#swintw

The lake had no name on any map Dunk had ever seen, and he had seen precious few maps in his life. It was simply there, nestled between two low hills like a secret the land had been keeping to itself, the surface so still it looked like hammered tin in the fading afternoon light.

Egg had spotted it from the road and declared they were stopping, which Dunk could not rightly argue against given that the boy had mud caked into his hair from a fall three days prior that neither of them had fully managed to wash out. So the horses were tied to a low branch, Egg was told to sit and stay, and Dunk waded in alone.

The cold hit him at the knees first and he nearly turned back, but the heat of the day had settled deep into his skin the way it did after long hours on the road — sitting in it, sweating through it, wearing it like a second gambeson — and the cold was a relief against that, sharp and clean and good in the way that simple things were good.

He went deeper. It crept up his thighs, his stomach, his chest, and he exhaled long and slow as it swallowed the heat whole, the ache in his shoulders loosening by degrees, the dust and sweat of three weeks on the road lifting off him like something he had not realized he was still carrying.

He stood there chest deep with his eyes closed and his head tipped back and the last of the sun warm on his face, the rest of him cold and grateful for it. It was the closest thing to peace he had felt in some time. He might have stayed like that a good while longer, if not for the sound that did not belong to any bird he had ever known.

He turned his head by degrees, water shifting around his chest with the movement, and scanned the far bank where the light was thinner and the reeds grew tall and tangled at the water's edge. Nothing. Just the stillness of the lake and the distant sound of Egg sulking on the bank behind him, kicking his heels against a tree root the way the boy did when he had been told to stay put and disagreed with the instruction.

His brow creased. He looked down at the water and saw nothing but his own submerged hands. The ripples spread outward from where he stood, each one breaking against his chest like a whisper. Then — a glint. Silver beneath the surface, quick as a blade caught in sunlight, darting just fast enough to leave the water smooth and undisturbed behind it. He leaned forward slightly, squinting.

It was pale and luminous, catching what little light filtered down through the water and giving it back tenfold, the way he imagined pearls did, though he had never been close enough to one to know for certain.

He had heard of pearls. Ser Arlan had described them once — small and perfectly round and worth more than a hedge knight would see in a lifetime of riding — but Dunk had never been close enough to a wealthy enough person to know if the description was true.

He reached down anyway, slow and careful, fingers closing around something small and smooth against the lake bed. He brought it up. Held it in his palm. It was no bigger than his thumbnail, sitting in the cup of his big scarred hand like it had no business being there, which it didn't. He turned it in the light. It gleamed the way expensive things gleamed — bewitching

How could something so small be so costly? He could not understand why they cost what they did. It was small enough to lose between the floorboards. Small enough to swallow by accident. And yet Ser Arlan had once told him a single pearl could buy a decent horse, and Dunk had filed that information away in the part of his mind reserved for things that were true and also deeply unfair.

Pretty, he thought, in the simple honest way he thought most things. Just a pretty little thing.

He was still turning it over in his palm, watching it catch the last of the light, when the water in front of him moved. He looked up.

A pair of eyes watched him from just above the surface. Big eyes and very still, the way deep water was still, unblinking and level with the waterline so that he could see nothing else — just eyes, and above them a crown of silky shair spreading across the surface like seafoam. They watched him with an expression he could not name and did not have time to try to name because his brain had already arrived at the relevant information.

A woman

There was a woman in front of him

The color left his face so fast he felt it go.

"I—" he started, and immediately spun around so his back was to her, which achieved very little given that he was chest deep in water and had nothing on his person that would help matters. His hands moved uselessly. He was a very large man and there was nowhere to put himself. "I didn't — I beg your pardon, my lady, I didn't know — I'm not — I wouldn't have—" He pressed a hand over his face, “ Seven hells. I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I'm — I'm an idiot, I'm thick as a stump, I didn't see you, I swear it on my honor, I didn't—"

He was still facing the opposite bank, one hand over his face, the pearl clutched in the other, the back of his neck burning red in a way that had nothing to do with the sun. He could hear the water moving behind him. Small sounds. Close.

"I'm sorry," he said again, to the reeds, “ I'm — I beg your pardon. Truly. I didn't know anyone was — I wouldn't have — I'm not—" He stopped. Tried again. "My name is Dunk—Ser Duncan the Tall. I'm a knight." He said it the way he always said it when he didn't know what else to say, like it was an answer to a question he hadn't quite heard. "I'm honorable. I want you to know that—“

He stood there with his hand over his face and the pearl biting into his palm and the water very quiet behind him and then — something touched the back of his shoulder. Two fingers. Light as anything. He went rigid from his heels to the base of his skull.

He turned around.

She was right there, close enough that he took a short involuntary step back and found the lake bed uneven under his foot and lurched, arms out, and very nearly went under entirely. He found his footing. Barely. He straightened up to his full height with as much dignity as the situation allowed, which was not a great deal, and looked at her face and kept his eyes there and did not look anywhere else because he was Ser Duncan the Tall and he was honorable and Ser Arlan had not raised a fool—

The first thing Dunk registered was how small she was. She barely came up to his chest—no, not his chest, because he was standing in water up to his chest, and she was—oh gods, she was there, entirely unclothed, the water lapping just below the gentle swell of her breasts, the pale curves of them catching the last amber light of the setting sun. Droplets clung to her skin, sliding slow and lazy down the slope of one nipple, dark pink and peaked from the chill of the water. His throat clicked when he swallowed.

She tilted her head, watching him watch her, her smile curling wider at the corners of her mouth. That was when he saw them—sharp little points of white just barely pressing into her lower lip.

Ser Arlan had raised a fool.

He looked at her face. Just her face. He was looking at her face.

He became aware that his mouth was open again.

He closed it.

Heat rose up his neck in a slow, merciless climb, flooding beneath his skin until even his ears burned. It felt near as scalding as the forge fires he had once stood too close to as a squire — only there was no stepping back from this. The flush spread across his cheeks, dark and unmistakable against wind-roughened skin that had known sun and steel but not this.

His mouth had gone dry.

Gods, it was dry.

He swallowed and found nothing there but the thick scrape of his own throat, as though the lake had stolen every drop of moisture from him and left him standing stupid and parched in the shallows. His tongue felt too large, clumsy against his teeth.

His eyes — traitors that they were — had gone wide as a boy’s.

Dunk tried very hard to remember how men behaved around maidens. Proper maidens. Maidens who wore pretty dresses and had pretty things and did not bathe naked in lakes.

He was fairly certain it involved being proper—

Not staring as though he had been struck over the head with a mace.

His heart had begun beating in a heavy, uneven rhythm against his ribs, each thud loud in his own ears. He attempted to square his shoulders — a knight’s posture, steady and respectable — but the water lapped treacherously at his chest, reminding him in no uncertain terms that he was bare as the day he was born.

Seven hells

A maiden — even a bold one — would have shrieked by now. Thrown her hands over herself. Splashed backward in outrage. Called down curses or brothers or both.

He did not know whether he ought to be grateful she was not screaming and summoning half the countryside — or deeply troubled that she was not.

Gods

She was beautiful

The fairest maiden he had ever laid eyes on. And Dunk had seen pretty women in his travels — at fairs, at inns, in castle yards bright with banners and silk. He had thought some of them lovely in their way.

None of them could compare to her.

No candle could match that sort of light.

Dunk had never been a man much sought after by the gentler sex. For all his efforts to speak softly and move carefully, he was still enormous — broad as a door, scarred, looming without meaning to. He knew he could be intimidating. No matter how small he tried to make himself, how mindful of his size, few maidens ever approached him.

He had grown used to that.

But she did not look afraid.

She did not look as though he frightened her at all.

It was only then, in his gawking, that he noticed the rest of her. Pearls threaded through all that silver-white hair in long draping strings, dozens of them, pale and luminous and worth more than everything he owned twice over.

And something else — a veil of sorts, so fine he could see straight through it, the kind of fabric so delicate he didn't know what to call it or how it had been made, held together by tiny pearls knotted throughout like stars in a pale sky, floating on the surface of the water around her. And at the center of her forehead, hanging from a single thread, a teardrop pearl that rested between her brows.

He looked down at the single pearl sitting in his open palm.

It looked very small suddenly.

"Did you drop this?"

He held the pearl out toward her on his open palm and kept his eyes fixed somewhere around her forehead, at the little teardrop pearl hanging there, which was a safe place to look and did not require him to look at anything else. His arm was very straight. He was holding it out at full extension, as if the extra few inches of distance would help matters, which it did not.

"I found it," he said. "On the lake bed. I thought — I didn't know it was — I wasn't trying to take it." He could hear himself talking and could not seem to stop, "I'm not a thief. I want you to know that as well. Honorable, like I said. I'm — if it's yours you should have it back”

She looked at his outstretched hand

She looked at his face

He was doing his very best. He was keeping his eyes on her forehead and his arm straight and his face was still doing the burning thing regardless. He was not a man of the nobility. He could never be. He had grown up in the streets of Flea Bottom where nobody had the luxury of modesty and he had spent his years since on the road.

Sleeping under hedges and eating what he could find, and the sum total of his experience with women of any kind was limited to innkeepers' wives who called him love when they handed him his supper and serving girls who refilled his ale without looking at him.

She looked at his outstretched hand for a long moment.

Then she reached out and gently, with two fingers, folded his hand closed around the pearl.

Dunk stared at his own fist.

He looked up.

She was smiling again. That small sharp smile with the points of her teeth just barely visible and her eyes bright and pleased and her head tilted.

His hand was still warm where her fingers had touched it. He stood there holding the pearl in a closed fist and trying to work out what to do next when he made the mistake of opening his hand again.

"I really think it might be yours," he said earnestly, and held it out a second time.

The smile dropped.

It did not fade. It did not fall slowly the way smiles usually fell. It simply stopped, like a candle pinched out, and what replaced it was something else entirely. Her ears — he had not looked closely at her ears before, had been very deliberately not looking at anything closely — spread outward and fanned wide, long and fin-like, spreading like the sails of a ship catching a sudden wind.

Her lips pulled back. All the way back. And there were her teeth — not just the two small sharp points he had glimpsed before but a full row of them, jagged and irregular and overlapping slightly.

She was not smiling

She was very much not smiling

A sound came from her — though he couldn't believe such a sound could come from a lady — it was low, clicking and sharp, like a warning felt against his bones, and she had drawn herself up in the water in a way that made her seem larger than she was, her eyes gone dark and flat.

The droplets of water cascading down her skin where glittering scales were much more prominent now, catching the last of the light like armor, like something that had always been there beneath the surface of her skin waiting for exactly this moment to make itself known.

They ran along her collarbones, down her shoulders, trailing into the water where he could only imagine they continued, and they were beautiful and terrible in equal measure the way a drawn blade was beautiful and terrible.

He was, he reflected dimly, an enormous fool.

Dunk was not a man who questioned the will of the gods. Scarce as their favor had always been for him — and it had always been scarce, for a boy born with nothing in Flea Bottom had little reason to believe the Seven spared him much thought — he had learned to accept the shape of his life without complaint.

He was a simple man. Honor was the only cloth he had ever owned and he had worn it thin in places but he had worn it nonetheless. So he could not explain, by any logic available to him, how he had arrived at this particular stretch of road to Ashford with a squire he hadn't asked for and a maiden he understood even less, walking beside him on feet that had been a fish tail.

He could not explain it. He had stopped trying.

What he could not stop, no matter how he tried, was looking at her. His eyes had developed a treacherous habit of finding her face every few seconds regardless of what else he pointed them at — the road, the treeline, the back of Egg's head, it didn't matter, they always drifted back.

She was pretty when she was still and she was pretty when she moved and she was devastating when she smiled, which she did often and without warning, and every time she did his cheeks went hot and his jaw went stupid.

Gods, but she was something. Something fierce too, he reminded himself, wincing as he shifted his sword arm and felt the long rake of claw marks pull tight beneath his sleeve — still fresh, still deep, the kind of marks that would scar. He had not entirely ruled out that she had been trying to eat him. He had also not entirely ruled out that he would have let her.

If he hadn't known better he would say she was trying to drown him with the surprising strength in her soft hands. The water surging and swallowing him, closing over his head cold and dark and complete, his feet leaving the lake bed entirely before he had understood what was happening — and then she had pulled him back up just as easily, one hand fisted in his hair, and he had broken the surface gasping while she watched him with those big eyes.

But surely such a wonderful creature wouldn’t dare to cause harm?

He had stood there, gripping the pearl tight in his palm, the claw marks on his forearm burning at the touch of the cold water, and he had thought — perhaps he had frightened her somehow. Perhaps she had panicked. He was large, he knew he was large, he had always known it, and a maiden alone in a lake with a man the size of Dunk had every right to panic.

He could not fault her for that. He did not fault her for that.

But surely. Surely a maiden that pretty, with pearls in her hair and that fine gossamer veil floating around her and a teardrop pearl sitting so delicately at the center of her forehead — surely such a maiden was not the sort to — he had rolled his sleeve down carefully over the marks. She had pressed her lips to his cheek not ten minutes later and he had felt the flush climb all the way to his ears and he had decided, quietly and finally, not to think about the lake anymore.

Egg kept pestering him about it regardless. The boy had that look on his face, the particular one where he thought hard and strenuous about something.

He had refused to say anything else, unsure how to voice it. He would sound mad if he did. He would not know how to explain such a pretty creature — not to an innkeeper, not to another knight, not to anyone with the sense the gods gave them. ‘ I found her in a lake’ was not an explanation. ‘ She has—had? a fish tail and teeth like broken glass and she kissed me and now she won't stop and I don't know what any of it means ‘ was considerably worse. He kept it behind his teeth where it belonged and watched the road and said nothing.

He had given her his spare shoes and his shirt and his cloak and his spare pants and gods — he had not been prepared for any of it. His shirt on her small frame, the hem falling past her thighs, the sleeves swallowing her hands entirely, and the pants cinched at her waist with a length of rope because there was nothing else for it, bunching at the ankles, and she had looked — he kept his eyes on the road. It was not proper to think about. She deserved better than his old worn things, that much was plain.

She should have had fine things. Silk and samite and embroidered cloth the way noble women wore, the kind of finery that came with wealth he would never have, fabric that caught the light the way she caught the light. Something worthy of the pearls in her hair and the veil and that delicate teardrop at her forehead. The nearest inn, he decided.

Whatever copper he had left. He would find her a dress at the nearest inn they came to if it cleaned him out entirely, because his clothes made him feel the full weight of what he was — a hedge knight with a bedroll and a horse he shared with his squire and not a copper to his name worth mentioning — and she deserved better than that. She deserved better than him, if he was being honest, which he tried to be.

She tugged suddenly on his forearm.

He stopped walking. Looked down at her. She held his forearm in both hands and pulled, patient and insistent, until he understood and crouched down to her level.

She pressed her lips to his cheek.

Warm and soft and unhurried, held a breath longer than usual, her small hands still curved around his forearm over the marks she had left there, and when she pulled back she was smiling that small curved smile directly into his face from two inches away.

And then she did not stop.

His other cheek. His jaw. The corner of his eye, which startled him enough that he made a sound he would never admit to making. His cheek again.

She was very thorough about it, cupping his face in both small hands to turn him where she wanted him, and Dunk stood bent at the waist with his hands braced on his knees because she had pulled him down to her height and he was too large to crouch comfortably and too bewildered to straighten up, folded nearly in half on the side of the road while she worked through whatever this was with the focused efficiency of someone completing a task.

His ears were on fire. Everything was on fire. He was a very large man bent double on a road to Ashford being kissed repeatedly on the face by someone that had a fish tail— and he had absolutely nothing to say about any of it.

Then she kissed his mouth.

Brief and soft and simple, the same as everything else she did, like it required no more thought than any of the rest of it, and pulled back with that smile still in place.

Dunk straightened up slowly.

His full height. All of it. He needed it.

"That — I—" He stopped. Took a breath. Tried again with the measured deliberateness of a man rebuilding something that had fallen over, “ My lady. Such displays of affection are — they are things reserved for husbands and wives. For couples who have — who are — it is not proper between two people who are not—"

She was looking up at him. Directly at him, big pretty eyes and very close, and he felt the thought he had been constructing simply come apart somewhere in the middle of his chest. The flush was climbing again. He could feel it, "It is not — that is to say — a man and a woman ought not to—" She tilted her head. The teardrop pearl swayed gently. He looked at her face and forgot what proper meant and what it was for and why he had ever thought it applied here.

“ Perhaps," he said, after a moment, in a voice that had given up entirely on authority, “ Perhaps not in public”

She smiled

He looked at the road

His ears were red

She patted his chest with one small hand, the way you patted something large and harmless, and then her hands were moving, sliding from his chest to his arms, down to his forearms and back up and she wrapped both hands around his bicep and squeezed with that same slow deliberate pressure and tilted her head like she was taking measurements and Dunk stood there with his mouth open mid-sentence and forgot entirely what the sentence had been.

Her fingers traced the ridges of his chest, pressing into muscle hardened by years of swordplay and labor. The contrast was sharp—her hands, cool as river stones against his sun-warmed skin, mapping him with unhurried curiosity.

Dunk swallowed hard, his breath hitching when she dug her thumbs into the thick cord of his forearm, kneading like she was testing dough. A soft, pleased sound hummed in her throat, something between a sigh and a purr, and the noise sent an odd jolt through him, half embarrassment, half something else entirely.

She lingered over the swell of his bicep, squeezing with deliberate interest, and Dunk’s face burned hotter than forge coals.

She moved up to his bicep again. Both hands this time, thumbs pressing into the muscle with that same slow deliberate interest, and she made the sound again, lower this time, more satisfied, like she had found what she was looking for and approved of it.

Dunk's jaw had gone very tight. He was staring at a fixed point somewhere above her head with the focused desperation of a man trying to think about something, anything, the road, the tourney, Ser Arlan's advice on sword grip, anything at all, and failing comprehensively because she had both hands on his arm and was purring and he was only a man.

"You are—" he started, and had to stop because his voice had done the thing again. He cleared his throat. Tried once more, “ You are very—" She dug her thumbs in again and the word he had been reaching for dissolved entirely. He exhaled through his nose. Long and slow and controlled, the way he breathed before a fight, which felt appropriate because he was losing this one badly.

She looked up at him with those eyes and that small curved smile and her hands still wrapped around his arm.

She looked very pleased with herself

Ser Arlan had never prepared him for this. Then again, Ser Arlan had been only a man too — and perhaps Dunk ought not to have judged him so harshly all those years when he whored and spent good coin on pretty faces. He understood now. He owed the old man an apology he would never be able to give.

She patted his cheek once and walked away toward Egg.

Dunk stood where she left him longer than he should have and watched her go and said nothing about it.

She reached Egg and looked up at him from the ground with that patient tilted attention and Egg looked back down at her from the saddle and whatever passed between them in that moment was apparently sufficient because she reached up and took his small face in both hands and began.

Forehead. Both cheeks. The tip of his nose, which scrunched. The top of his bald head, which she pressed her lips to and held a moment. Egg did not pull away. Egg did not say anything sharp or clever or pointed. Egg, who had an opinion on everything and kept it ready, went very quiet and very still under her hands and his chin tipped up slightly the way a cat tipped its chin up when you found the right spot, asking for more without asking, and his eyes drifted shut and stayed there. She chirped softly.

She smoothed both palms over his head. She tucked his collar up and straightened his cloak and kissed his temple and his cheek again and Egg sat in the saddle and basked in it the way the earth basked in sun after a long winter, openly and without shame.

Dunk watched them and said nothing and looked back at the road.

Something sat in his chest that he didn’t have a name for either.

They walked like that for a time, the three of them, the horses plodding and the road flattening out ahead and the distant sound of Ashford carrying on the wind before they could see it — woodsmoke and voices and the faint bright noise of a crowd gathered for something. She had drifted back to his side by then, close enough that her shoulder brushed his arm when the road narrowed, and she did not move away from it. He did not move away from it either. He told himself it was because the road was narrow.

It was not a narrow road.

“We’ll need to know what to call you “ he said, to the road ahead, because saying it to her face still did things to his ability to form sentences, “Before we get there. Someone’ll ask”

She looked up at him. Patient and unhurried, the teardrop pearl swaying gently at her brow.

He opened his mouth

“Bess,” he said

The silence that followed was considerable

She looked at him. Egg looked at him. Even the horse seemed to have an opinion.

“Bess,” Egg repeated, in the tone of a man identifying a dead body.

“It’s a good name,” Dunk said, with the defensive conviction of someone who knew he was losing. “Common, Tis’ a pretty name ”

“She has pearls in her hair,” Egg said. “She has — “ he gestured broadly at all of her, “ — she looks like that, and you want to call her Bess”

“What’s wrong with Bess—”

“My horse is named Bess, Dunk.”

A pause

“ The horse is named Maester,” Dunk said

“I renamed her. In my head. Just now. So that you would understand the problem”

She was watching them with her head tilted, looking between them

"She deserves better than Bess," Egg said, with finality.

"There is nothing wrong with Bess," Dunk said, “ Bess suits her”

"Bess," Egg said flatly, "is the name of a dairy cow."

"It is not—"

"Or a washerwoman “

"There is nothing wrong with washerwomen—"

She was watching them both with her head tilted and her hands folded neatly in front of her, looking between them with the mild interest of someone watching two dogs argue over a bone. The teardrop pearl swayed. She chirped once, softly, to no one in particular.

"She agrees with me," Egg said

"She doesn't know what we're talking about”

"She knows your tone," Egg said, "Everyone knows your tone."

Dunk looked at the road ahead and said nothing because there was nothing to say that would help him.

Egg was quiet for a moment, the sharpness leaving his voice briefly, replaced by something younger. "My father used to read to me when I was small," he said. "Old stories mostly. He mentioned a name once — Nimue." He looked at her, at the pearls and the veil and the teardrop at her brow and the shimmer of her skin in the last of the light. "It means Lady of the Lake”

Dunk looked at her

She tilted her head at him and waited.

"Nimue" he said

She smiled, wide and slow and warm, and the points of her teeth caught the light.

"You're welcome," Egg said

"I didn't thank you “

"You will," Egg said, with the serenity of someone who had never once in his life been wrong about anything.

They heard Ashford before they saw it.

The noise came first — a distant roar that grew gradually into something distinguishable, voices and steel and the deep percussion of hooves on packed earth, the particular layered sound of a great many people gathered in one place with something happening. Then the banners, visible above the treeline, bright against the pale sky.

Then the gates, and the crowd funneling through them in both directions, people leaving with tired feet and full eyes, people entering still bright with anticipation, and Dunk slowed without meaning to at the sight of it.

Nimue stopped beside him. Her hand found his arm. He let her take it.

He found comfort in such a simple touch. It was not just him here. He had his squire at his back and Nimue at his side and that was — that was something. That was more than he had arrived at most places with. Ser Arlan had always ridden alone at the end, just the two of them, and before that it had been just Dunk.

He was not that boy anymore. He had people now, small as the number was, and they had followed him here and that meant something. It meant he had to be worth following. It meant he had to be what he said he was — honorable, decent, a true knight.

He looked down at Nimue's small hand on his arm. She was not looking at him. She was looking at the gates, at the press of people moving through them, at the banners and the noise and the whole enormous unfamiliar world of it, and there was no fear in her face. None at all.

Whether she had walked on land before, whether any of this was new to her or old to her, whether she had seen a hundred tourneys from the bottom of a hundred lakes — he didn't know.

He knew very little about her and had no way of asking and she had no way of telling him and somehow that did not trouble him the way it should have. She was here.

She had chosen to be here, with him and his squire egg.

Dunk squared his shoulders.

He was Ser Duncan the Tall. He had trained nine years under a good man who had believed in him when there was very little to believe in.

He had a sword that had belonged to that good man— honest about what he was, and a name he had carried down every road he had ever ridden without disgracing it. He was not a lord.

He was not a knight with a castle and a father who had jousted before him. He was a hedge knight with mud on his boots and a squire on a borrowed mare and something that had been a fish not two days ago holding his arm, and yet it meant everything to him.

He walked forward through the gates of Ashford and the noise rose up around him like a tide and he did not flinch from it.

The grounds were everything the road had promised and more. The smell hit him first — horses and sawdust and roasting meat and the particular sharp smell of oiled steel baking in the afternoon sun. Then the sound resolved itself into its parts — the distant ring of steel on steel from the practice yard, the calls of merchants hawking food and favor tokens and sharpening services, the low constant rumble of a thousand conversations happening at once.

Banners everywhere, more than he could count, snapping and turning in the warm breeze. Pavilions stretched in rows that seemed to go on further than made sense, silk and wool and fine linen in every color, each one bearing a sigil outside. Sigils he half knew and half didn't — stags and lions and towers and things he couldn't name.

Squires everywhere underfoot, running errands, carrying helms, polishing things that were already polished. Pages younger than Egg with the harried expressions of boys who had been told to hurry and had been hurrying since dawn. And the smell of the food — gods, the food — roasting meat somewhere close enough that his stomach made its feelings known immediately and without subtlety.

Nimue's hand tightened on his arm

He looked down at her

She was looking up at him with those big eyes, not at the grounds, not at the banners, just at him, and there was something in her face that he didn't have a word for but felt in his chest regardless. He looked at her for a moment that stretched slightly longer than he intended and then looked away because looking at her for too long still did things to his ability to think clearly and he needed to think clearly right now.

"Stay here," he told her, then to Egg, “ Both of you”

Egg looked at him with the expression of someone who had been asked to do something beneath their considerable capabilities. "Both of us," he repeated.

"Both of you”

"So you want me," Egg said, "to stand here. In the middle of Ashford. And watch her “

"Yes”

Egg looked at Nimue. Nimue had found a banner with an interesting sigil and was studying it with her head tilted and the teardrop pearl swaying at her brow, entirely indifferent to the conversation happening two feet away from her.

"And if she wanders?” Egg questioned

"She won't wander”

"She absolutely will wander”

"Then stop her”

Egg looked at him with the flat patience of someone pointing out something obvious to someone who should already know it, “ Ser Duncan, she dragged you underwater. What exactly am I supposed to do?”

Dunk opened his mouth

He closed it.

"If you lose her," he said finally, pointing at Egg, "I will find the biggest stick between here and the Reach and I will clout you with it”

"Noted," Egg said, entirely unbothered. "Off you go then”

Dunk looked at Nimue one last time. She chirped at him, soft and warm, without looking away from the banner.

He ducked through the door of the registration office.

His forehead caught the top of the frame.

He went in anyway, cheeks burning hot with embarrassment.