Chapter Text
Emma POV
The airport seat was, objectively, one of the least comfortable surfaces Emma Kennedy had ever attempted to sit on in her seventeen years of life. Her neck was currently bent at an angle that would undoubtedly haunt a chiropractor for years to come, and her heavy backpack was wedged between her head and a rigid plastic armrest like a very lumpy, highly expensive pillow. With the departures board blinking DELAYED next to her flight for the past two agonising hours, she had already exhausted her limited options for entertainment. She had eaten an overpriced, tasteless sandwich, scrolled through her phone until her eyes dried out in the dry air conditioned breeze, and reorganised the contents of her carry on twice. Sleep, then, was the only reasonable response to all of this.
Drifting downward into that suffocating blankness of airport terminal unconsciousness, her final coherent thought was something she'd been idly turning over since her mother had helped her haul her massive suitcase onto the check in scale. They had watched the red digital numbers climb with the grim satisfaction of generals watching a long siege conclude. Honestly, Emma thought, the edges of her mind already blurring, if I had all of this stuff in medieval times— the cute hand mirrors, the instant ramen, the dried pasta, the sugar— I'd be a queen. An actual queen. People would probably build grand temples to the girl who showed up with ten pounds of carbohydrates and a solar powered portable charger that turned sunlight into magic thunder. Forget being a queen; she’d be a god with a capital G. Smiling faintly at her own delusion, she slipped into sleep.
She did not wake up to a boarding announcement. The first thing Emma became aware of was that the ground beneath her was soft in a way that airport terminals emphatically were not. It was faintly damp, giving way beneath her weight, and smelled intensely of rich, dark earth and sharp pine resin— something green and deeply alive that had absolutely no business existing in a departure lounge. The second thing she registered was birdsong. Real birdsong. It was the chaotic, overlapping chatter made by actual wild birds, not the looped ambient tracks of a relaxation playlist.
She opened one eye to see a canopy of leaves. She opened the other eye to see exactly the same thing.
Sitting up very slowly, the way one does when the brain is frantically trying to calculate whether it is experiencing a vivid fever dream or a bizarre medical emergency, Emma looked around. Her backpack slid off the side of her head, landing in a bed of thick green moss with a soft thud. Propped against a massive, twisting tree root nearby was her guitar case, its metal clasps fully intact. That singular, mundane detail was, honestly, the only thing keeping her from spiralling into a full blown panic attack. Somewhere behind her, she could hear the faint, pathetic squeak of plastic wheels that desperately wanted to be gliding across smooth linoleum. Her bright pink suitcase sat tilted awkwardly in the dirt, its telescopic handle still fully extended as if waiting for her to grab it.
The trees surrounding her were old. Not neatly curated park old, but old old. They pressed in from every side with a heavy, ancient presence that suggested they had stood in this exact spot for centuries and had distinct, unyielding opinions about it. Emma stood up on shaky legs, brushing the damp moss off her soft blue cardigan. Her charm bracelet clinked softly against her wrist— a small, familiar, metallic sound that felt entirely alien in this vast, unfamiliar place.
She was definitely not at the airport.
Turning in a slow, bewildered circle, she arrived at this impossible conclusion several more times before her mind was finally willing to accept the visual evidence. "Okay," she said aloud, her voice sounding incredibly small among the massive timber. Saying things out loud made them feel more manageable, a survival technique she had rigorously honed across years of difficult exams and tense family dinners. If you just talked to yourself like you were the main character in a slightly unhinged sitcom, eventually everything would be fine. "Okay. This is... fine. This is something."
She quickly went through a mental checklist: she hadn’t been drinking, and she definitely hadn’t taken any drugs. She didn’t even have a headache, so she could rule out anything dramatic. She felt completely normal, except for the fact that she was in a huge forest, the airport was gone, and the light looked almost medieval as it filtered through the new spring leaves.
Medieval-ish. The word arrived in her brain completely uninvited and stayed there, looking incredibly smug. Because right in front of her, cutting through the dense timber, was a road. Or not a road, exactly. Roads had smooth asphalt, painted lines, occasional roadkill, the echo of heavy bass from three lanes over, and obnoxious assholes complaining about women drivers. This was a dirt track worn smooth by heavy boots, animal hooves, and wooden cart wheels, threading naturally between the trees as if it had simply grown there. It was the rustic, unpolished ancestor of a road. Staring at it, Emma promptly sneezed, deeply wishing that plants could be sexually shamed for their aggressive pollen. What do you mean I’m allergic to plants making love, she grumbled internally, digging into her backpack for a napkin. Realising that no modern road meant no people, which subsequently meant no garbage cans, she shoved the used napkin back into a side pocket with a disgusted grimace.
Desperate for a tether to modern reality, she dug into her skirt pocket and pulled out her smartphone. She opened WhatsApp, intending to take a quick selfie to let her friends know she was finally 'touching grass'— only to realise the message wasn’t sending. The little loading circle just spun into infinity. A cold sweat broke out on her palms as she quickly flicked through her other apps. Okay... Okay, don’t panic. This happens. Dead zones exist. Fuck. Phone call? SMS? Maps? Will something work, for fuck’s sake? Nothing did. The signal bars were completely empty. But then a faint memory surfaced of an app her father— a rugged, outdoorsy, hiking enthusiast who lived for shit like this— had insisted she keep on her home screen: the native compass app that literally no one ever used.
Lo and behold, it worked. The digital dial spun and locked onto North. She might not have the faintest idea where she was going, but at least she would know which way she was heading.
Reinvigorated by that tiny, pathetic technological victory, Emma pulled her backpack on, adjusting the straps and redistributing the weight exactly the way her father had taught her during a disastrous hiking trip that had ended in a twisted ankle and a very instructive argument. She grabbed the handle of her suitcase, picked up her guitar case, and looked left, then right, then left again. The leftward path had a slight, continuous downward slope. Gravity meant water, and water usually meant people. Left it was.
She put her headphones on after the first five agonising minutes, mostly because the deep silence of the ancient woods was the heavy, oppressive kind that sat right on your shoulders, but also because Midnight Sun was objectively the correct song for walking through a mysterious forest in a plaid maxi skirt that kept snagging on absolutely every stray twig. The pulsing melody filled the empty space behind her eyes, and she walked, dragging the massive suitcase over gnarled roots and embedded stones with the grim, unwavering determination of someone who had paid exorbitant overweight baggage fees and was therefore spiritually committed to her luggage.
As the hours passed, the trees finally began to thin, and the dirt road widened marginally. The ambient light grew warmer, turning golden at the edges, and through a wide gap in the canopy, she caught a glimpse of the sky. It was a proper, piercing blue— the vibrant, unfiltered kind of blue that existed before air pollution, seventies hairspray, and fossil fuels decided they were the main characters of the atmosphere. Okay, she thought, turning her face up to bask in it for a moment. So it's pretty here. That's something.
To keep her mind from spiralling into sheer panic, she ran a continuous mental inventory of her hoard. She and her mom had an entire fight about her baggage. She’d defended that she should bring more outfits, whereas her mother defended that her hobbies and nutrition were more important and that she knew her daughter and she wouldn’t spend her money on groceries.
Her mom was right. Emma would go crazy without her hobbies and her favourite foods. Still, at least her mom agreed to visit later, bringing another big suitcase with the clothes Emma left behind.
So, Emma had instant soup packets, the spicy Buldak ramen she’d begged her mom for, a stash of dried pasta just in case, two big jars of peanut butter, some basic spices, a portable water filter, four outfits, two pairs of shoes, and two sets of pyjamas. For hobbies, she packed a sewing kit, crochet supplies, an embroidery kit, handmade bags, lots of makeup and jewelry, her acoustic guitar, laptop, chargers, a tent, sleeping bag, a solar power bank, her beloved Kobo e-reader (definitely not a Kindle), hair ties, enough stationery to run a small shop, a V60 coffee dripper, filter paper, a jar of coffee, her favorite cup, and some random kitchen stuff her mom insisted on.
She was half lost in that medieval queen hypothetical again when she came around a long, sweeping bend in the road and finally saw it.
A low, sprawling building with a heavy thatched roof sat nestled in a clearing, friendly smoke curling from its stone chimney into the cooling evening air. There was a walled yard, a wooden stable, and the distinct, earthy smell of horse sweat carried on the breeze. A weathered wooden sign she couldn't quite read from this distance hung above a heavy oak door. It was an inn. Almost certainly an inn.
“Okay,” Emma said quietly as she stretched. This is good. There are people here. I can work with that.
She started toward it, making reasonable progress despite currently renegotiating her toxic relationship with the suitcase wheels, which were emphatically not built for packed dirt and loose gravel. She was halfway across the clearing when she heard the heavy, rhythmic thud of hoofbeats. She looked up to see a man riding a massive road horse, leading two others by their reins, coming from the direction of the inn and heading toward her at an easy, unhurried walk.
He was tall. Really tall— so much that Emma had to rethink what she thought was normal. His shoulders were broad, his legs long, and he looked like someone who spent all his time outside, with sun browned skin and wind roughened features. He seemed young, maybe a little older than her, but his size and worn clothes made him look older. He watched her with a wary expression she couldn’t quite figure out. Maybe he was just nervous about her neon eyeliner, she thought.
He stopped his horse a few feet away, the massive beast snorting softly, and he said something to her. Emma didn't catch a single syllable of it because her Glitter Gel Pen playlist did not care about external medieval looking developments, and her song was currently at a frankly triumphant moment in the bridge.
Holding up one finger in a universal just one second gesture, Emma reached up and double tapped the side of her headphone, cutting the music mid-soar. The world came rushing back in: the rustle of the wind, the distant trill of birds, and the heavy, impatient stamp of a horse's holed hoof. She looked up at the very tall young man perched atop his very tall horse.
"I'm sorry," she said, deploying the pleasant, carefully neutral customers ervice tone she used when she desperately needed to make a good first impression. "I couldn't hear you. Could you repeat that?"
There was a heavy, lingering pause. He looked at her headphones, his brow furrowing deeply as he clearly tried to determine what kind of sorcery they were. Is he Amish, Emma wondered. Then his gaze drifted down to her face, and from there, his eyes moved almost involuntarily over the rest of her, tracing her outline the way people look when they encounter something their brain completely fails to categorise.
She was, she had to admit, a lot to take in if he indeed was Amish. She had insisted on wearing a cute outfit today despite her mother’s protests because airport terminals were full of cute people, and she couldn’t possibly be caught travelling in sad grey sweatpants. Her blue plaid maxi skirt rippled in the forest breeze beneath a soft, worn blue cardigan and a chunky, stylised waist belt that had felt like a reasonable structural fashion decision that morning. Her hair, worn loose over her shoulders, caught the fading sunlight in several striking colours at once: natural pale blonde threaded heavily with a shock of neon pink near her left temple, electric blue on the right, and cheerful streaks of red, purple, and green. Her mother had said it made her look like a confused tropical fish; Emma thought it made her look avant-garde and interesting. Her silver hoop earrings swayed, her six rings flashed in the sun, her layered chain necklaces glinted against her chest, and her metal charm bracelet chimed softly in the quiet forest as she shifted the aching weight of her guitar case.
The giant man just stared.
Then, apparently deciding that staring from atop a horse was not going to magically resolve the profound confusion of this encounter, he swung himself down from the saddle with practised ease. He was somehow even taller on the ground, a towering wall of muscle and worn fabric. Yet, despite his deeply intimidating size, he had the distinct, weary look of someone who was entirely used to people staring at him— albeit usually for very different reasons. There was a cautious, almost quiet relief in his posture, as if he were genuinely glad to be the least remarkable, least bizarre person in a conversation for once in his life.
He repeated what he had said. Emma tipped her head slightly, listening incredibly hard, trying to parse the syllables. There was something... not quite wrong about his words, but distant. It sounded like English heard underwater, or the linguistic gap between the way her grandmother spoke and the way she did, only stretched across considerably more time and distance. Whar be ye headin', lass? Or something roughly resembling that phonetic shape. The meaning of the question managed to push its way through the heavy, archaic accent. She blinked as the reality of the linguistic shift settled over her like a heavy blanket.
Oh, she thought, a spark of manic, problem solving adrenaline flickering to life in her chest. Oh, this is going to be incredibly interesting.
She took a moment to look past his massive frame at the inn, its smoke still curling peacefully from the chimney into the crisp air. She looked at his horses, standing there patient and entirely unconcerned. She looked back down the dirt track— that rustic ancestor of all roads— stretching back into the ancient trees she had just emerged from. Finally, her gaze travelled all the way back up to the very tall, very serious young man in front of her. He was waiting for her answer with the careful, quiet patience of someone who had decided, against a mountain of visual evidence warning him otherwise, to give this bizarre encounter the benefit of the doubt.
Emma Kennedy took a deep, steadying breath.
"The inn," she said, making sure to speak clearly as she pointed toward the thatched building. She lifted the handle of her big pink suitcase and gave it a little shake. "I'm heading to the inn. And I have a lot of questions."
Dunk POV
The inn was not far now. Dunk could see the grey smoke from its chimney rising steadily above the treeline, and the sheer domestic sight of it settled a knot in his chest that had been coiled tight since morning. A roof. A hot, greasy meal that wasn't dried beef and hard bread eaten from a saddlebag. Perhaps a straw pallet if the innkeep was feeling charitable, or at least a dry spot in the stable that the horses wouldn't begrudge him.
He had three of them now— Thunder, Sweetfoot, and Chestnut. They were decent, sturdy animals; certainly not war bred destriers, nothing that would ever turn a high lord's head, but they were his. That realisation still felt strange in his mind, a heavy responsibility he hadn't quite gotten used to yet, though it was a good sort of strange. It was the exact way a finely balanced sword felt the first few times you swung it, testing the weight of it in a hand that was still growing.
He had been thinking about the long road ahead, weighing which fork he'd take after the inn and quietly agonising over whether the impending tourney at Ashford Meadow would truly be worth risking the little coin he had left. He was deep in that familiar, cyclical worry when Thunder's ears suddenly pricked forward, the great horse letting out a low, questioning huff.
Dunk looked up. There was a girl on the road ahead.
His first, immediate thought was that she was lost. She bore the distinct, defensive posture of someone who had arrived somewhere entirely unexpected and was working very hard not to show it. Her chin was tipped up defiantly, her shoulders were thrown back, and she moved with the careful, deliberate stride of a person who had decided that moving strictly forward was the only way to avoid breaking down. That much, Dunk recognised perfectly. He'd worn that exact same look himself, more times than he could count, alongside Ser Arlan, when they had the misfortune of getting tangled with a landed knight or a petty lord.
His second thought was that something was deeply, profoundly wrong with what his eyes were seeing, though it took his mind a long moment to catch up and put a finger on exactly why.
For one, she was dragging a screaming block behind her. It was an enormous, bright pink, rectangular chest resting on tiny wheels. It was taller than her hip and rolled across the packed dirt with a low, unnatural, scraping rumble that matched no wooden cart or iron-rimmed barrow he had ever heard. A sack of sorts was bound tightly to its handle, and in her other hand, she carried a flat, hard sided case that was long and narrow, shaped almost like a weapon but lacking the weight of steel. On her back sat a square pack, riding high with the orderly, disciplined weight of something very carefully loaded.
He could have easily written off the strange bags. Travellers on the Kingsroad carried strange, unwieldy things all the time. It was the rest of her that brought his mind to a jarring halt.
Her hair defied any natural explanation. The base of it was pale as spun flax, ordinary enough on its own, but running thickly through it were colours that caught the afternoon light in a way that made him wonder, quite seriously, if he was coming down with a sudden fever. They weren't the hues of a Tyroshi dye that had bled or faded in the wash; they were aggressive, impossibly vibrant colours that had no right existing in anyone's hair. A bright, almost painful pink streaked near her temple, sitting starkly alongside a blue that matched the summer sky, threads of deep red and violet, and a cheerful, ridiculous green that reminded him of new leaves after a heavy rainstorm.
She wore a long, patterned skirt that swept the dirt and a short, soft blue coat belted at the waist, which was sensible enough for the chill of the air, but absolutely everything else about her was an affront to sensibility. There were heavy rings on her fingers— more rings than he'd ever seen adorning the hands of highborn women at court events he'd only managed to glimpse from a distance. Layered metal chains hung thickly around her neck, gleaming loops of silver swayed from her ears, and a heavy bracelet clinked and chimed continuously, adorned with a dozen small metal shapes he couldn't identify from horseback. She looked, Dunk thought in utter bewilderment, like someone had taken a loud street market, a travelling mummer, and a wealthy noble's spoiled daughter, and somehow forced them all into a single, exhausting person.
And then there was the bizarre contraption resting on her ears. It wasn't the metal hoops; it was something else sitting directly over them. It was large, purple, and curved, connected by a thick band that arched right over the top of her head. He had absolutely no idea what it was meant to be— perhaps some strange, foreign circlet or a crown from the distant East? She hadn't looked up yet, her gaze entirely focused on navigating her impossible wheeled box around a deep, dried rut in the dirt road with the focused, gritted irritation of someone who deeply resented every moment of the physical labour.
Dunk drew Thunder up beside her, the great hooves thudding heavily, but she still didn't look up. He tried calling out to her, raising his voice this time, the way you spoke to someone who was either deaf or severely distracted by their own misery. "Girl. Where are you bound?"
Nothing. Not even a flicker of an eyelid.
He stared down at the purple band over her head. Faintly— and this was the precise moment Dunk of Flea Bottom decided he must actually be hallucinating— he thought he could hear music. It was thin and tinny and coming from absolutely nowhere, sounding as if a tiny, invisible bard had been shrunk down to the size of a dung beetle and tucked securely behind her ears. She hadn't heard him because the strange circlet was somehow actively making music.
He was still turning that sheer impossibility over in his mind, trying to decide how a hedge knight was supposed to feel about sorcery on the kingsroad, when she finally looked up at him. She didn't startle. She simply raised one finger— a calm, unbothered gesture from someone who clearly dealt with interruptions regularly— and tapped the side of the purple thing on her ears twice in quick succession. The faint music immediately stopped.
She looked up at him properly, and Dunk felt his breath catch slightly in his throat. Despite the crazy, unnatural colours painted sharply across her eyelids, her eyes were undeniably beautiful. They were a light, steady grey, the exact shade of the sky right before a heavy rain breaks. They were remarkably calm for someone standing alone on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere, dragging half a market's worth of bizarre goods behind her. She didn't look frightened of his massive size or his rough appearance; if anything, she looked incredibly patient with him.
"I'm sorry," she said, her voice clear and ringing. "I couldn't hear you. Could you repeat that?"
Her voice was as strange as the rest of her. Not threatening, just distinctly, deeply different. She spoke the Common Tongue clearly enough for him to understand the words, but the shape of them was completely off, carrying a rolling, fast-clipped accent unlike any he'd heard in King's Landing, the Stormlands, Dorne, or anywhere else his travels with Ser Arlan had taken him. The words spilt out fast and rounded in all the wrong places, as if the language had been pressed forcibly into an entirely different mould. Between the strange cadence, the vivid colours, and the sheer amount of jewellery, he assumed she must be the eccentric, spoiled daughter of a wealthy Tyroshi merchant who had somehow gotten separated from her armed escort.
He repeated what he'd said, making sure to pitch his voice respectfully. Dunk the lunk, thick as a castle wall, he chided himself, feeling a flush of embarrassment heat the back of his neck. She obviously wasn’t just a common 'girl' to be shouted at on the road.
She looked at him steadily for a long moment, listening hard, then glanced past his massive warhorse at the inn, and then back up at him again. Dunk became uncomfortably aware that he was staring. He’d been staring since he first spotted her on the road, which bothered his conscience; he was a man people stared at all the time— mostly for his sheer size, or because they were trying to calculate if he was dangerous enough to cross the street for— and he generally considered staring to be incredibly rude. He actively tried to arrange his rugged face into something more neutral as she looked up at him.
For the first time, he registered that she didn't seem the least bit intimidated by him. He was a massive man who had made seasoned, battle hardened warriors step back inadvertently just by standing near them in a tavern. Yet this girl, who was likely only a little older than him, was looking up at him from approximately his chest height with no particular signs of physical concern.
Pointing past him with a ring adorned hand, she lifted the great wheeled box with the other in a gesture that seemed to be trying to explain herself, the screaming box, and her entire situation all at once with entirely insufficient materials. "The inn," she said clearly in her impossible, lilting accent. "I'm heading to the inn. And I have a lot of questions."
Dunk looked down at her. He looked at the heavy box resting on its tiny wheels, the flat hard case, the methodically loaded pack strapped to her back, the vivid, impossible colours threaded through her hair, the silver rings on her fingers, and the strange, purple contraption that made music sitting over her ears.
He thought about Ser Arlan. He thought about the things the old man used to say around the campfire about the road taking strange turns, about the Seven moving the world in directions a simple man couldn't always follow or understand. Then he looked back over his shoulder at the inn, where there would be a solid roof, a hot meal, and a dry straw pallet, which was exactly where he had intended to go anyway.
"Aye," Dunk said slowly, his deep voice a low rumble. "The inn."
He turned Thunder back toward the rising smoke, clicking his tongue to lead the other two horses, and actively forced himself not to look over his shoulder to see if she was following. He told himself it was none of his business. A hedge knight with a light purse had no cause to entangle himself in whatever strange Tyroshi mummer's farce this was. The sensible, Ser Arlan-approved thing to do was to get to the inn, pay his coppers for a meal, sleep heavily, and be gone down the road to Ashford before this strange wind blew any further in his direction.
Then, he heard the low, scraping trundle of the wheel box dragging along the dirt road right behind his horse's hooves. He turned around in the saddle, looking down at her, suddenly gripped by the distinct, sinking feeling that this was going to be a very, very long evening.
"I—uh, my name is Emma. Emma Kennedy. And you?" she asked when he met her painted eyes again.
"I am Dunk," he replied, the blunt words tumbling out before he could dress them properly in courtesy. The back of his neck instantly went hot. Ser Arlan had drilled it into his thick skull a hundred times— A knight gives his title, boy, not just his name like some stablehand in the muck— and here he was, forgetting his manners in front of a strange girl on a dirt road. "Ser Dunk. I am a knight. I'm travelling to the tourney at Ashford Meadow."
He watched her face closely when he said the word knight. He'd expected nothing, really; perhaps a polite nod, or the blankness of someone who didn't know him and had no reason to care, which was how most people reacted to a giant in worn, unpolished armour. What he got instead was far stranger. Her grey eyes went incredibly wide, and something moved through them fast, like a dark cloud shadow sweeping across an open field. It looked almost exactly like recognition, which made absolutely no sense considering he had never seen this girl before in his life, and he certainly would have remembered her. She blinked it away quickly, smoothing her face back into something highly manageable— she was clearly well practised at that— but he had seen it. He said nothing, simply waiting from atop his horse.
She smiled at him, a very bright, dazzling smile that was doing a great deal of heavy lifting to cover whatever she had just thought. "Oh," she said, saying the word hedge knight as if it meant something highly specific and important to her. Then, before he could decide what to make of that tone, she added, "How lucky I am."
Dunk narrowed his eyes slightly. He had been called many things in his life— a lunk, a giant, a brute, a fool— but 'lucky' was rarely among them.
"Ser Duncan—" she started.
He opened his mouth to correct her, then slowly closed it. She had called him Duncan. Not Dunk. He had explicitly told her Dunk, the same blunt name he gave everyone, the same name he'd carried since he was small enough to be called things by people bigger than him. Duncan sounded like a highborn lordling’s name, or a proper, storied knight’s. She probably hadn’t met many knights birthed in the gutters of Flea Bottom and must have just assumed it was short for something grander. Still, the sound of it on her tongue had a nice ring to it, he thought. Ser Duncan.
"—Ser Dunk," she corrected herself, catching the slip though not very smoothly. "Would you perhaps accept my jewellery as payment for—" she paused, clearly arranging the words with deliberate care, "—for protecting me?"
He looked down at the jewellery in question, noting that there was quite a staggering lot of it.
"I have no money," she went on, the manufactured brightness in her voice immediately dropping away to reveal something far more earnest, tired, and worried beneath it. "I was planning to perform at Ashford, at the tourney, and sell my... my things for some coin. But a woman alone on the road is, well..." She gestured vaguely around them at the darkening, empty forest. "A little less safe than most everyone, I fear. I swear I'll pay you. I can play at the inn tonight as well, if you require immediate payment. That ought to get me some coins, if there are people around." She took a shallow, shaky breath. "Please? Just until the tourney grounds at least?"
Dunk looked down at her for a long, heavy moment. He thought about saying no. The sensible thing—the very thing that kept a solitary hedge knight free from messy entanglements and situations that multiplied their danger without warning—was to decline politely, wish her the blessings of the Crone on the road, and continue being the only strange thing in his own story. But he thought about the long road between here and Ashford, and the desperate men who sometimes walked it. He thought about what inevitably happened to women travelling entirely alone. He was not a boy anymore, and Ser Arlan had never been the sort of knight to look away from an uncomfortable truth simply because it was inconvenient to his purse.
He looked at Emma Kennedy— a name from nowhere he recognised— standing in the dirt with her impossible luggage, her brightly colored hair, and her too-bright smile doing its absolute level best to mask how tightly her white-knuckled hands were gripping the handle of that wheeled box. She was frightened. Perhaps not of him, but the fear was definitely there beneath the composure, settling in her bones like cold air drafting under a hearthrug. She had nothing: no heavy coin purse, no armed escort, no horse. Only the strange things she carried.
He scratched the back of his neck, feeling the prickle of stubble. The jewellery was considerable as far as payments went; he could see the heavy weight of the real metal even from the saddle. A true knight wouldn't ask for a lone lady's ring; he knew that. A sellsword would. But a hedge knight with two spare horses he'd just bought, a rumbling stomach, and a long, expensive road ahead had no particular grounds to be overly proud.
"You play?" he asked, his voice a deep rumble.
"Yes," she answered immediately, without a trace of hesitation.
"What instrument?"
She reached over her shoulder and touched the long, flat case resting against her back. He still didn't know what was inside it, just as he didn't know what most of her bizarre possessions were, but he was used to being honest with himself when he didn't know something. "A very good one," she said, and a genuine, warm certainty slipped into her voice— the first thing she'd said that didn't feel carefully constructed for his benefit. "I promise you, the inn will be glad of it, and you as well."
Dunk turned this over in his mind, the slow, methodical turning of a man weighing his meagre options. A girl alone. Ashford Meadow. The very same road he was already taking. Jewellery that looked to be worth far more than nothing. He looked at Thunder's dark mane, then at the two spare horses trailing behind him, feeling faintly ridiculous about how quickly this particular thought had arrived to solve his problem.
"You can ride?" he asked.
She looked past him at the horses with an expression he couldn't quite interpret. It wasn't quite fear, and it wasn't quite confidence; it was something tense in between, negotiating with its own physical limitations in real time. "I can learn," she said carefully.
Dunk almost smiled. It was a very near thing. He reached down and unhooked the leather reins of the spare Chestnut, holding it out slightly to the side— not offering it just yet, but holding it suspended, making it a question.
"We'll reach the inn before dark if we move," he said, his tone practical and flat. "You can play tonight. Anything you make is yours." He paused, looking down at her ringed hands. "One of the rings. That's all I want. Something to show I had cause to guard you, if anyone asks questions."
He was fairly certain Ser Arlan was somewhere in the heavens watching this, and that the old man would have liked Emma. He had always liked songs and strange things, and the conversation wouldn't have been nearly as awkward if the old knight had been here to lead it. More importantly, Dunk knew deeply that Ser Arlan, as old and rough and world-weary as he had been, would never once in his long life have ridden past a maid on the road who needed help.
"Well?" Dunk prompted, the horse shifting restlessly beneath him.
The breath she let out was so long and shaky that Dunk wondered, distantly, how long she'd actually been holding it in her chest. Her shoulders dropped all at once, the careful, bright composure she'd been wearing like fitted armour going completely slack, replaced by pure, unguarded, staggering relief.
And then, she smiled. It wasn't the bright, brittle smile she'd been using to negotiate with him, nor the careful mask she'd constructed since taking off her musical ear band. This was entirely different. This was a smile that didn't ask permission— it simply arrived, wide, warm, and entirely unguarded, hitting Dunk right in the chest with the blunt, physical force of a lance he was wholly unprepared for.
He became, abruptly, very aware of his massive, clumsy hands holding the reins. This turned out to be highly prescient, because she immediately stepped forward and took both of them. His great, scarred, road rough hands were entirely enveloped in hers. He could feel the cool, hard metal of her numerous rings pressing against his skin, contrasting sharply with the surprising warmth of her palms. She was looking up at him with that blinding, radiant smile as if he had done something profoundly heroic and remarkable, when all he had truly done was agree to ride in the exact same direction he was already going.
"Oh, thank you so much, Ser. You have no idea how scared I've been," she breathed, her voice thick with gratitude.
Dunk stood incredibly still in the stirrups. He was reasonably experienced with being large and accidental in small spaces, used to ducking under tavern beams and keeping his elbows tucked in crowded squares. But this was an entirely different variety of the same problem, and he had not been issued any instructions for what to do when a beautiful girl held his hands.
"Thank you! Thank you! I promise I'll pay you back and I won't be a burden to you!"
He looked down at her face, then down at their joined hands.
Dunk cleared his throat roughly, a deep, scraping sound. He was a man who was easily made to feel clumsy; he had spent enough years learning to exist inside his own considerable dimensions that he didn't generally trip over himself anymore. But there was something about being thanked like this— with both hands gripped tight, and a smile that seemed to contain more heat than most hearth fires he'd slept beside— that stripped away his armour. It made him feel approximately fifteen years old again, and roughly the size of a hay barn.
"Aye," he managed. It was a gruff, single syllable. That was all he could muster.
She didn't seem to notice his utter, mortifying paralysis, or if she did, she was charitable enough not to remark on the flush rising up his neck. She released his hands after a moment— he acutely noticed the exact, chilling moment she let go— and turned back toward her impossible luggage with the brisk, commanding efficiency of someone who had already moved on to solving the next logistical problem.
"Right," she said, eyeing the spare Chestnut with the focused, slightly narrowed expression of someone taking inventory of a daunting situation. She looked at her screaming pink suitcase, looked back at the horse, and then at the suitcase again. Her mouth pressed into a tight, sideways line. "How does the..." She gestured helplessly at the wheeled box. "How does that work, with the horse?”
Dunk considered the wheeled box from his saddle. He had been considering it, on and off, since he'd first seen it trundling across the packed dirt, and he was absolutely no closer to a satisfying answer about its nature than he'd been at the start. It was entirely too large to sling across a leather saddle, and too rigid to fold into a pack. It had a metal handle that telescoped in and out— a marvel of smithing in its own right— but the small plastic wheels at its base were entirely the wrong sort for anything but a very smooth road or an indoor floor.
"We tie it," he said firmly, because that was simply what you did with unwieldy things that needed to go somewhere on a horse.
She looked up at him. He looked down at the box.
"Somehow," he added, his deep voice lacking total confidence.
The corner of her mouth twitched. It wasn't quite a full smile, but it belonged to the same familiar family of amusement. "Somehow," she agreed, with a deadpan seriousness that suggested she found this predicament much funnier than she was showing.
It took far longer than it should have. The box was unbelievably awkward, its rigid, rectangular shape entirely wrong for the rough hemp ropes Dunk had on hand. It kept wanting to tip sideways and slide toward the dirt, and the spare Chestnut— a patient animal, generally— had distinct, agitated thoughts about the whole arrangement, which it expressed through a series of meaningful, nervous sidesteps. Emma stepped up to the horse's head during this frustrating process, stroking its nose and speaking to it in a low, steady stream of rhythmic words that Dunk couldn't entirely make out. Inexplicably, the horse appeared to listen, its ears swivelling toward her strange accent. By the end of the struggle, the animal was standing perfectly still, and the wheeled box was secured against the saddle in an arrangement that was far more creative than elegant, but sturdy enough that Dunk figured it would hold until they reached the inn.
The flat case— the instrument case, he reminded himself— she absolutely would not be parted from. She slung it diagonally over her back alongside her heavy pack, politely declining his offer to tie it to the horse for her. Standing beside the spare Chestnut, she looked up at the empty saddle with the tight expression of someone who had firmly committed to a course of action and was only now confronting its terrifying, physical implications.
"Show me," she said. It wasn't a question; it was a demand for instruction.
Dunk showed her, demonstrating where to place her foot and how to grip the pommel. She watched his demonstration with the full, intense attention of someone who was actively memorising rather than simply observing, asking two surprisingly good, practical questions about balance before stepping up. She wedged her shoe into the stirrup and hauled herself up with much more sheer determination than knightly grace, landing in the worn leather saddle with a small grunt of effort. The expression of pure, unselfconscious triumph that broke across her face as she looked down at him was so bright that Dunk instinctively looked away, turning his head the same way a man looks away from something deeply private.
"Right," Emma said from the saddle, sounding a little breathless but victorious. She settled her plaid skirt around her legs with more care than a seasoned rider, but with far more confidence than someone who had never sat a horse before, gathering the leather reins exactly the way he'd shown her despite her white-gripped knuckles. "Right. I can do this."
He was fairly certain she was talking entirely to herself, so he didn't interrupt.
Dunk mounted Thunder, took the coarse lead rope of the packhorse, and turned them back toward the dirt track leading to the inn. The smoke from the chimney was closer now, the smell of it warm and promisingly familiar, and the light was just beginning to go a deep, rich amber at the edges of the sky the way it did in the quiet hour before full evening. He was only three long strides ahead when he heard her horse fall into step behind him. Just beneath the soft, rhythmic thud of hooves on packed dirt, he could hear the faint, delicate chiming of her charm bracelet— a sound that was already becoming familiar to him after barely half an hour in her presence.
He had agreed to accept one ring as payment for this protection. Yet, as he listened to the metallic chime of her jewellery and the creak of the awkwardly loaded wheel box shifting on the horse, Dunk had the distinct, overwhelming feeling— not for the first time since he'd come around that bend in the road—that he had just agreed to considerably more than that without quite meaning to.
Ahead of them, the inn's wooden sign swayed softly in the evening breeze, welcoming them out of the forest.