Chapter Text
The chamber was being rearranged.
Not by servants.
That was the first unusual thing.
Aerion was moving things himself, picking up objects from one surface and placing them on another with the focused dissatisfaction of a man looking for an arrangement that did not exist yet. A candleholder. A stack of correspondence. A small chest of personal effects was relocated from the left side of the room to the right and then partially back again.
Dunk stood near the door and watched this.
"Are you going to help?" Aerion questioned tightly, without looking at him.
"I wasn’t sure if you wanted help or an audience."
"Help, you fool."
Dunk pushed off the wall and came further into the room.
He moved a trunk when directed and shifted a table two feet to the left and held things while Aerion decided where they were going, and the work settled into a rhythm that was not uncomfortable.
They had been in rooms together long enough now that the silence between them had changed quality, lost its edges, become something you could exist inside without it meaning anything in particular.
The chest was open on the floor near the window.
Dunk nearly moved past it, would have moved past it, except that the light from the window caught something inside, and he stopped.
He looked down.
The egg sat in a nest of dark cloth, and it was the most remarkable object he had ever seen in a room that contained a prince of the Targaryen line and all the remarkable objects that implied.
It was roughly the size of a man’s skull, gold and silver in a pattern that was not quite either colour, and running through it in veins that caught the light like trapped fire were threads of deep red that moved when the light moved, as if something inside them was not entirely still.
He stood over it and said nothing for a moment.
"Do not touch it," Aerion warned from across the room.
"I wasn’t going to."
"You were thinking about it."
Dunk looked up.
Aerion had stopped what he was doing and was looking at the egg with an expression that was not quite any of his usual expressions. Flatter than anger, quieter than contempt. Something that had been worn smooth by a long time of being felt.
"What is it?" Dunk asked because he couldn't exactly help himself.
Aerion crossed the room and crouched beside the chest, and looked at the egg without touching it himself.
Up close, it was more remarkable, not less. The red veining pulsed faintly when the light shifted, or seemed to, the kind of thing you were not certain you had seen.
"A dragon’s egg," Aerion explained briefly.
"I gathered that much."
"They placed it in my cradle when I was born." He said it without self-pity, the way you say a fact that is simply a fact. "It is customary, or was, when the family still had them. Most do nothing. Some, in the old days, hatched." He looked at the veining. "This one has not hatched."
Dunk looked at the egg and then at the side of Aerion’s face.
"I believed, when I was young," Aerion admitted quietly, "that it would hatch eventually. That it was a matter of proving something. Being sufficient. Being." He paused. "Dragon enough." The last two words came out carefully, stripped of the feeling that had once been in them by a long process of stripping. "I believed that for a considerable time."
"And now?”
Aerion looked at the egg. "Now I am not young,” he whispered, a hollow look in his usually burning eyes.
The room was quiet. Outside, the city went about its business, indifferent and continuous.
"If it had hatched," Aerion explained, his voice even, controlled, a man reporting rather than confessing, "everything would be different. You understand that? A dragonrider is not questioned. A dragonrider is not whispered about in corridors. Men call cruelty strength in a man with a dragon beneath him. They call it power. They call it fire and blood and the right of conquest." He turned the egg slightly in its cloth, just slightly. "They would not have called me a monster. My blessing would not have been a curse. They would have understood that a man who carries the dragon in his very body, who hatches an egg from his own cradle, is not an aberration but a culmination." He set the egg back. "Instead..."
He did not finish the sentence. He did not need to.
Duncan looked at him. At the controlled face and the flat eyes and the long history of a man who had been told by the world, in many different ways and over many years, that he was wrong in some fundamental sense, and had responded to being told so with cruelty and arrogance and the violence of someone who has decided that if the world will make him a monster he will at least be a magnificent one.
And he was, truly, both a monster and magnificent.
He thought about Tanselle at the fair. The thing that had started all of this.
He thought about a boy putting his hands on an egg every morning, perhaps, waiting for it to be warm.
"The egg didn’t hatch," Dunk noted with great trepidation, "and the blessing didn’t go away, and men made you feel wrong for both."
Aerion looked at him.
"That’s not your fault," Duncan said. "Neither of them."
Aerion’s expression did not change.
He stood and moved away from the chest and the subject both, back to the rearranging that had not been finished, and Dunk let him go, because some things needed to be put down and walked away from before they could be picked up again.
They worked in silence for a time.
Dunk moved a chest to where Aerion pointed and straightened up and said, without having planned to say it, "Why me?"
Aerion stilled, likely knowing what was coming, what had been coming for a considerable amount of time now, for years.
"At Ashford," Dunk said. "After. You could have had me punished. Executed, even, if you’d pushed for it hard enough. Instead, you took me into your service." He had been carrying the question for a long time, he realised, since the beginning, since the room with the window and no bars. "Why?"
The silence ran.
Aerion stood with his back partly to Dunk and did not answer immediately, which was itself an answer of a kind, because Aerion was not a man who was usually slow with words.
"My intention," he said at last, "was not kindness."
"I know."
"I intended to use you. To have access to a man who had defied me publicly, who had struck me, and to repay that in full at my leisure." He said it without apparent shame, a plain account of what had been true. "I wanted to hurt you. I wanted to break you down slowly and thoroughly and leave you with nothing."
Duncan said nothing. There was nothing to say. He had guessed all of this already.
"You fascinated me," Aerion admitted, the words coming out like they had cost something. "That was the inconvenience of it. Men do not hit me and argue with me and carry me down corridors like I am a parcel. Men do not tell me to apologise and hold my gaze until I do. They bend, or they fear, or they perform whatever it is they think I want to see." He turned slightly, not fully, his profile to Dunk. "You did none of those things. You treated me as though I were simply a man who was behaving badly rather than a prince who had to be managed. I found I could not..." He stopped. "I could not stop thinking about it."
Dunk looked at the floor.
"Somewhere it changed," Aerion noted. He said it as if this were an irritating practical problem rather than a confession. "I cannot tell you when. I cannot give you a day or a moment. I am aware that it changed, and I am not entirely pleased about it, and I cannot explain the mechanism by which it happened."
"What changed?"
Aerion turned fully now. He looked at Duncan with pale eyes and the expression that was not warmth and was not its opposite, the expression that lived somewhere between them with no proper name.
"Do not ask me to call it affection," he said. Sharply. Immediately. "Do not stand there with that face and ask me to say something I will not say."
"I wasn’t going to…"
"You were thinking it."
"I was not thinkin-"
"You are mine," Aerion declared gruesomely. He said it the way he said everything he meant entirely. "My knight. My sword. My dog, if you prefer, as you have never seemed to mind it. You wear my mark on your chest, and you stand at my door, and you are mine, and I do not share what is mine, and I do not release what is mine, and I am not accustomed to needing anything, and I find that I-"
He stopped.
The room was very quiet.
"I find that I keep account of where you are," he admitted, quieter now. Not softer. Quieter, which was different. "At all times. Whether you are at the door, across the room, or somewhere in the keep. I am aware of it. I have always been aware of it." He looked at the window. "That is not affection. That is possession. I am possessive of what belongs to me. That is entirely consistent and requires no further examination."
Duncan looked at him, his heart beating loudly in his chest.
He looked at the prince, who had rearranged his own room because he was agitated and would not say so, who had moved the egg himself rather than let a servant touch it, who kept account of where Duncan was at all times and called it possession so that he would not have to call it anything else.
"Aye, my prince," Dunk whispered.
Something in Aerion’s face that had been tightly held released, very slightly, in the way a fist releases when it has been holding something long enough and is simply tired.
He turned back to the window.
The egg sat in its chest in the low afternoon light, gold and silver and red, the veins of it moving or seeming to move, not hatched and not cold either, carrying its fire trapped and patient, waiting for something that might or might not come.
Duncan looked at it.
He thought about a boy in a cradle with an egg beside him and a world that had already decided what he was before he had a chance to decide it himself.
He thought about the cruelty that was really humiliation wearing armour, not completely, but at least partially.
He thought about a man who could only speak the language of ownership because no one had ever taught him any other.
He did not say any of this.
He picked up the end of the table Aerion had been moving and waited, and after a moment Aerion came and took the other end, and they finished the work, and the egg sat in its chest and held its fire, and outside the city went on without them.