Westeros is large, large enough for Lyonel Baratheon to count on one hand the number of times he comes face to face with Ser Duncan the Tall, but small enough that in the decades separating them, he does not stop hearing of him, from hedge knight to Kingsguard.
Dunk was young when they met. Lyonel had known him only two days when he offered him the rest of his life—a home in the Stormlands where he’d wear gold and wield the best devices, enjoy a full stomach for as long as House Baratheon could put food on its tables and sleep with a roof over his head until Storm’s End crumbled. What Lyonel offered was the duty and honour of a household knight. What he wanted was to keep Dunk for himself.
Dunk had age lines on his face when they fought. The boy from Flea Bottom never knew the year of his birth, but Lyonel thought he looked to be nearing fifty then. As furious as Lyonel had been until the very moment he donned his stag's helmet, he never was going to triumph. He wishes he could reason that it was only because he was older and no longer in the same fighting shape. He even wishes it was because in the thirty years they spent apart, when he was not there to bear witness, Dunk had gone from a green boy to a seasoned knight of renown. But in his heart, he knows that it is because the moment he raised his sword, he was back at Ashford Meadow in the morning fog and the Lord Commander of the Kingsguard was still standing dumbly in the golden antlered tent, in a tunic that needed some mending with a bread roll in his hand, and the King was a child whose voice Lyonel still heard ringing high and bright as the bottom of his cloak trailed in the mud.
Dunk’s golden hair had long gone gray when he arrived at Storm's End in the dead of night. The news of Summerhall had beaten him there. Lyonel’s weathered stag-antler crutch fell from his hand and Dunk's face crumpled like a boy's. Dunk's pages in the White Book ended at Summerhall, and lost to history is that from that day until the end of their days, fifty years after Lyonel asked for a lifetime, they were not apart again.
