—I know," he says. "I'm tryin' to be gentle."

“You can be quick and gentle.”

He blinks to that. Grows as heedless as you wished him to be all this time and you watch the permission taking shape in a mind trained to deny itself. He pulls the laces loose, opens the front of your bodice, works fabric from shoulders and arms with an urgency that keeps catching on worship. When cloth sticks at your elbow, you both swear at it. When your skirt snags beneath your hip, he makes a noise close to despair and you have to lift yourself enough for him to drag it free.

Once you're denuded properly, framed by green and dark, he sits back on his heels and his face breaks open around the sight so quickly he has no time to hide it. Want, yes, awful and plain. But wonder too, and fear of the wonder, and that same helpless grace he wears when given food he did not ask for and badly needed. His hands hover near your sides without touching, fingers flexed, palms dirty, as though he has come upon something hallowed and has no idea what Gods do to fools who reach too fast.

“Do not look like that,” you say, though you want him to look exactly like that until the trees fall down.

His throat works once. “Like what?”

“Like it's a trickery,” you tell him. "I'm here."

To prove it, you push yourself up on your elbows and reach. Crawling. Climbing. You're climbing, climbing, climbing and there is no end to him. Duncan The Tall, Duncan The Broad, Duncan the man you've wanted so badly all this time and suddenly cannot contain it. Whatever it is that is happening now has not so much set you to be doing this, but has stripped the already precarious layers of we shouldn't, I couldn't, he wouldn't and made your mind and heart and hands and legs go need you, want you, death to me if I can't have you, please, please, please—

Your arms make it to his neck, hips slot into his lap, and there he is, angry and throbbing and so needy for you that the heat of him seems to have found its own heart. His hands catch your waist, grip harder when your skin gives under them. The first press of you against him turns his face ruinous. His mouth opens. His lashes jump. For one breath he looks as if he might beg pardon of your bones for wanting them so badly.

Then, you push him, barely. Pressure on the chest, a lean of your weight, and still he goes, pliant, as if all the strength has been taken out from under him. His back sinks into the moss, arms fling to the sides for he'd let you crucify him. You land with your palms on either of his shoulders, knees wedged into the dirt and thighs crowding his ribs. Between your legs his stomach rises softly, and the hairs on it tickle the skin most sensitive.

“There,” you breathe.

Duncan is stricken. Drained of volition as if volition were blood, and that one is occupied to gather elsewhere. He bends his knees slightly to ease some of the terrible sensation of air cooling the weep of his cock, and thinks he's never been so close to bursting just from being. He has his eyes closed to achieve anything—regroup, withstand, persist this unbearable wave of tenderness that thrashes in him—when your fingers get to the tendons of his neck and caress him, and it's all he needs to tip his head back and bare his throat to you.

There, your looking turns worse. You gape at the long working line of it until Duncan’s breath snags. The notch above his breastbone. Sinew drawn tight under the skin. The pulse batting there as if trying to get out. Your fingers follow first, light enough to make him suffer, then firmer when his head lolls to the side and his mouth opens on a sound he seems to bite in half.

“Don’t do that,” he says, palms flexing in the dirt.

You pause. “Do what?”

Dunk's lids crack open and he finds you above him with your hair all wild, staring as if you've found a chunk of gold in the mud. “Look at me so,” he says. "As if I'm—"

He fails there, since there are no words for it. As if I'm worth looking at. As if you're seeing something comely. Too much feeling is brought to a narrow door and made to wait outside because no word is plain and large enough to carry it in.

"You are," you tell him. Set both palms lower, where his chest is warm, alive and broad enough that your fingers look foolishly small against it. Through the sparse hair, over the hard-won muscle and the softer give laid over it, and that one you give a greedy squeeze. His nipple tightens under the heel of your hand and he jerks, shocked enough to look double-crossed by his own body, so you do it again.

“Gods,” he says, strangled.

“Good?”

His answer comes late, dragged through the teeth. “Aye," he says, though the mind still lingers in the country of mortification. Arms begin their raise, some old reflex reaching to cover himself, to help you or stop you, or simply manage the unbearable position of being wanted.

You swat them away, go back to cradling his jaw, and tell him softly, "Don't." He freezes, then melts under your thumbs on his cheekbones. "Don't be scared of me," you whisper.

“I ain't scared of you.”

“You are.”

His face twists, proud even now. “I’m scared of what I’ll do.”

“What will you do?”

"Shame myself," he says. "Fail you, I—"

"You won't," you tell him. "Is it shameful if we are both ruined? I just want to—" A swallow. "I just want to look." You bend over him, and the shift of your hips brings proof to your side of things. Your cunt grinds his stomach, leaves him all slicked and warm, and Duncan learns it helps little to nothing that you are equally fervent. Only makes him worse for it. He lies under you, enormous and nearly unmanned, and hears you whisper an absent, "Let me," a second before your mouth finds his chest.

He goes silent in that alarming way men do when noise has become too small for the body. Every part of him tightens. You kiss him, once, then again, then open your mouth and press your tongue to skin which tastes like freedom you have with him on the road, human and dear, and when your teeth graze him he gasps, and your own skin goes hot at the power of it. “You’re beautiful,” you say into him.

He shakes his head hard. “N-no.”

“Yes.”

“No, girl, don’t—”

“Yes,” you say again, and put your mouth lower to make the word enter him another way.

With it, your frame slides down his. His muscles pull tighter for it, cock strains against your stomach, hard and furious with denial, and the sight of him suffering through praise makes something in you go soft and feral both. Your hands glide from his ribs to hips, thumbs follow the inward cut there, then squeeze the warm, soft belt of flesh low on his belly. It's so generous and male and so violently lovely it makes your teeth set. Some songs ought to be rewritten for men like him. Some maiden's graces ought to be stolen back and hung on his foolish body where they belong. The supple flesh at his middle should be praised the way poets praise hips and breasts and long necks. His breadth should be Venusian, size should be called lush. His stubborn, hungry, frightened beauty should have men lighting candles under it and women lying awake from thinking too long.

It feels as if he sets of the beauty in you when he's all across your lips, gentle, coarse, freckled with the body that bears marks of every touch. It blooms easily where your fingers rake him, where your teeth nick him, where you suck and lick and kiss. He blemishes red against milk, and then the milk whole blushes into pink from all the blood that's alive within him, and for you.

“You're so gorgeous,” you murmur, face lost in skin. “It makes me angry that you do not see it.”

"You oughtn't eat those mushrooms," he says, trying for light, coming out pitiful. "They fool your eyes."

Your mouth splits into a smile. "I'm telling the truth," you tell his belly. "Only now I've the courage for it."

"Aye, well." Duncan swallows, and his spine bends towards you with it. "It's doing me harm, girl," he says anyway.

"Hm, good," you hum. Keep going lower, lower still until your nose finds his navel and rests there. The hair thickens beneath your mouth, darkening downwards, and you press your face into it because you can, because he lets you, because the smell of him there goes straight through your skull. You wedge your nose into the small dip of his belly and breathe him in.

It makes him feel like he's dying. Lust has him hard and fevered, yes, but your adoration takes his joints apart. He has imagined your mouth for months in shameful pieces: the shape it takes when you sleep, the wet inside of it when you laugh, the feel of it in a bedroll dream that left him waking guilty and sticky and half-mad with it. Now those same lips chose him, return to him, find new places to be fond over. He has no defence built for being cherished.

“Please,” he says, though he's unsure what he begs for. His hips jump, hand joins the begging in your hair, and you just stay, drunk, half-conscious, with every breathing device body offers devoted to the densest parts of him.

There's no friction to explain it. It's only his mind draining and draining of thought so his blood can fill him elsewhere. He feels himself sweating, muscles in his sacrum thumping, sack going hard as rocks, before he even realises he's going to come simply from this. “My girl—" he tries, voice cracking around it. "Wait. I'm—oh—”

You do hear him, but understand too late. He goes rigid beneath you, helpless and huge, and his lower back lifts off the ground, breath breaks into loud, choked moans, and then he spills so hot against your body it shocks you. A wicked part of you goes yes. Give me. The gentler one holds him through it, sighs all delighted and lets him rut into a poor cradle made of your bodies pressed together.

"I'm sorry," he whispers, shaking. "I'm sorry. Forgive me."

Your head lifts, sluggish, and you catch him turning his face aside, red to the ears. "Forgive you?" you ask.

“I didn’t mean—” He swallows hard. “I should’ve held. I should’ve—”

“Stop,” you say. Come back up to have your eyes level and drag some of the wet with you. "I could kiss you bloody for that.”

You brush the hair off his forehead. It shines satin. Makes him this much more beautiful. He looks at you, dumbfounded and startled, then lets his lids lower when you put your mouth back on him. To his cheek. Then, the high freckle on it you have wanted since before the forest went strange. “Pretty,” you tell him. “Gorgeous. Sweet stupid man.”

“Do not call me sweet after that.”

“I’ll call you what I like.”

He tries to look stern. Fails because your mouth is on his again. Fails worse because he has barely softened at all, still hard, still wanting, already gathering toward the next hunger while shame loosens its fingers from his throat.

His hands come to you, and arrive with less fear. Still careful, but firmer now, dirt-palmed and shaking, learning the shapes that've been bludgeoning him in his sleep. His mouth opens wider, touch slides up, then down, then around, and when you gasp he hears it bright as struck metal and groans as if the sound is next to his ear.

“Tell me,” he says against your lips.

“What?”

“If I do wrong.”

“You won’t.”

“Tell me.”

You look at him then, this great man under you, stubborn and proud and delicate where he has hidden it worst, heart bigger than his body and twice as easy to wound. “I’ll tell you,” you say. “And I’ll tell you when it’s right.”

His eyes close briefly. “Aye,” he breathes. “Do that.”

"And you tell me," you say, "what do you want."

“Your neck,” he says, gathering you closer. Rising to sit, and pulling you with him. You let yourself be lifted and sat back onto his lap. "The nape." His voice roughens. "I want—Seven forgive me, I want to smell you there."

The wish should be strange. It is strange. It feels like a hand closing under your ribs. “Then do it,” you tell him.

He finds your hips and turns you, guiding rather than hauling, mouth already searching for the place before he has settled you. You feel him shift, chest coming to your back, breath over your shoulder, and when his nose presses where it ought to, he makes a sound so low it seems to enter the ground before it enters you.

“Gods,” he says.

You brace yourself on both hands. “What?”

There's no proper answer. Just mouth opening over skin, wet and hot and shaking. He breathes you in there, kisses, breathes again, each pass less composed than the one before. His groan reaches your spine as heat before sound.

One permission opens the next in him. More private. You let him smell you without recoiling or calling him a creep, and worse—seem to enjoy it, because the sweet scent of your cunt joins all the other ones. The locked, starved part of Duncan takes the gift and grows bold from enduring it. Your body softens forward, the shape of yes becomes flesh under him. It loosens something old and badly tied. If he may put his mouth here, then he may want the slope of your back. If he may want that, then perhaps the weight of himself over you is no crime. Perhaps wanting to cover you is only wanting, and no beast’s law until he makes it one.

He presses you down and you go willingly, sinking onto the moss, cheek turned to the side, hips lifting because Gods, I want you here, I want you right here. The earth gives as if it has been waiting to receive the shape of you both and smells loud.

Then, his frame comes over you. One arm wedges itself across your shoulders, the other braces on the ground. His weight lowers in pieces: chest to back, belly to pelvis, cock—slick and warm—to ass, calves to your feet, and it thrills you that there is so much of him still going on when you yourself end.

“I want you like this,” he says, mouth to your ear.

Your arms weaken. “Dunk.”

Your voice makes gold flare behind his eyes. He sees it, absurdly, as his name leaves your mouth: gold struck thin, gold swallowed, gold caught in the hollow under his tongue. His arm tightens, asking with the pressure before his mouth can manage the question. “Can I? Have you like this?”

“Yes,” you near cry. “Yes. Take me.”

Duncan closes his eyes. Settles a bit heavier. “Too much?” he asks, wrecked.

“No.” You push back against him, furious with tenderness. “I swear to the Seven, I’ll bite you. More, Duncan. Give me more.”

Your restlessness does something terrible to him. So he gives you more, in small increments, though he wants to give you all of it at once. Shields you with himself until the forest air can hardly get between you. You feel his heart hammering through his chest, buzzing like it's bees sealed under bark, and him rolling his hips into the plush of your buttocks. The promise of him is tremendous—slick, large, rigid, veined perfectly, with a thick blunt head that barely squeezes itself through the crease, and heavy, potent balls, ready to fill you up to the brim.

“I want you,” he murmurs at your ear, words broken by the drag of his pelvis. “I want you so much. Wanted you—Gods, I wanted—”

“Then have me,” you whine and almost impale yourself on him. Duncan huffs a laboured breath, trembles when his hand leaves the dirt to guide himself inside you and you welcome the sweet weight pressing your shape into the ground. He's all over you. His scent has bled over to your tissues. His thighs flex over yours, and then, oh—

"Fuck—" he grits, and it's deeply satisfying. The crown breaches you. The whole wood pulses dark green, copper, red at the roots. The girth splits you. Only then do you remember how unbearable the need has been, because the answer to it comes shaped like Duncan and hurts accordingly. Your body takes him by inches, each one too much until the next one proves it survivable. He pushes in so slowly you can make out the build of him in your mind, impossibly present, taking his place through clench and that bright pain that flashes behind your eyes whenever your body tries to change its mind.

“Easy,” he pants, though there is nothing easy in him. “Easy, girl.”

He grips your hip, shaking so much the fingers jump on you. Holds himself there, barely inside enough to destroy you, nowhere near enough to save you. The restraint of it turns wicked. You feel the carefulness in him like another ache, another place he refuses to fill. “Duncan,” you whisper, pleading.

“I know,” he says. “I know.”

“You don’t.”

He tries to breathe. You feel it against your back, great lungs straining, arm tight across you. He gives you another inch and your vision darkens. Your thighs start quivering under his, badly enough that he stops. “Sweetheart,” he says. “You were to tell me.”

“I am telling you.”

“You’re shaking.”

“Yes." You swallow. Find his forearm and squeeze it meanly until your nails leave dents there. "Because you stopped.”

He hides in the back of your neck. For a second Dunk seems to lose the whole battle against himself there, hips twitching, cock dragging deeper by a cruel little accident that makes you choke on his name. He goes still immediately, horrified by his own body, and you could howl from the piety of it.

“Keep going,” you say.

“I’ll hurt you.”

“N-no—it hurts wherever you aren’t,” you say, and he groans. “Please,” you say, needy, crazed, with your truth made fanatic. “Duncan, please. I need you. I need you, I need you—”

"Gods damn it, girl," he says. "Gods damn it, I need you too."

He pushes in farther. Rougher, all of him, setting you aflame from the inside. Your body empties of room for hunger or air or shame, because he's taken up all of the space within it. He rolls his hips and finds another impossible depth, making the burn open into something lovely enough to frighten you.

“There,” you sob. "Right there."

He is all over you. In you. Around you. Heavy enough to press your breath into the earth, careful enough that you can feel forbearance shivering through him. His groan comes against your spine before your ears receive it, and when his mouth opens by your neck, all you can do is push back and take the shape he has made of you.

Then, Duncan's hips lift. He feels himself dragging all the way back, and your cunt grips him on the exit like it disagrees with the hollowing. "Fuck, you're so—" he says. Sinks back in, faster, hungrier, worse, better, more, and finds that however little space the angle grants you, you use it wisely. Push your sweet ass out for him until your bodies meet with a wet slap and only then does he understand how wet you've made yourself for him. How ready you are. How willing.

He slots flush to you and finishes his thought: "—tight."

"Gods, fuck me more," you say. "Dunk—"

His name turns gold behind his eyes again. Brighter this time, struck hard enough to spark. He works his muscles and feels the colour burst through his skull, down his spine, into the hand he has braced across you.

“Like this?” he asks, already doing it again.

“Yes," you breathe. "Jus' like that. Oh, fuck—”

So he gives it to you. Just like that.

The boy in him, the one who blushes and stammers and hides his wants under duty until duty starts to resemble cowardice, gets shouldered aside by something broader. Some man’s part of him with dirt under its nails and your heat round its cock and no room left for pretty suffering. He still holds you with care; that remains. But his hips are done pretending they do not know what they want.

He fucks you harder, and the moss takes the force of it. Your fingers claw into green and black and flesh of his forearm. His palm slips in the dirt and catches again. The earth smells damp and opened. Leaves taste bitter on the air, and beneath all of it is you: hot, slick, clenching down each time he draws back as if your body would rather keep him entire.

“Duncan,” you gasp.

He buries his face against the back of your neck. “Say it again.”

“Duncan.”

Gold, again. He groans, broken loose enough that his mouth starts working without permission. “You’re beautiful,” he says. "So beautiful."

You laugh, though it comes out ragged. “Now?”

“Aye, now.” His hips grind deep on the word. “Especially now.”

“Liar.”

“No.” He lifts enough to look down the line of you, the turn of your cheek, the sweat on your neck, the place where your malleable body strains under his and endures more, asks for more than he would ever suspect. “You are. Gods, you are. I can scarce stand it.”

You shudder around him. That does him harm, too.

He drops his mouth to your ear. “If the sun never came up, I’d not care. If this wood kept us here and there was only this, only you under me, I’d—” His voice catches. He drives into you again, short and rough. “I’d be a worse man than I thought.”

“You’d be honest,” you say, smiling. Exhilarated. Turn your face enough that your cheek drags in the moss. “Tell me more.”

That should shame him. It does, but the shame is toothless. The mushrooms have made a ruin of his monastery for silence, and his body has found the ruin agreeable. “I hate when men look at you,” he says.

Your breathing trips. “What?”

“I hate it.” His hand tightens on your ribs, then loosens quickly, remembering. “In inns. On roads. When you smile to get us bread cheaper. When some man thinks you soft because you’ve a soft mouth, or thinks you easy because you are kind, or thinks—” He thrusts harder, angry now, the memory of every look finding your body through his. “I know what they think.”

You push back into him, mean with pleasure. “How do you know?”

He goes still for half a breath. Then his mouth finds the shell of your ear, and his voice drops so low it seems dragged from the ground.

“I am a man.”

There. There it is. The confession under all confessions. He has looked too. He has thought. He has watched the curve of your smile over a cup, the bend of your back by the fire, the softness of your mouth in sleep, and made himself suffer for it as if suffering could make him clean. He has wanted with the rest of them and hated them for wanting less carefully.

You clench around him so hard his forehead knocks between your shoulder blades.

“Seven hells,” he chokes.

“Were you thinking too?” you ask, cruel because you need him to say it.

“Aye.”

“What?”

His hips start again, less measured, sloppier and greater for it. The more they do, the more you drip for him and Duncan no longer knows anything. He just feels.

“Your mouth," he says. "Your hands. How you’d sound if I—” He loses the sentence inside you and has to drag it back by force. “How you’d look under me. Over me. Anywhere. I thought of you so much I near made myself sick with it.”

“Good,” you pant.

“Good?”

“Yes. I wanted you sick.”

He gets punched to the gut by sheer force of words. Drives into you harder, close and blunt and heavy, his arm drawing you up enough that your back bows under him. His chest drags over your skin and hums through you, hair falls forward, tickling your cheek. His mouth returns to your neck as if that place has become a home he means to worry open.

“My girl,” he mutters.

“Yes,” you breathe.

“My girl?”

“Yes, Duncan, yours, just—fuck—”

More, more, more is what you want, so he gives it. Gives you more because you asked and because he has wanted to be asked for so long the wanting has grown limbs. He gives you the weight, and the girth of him until the tip touches the spot that makes you go there. There, right there, fuck me there, more, you keep saying. He smiles through it, nods through it, and despite his balls going laden enough to feel heavier than whole of him, he still manages to tease you.

“There?” Duncan asks.

“There," you say. "There, don’t stop.”

Your legs tense. Feet curl against his calves, and your toes find them for purchase. He wonders if he is deep enough to dent the earth beneath your belly when he fills you. If you will be sore from him. If you will let him soothe you with his mouth after.

“I wouldn’t,” he says, and then feels the change in you. The hardening of your buttocks under him. The faint tremor starting low, travelling outward through muscle, your body drawing itself tight around the place where he is buried. His hips falter, then go meaner because you push back for it. “Close?”

“Oh, fuck, Dunk.” Your face has gone into the dirt. Your cheek, your mouth, all that cleverness pressed to moss and leaf-mould while you pant under him like the ground has stolen the rest of your words. “Fuck, my darling, I—”

His whole body stumbles at that. “Say that again.”

“Yes—” you breathe instead, uselessly, beautifully. Your thighs shake beneath his. “Darling, Oh Gods, yes—”

You tighten on him. Duncan chokes. His arm bands across you with a blind little jerk, keeping you under him, keeping himself in you, his other hand clawing at the earth by your shoulder. “Girl—”

Then it has you. Breaks hot and huge through your nerves, too large for the body it has been given. Your hands seize in the ground. Hips kick back into him and then can do nothing but bear it, taking the thick drag of him through each bright pulse while the world opens its wet mouth around you. Soil at your cheek. Leaves green on the tongue of the air. His chest heavy over your back, a low-humming cage. His breath at your neck, ragged and stunned. His cock inside you, absolute.

Pleasure rolls through so fiercely it feels delivered, brought down to you by the only body that could have carried it. Your Venusian boy. Your tall knight. Your man with the freckled face and the foolish, breakable heart. You had wanted him before the mushrooms. You want him through them. You will want him when the forest has spat you both out into ordinary daylight and made cowards of all this green magic.

“Duncan,” you sob into the dirt.

He tries to hold. For one more breath, he tries. There is some last thread in him that thinks of weight, of gentleness, of the promise he made you with his mouth and his shaking hands. Then you clench again, deep and helpless, sucking him in as if your body means to wring the marrow out of him, and the thread snaps clean.

He slots himself tight to you. All the way in, hips pressed hard to your ass, whole of him poured over you, size finally surrendered to yours with no cleverness left in it. His mouth goes into your hair.

“Fuck,” he bites out. “Fuck, fuck—Seven—”

He comes worse than the first time. Brutal enough that he thinks, distantly, he might go blind from it. His body drives deep and stays there, sack flattened against you, him spilling hard into the tight, shuddering hold while the whole woods dissolve from his vision. His groan tears out loud, then breaks into something rawer. Teeth catch in your hair. For a moment he forgets how much of him there is, forgets all the roads he failed to find, forgets everything. Remembers his girl only.

“My girl,” he cries into your hair, ruined with it. “Gods—my girl.”

Several heartbeats continue the spending in him as aftershock, profound and almost soundless. It leaves him hollowed in a way hunger never managed, emptied clean through and simple with awe: he has put himself in you. Some living of him has gone where his hands and mouth and morning thoughts have been circling for months, and no witchcraft can explain the feeling spreading through his ribs now. That is his own. The fierce gladness of being allowed to give you something his body made, before sense arrives and worries it with teeth.

“Oh—” you say.

It is the first small sound either of you has made that belongs to the after. Thin, dazed, almost curious. Duncan hears it and comes back to himself by ugly degrees: ground under his knees, sweat cooling along his spine, the fist of his hand in your hair, the full weight of him poured over you as if you are something the earth gave him to smother.

“Seven hells,” he whispers. Gathers himself off you with a haste that makes both of you wince, then gets an arm beneath your ribs and rolls you with him onto your sides. The movement is clumsy, tender, terrible. You end up tucked against him, his chest to your back for another breath, his mouth at the crown of your head, both of you still joined in the softening.

“Did I hurt you?” he asks.

You laugh. It comes out loose and pleased and completely unhelpful.

Duncan lifts himself enough to look at your face. “That is no answer.”

“I know.” You turn your head with difficulty, cheek streaked with dirt, eyes gone drowsy in a way that makes him ache all over again. “Ask me again when my bones remember their duties.”

His brow pulls, worried despite everything. “How do you feel?”

“Like I’ve been taken apart and put back wrong.” Your smile curls, lazy and wicked at the edge. “Happy.”

Satisfied enough, he eases himself from you, jaw tight with the sensation, and then goes still. For a second he only stares, caught by the sight of his seed slipping warm down your thigh, white as milk, taking grains of dirt with it. Wonder hits first. Possession after. Then sense comes in like cold water poured down his neck. “Oh, Gods,” he breathes.

You turn into him before he can get any farther into horror, nuzzling your face against his chest as if you mean to burrow under the skin there and quiet the heart hammering beneath it. “Don’t worry,” you murmur. “I know how to make moon tea. Hush. Just—hush a moment.”

His hand hovers above your back, then settles, broad and shaking. “You are sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“And the itching?” he asks. “Is it still on you?”

You tip your face up enough to look at him. The forest has begun to dull around the edges. Green is green again, mostly. His hair is only light brown where damp has darkened it, though a warm thread still catches in it when he moves. The air no longer tastes quite so loudly of leaves. “No,” you say. “All my itches have been scratched.”

Duncan nods, solemn as a septon receiving grave news, and draws you closer. You let him have that for three breaths. Then, you add: “Doesn’t mean I won’t itch again.”

His face changes so quickly it makes you laugh: worry struck through, then comprehension, then that wide boyish smile he has been hoarding from you like a miser. He laughs too, and the sound rolls through his chest into your cheek.

“I’ve got you all covered in dirt,” he says, as if this is suddenly the great shame of the hour.

His palms move over you, brushing at your shoulder, your arm, the smear along your hip, making a worse mess of it because his hands are filthy too. The gentleness of the attempt makes your throat pinch.

“Yeah, you brute,” you say. “Manhandling me like that. So unknightly—”

He cuts you off with his mouth. Better for it, like he's taken the lesson and learnt carefully. Long, deep, with no hunger's panic or teeth knocking, and no witchcraft dragging him by the blood. Loving too, with his hand at your jaw, thumb near the mouth's corner. You soften into him. Breath leaves him through his nose. He tastes only of ruined man.

When he lets you go, his forehead stays against yours. “Will you listen to me next time?” he asks.

You look down and trail your fingers through the hair on his chest, damp and curling under your touch. “No.”

His eyes open. “No?”

“I would go hungry another week if this is where it gets us.”

“Girl,” he says, despairing and fond in equal measure. He wraps you in before you can make it worse, chin settling on the top of your head. You feel the shape of his smile there, hidden in your hair. Beyond him, the trees stand dense and black and wet, all their malice used up or merely bored of you at last.

Then Duncan goes still. “Hey,” he says quietly.

You shift against him. “What?”

His hand smooths once over your back, then points past your shoulder. You twist to look, and between the close trunks, farther ahead than any path had shown itself before, light pours through in a clean, ordinary sheet.

“Look,” he says.

"Gods be good," you say. "See? You ought to trust me more."

"As if that is your doing," Duncan huffs, all exasperated but still endeared.

"Hush, knight," you tell him. "Or I will eat you."

Duncan mutters something about never eating anything you hand him again, then takes your hand before you can answer. It rather spoils the threat.

The first thought is his first hangover. This one does not get even close to it, but the memory comes unbidden. He was fifteen and Rafe had found a stash in Uncle Arlan’s desk at the office—two half-drunk bottles of scotch pushed to the back. They stole both and took off to the hill beyond the orphanage, where the grass was always flattened by somebody’s wrongdoings before theirs. There they sat shoulder to shoulder, daring each other on, drinking to never getting adopted, because getting adopted meant being split apart and that was reason enough, at fifteen, to make a ceremony of poison. Before Dunk twigged that Rafe was cheating, tipping less down than she claimed, he had swallowed near half a bottle and felt it bloom right behind his eyes.

Rafe died of pneumonia not long after. Dunk, bitter with it, decided then that he would never again toast anything before the thing was sealed and certain. The universe, if his life had taught him anything at all, was the sort to hear the hopeful lift a glass and answer, hold my beer.

When they staggered back into the ‘home’ that night, hanging off each other and burping and laughing fit to wake the dead, Uncle Arlan was waiting with another bottle. He marched Dunk to the sink, made him drink water, then poured three more gulps of whisky into him for punishment or cure or some mixture of the two, and after that Dunk remembered nothing. He woke what felt like a week later with a hole in his head and a foxhole full of chickens in his stomach. The next time he drank was after he left the orphanage at eighteen, when Uncle Arlan had died too.

He blinks the flashback away. His head hurts, yes. His stomach has complaints of its own. He very possibly has heartburn. But the worst of it is in his eyes and, once again, he curses Raymun for telling him to look proper. Dunk wonders what could be worse than forgetting to take his contact lenses out before sleeping and comes up with no worthy contenders. His eyes are so dry he can feel the things drag against his lids every time he moves them.

Then, the night starts returning in order. Raymun. The ring. The cider bargain. The Laughing Storm sign in neon. Dancing. His toes getting crushed. More drink. Burning his tongue. Your shoe. You.

His heart swells. He chuckles to himself, rolls onto his stomach and inhales your scent from the sheet. Clementines still. In a boyish, unhygienic fit of fuck it, he digs thumb and forefinger into each eye, plucks the offensive silicone out, and flings the sticky discs somewhere beyond the bed. He promises himself a heroic amount of eye drops later, just so he can have this moment uninterrupted by pain.

And there, relieved of it, he goes through everything beat by beat. Kissing you and the taste of you. Your ass in his hands—his palms seem to remember the weight of it so clearly they almost burn. His mouth between your legs, tongue still tingling as if memory alone has a texture. Your fingers in his hair. Your face, your gorgeous face, right in front of him through so much of it. Your neck under his mouth. Your breasts, even prettier than he had imagined, and in the state he is in now he can finally admit he has imagined them more than once. Your thighs. The way you felt around him. The way you went wet for him. The way you came on him. His orgasm after, so strong and insane his bones still seem lit from within by it.

He is getting hard from the memory alone.

Certain now that all he needs is a shower after you’ve had yours, and then coffee, and then a look through the kitchen to see whether he owns anything fit to be turned into breakfast for you, Dunk pushes himself up. He cannot see for shit, so he gropes across the bedside table for his glasses. When he gets them on, something is wrong: your things are gone.

He stares first, as if the missing dress might reappear. Then he says your name once, still hoarse with sleep. Louder the second time. Nothing. He checks the bathroom. Empty. Kitchen. Empty. Hallway. Empty too, save for the ordinary little pettiness of his own belongings.

For a strange, stretched moment he does not let himself believe it. Because last night had felt too large for leaving. It had felt like one of those things a man does not simply get up from and continue being the same size afterwards.

Then a chill licks his spine and he starts reassessing the damage. Maybe he is remembering it wrong. Maybe he hurt you. Maybe he did something. Maybe you had not wanted it at all and the drink had carried the both of you clean past whatever should have stopped you. His stomach turns over so hard it nearly makes good on all that old whisky memory. With trembling hands he reaches for his phone and hangs there for a full minute, unable to decide whether to call, text, or forget both and just go to see you.

In the end he types: you okay? Then he stares at the screen, holding his breath, eyes stinging, and tells himself the sting is all Raymun’s fault.

Yeah, you? You text back. He breathes again, but then more comes: Sorry, I still have to get that thing done with Lyonel today. Crazy night, right? I can barely remember anything…

And Dunk, being Dunk, believes you. In a plain way. He believes the thing he has been given because he does not know what else he is meant to do with it. You know you slept together, that much is clear from the shape of your message and the carefulness of it, but the rest—how it happened, who said what, whether it had meaning while it was happening or only afterwards—has evidently gone blurry on your end. Or worse, not blurry at all, and this is simply you being kind enough to hand him a version he can survive.

He stares at the screen a long time. Reads crazy night twice. Then I can barely remember anything enough times for the words to start looking cheap and strange. Something dies in him very quietly.

A small part, but central enough that the rest has to rearrange around the vacancy. Last night took a seat in him like revelation. This morning, even after you’d gone, some part of him had still been stupid enough to think the size of it must have reached you too. Then, that you had gone because you were frightened, maybe, or hungover, or embarrassed, but not because what happened had been small. Not because it had dissolved into a general category of mad things done under the influence.

Now he feels like an idiot. A huge, naked idiot who had lain there getting hard over the memory of a thing you are already filing under mishap. He types and deletes three replies before settling on something short and harmless, because apparently he is going to help you pretend this did not split him open.

Then the hangover comes for him properly, or so he tells himself. His stomach drops sick and sour. His head starts hurting in earnest. The burn rises hot behind his breastbone.

Right. Heartburn. That will be what this is.

It’s noon when his text finds you. You are sat by the bedroom window, not doing anything useful enough to call interrupted. Just messages from Rowan (all along the lines of omg I think he’s going to propose and you going nooo, you’re kidding!) and Lyonel, who apparently regenerates in sleep like some ancient deity and is ready to get back to earning money first thing in the morning.

There’s a caterpillar outside, hanging behind glass under the little rain guard. Yesterday it swayed there, shaped like a letter J, and you thought about cleaning the windows over the weekend. Today it’s Sunday, and it reminds you that you haven’t. 

The message lights your screen. Where Duncan’s name blinks there is also a risk of combustion in the chest and queasiness in the stomach that has nothing to do with hunger. The thing outside is splitting.

The skin has gone slack and wrong-looking, as if the creature has outgrown itself in the night. Near the top, just behind where the head was, the casing has begun to crack. A fine break, entirely undramatic and non-biblical, widening by effort so steady it almost fools the eye. The body beneath is a colourless, wet-looking green, ridged and tender as something newly unwrapped.

It takes ten minutes, maybe thirteen, for the caterpillar to turn properly into a chrysalis. You know this for no respectable reason. The old skin keeps wrinkling upward in increments. The thing inside keeps working free, contracting and suspending and becoming less like an animal than an object. It all looks like what you feel like doing. Oh, to go hard around the edges and let the red, tender body inside rest.

The first text back is normal enough for you to spot an opening in it right away. It is sent by the splitting thing, one that’s swollen enough to be on the verge of crawling out of its own flesh. Before Dunk gets to squeeze himself through that opening, the carapace grows around you. It seals all the endless possibilities that hang in the air for a second before one message and the next. He might’ve said I had a good time. He might’ve asked to see you. He might’ve dismissed it. You will never know, because you dismiss it first, because that’s sane and safe and saves him the trouble of backing out from something awkward and difficult to manage.

The second it goes, your stomach coils as if you have thrown not words but crockery. You sit there with the phone in your hand and feel the small, sick pleasure of having made the first cut. Clean. Efficient. Merciful, if one is generous, though you are not in a generous mood towards yourself and so call it what it more likely is: cowardice with punctuation. People are most convincing when they misname their own fear.

Then, you wait for the reply with your whole body. While you do, the remnants of him keep turning up in you. Memory comes in rags, so not that exactly, but some knowledge hidden within the body. There is a sweet, mean ache low in you that makes the walk from kitchen to sofa feel faintly lewd. He had taken up space—that much remains beyond dispute. Whatever your mind has misplaced, your cunt has kept better minutes. It throbs once, as if to make a point, and you press your thighs together hard enough to feel insulted by yourself.

He texts back. No bother, lass. I’m rough as arseholes myself. Good luck with Lyonel.

You read his answer once. Then again, because the first pass leaves meaning behind in favour of harrow. It is kind. Funny. Painfully normal. And of course decent, because Duncan would find a way to be decent while being flayed.

For a moment you imagine the other versions of this. The worse one, where he says nothing and lets silence do the work. The more dangerous one, where he says he remembers perfectly, that he meant it, that he wants to talk. Your whole system reacts to the latter like a horse shown fire: no. You are not doing that again. Not taking one night, one man, one dangerous amount of wanting, and turning it into proof of something bigger. Not with Duncan. The cost of being wrong there would have a headcount too large.

So you put the phone face down and tell yourself the matter is, if not settled, at least stapled shut for the day. It holds weakly.

When you stand, the ache deepens. Begrudgingly, the opposite of awful. A private soreness, warm at the centre, the sort a younger woman might have strutted about with in triumph. On you it feels less triumphant than compromising. You can nearly map him from it. The breadth. The moment of being too full and wanting more. You shut your eyes briefly and lean against the bed frame because self-respect is taking the scenic route today.

You need water. A shower. Concealer. Clothes that imply managerial competence. You need food too, though the thought of food turns your stomach in theory while your body, rude and basic, keeps reminding you it has been running on lager fumes.

Lyonel sends another message: Running twenty behind.

You push off the bed. The shower helps only in the most crude sense. It gets you clean. It does nothing for the fact that under the water your body keeps offering up pieces of him out of sequence: his mouth at your throat; the weight of his hand at the back of your thigh; the rough, wrecked sound of his voice. You wash your hair twice as if that might get the night to stop clinging. By the time you step out, the mirror gives you a woman who still looks suspicious but at least no longer criminal.

You dress for competence. Put on your face with a steadier hand than you feel. Drink water. Find half a banana. Hate it. Eat it anyway. Then you pick up your phone again and stare once at Duncan’s thread without opening it, as though proximity alone might tell you what sort of day he is having. The screen tells you nothing. Right, then.

When you get to the meeting, Raymun looks, for a change, pale. “Oi!” you call out to him.

Raymun looks up at your call and tries for one of his usual grins, but it comes out thin and badly fixed. When you get close enough to throw your arms round him, the whole of him gives a little shake under the hug.

You pull back and look at his face. “You didn’t ask her yet—”

“I mean to do it proper,” he says, smoothing a hand over his tie. In Raymun’s mouth the nerves come out dressed as indignation. “None of this half-arsed business. Wanted the ground under me first, dint I.”

You pat his back twice, firm enough to count as instruction. “After this, you have to.”

“Aye, well.” His eyes travel over your face, pause there. “After lookin’ at you, I’d say there’s no point either of us delayin’ things. Christ, what hit you? You look as if somebody kept you in a drawer overnight.”

“Something large and blond,” you mutter, realising too late that the thought has actually left your mouth.

Raymun blinks.

“Hangover,” you say briskly, already turning. “Obviously. Come on.”

He squints after you, not wholly convinced, but his own nerves are doing too much work for him to pick that thread up and pull. So he only mutters, “Right,” and falls into step beside you.

Lyonel’s office is on one level less extravagant than the party had been and on another considerably more so. Instead of theatrical effort, it’s just old money—and that never needs to announce itself twice. The room is high-ceilinged and quiet, dark wood, deep carpet, and windows taller than any sensible man requires. The desk is broad enough to furnish an open space. There is art on the walls you suspect ought to be insured separately from the building. Even the water glasses seem to have been born expensive.

It will never cease to amaze you, the effortlessness of buildings like this. They endure every trend while never gleaming.

Lyonel rises when you both come in. Raymun does too, in his own way—straightening half an inch and gathering himself by the shoulders.

“Mr. Fossoway,” Lyonel says.

“Raymun’ll do.”

Lyonel’s mouth gives a brief shape that may count as a grin. “Very well. Sit.”

You take the chair a little aside from them, sinking into a role between participant and furniture. Raymun sits opposite Lyonel and, for the first minute or two, does better than you expected. Manages to not fidget much. Talks calmly. He states his numbers plain, lays out what he’s after, what he’s offering, where the return is meant to come from. Lyonel listens in that unnerving, courteous way of his, fingers linked loosely over one knee, as if nothing in the world is easier than deciding where other people’s futures go.

The questions begin. Forecasts. Timelines. Risk. Raymun answers with enough confidence to sound serious and enough caution to avoid sounding stupid. Once or twice he glances at you, very quickly, for ballast more than rescue, and each time you give him the smallest nod you can manage without turning this into a mothering exercise.

Lyonel steeples his fingers. “Tell me something, then. Am I making a deal with you, or with all the Fossoways?”

Raymun does not flinch, though you can see the effort it costs him. “With me.”

“And your family shares that understanding?”

“I’ve my grandfather’s blessing,” Raymun says. “The deal’s mine.”

Lyonel lifts one brow. “And not with your cousin?”

You almost smile. He has done his reading, then. It occurs to you that while you were having an existential crisis over an insect, Lyonel had been digging through Fossoway history and deciding where the weak boards were.

Raymun snorts through his nose. “No. Just me. My cousin’s a raging cunt anyway.”

For the first time since you entered, Lyonel laughs outright. It is brief and clean and, annoyingly, rather handsome on him.

“Well,” he says, “clarity is valuable.”

From there the thing loosens. They go through the terms in earnest: the investment figure, the staging of it, the reporting, the milestones that have to be met before more money moves. Lyonel pushes where pushing is called for. Raymun pushes back where he safely can. By the end of it they have arrived somewhere real. Better than merely a promise—the bones of obligation.

When they stand and shake on it, Raymun’s face does something boyish and unguarded for half a second, and you have to look down so as not to embarrass him by seeing it too clearly.

Lyonel walks you out with the same impossible ease with which he seems to do everything. At the door he says, “I expect competence from both of you now that we’ve all made each other’s lives more complicated.”

“Wouldn’t dream of anything else,” you say.

“I would,” says Raymun. “But I’ll resist.”

That earns him another flash of grin, and then the door is shut behind you.

The moment you are clear of the office and into the corridor, Raymun turns and catches you in a hug so hard it nearly chokes you. “Oh, hell,” he says into your hair, voice gone rough. “Thank you.”

You hug him back just as hard. “You did that.”

“Aye, but you got me in the room.”

“You still did it.”

He squeezes once more before letting you go enough to look at your face. His own is pink around the eyes, though he is making a fair attempt to behave as if this is not the case. “Love you,” he says, quick and graceless in the way people mean it most. “You know that, aye?”

The answer comes easier than most things have today. “Love you too.”

He gives you a crooked look. “Even with the state of me.”

“Especially with the state of you.”

“And Rowan. And Duncan,” he says, as if correcting the record before the court adjourns.

“And Rowan,” you agree. “And Duncan.” On that one you agree less.

For one second the four of you arrange themselves in your mind as something fixed and sheltering. Then the second passes, because life has never once in its history let you keep a thought that neat for long.

In the evening, you receive a picture of Rowan’s hand with a ring on it and a spray of emojis including champagne, a bride and groom, confetti and clovers. So it is sealed.

Happiness comes easy. Real, clean happiness. You grin at the screen. You even let out a small noise of triumph meant for nobody. Rowan got what she wanted. Raymun did too. The world has managed to carry a fragile thing all the way across without dropping it on its head.

You do your best to remain in that feeling. Not to let your mind go bolting on ahead to the rest of it. To the two of them having a child. Then another. Moving out somewhere greener and farther. A garden. A car seat. New routines. New friends with the same shape of lives and weatherproof jackets and two children apiece. A future that begins by changing one thing and ends by changing the map.

As if to confirm that nothing is changing except for everything, Rowan sends another message a minute later. Thursday, pub! Be there or I’ll come drag you out by the ankles myself.

Duncan gets his notification on Monday morning. He’s been sleeping the harrowing thoughts off most of Sunday and then decided it’s not worth getting up just to exist for two hours before he can go back to bed again. He wakes with none of the hangover present in the muscles and all of it present in the heart area. When he unlocks his phone a picture of Rowan is there, her eyes red-rimmed and a hand she’s holding up for the camera a little blurry, presumably shaking. Caption: She said aye. Lower, there’s another message: Thursday at the pub, celebratory pints. Be there!

First instinct is to ask whether you’re going to be there as well, but Duncan decides that is a touch too transparent, and then rules that of course you will be. He replies with an awkward congratulations gif and answers the invitation with a thumbs-up. Then, it is only preparation for chaos.

Work helps, in the way small children help by leaving no room for adult nonsense. By eight-thirty he has already settled one dispute over whether farting loudly in assembly counts as bad behaviour or is it simply a natural thing to do (Dunk doesn’t believe in holding back farts so it was actually difficult to come with an answer that wouldn’t have him chased by outraged parents), confiscated a conker being used as a weapon of unclear classification, and been asked by a girl in senior infants whether boys are a different species or a poor decision God kept making. Duncan, who has no degree fit for that conversation, tells her boys are only boys and she receives this with the grave disappointment of a young scientist dealing with corrupted data.

He likes it here for reasons he can never explain without sounding simple. The children are still small enough to bring him their problems before shame gets to them and teaches them to hide. Their miseries are immediate and manageable. Somebody said somebody else’s mam smells of onions. Somebody has lost a mitten and therefore, by the logic of six-year-olds, possibly a hand. Two lads in third class are no longer friends because one called Sonic shite and now both require arbitration. There is work in that. Useful work. Work where his size and voice and patience tend to help more often than they harm.

When he strides through the courtyard he sees Egg arriving on a bike, schoolbag bouncing against his narrow back, and the sight lifts something in him. Spring has finally turned warm enough for it. The trees along the road are doing their pale green best. Egg has flushed cheeks and wind-bright eyes and looks, for once, exactly his age instead of like a small prince in temporary exile from a state occasion. Duncan watches him skid slightly, recover, and look around with the quick guardedness he still has before he spots him and brightens.

There. That alone makes the morning easier to bear. It reminds Dunk, as it often does, of the day Egg first arrived.

He and half the staff had been summoned to the principal’s office and found Maekar Targaryen sitting in one of the old creaking chairs, broad-shouldered and severe in an immaculate suit, with a backdrop of finger paintings, reward charts and a cardboard sun smiling over the alphabet. It had looked ridiculous and somehow made him more intimidating. Duncan knew the name in the vague, public way most people did. Money. Industry. Scandal. A face in papers and on screens, full of hard lines and expensive grief. Every time one of the older sons disgraced himself, the dead wife got dragged up by columnists as if her absence were copy somebody could keep billing.

Until that meeting Dunk had thought there were only two sons, because those were the two who surfaced most often in the news. One for violence. One for drink. Aerion seemed the sort to wake looking for something weaker than himself to ruin. Daerion, from what Rowan said when she read the stories out loud, looked bent on drinking himself into the ground for want of a better hobby. Different girls, different headlines, same family jaw. Aerion had been accused twice of sexual misconduct, and the second time Duncan had had to put his tea down and walk out to the back garden before he broke the mug in his hand.

Then there were apparently four. One son up in Wales at university, keeping himself largely out of sight. And the fourth: Aegon.

Duncan never knew whether it was love that brought Maekar to the doorstep of a regular primary school or only some cold-blooded experiment to determine whether his sons were being ruined at home or arriving that way from the factory. What he said, in that room full of child-sized art and adult discomfort, was that he was at the end of his patience and if one son did not come out right he did not know what he was going to do.

There followed negotiations. Terms. Safeguards. Most of them concerned Egg’s safety among what Maekar plainly thought of as the common people. Then came the insistence on equal treatment, which made the principal blink and ask, with an offence he tried to keep professional, whether Mr Targaryen imagined anybody in this building handed out favours according to the size of a parent’s bank account.

Maekar had gone still at that. Then given him a look that could have salted a field.

Dunk had spent most of the meeting wondering why exactly he was in the room at all, until Maekar’s gaze landed on him and stayed there a beat too long. “I take it you are the physical educator,” he said.

It landed just shy of insult. Duncan, who at the time still answered to things with more politeness than strategy, nodded. 

“I expect you to keep an eye on him. I am certain he’ll excel in every other field, but he is small for his age and may struggle with contact sports. Team games. Anything where bigger boys forget their own momentum.” He paused. “You look like a man acquainted with bodily disadvantage.”

Dunk had the sense it might have gone down easier without the last part, but Maekar struck him as the sort of man who would rather sour his own point than leave a barb unused. “I’ll do my best, sir,” he said.

Maekar turned then to the principal. “If my terms are met, I am willing to make a donation to the school.”

Mr Penrose, who had sat through all of this with his hands folded over a biscuit-tin stomach and an expression of increasing offence, said, “We do not need bribes, good man. You may make a donation if you wish. Money or no money, we’ll do our best to educate your son and keep him safe. If that satisfies you, bring him on Monday.”

That did satisfy him, or near enough. Maekar rose. The chair gave a long, miserable creak under the release of him. He shook nobody’s hand, only buttoned his coat and said, “Very well.”

And that was that. Monday came, and with it Aegon Targaryen, schoolbag nearly bigger than all of him and a face set in the expectation of a child being delivered somewhere he fully intends to hate.

“Oi!” Egg calls and it makes Dunk snort outright.

“Oi yourself,” Dunk calls back. “And don’t be oi-ing teachers before first bell. It’s a bad habit.”

Egg, one foot down and one still on the pedal, gives him a look of deep constitutional disagreement. “You’re only P.E.”

“That’s teacher enough for manners,” Dunk says, and reaches to steady the handlebars while Egg swings off. “How’s your weekend?”

Egg’s face darkens by a shade. Not much. Only enough for Dunk to catch it. “Let’s just say,” he answers, “I’m glad to be somewhere that isn’t home.”

Dunk’s about to ask more, but Egg has already craned his neck up at him with that sharp little squint he reserves for weak spots in adults. “What state are you in?” he says.

Dunk blinks. “I’m in no state.”

“You are too. You look like boiled shite.”

“Watch your mouth.”

“You look hungover, then.”

Dunk snorts. “And what would you know about that?”

Egg shrugs and starts wheeling the bike towards the racks. “I’ve an alcoholic brother.”

That shuts Dunk up for a step or two. They head inside together, the corridor still carrying that morning-school smell of floor cleaner, pencil shavings and damp coats. Egg walks beside him with his bag thumping lightly against his hip, all small serious purpose.

After a minute Dunk says, quieter, “You can tell me if something’s not right at home, aye?”

Egg gives a short breath through his nose. “Nothing is right at home. But it’s not wrong either. It’s just the natural state of young men being idiots.” He glances up. “I hope I’m never like that.”

Dunk considers him. The bald head. The solemn little mouth. The old eyes in the child’s face.

“Well,” he says, “your hair’s growing back.”

Egg lets out a groan of such genuine misery it near enough lifts Dunk’s spirits on the spot. “Daerion was too occupied yesterday to fix it.”

That has been the arrangement for a while now. Egg had first shaved his head clean as a way of stepping out from under the Targaryen name, or trying to. Dunk had worried the other children might make sport of it. They had done the opposite. The look suited him. It matched the nickname too well. And the girls from the older classes, for reasons beyond Dunk’s area of certification, had taken to patting his head on sight. Egg accepted this attention with the stoicism of a saint and the satisfaction of a small emperor. Dunk, whenever he caught it happening, always had to smile.

Egg glances at him again as they turn for the staff corridor. “So?”

“So what?”

“So what happened to you?”

“Nothing happened to me.”

Egg gives him a look of withering disbelief. “A girl has plainly made you this sodden.”

Dunk nearly trips on the threshold. “What would you know about that?”

“Not much,” Egg says. “Girls like me enough.”

That one lands with such perfect calm Dunk can only stare at him.

Egg looks back, faintly smug now. “I’m observant. That’s all.”

“And humble.”

“I never said they liked me for my humility.”

It gets a laugh out of Dunk. Strange in his chest, rusty at the start and easier after, but Egg hears it and seems pleased enough with the result to let him keep some dignity.

Then the boy cuts him another sideways glance. “She’ll either marry you or ruin your week,” he says. “Judging by your face, I’d say she’s trying for both.”

Dunk scowls. “Into class with you.”

Egg only grins and slips ahead of him down the corridor, quick as a fish, leaving Dunk to watch the little bald head bob off towards morning assembly and think, not for the first time, that Maekar’s house is wasting its only decent son.

The rest of the day stays relatively calm. He runs his classes, listens with only half an ear to the stories in the teachers’ room, and lingers after school to sort the P.E. equipment. Then, after work, he goes for a run on the sports ground to sweat out whatever poison remains in him. Enough, at least, to tire himself so thoroughly that the evening passes in a large supper and the telly.

After that, Dunk calls Raymun to congratulate him properly and smiles all the way through the conversation. Raymun sounds beyond happy, and that makes Dunk happy too.

He tries not to think too much about Thursday. The further he gets from Saturday night and Sunday morning, the more the details begin to blur. He cannot quite trust his memory on that front, and wonders whether half of it might have been fabricated by his touch-starved nature. Duncan, having not been hugged much in life, takes to every form of touch with alarming eagerness. Part of why he loves working with kids, and not in any odd sense. If he can improve somebody’s day simply by letting them hang off his neck, then his own improves by proxy.

He is acutely aware of the flavours of touch and the purposes they serve. Arlan had mostly used the sharp sort on him, like cuffs to the ear, swats across the back of the head with quick arrival and longer sting in the pride than the skin. It did something lasting to his measurements. A hand on the shoulder, a pat between the shoulder blades, even somebody squeezing his arm in passing—those landed in him with the force of bells. Kindness, when it came by touch, always rang louder for having once had to compete.

He knows fists too. The heavy kind and the swift, furious kind. He was a boy once, and boys always seem to reach some age where words stop being considered a sufficient technology for disagreement. He got hit, hit back, learned the ordinary grammar of it. Then a girl kissed him for the first time and he was so thoroughly baffled by the change in rules he near forgot his own name. Had no notion what to do with his tongue, or his hands, or his teeth, which only seemed to get in the way. Later he learned that knowing what to do with one’s tongue around girls is, in fact, a fairly important life skill.

For the most part, though, girls frightened him. Not because they were fearsome exactly, but because so many of them looked breakable, and the last thing Duncan ever wanted was to hurt somebody by accident. That remained true even after his first girlfriend, who more or less decided he was going to be hers and left him little room to object. He had not objected. Back then, he loved her so much he could not imagine ever wanting to be touched by anybody else. Most of what he knows about kissing and hands and how to pay attention, he learned with her. It was with her too that he first learned he was built on the larger side and would have to give some extra thought to putting himself places.

Sex had come on him like revelation. That the body could be used for things beyond labour and function—beyond running and lifting and throwing and swimming and eating—struck him as near miraculous. For a long while he thought he was not much good at it. Then one night he finally made her come. She shook in the thighs for what felt like ages and thanked him so earnestly afterwards that something permanent shifted in his understanding of himself. He had done that. He could do that. The knowledge stayed.

Then, she moved to another town, and he missed her hard for the better part of a year. There were others after. More serious and less serious, though to Duncan anything involving a woman always ends up serious at his end whether it was meant to or not. The last had been serious enough to send him out drinking over the break-up, and that was how he learned the true meaning of one door closing and another opening. He met Raymun because his own life had just gone pear-shaped.

So yes, he hates the thought of Saturday turning out to have been a one-night stand. Hates it with a fullness that makes his chest feel packed too tight. But if that is the price of keeping the door open on the friendship—yours, Rowan’s, Raymun’s, all of it together—then he will simply withstand it. He has withstood worse things than wanting more of somebody than they are willing to give.

By Thursday Duncan has decided there is no earthly reason to look proper for the ordinary public suffering of a pub. He puts on the old jeans instead, with enough room in the crotch to let him sit down without feeling castrated, and wears his glasses rather than tormenting his eyes with contacts.

The place is their usual pub. Wood darkened by a century of spills, a mirror behind the bar, old men sunk into their corners like permanent fixtures. Duncan is grateful for that. More grateful still when he walks in and finds everyone already there. He does not have to be alone with you or stand in a doorway waiting to see whether you smile.

You do smile. That is nearly worse.

Annoyingly, four days have done nothing to reduce your face. You are just as pretty as before, maybe more for having returned to the ordinary frame of your life. Hair done. Clothes on. Mouth moving around something Rowan has said. Duncan has the odd, unwelcome sense of a man finding his house exactly where he left it and being surprised all over again that it can survive without him.

“Here he is,” says Raymun.

Dunk goes to him first. They clasp shoulders, then arms, then end up half in a hug anyway, Raymun grinning with that pleased, slightly dazed look. Rowan is next. Duncan gathers her up and squeezes before he thinks better of it, lifting her clean off the floor for a second.

“Oh, put me down, you brute—” she laughs, though she is laughing too hard to sound earnest.

He sets her back on her feet. Takes her hand when she flashes the ring without even pretending modesty and gives it the solemn inspection it plainly wants. “Suits you,” he says.

“Shut up,” Rowan tells him, fond.

Then you stand. There is no obvious right answer to you. A handshake would be psychotic. No touch would be worse. So Duncan goes in for the brief, awkward hug of someone attempting to behave normally while every part of his body remembers another use for yours. You smell good, too. He keeps it short enough to count as decent and still has to stop himself from closing his eyes.

“All right?” he asks.

“Yeah,” you say. “You?”

“Grand.”

It is a lie small enough to pass unchallenged.

Rowan, seeing the shape of the table better than either of the men at it, announces she is getting the drinks in and leaves them behind in a little pocket of silence with you. Raymun sits down first, which helps. Duncan follows. You take the seat opposite, and for one idiotic second he thinks of the angle of your face from bed height and has to look at the menu chalkboard over your shoulder until the thought goes elsewhere.

“So,” he says to Raymun, because Raymun is blessedly not you. “How’d the thing with Lyonel go?”

Raymun snorts. “Like doing business with the King of England if he’d got into property instead.”

You huff a laugh. Duncan’s eyes jump to you and away again. “He did the raised eyebrow thing,” you say. “About six times. Which in Lyonel terms is practically a standing ovation.”

Dunk glances between you both. “Aye?”

Raymun leans back a touch. “Aye. Good, though. Better than good, truth be told. He’s putting proper money in, enough that I can get started without begging every bank in Ireland to laugh in my face first. I keep control of the day-to-day. We settle on milestones, I report where things stand, and once the thing starts earning he gets his return in slices rather than all at once.”

Dunk’s brows lift a little at that. “He’s given you decent terms, then,” he says.

“He has,” Raymun admits, sounding faintly surprised all over again. “Bastard near made me sweat through my shirt for them, mind.”

Dunk smiles at that, small and pleased, and claps Raymun once on the shoulder. “Well done, mate. Genuinely, well done.”

Raymun huffs. Points to you. “Wouldn’t be there without her.”

Dunk looks at you and says, “Well done you too, then.”

Rowan returns with the pints at that exact moment. Once she sits, the discomfort thins. Duncan suspects it will take more than one round to kill it, but it thins. Shared out between the four until it can pass for ordinary awkwardness, which this group has always had enough of to hide inside.

Raymun talks most. Rowan interrupts best. You slip in from the side with remarks that land late and perfect and leave everyone laughing a fraction longer than expected. Duncan drinks his first pint too fast and the second at a better pace. By halfway through it, he starts to think perhaps this might be survivable after all. Perhaps there is a route back to himself. Perhaps if he sees you enough like this—at a table, clothed, talking shite with Rowan—his body will eventually stop leaping ahead of him like an untrained dog.

Then Rowan says something filthy about engaged people getting a tax break for public indecency, and you laugh so suddenly you choke on the first part of it, hand flying to your throat. Just that. Fingers light at the base of your neck, head tipped back, eyes watering. And Duncan is back where he started, yearning tremendously.

To you, the evening is being stretched on a wheel of Kathrene. One night with him has done something ugly to the proportions. What had been, before, a crush you could keep in a back room and visit only under supervision, has swollen into full-blown anguish. He looked nice the other night, yes. Fine. Lovely, even. Fuck that version of him, honestly (and literally), if this one is available now.

His hair is unruly in a way that suggests fingers have gone through it and he has not corrected the damage. He sweats a little at the temples under the warmth of the pub. There is two days’ worth of ginger stubble over his jaw, catching the light whenever he turns. The glasses do him no favours whatsoever, unless the aim is to make you insane. They magnify his eyes, make the creases around them show harder every time he laughs, and the whole effect of it is so offensively dear you want to take a bat to something municipal.

He keeps hunching, too. Folding himself down as if his height is an inconvenience he ought to apologise for. It catches at you every time. You want him at full mast. Full height. Taking up the room he was issued and then some. Instead he sits there bent over his pint, broad shoulders making concessions to furniture built for smaller men, and your heart goes at him with all the discipline of a dog that’s slipped the lead. 

So you laugh more than you need to. Lean into Rowan’s jokes. Put on a touch of theatre to hide the fact you keep cannibalising your lips whenever he so much as shifts in your peripheral vision.

By the time Rowan decides Raymun has crossed from merry into useless, you are relieved. Then you stop being relieved, because of course she has already called a taxi, eliminating any possibility of standing about in a group until the night thins naturally and somebody else solves the logistics for you.

Ten minutes later you are outside in the damp dark, patting Raymun’s back while Rowan tries to lever him into the seat.

“Leg first,” she tells him, with the tone of a woman explaining a concept to a toddler.

“I’ve got legs,” Raymun informs the street with deep offence.

“Aye,” says Duncan. “That’s half the issue.”

You laugh and get cross with yourself about it. Raymun eventually folds, though not with dignity. Rowan gets him in by a combination of strategy, force, and old fiancée rights newly acquired. Once he is seated, pink as ham and blinking with the solemnity of the deeply drunk, she turns back, catches your face in both hands and plants a long, slightly wet kiss on your cheek.

“We must meet,” she says. “Alone. Girl talk.”

You nod because there is no safe alternative.

Then she hooks an arm round Duncan’s waist for a brief, fierce squeeze, tells him something too fast for you to catch, and climbs in after Raymun. The door slams. The car pulls off with both of them waving through the window like royals leaving a provincial tragedy. The only thing missing is a string of cans.

The silence after is deafening.

He sways on his heels. Puts both hands in his pockets and inhales loudly. “Are you… all right?” Duncan asks, meaning vaguely everything. What Duncan means is: Did I hurt you? Did you hate it? Was I not careful enough? Is my dick too big? 

You blink. Smile tightly while trying to make it look genuine. “Yeah,” you say. “Promise, it’s all good.” What you mean is: I’m scared shitless. I can’t even look at you. Your giant cock scraped my cunt raw and I couldn’t pee without thinking about you for three days and it wasn’t unpleasant. “Everything’s fine,” you say, nodding like you’re going through internal bleeding in the brain. “You?”

“Mm,” Dunk hums. He looks away then. “Can we—”

“Do we need to talk about it?” you blurt. “Or can we just… still be friends?”

He stands there with the answer in his mouth and finds it no use to either of you. It is not that he does not want to talk about it. He wants, with a force that nearly embarrasses him, to drag the whole night out under a bright lamp and look at every part of it until he knows what it meant to you and whether he imagined half the tenderness in it or only most. But the look on your face is careful in a way he recognises. Cornered, near enough. And if the price of keeping you from bolting is silence, then silence it is.

Still, one thing lifts. Small, but real. You would not be asking to stay friends if you hated him. You would not be standing here trying this hard if the whole thing had disgusted you.

“Yeah,” he says at last, and even to himself he sounds tired. “Aye. Course we can.”

Your shoulders loosen by a degree.

He swallows. “I only meant—” His hand shifts uselessly inside his pocket. “Wanted t’be sure you were… good.”

“I’m good,” you say quickly. “If you’re good, I’m good.”

It hits him strangely. Like being handed back his own shirt still warm from somebody else’s body.

He looks at you for a second. Your mouth is worrying itself. Your eyes keep missing his by inches. There is enough strain in the set of you to make him wonder whether either of you counts as good in any meaningful sense.

Then, because he is weak where you are concerned and because the question has been chewing through him all week, he hears himself ask, “D’you really not remember much?”

You blink at him. “The walk,” you say after a beat. “Bits of it. Lyonel’s party. Being very drunk. You getting me home.” A tiny shrug. “After that it’s mostly fog.”

Mostly. The vagueness gnaws.

“What about you?” you ask.

“Yeah,” Duncan says, feeling like it’s not really him saying it. “Me too,” he says and feels like he’s just told the first lie in his life.

You nod as though that helps. Maybe it does. Maybe this is exactly what you needed from him: for the night to be reduced to oblivion, to some mutual patch of bad visibility the pair of you can blame and step around.

“Right,” you say, with the bright, dead tone of someone trying to wrap a wound in office stationery. “Well. Good.”

“Aye.”

You stare. He stares back. There are a dozen things he could say. I remember all of it. You were lovely. You fell asleep on my arm. I have been half-sick over your texts for days. Instead he rocks once on his feet and drags his gaze to the pavement.

“Should I walk ye?” he asks.

You smile again, that same thin effort. “No. I still have to swing by Lyonel’s. I’m alright.”

He nods because there is nothing else left that will not make it worse.

“See you round, then,” you say.

“See you.”

You turn first. He watches you go for one second longer than a friend ought to, then makes himself head the other way, carrying the full clear memory of your body.

You’ve lied so much tonight that one more seems like nothing. There’s no need to swing by Lyonel’s at all, but the last time you walked with Duncan the sex happened, so you’re not taking any more risks. The scenic route home is fine. The whole thing is fine—it’s settled, crudely, but settled. The whole evening has felt like paper pinned over a cracked wall, but you reckon the plastering can be done later. Still, you go to bed feeling like something is terribly wrong, and can’t put a finger on it.

What is terribly wrong you learn about two weeks later, which work and Lyonel, and Rowan and Raymun being too busy being happy to provoke any other group meeting have made into an existential blur. It dawns on you, with a bone-chilling lick on the brain, that your period is suspiciously late.

Like an afterthought, it gets pushed aside. It is an evening-you problem. Work first.

By the time that is done, you have nearly forgotten to buy the test and have to turn back to the pharmacy. The cashier smirks at you so smugly you almost punch her teeth in.

At home, you tell yourself it is hardly possible, but better safe than sorry. You take the test, then sit on the toilet lid waiting for your phone alarm to ring. When it does, you close your eyes first. Make a wish. Then look.

Two blue lines, clear as day, and you forget how to breathe altogether.