Chapter Text
Dunk had not bathed in a river in front of another living soul in years, not properly, not with his shirt off where any fool with eyes might see. Ser Arlan had taught him that trick along with the rest. How to hold a lance steady through a fall of rain, how to judge a horse's wind before you asked it to run, how to wash in the dark of an inn's back room with the door bolted and a single candle guttering low, boots close by in case a quick escape was needed.
Some things a man has to keep to himself, the old knight used to say, and some things a man keeps to himself or he does not keep his skin. He said it gruffly, plainly, the way he said most things. Dunk had learned to hear the warning underneath it all the same.
He had been a boy of six the first time someone saw his Mark and did something about it. He did not much like to remember that something. There had been a strap, and a woman shrieking about dragonspawn and traitor's get, and a long while after where he could not lie upon his back at all without the pain waking him.
When it healed, it healed crooked; the proud three-headed beast that sprawled from hip to shoulder blade now cut through with old white ridges, like fine embroidery some vengeful hand had taken shears to and never bothered to mend. He did not think much anymore on whether it still looked like what it once had been. He knew only that it must stay hidden, and had kept that rule faithfully for the better part of his life, the way another boy might keep a prayer to the gods.
It had not always been strangers' hands that found it, either.
There had been a master he'd apprenticed under, once, before Ser Arlan. A good enough man in most respects, save that good men could still go pale and frightened and cruel all at once when they saw a dragon on a beggar boy's back. Dunk had learned early that the mark did not care whether the man wielding the strap believed in dragons returning or only feared what others would say if word got out he'd sheltered one.
Fear did the same work either way.
Ser Arlan of Pennytree had never asked him where the scars came from. He had only looked at them once, the first night he'd taken Dunk on as squire and made him strip to see what he was buying in a boy, and gone very quiet, and then said, in that same gruff voice he used for everything from a horse gone lame to a lord gone back on his word, "Well. We'll keep that between us, lad, and no harm needs come of it."
And that had been the whole of it. No more questions. No fear in the old man's face, only a kind of settled grimness, as if he'd expected the world to be exactly this disappointing and was not surprised to have it confirmed.
For eight years after that, it was between them and no one else.
Dunk grew the way weeds grow, faster than anyone had business growing, until he stood a head over most grown men and had to duck through half the doorways in the Seven Kingdoms. He learned the tourney trade at the old man's elbow. Things like how to walk a horse cool after a run, how to sharpen a blade and polish armour, and, most importantly, how to hold his tongue around lords who'd sooner see a hedge knight's teeth scattered on the floor than his opinions.
He learned, too, without ever being told outright, that he would go on being that broad-backed, lunk of a boy from Flea Bottom for as long as he lived, and that whatever slept beneath his shirt was not a blessing waiting on a mate to claim him, whatever the septons' tales said of soul marks and royal blood. It was a brand. A thing to be kept dark, the way a man keeps a knife sheathed in a crowd, not because the knife is shameful but because drawing it gets a man killed.
There had been close calls enough over the years to keep the lesson fresh.
Once, at an inn outside Stoney Sept, the innkeeper's wife had come upon Dunk half out of his tunic before a wash-basin, and he had gone cold all over, certain the whole of it was about to unravel, but Ser Arlan had appeared in the doorway a heartbeat later, loud and bad-tempered and entirely unreasonable, going on about a horse that needed looking at until the woman's attention had drifted elsewhere and Dunk had got his shirt back over his head with hands that would not quite stop shaking.
Ser Arlan never spoke of it after, save to say, low and uncaring, as if remarking on the weather, "Best we take the room at the end of the hall next time, lad, out of the traffic."
That was the whole of the scolding he ever got, if scolding it could even be called. The old man did not waste words making Dunk feel smaller than the world already had. Even if he did occasionally give him a clot behind the ear when he felt Dunk was being too big of a fool to not be corrected.
Another time, in a hedge on the edges of some town Dunk could no longer put a name to, he had woken in the small hours to find Ser Arlan sitting up by firelight, watching the darkness, an old sword bare across his knees, though nothing in the night had stirred but wind. When Dunk asked him what was amiss, the old man had only shrugged his thin shoulders and said he'd never trusted a night too quiet, and that was answer enough not to press further. It was some years before Dunk understood that Ser Arlan had simply not trusted himself to sleep that night, with the two of them so exposed and so far from anywhere either could run to safety.
Mostly, though, it was smaller than all that. A hundred quiet habits stacked one atop the next until they made a kind of armor of their own. Dunk learned to sleep in his small clothes even in high summer, to turn from any man's stare a moment too long, to take the washing water alone or not at all.
He learned which septs kept baths behind locked doors for travelers of means, and which inns would let a man pay extra for privacy without asking why he wanted it, and he learned, above all, never to let his shirt come off in the practice yard even when the sun beat down cruel enough to make lesser men weep for shade. Squires laughed at him for it sometimes, called him modest as a maid, and Dunk let them laugh, because a boy laughed at for modesty was a boy nobody looked at twice, and a boy nobody looked at twice was a boy who lived to see another name-day.
Years passed that way, one much like the last, until Dunk had near forgotten there was any other way a life might be lived, and so he did not think of destiny at all, the spring Ser Arlan’s cough would not leave him. It came on slow, the way bad things came on when a man was too stubborn to admit them. A rattle in the old knight's chest that worsened with every league of road, a grayness about his mouth that no amount of hot broth or honeyed wine seemed to shift.
They had turned their tired old horses toward a meadow called Ashford because there was a tourney there, and a tourney meant a purse, and a purse meant the both of them might eat through another winter, and perhaps, if the purse ran fat enough, buy a maester's tonic that did more than dull the cough for an hour at a time. Dunk did not let himself think past that. He had learned long since that a man who thought too far past the next inn, the next meal, the next patch of shade for a failing old knight to rest in, only frightened himself for nothing.
The road down into the Reach that spring was thick with dust and slow with traffic, half of Westeros it seemed bound for the same green meadow and the same seven days of feasting and steel. Dunk walked beside the horses more often than he rode, to spare them and to spare the old man's cough the jolting, and there was a strange, aching peace in it despite everything. The good smell of trampled grass, the noise of other travelers' talk drifting back to him on the wind, Ser Arlan dozing upright in the saddle with the ease of a man who had slept on horseback more nights than he'd slept in a bed.
Once, near a river crossing, Ser Arlan had roused himself enough to say, apropos of nothing, "There'll be Targaryens at Ashford, lad. Might be you'll set eyes on one, if you're lucky and keep your head down."
He had said it the way he said most things, plain as unspoiled milk, and Dunk had thought nothing more of it than any other piece of the old man's gruffness. No different, in that moment, from being told to mind an icy patch of road or an ill-tempered horse.
He had no notion, walking dust to his knees with an old man's cough rattling beside him, that he was walking at long last toward the very thing years of hard-won caution had been built to keep hidden from the world.
He thought only of the coin they needed, and the cough that would not quiet, and the green meadow waiting somewhere ahead of them, entirely unaware that Ashford was waiting to teach him the difference between a mark a man hides to live, and a mark that finds him regardless of how well he has learned to hide it.