Chapter Text
Lyonel would not have marked it at all but for how the man's head turned to watch him piss.
He had blackened enough eyes in his lifetime, and suffered enough of them too, to know that a wound to the head was oft less serious than it looked. They bled, those wounds, and bruised up terribly, dire enough to frighten children and set dogs to barking, but more often than not they were fine on the morrow. The swelling eased, the bruising healed, the bleeding slowed and stopped. A black eye would open again, and pure summer blue would blink and be present.
Yet he misliked it, the way that Duncan's head swiveled to follow him. The way it wobbled on his neck, as if someone had tied a bladder to a string and set it floating downstream. The slow way his other eye drifted, present and then gone again.
There's a war coming, he thought. It was on his lips to say. There's a war coming. We could be...
He shook himself clean. Tucked himself away. Duncan watched him still, head tilted in that queer fashion. Like he were peering around a corner. Each step back up the grassy bank was agony, but Lyonel took them, until his leg was screaming, the bone shifting, he could hear his maester saying you mustn't put weight upon it if you can help it, my lord. What the fuck did maesters know, if they had missed something so monumental as this?
He got down onto his good leg. "Look at me," he said. He watched Duncan tilt his head again, and pushed roughly against his cheek. "Not with that eye. The other one."
"I can't see anything with the other one," Duncan said. He winced when Lyonel prodded him again, making him turn the other way. "S'all swollen shut." He said it as though he thought Lyonel were thick, or perhaps drunk. What a turn, Lyonel thought, for Duncan to feel the smartest one present. If he were feeling better he might have laughed. He might have made a jest of it. Tried to make Duncan laugh.
"Turn into the sun," he said instead. "Close your eye, and tell me when you see my hand."
"Lyonel, how'm I supposed to see your hand if my eye is closed?"
"Gods be good, you stubborn cunt. Just...do as I say."
Duncan huffed. Tilted his head back so that the bright early spring light was on him, turning his hair to copper, his skin to gold. Beautiful man, Lyonel thought. Beautiful man who doesn't know it. He touched his fingertips to the stiff-hot flesh of Duncan's cheek, and they came away wet. He'd been weeping, earlier. Weeping for Baelor fucking Targaryen. Yet he touched the other cheek, beneath the blackened eye, and the damp there felt different. Thicker.
"Fine," Lyonel said, and put his palm over Duncan's right eye. Ignored the man's rough snort of protest. "Can you see?"
"No. Your hand's over my eye."
"You don't see the light?"
"It's closed, Lyonel. What are you on about?"
He put his other palm close to Duncan's cheek. The bad side. Huge and raw and purple-black. Lyonel could not even see his lashes, so complete was the swelling. He could not see the faintest sliver of blue.
He held his hand there, waiting. Took it away again. Brought it close. Duncan lay there, breathing deeply, not a sign, not a flinch. He could have been asleep. He could have been dead.
Lyonel uncovered his eye. His good eye. Gods, he thought. Fucking gods. "Come," he said aloud, and pulled at Duncan's hand until he rose, and then had to pull himself up on the man's own arm, for his leg was too frail to bear him.
"Lyonel, I...It is a fine offer, but I don't...I can't..."
"Piss on Storm's End," Lyonel said. "We need to find that fucking maester again."
The maester had gone back to the tourney-town, where men in black and yellow were busily pulling up tent pegs, and folding great sheets of oiled canvas down into squares. There was an entire cart just for Lyonel's arms and armor and clothes, which they wove around, Duncan stumbling and wavering, and needing to turn his head to see where he was going. He stopped, nearly dragging Lyonel to the ground, to look at the scarred and dented breastplate with the antlers in their black enamel rising up like the branches of some ancient heathen tree. Lyonel’s helm rested beside it, curiously naked without its iron tines.
"It is the time when harts shed their antlers," Lyonel said, and Duncan swung his head ponderously around, a hollow look about him. Not for his own pain, which he had been bearing stoically ever since Lyonel had found him beneath the ruddy tree, but for Lyonel's pain. He could see it, the split lips parted to apologize, could feel it in his water, and so he pushed his palm messily against Duncan's mouth to make him be quiet.
"Stop," he said, "stop agonizing."
When he took his hand away there was a smear of red there. He left it to dry as they wound through the chaos of a tourney being dismantled, and Duncan let himself be towed along. Lyonel thought it was more out of chivalry than any actual desire to have his injuries tended further, but he was willing to exploit the man's sense of duty as long as Duncan allowed him. He was not such an honorable man as all that, and shame was a bedfellow that he had long ago kicked from his sheets.
"Watch your step," he said as they walked, and Duncan obeyed, easy, mild like a well-broken horse or a hound, "here, there's a hole. Mind your right. There you go. There's a good lad." He thought, I could grow used to this. Big man like Duncan on his arm, at his shoulder, standing behind him at Storm's End. If the bloody Targaryens didn't take him. But then, he thought, dragons were fickle, prideful things. They took the choicest cuts of meat, and the finest holds, and the richest treasures, and Baelor, the only one among them with the sense the gods gave a fucking stone, was dead. They would pass over, he thought, and the shadow of their great wings would fade, and they would leave behind this bit of gold for Lyonel, who was also proud, yes, but not stupid. A stag was a cleverer animal than a dragon, for how it was prey as well as king.
The maester had his own cart, full to the brim with chests both small and large. He'd brought his whole damn collection of herbs and unguents on the assumption that Lyonel would get himself battered, which was usually the case at tourneys. He rode hard, he fought hard, he laughed loud and often — there was no other way to live a life. It had served well enough, this time, for himself and for Duncan, too.
"Maester," he said, and could not remember the man's name. His father's man, recently sent to replace the old maester, Ruban, who had died. He'd known Ruban since he was a boy; he knew this one not at all.
"Allard, my lord," the man said.
"Yes, fine. Duncan, sit. Good lad." Duncan tilted his head back as he went down, leaning against the wheel of the cart so that the whole thing sank an inch into the mud. He pictured, almost like an afterthought, how far a bed might sink beneath that weight, the indent left in soft down. He shook it away.
"Look at his eye," he said, and Maester Allard blinked, and looked.
"'Tis swollen shut, my lord."
"That's what I said," Duncan murmured, and Lyonel almost threw his hands in the air.
"Fucking jesters, the both of you. Look," he said, and grabbed Duncan by the chin, and made him turn his head. Wet on his cheek, wet on his chin — not tears, for he'd stopped weeping ages ago, on the walk back down the hill. A breeze caught his fine red-gold hair, and the sun upon his bruised face carved a straight line from brow to cheek. Puffed and swollen and purpled, yes, but flatter than was right.
"Ah," the maester said, and rose at last to his feet. He needed to be standing in order to reach Duncan's face, and his fingers poked and prodded, touched the wetness on Duncan's skin, brought a finger to lips and tongue — Lyonel looked away.
"Ser," the man said, and gently took Duncan's hand. "Come with me. We will have need of a place for you to lie, I think. And better tools than I have brought."
"Lyonel?" Duncan said, and the pain in his own leg made him short, made him blunter than he should be. He ought have taken the man aside, gentled him, spoken softly, but his bones were afire and he'd had neither wine nor poppy for hours.
"The eye is gone," he said, and heard Duncan's short and startled inhale, like a blade to gut. "Go, ser. I will be right behind you. I swear it."
He followed. Of course he did. It was...what, duty? Not in the way that Duncan took it, as a solemn oath, as something to live by. But how could he not? Duncan was his sworn sword. No, his friend. Yes, but more than that, his brother in arms, his, just his. Lyonel had seen him across the expanse of his tent, right at the moment when he had been contemplating how dull people were, how cringing, how obsequious, and then here came this giant of a man who crouched like a fainting maid but with a fire in his belly that roused him like a snorting fucking bull the second he caught whiff of injustice. The gods had seen fit to give Duncan to him, jam sticky and sweet on his fingers, laughter on his mouth.
Lyonel had long ago given up on notions of true knights and honor. The realm latched on to men like a leech, sucked the duty out of them and spat greed in its stead; the realm was a place where men were dragons, and dragons, all the grandness and the mystic power of them, were dead, and perhaps only the Northmen had the right of it, sequestering themselves up there in their frozen holdfasts. But for the span of a morning, dawn breaking across the misty sky, he'd remembered why he took the knee at eighteen; he'd remembered, for perhaps a half-hour, what it was like to be a knight in more than name.
So, yes. He followed. He followed Duncan, now leaning against tottering old Allard, as the maester guided him around puddles and clumps of horse dung and tent pegs left strew about. Everyone was eager to leave, but there were a few tents still standing, Reachmen and Riverlords toadying up to the new heir. Never mind that Prince Valarr was more like to want to mourn his father in peace; it was not for them, for the princes, for the crown. Their lives were forfeit to the public the second they were born.
It served in this case, however, as Allard went rapping on the tentpole of a large, grey and white tent, and Lyonel saw the sigil, the white tower and the red flame, and grimaced. He wanted to owe the Targaryens not at all; he wanted to owe the supercilious cunts of the Reach even less.
"Wait," Allard said, and ducked inside when a muffled voice bade him enter. Duncan did not so much 'wait' as 'freeze' — he was trembling, Lyonel saw, and so he hobbled closer, quick as he could on his blasted fucking leg. The pain lanced up and down him, from the ball of his foot all the way up to his hip; he gritted his teeth and bore it, but leaned with more weight than he ought on Duncan's side when he came near enough. But it was good. Warm. The man radiated heat like a campfire, and a big arm came around his waist, unthinking, so that they braced each other up.
"I don't understand," Duncan said. Vague, lost voice, like a little boy. He couldn't be much more than twenty, or thereabouts. When he took a deep breath it filled his chest like a bellows and Lyonel could feel it, through quilted doublet, through cloth of gold. He had the absurd urge to swing his cloak around Duncan's shoulders, as if it were needed, as if he lacked for warmth. The pain, he thought. The pain getting to him, and the exhaustion. "I don't..."
"Better an eye than a hand," Lyonel said, and to that, Duncan had no response.
The Hightower maester was a man named Colmir, not so aged as Allard, but with a heavier length of chain about his neck. Lyonel counted twelve links before he stopped, dizzy with the pain of his leg: red gold, there was, and bronze, black iron and steel and three links in the cold bright clarity of silver. He did not know what all the metals meant, though in comparison to Allard he noted a difference in numbers alone, for Allard had two links that might be gold, and only one of silver. Not all maesters, he knew, were created equal, but Colmir seemed a more medically-minded man. He bustled Duncan into the tent and tied it fast against any incomers, and then sat the big man down on a cot that creaked dramatically beneath his weight.
“Perhaps, my lord, it would be wise,” Allard started to say, and made a gesture as if to take Lyonel by the arm.
“I’m not leaving,” he said, and Duncan said, in that soft, uncertain voice, “Lyonel, what’s going to happen?” The man had nearly beaten Aerion Targaryen to death with his own shield not a day and a half ago, but to look at him now you wouldn’t think it, shoulders crawling towards his ears, the fringe of his hair in front of his good eye. He had been taken with the lad there under the elm tree, throwing out offers like a blind man at darts. Friendship, service, training, coin — these things and more he’d offered to Duncan, but none of them had struck true. Now, he crabbed his way to the side of the cot to try again, and leaned as far down as he could to offer once more. Even that was hardly far enough. Duncan seated still came up to his chest, and his leg screamed when he bent, trying to keep his weight on his right as he slid his hand across the nape of Duncan’s neck.
“Look at me,” he said, and Duncan’s glossy blue eye focused, the pupil going pinprick small. He could smell the man’s breath, the iron tang of blood and stale wine. “The eye must come out,” he said, and Duncan made a low noise, like a wounded animal. “You saw Ser Rhysling. An eye is not so terrible to lose. And after, after you will come with me to Storm’s End. Hm? To rest and recover.”
“I ought be done with lords,” Duncan said, and Lyonel squeezed the back of his neck and pressed their foreheads together, so that he felt the grinding of their skulls. Something to place him in the world, to ground him. Duncan’s eye closed, his lashes the same red-gold as his hair, sweeping down over his cheek. Beautiful, he’d thought earlier. Beautiful, he thought again, this man who in a kinder world would give pony rides to children and wildflowers to washerwomen, but who, stuck in the shit and the mire with all the rest of them, had taken justice as his calling.
You soft heart, he cursed — himself or Duncan, he did not know. You soft and bleeding heart.
“You should,” he said, “but not for a while yet. You can bring that boy, too.”
“His father said no.”
“Then I will ask.” Another noise, a sharp inhale, a sweetly shuddering exhale. Duncan’s eye opened and it was bright and wet with tears.
“Why are you doing this?” he asked.
Because you are quite possibly the last good man in Westeros. A true knight. Fuck, the only true knight. Because someday there will be songs written about you. Because I want you to keep looking at me like that, like I’ve moved the whole earth, like I lit the sun for you.
“I don’t know,” he said, because the truth was strange and painful, and he was not drunk enough to disclose it.
Duncan took a deep breath. “You’re a good friend, Lyonel,” he said, and perhaps it was a portent, or an omen, that Lyonel felt he could sustain himself on that trembling admission alone for years to come.
“Here,” someone said; it was Allard, with a low stool that would only be marginally more comfortable than standing. He was looking at Lyonel’s leg like he had taken personal offense to it. Lyonel thought only fleetingly of the man’s earlier instructions, to try, my lord, try not to bear weight upon it, but he sank gratefully down upon the offered seat, groaning and letting his bad leg stretch out before him. There had been some question, earlier, of whether it were broken or only fractured, but he thought that it was a question that made little sense to ask. The bone was bad, that was all that mattered, and it would either heal or it wouldn’t. If the last tourney he ever rode in were to end with his victory in a Trial of Seven…well. There were less noble endings, weren’t there? And he would bring home with him a prize stolen from the gods themselves.
“D’you…” Duncan said, and Lyonel tossed aside his crutch so that he had both hands free, to reach out, and be reached towards in turn. Duncan’s hand was big, square, thick fingers, scars on the knuckles. From what? They were old, sun-faded — he had seen such scars on men who fought for a living, men whose gauntlets pinched them when they threw punches. Men who threw punches, full stop. There were a few new wounds, even, from where Duncan had beaten Aerion’s face in, and Lyonel brushed his thumb over them, the scabs forming. “D’you know what’s going to…happen?” —
He sounded queer and distant when he said it. He does not believe it still, Lyonel thought. But even if Duncan did not believe it, he was allowing himself to be led. It was not the man’s hand that Lyonel was holding, but his leash. He had the terrifying idea that if he told Duncan to forget it all, that he would be fine, the eye would be kept, Duncan would probably listen. Perhaps not believe him, but would be so willing to follow along that his own belief would cease to matter.
“I’ve never seen an extirpation before,” he admitted, with an idiotic little ripple of shame to accompany it. For what purpose? Because he had not seen a thing done? No — no, because he could not give Duncan a better notion of what was to come. But Duncan shook his head.
“Not…not that,” he said, “I don’t want to know about…if it needs to be done, it’ll be done. And it doesn’t much matter how, right?”
“Right,” he said, and Duncan’s hand moved under his, palm turning up so that his fingers brushed the underside of Lyonel’s wrist.
“I meant after. I won’t…can I ride? Am I to…?”
“You’ll follow me,” Lyonel said. Lowered his voice to a murmur as the two maesters buzzed around them. Mixing things, clinking glass together. A hive of two bustling, elderly bees. “If I must lash you to your horse, I shall do so, but if needs must I will find a wheelhouse. Lord Ashford is like to have one he may part with.”
“M’lord, that’s, you oughtn’t, I’m not—”
“What else shall I spend the coin on? It is a long, dull road back to Storm’s End, ser, and I would have you by my side and in comfort sooner than I would have drink or whores or…” He waved his other hand. “Any other frittering distraction this hateful little town might offer. It is six weeks to Storm’s End by way of the Roseroad. Time enough for you to recover, I should think. It cannot be that hard, you know, the eye is such a small thing. Like losing your smallest toe. Of no consequence.”
“I’ll be turnin’ my head a lot more,” Duncan said. Lyonel did not have anything to say to that, and Duncan sounded…resigned to it. He knew, Lyonel thought. For all Lyonel’s prating, he knew what he would be losing. One half of a man’s vision was nothing to sneeze at; he would need to relearn how to balance, how to run, how to mount a horse and how to swing a sword. There would be, forever after, the fear that a man might come up on his left side and gut him, if such a man were only small and quick and silent enough. It was not only sight he was losing, but surety.
Dangerous, to let a man so affected loose upon the road. A man who’d lost faith in his soul was one thing; a man who’d lost faith in his sword arm quite another. Lyonel knew all too many of the former, but the latter all seemed to die sooner rather than later, and it was too ignominious an end for Ser Duncan the Tall, whom the gods had judged worthy.
“You will learn to mind it,” Lyonel said. He heard the pitchy, desperate edge to his own voice and chided himself for it. He was no longer blindly flinging darts, he reminded himself; he had found his target, and now it was only a sustained siege that was required. He did not need to convince Duncan, who was looking down at him with his good eye shining, lashes spiky with unshed tears; the man only wanted for reassurance. “You hold a sword with your right hand? Good. We’ll get another shield for you, a bigger one. Something you can feel the heft of, so you know where it is without seeing it. And my master at arms will train you. He’s polished up hundreds of green boys, he’ll be thrilled that you come to him knowing which end of the sword you stab with.”
“The pointy end,” Duncan said, and Lyonel, startled, laughed so hard he nearly doubled over. He thought he saw a flicker of a smile on Duncan’s mouth as well, his good eye crinkling at the corner. What a marvel, this man. What a fucking treasure.
And mine, he thought. Positively dragonish. Beautiful and sweet and good and all mine.
A cleared throat behind him. Colmir was stood there, with Allard at his side. He had a bundle in his hands, a rolled sleeve of oiled leather, which he set upon a small, low table and gently unfolded. In little pockets of silk, five black-bladed knives of increasingly small size were tucked away. The smallest was so finely made that the edge of it was translucent when Colmir took it out to examine it.
“We are ready, my lord,” he said. Duncan took a heavy, gasping breath, and Lyonel, not thinking, squeezed his hand. “Lie back, ser. When you wake it will be done.”
Lyonel had told it true: he had never seen an extirpation before, nor any act of chirurgery. Such a thing was the provenance of maesters and back-alley leeches, those men in Lannisport and King’s Landing who preyed on the poor and the foolish, and who were as apt to take your teeth as they were to heal you. Certainly it was not anything a lord ought to be exposed to, and yet when Allard once again made as if to shoo him away, Lyonel stayed squarely put. He held Duncan’s hand while Colmir mixed a draught of poppy and sweetsleep and willow bark. “How much do you weigh?” he asked Duncan, who looked so perplexed that Colmir did not even wait to hear an answer, but said, “Nineteen, twenty stone, perhaps. I should rather give you slightly too little than too much, but I have no means to tie you down here. The cot will not hold if you should struggle.”
“You have me,” Lyonel said. Neither maester had anything to say to that. Perhaps it was for the best, for Lyonel’s pride; he did not relish his chances of holding Duncan down, not with his leg fractured or broken, and perhaps not even if it were healthy. In a tourney, on horseback, with lance and shield, he would have felt confident in his ability to win. Having seen Duncan’s strength on the field, and how easily he had ground the prince into the mud, he was no longer so certain of his standing in a melee. A strange feeling for a man, to come to terms with the idea that he, who had long been the tallest, the quickest, the strongest in any room he entered, was no longer…well, at least some of those. But he was old enough at this point that such revelations did not wound him nor disappoint him, but instead made him almost rabid with hunger.
(It was the nature of the nobility, he thought, that as young men they sought to become, and as old men they sought to possess. In this, the same as any Targaryen.)
But he was strong, still, and if he could not precisely hold Duncan down, he could at least keep the man from doing irreparable damage to the maesters. So a measure of potion was meted out into a small, silver cup, which Duncan took, and which his big hand made look like a child’s toy. He stared down into it, the steam from the steeped willow bark curling up around his cheeks, faint grey cat’s whiskers in the filtered spring sunshine. In his other hand he was still clutching at Lyonel’s wrist, blunt nails carving half-moon bruises into the divot where veins and tendons gathered. As though he were afraid to let go.
“Best get it done with, man,” Lyonel said, and Duncan’s good eye fluttered shut, and his throat worked as he nodded. Then he tipped his head back and drank.
It could not have been much more than a mouthful, but the effects of it became apparent within a quarter of an hour. Duncan swayed first, his grip on Lyonel’s wrist loosening, and then he shook his head slowly back and forth. “Feels,” he said, and blinked, and leaned down to try and grope for Lyonel’s shoulder. “Feels funny.”
“It does,” Lyonel agreed. He’d had a draught of poppy a time or two in his life, not poppy wine, as they gave to children when their teeth were crowning, but the stronger stuff. He thought that the mix Colmir had given Duncan must have been stronger still. “Sleep, ser. I will be here when you wake.” Duncan nodded, expression thoughtful, like Lyonel had suggested that they move out to the grass to enjoy the sunshine. Then he started to tilt forwards, and Lyonel was obliged to catch him, grunting when it jostled his leg. Between himself and the two maesters they were able to wrestle Duncan back, so he was reclining in the cot and not in a heap on the floor; his mouth had gone slack, and his good eye was still open, just barely, a sliver of fuzzy blue.
Taken by some urge he had no desire to examine, Lyonel brushed the fringe of red-gold hair from Duncan’s brow. If his hand lingered, if his fingers petted over bruises and nicks, if his nails scratched gently through old and flaking blood, that was his business and no one else’s.
“Sleep,” he said again, and Duncan heaved a huge, ponderous sigh, like an old dog settling down before a hearth, and his eye slid shut at last.
Duncan slept through the whole of it, a greater blessing than Lyonel had dared to hope for.
The maesters brought out a queer little contraption, which looked like a pair of small, blunted scissors, and which Colmir used to pry open Duncan’s bad eye. “Hold,” he said to Allard, and the man held them, so that the blunted steel kept the lids from closing again, as bookends might keep tidy a shelf of tomes. Beneath the purple bruising it did not look so bad as Lyonel had thought, such that for a moment he dared to hope that the eye might be saved — perhaps not the sight, but the shape of it — until he looked at it from the side and saw how much flatter it appeared. And too, there was something terribly off about the look of it, which he did not recognize until he had spent long seconds studying it. Duncan’s eye was no longer blue, he saw. Or rather, was only half blue, the dark pit of his pupil yawning like a sly mouth, black midnight alongside summer sky, and there was a spot that seemed to bulge outwards, bluer than blue, as if he could touch it with his fingertips. The white of his eye had turned red, but curiously there was no blood, only that too-thick fluid that was not tears, but which must have been the contents of the eye itself.
“If you must vomit, my lord, please do so to the side,” Colmir said. Lyonel wondered what his face looked like, that the maester felt the need to caution him so. He swallowed; his mouth was thick with spit, but he pushed it down. He had seen more grievous wounds at the Redgrass, and he had not even been in the initial charge. He had seen worse at this very tourney: Beesbury’s mangled chest, the shattered remnants of Hardyng’s leg. Had seen, even, the wound Prince Baelor had taken, pulped brain and jagged cracked egg skull, blood and flesh macerated inside, the soup that made a man what he was laid bare for open perusal. It still held not a candle to this, though he could not tear his attention away.
“The color of the eye,” Colmir said, “has plugged the wound.” He took from his rolled leather bundle the smallest black-bladed knife. “The front of the eye is covered in a thin skin. I will make a cut to release it, and then I will be able to trim the muscles, and lift the eye out.”
“Just get on with it, man,” Lyonel said. If he were younger perhaps the lesson would fascinate him, but he was no longer young, and he only felt tired, and shabby, and pained.
He watched as Colmir took up place beside Duncan, who was twitching faintly, battered mouth murmuring nonsense syllables. His hand had fallen loose when the sweetsleep had worked its magic, and so Lyonel took it up again, as much out of selfishness as out of any desire to offer comfort. He needed something to do with his hands. He needed something to do. He was not used to sitting idle, heir apparent that he might be.
“It’s all right,” he said. If nothing else, he was a grand teller of stories. If nothing else, he could always lie. “I told you true, ser, that I’ll have you at Storm’s End. Have you ever been sailing?” There was no response. He watched as Colmir lightly dragged the blade across the front of the eye. It did not burst, as Lyonel thought it might, but some thin, translucent membrane, like the scum on the top of a stew after it had set, peeled back in curling onionskin layers. Beneath, the eye glistened, red and wet. He cleared his throat.
“If you haven’t,” he said, “I’ll teach you. No man has truly lived until he has sailed Shipbreaker Bay. Now there’s a mistress to test your mettle. She’d sooner chew you up and shit you out than bear you atop her heaving bosom, but gods, when the weather is fine you can see clear across the Narrow Sea, and her waters, all gilt with sunlight…Like sapphires, Duncan. They call Tarth that, you know. The Sapphire Isle. No gems to be found on it, so far as I know, but no prettier coast in all the kingdoms. We’ll go there, you and I.”
With that wisp of skin flayed back, the eye seemed to move easier. Colmir prodded it with his finger, lightly, and it turned this way and that while Duncan trembled in uneasy sleep. Could he feel it still? The flesh of his eyelid had split, Lyonel noted — blood trickled down and pooled in the corner of his eye, thick and red as wine. Colmir brushed it matter-of-factly away and slid the knife, blade out, around the inside edge of the socket. Scraps of that thin, clear flesh flensed away at the touch.
“Or anywhere,” Lyonel said, clutching at Duncan’s hand all the tighter as he watched the knife perform its grisly miracle. “Anywhere you’d like. Braavos, Tyrosh…Not Lys, I think. You wouldn’t like it. But Tyrosh. If you thought Beesbury’s mustache was garish, you shall love Tyrosh. Like a bunch of plumed fucking birds, they are. The Summer Isles, even, when you’re well enough, when we’ve made a strong sailor of you. A few months at sea and we’ll have you tanned as hide and twice as strong. You’ll burn like the hells for the first week and curse me for a whoreson but after, you’ll not go another day of your life without longing for the sun and the salt.”
The muscles that held Duncan’s eye in place were thick, pink cords, stretched strands of dyed rope; he thought of the mainsheet on the Golden Hind, at anchor off Massey’s Hook. He’d had no cause for sailing, not for some years, not while tourneys had held his attention, but now it was all he could think of: Duncan salt-crusted and browned beneath the sun; Duncan on the deck heaving at the halyard, big shoulders flexing; Duncan lying in the white sand on the shores of Tarth or basking in the spray of the fountains of Braavos. In his imaginings Duncan was two-eyed and whole, and Lyonel was hale enough still to scramble up the shrouds to the mizzen.
“There,” Colmir said. He used his sleeve to wipe sweat from his brow. There was more blood now, Lyonel saw, running down Duncan’s cheek and across his nose in rivulets. It beaded under his nostril, and became a fine, misty spray upon the next inhale, so it looked like he wore a square of Myrish lace across his lips. “The most difficult part is done. Allard, I will hold the speculum. Please fetch an iron for the cautery.”
They traded places, and soon the little tent was rife with heat as Allard lit a taper and jabbed it down into the dirt to hold it. From one of Maester Colmir’s many boxes and crates he took a long piece of iron with a bent, slender head and a wooden handle, and this he held over the flames until it glowed. Then they switched back, as seamless as a dance. Lyonel squeezed Duncan’s hand, and imagined that he felt a faint response.
“I will lift the eye and cut the cord to the brain,” Colmir said. He wore a faint, pleased expression; the look of a man performing a job well done. “You must cauterize as soon as I have made the cut, and then we will rinse with wine and vinegar.”
“Basting him like a bird,” Lyonel said.
“Wine for the gods,” Colmir said, “and vinegar to guard against miasma. The smell will prevent bad air from entering the brain and causing a fever.”
Lyonel had not thought much beyond the removal of the eye itself. The notion of a fever, or worse yet, a fever of the brain, had never entered his mind. It seized him now, a wretched fear that all of this would be for naught, that he would have watched Duncan’s eye plucked from his skull only to lose him a fortnight hence, first to raving lunacy, and then to muttering, and then to the Stranger.
“Don’t,” he said. “Don’t let that happen.” There was no amount of coin or privilege he could offer to make it so. There was prayer, he supposed, but Lyonel did not think much of the state of his soul; the Seven would sooner have Duncan, who was good and just and virtuous, and whose only act of selfishness appeared to have been taking a child to squire for no other reason than that he could.
“I have done this many times, my lord,” Colmir said. “It is a duty and a privilege to do so. The eye is a fascinating organ, complex, many-layered. If your companion has no use for it, I should like to keep the specimen for myself. It is of a very good size, and excellent condition.”
Lyonel would personally rather have eaten his own fucking boots. There was something about forging those chains, he thought, which raised the minds of maesters up into the clouds. The man ought to be shouting, for how high he sat, for how far down he looked upon the masses.
“Just do it,” he said, and Colmir shrugged, and from his rolled leather he took out a curved needle, like the ones that Lyonel had once used to puncture canvas, sitting on the deck of the Merry Maid when he was twelve and learning how to repair a sail from his father’s master of ships. Firm but controlled, he’d said, and the needle had needed force to puncture the canvas, but once through had glided smooth as silk. It was the same with the eye. Tougher than it looked, Lyonel thought, and watched Colmir pierce through that haunting eclipse of black and blue, hooking it up as a man would a fish. There was not nearly enough blood for such a mutilation, and the sounds, he thought — the sounds were too quiet. There ought be bones cracking, the squelch of pulverized flesh…but no. Hardly anything at all, just a wet, soft suck as the eye rose from the socket, tugged up just enough to expose another braided rope of glistening red behind it.
That is his brain, Lyonel thought, or near enough. That leads back to his brain. It was this, more than anything else, that made him nearly sick again, a flood of spit to the mouth. He swallowed hard, and grit his teeth. It felt important that he keep watching. A vigil, maybe, as Colmir brought the knife once more to flesh. “Now,” he said, and the blade cut, the eye lifted up, and Allard swooped in behind it with the cautery. Perhaps the poppy was wearing thin, because Duncan’s whole body seized at this, with the burning sizzle, with the smell of roasting meat filling the tent, uncomfortably close to tantalizing. His mouth hung open, and a low moan came out of him, and Lyonel braced his forearm over the broad chest and held grimly on.
“Good,” Colmir said, and the iron was removed, and Dunk’s body slackened down, cut strings as the muscles around his eye, those thick, pink ropes. His lips twisted in unhappy curls, and Lyonel, unthinking, touched the corner of them as the maesters bustled around him. Fetching wine and vinegar. Sluicing away the blood. Red flesh beneath, pulsing with Duncan’s heartbeat, slick folds like a cunt or a man’s guts spilling from a hole in his side or a wound to the skull. It was done, he thought, and laid his cheek down on Duncan’s chest, listening to the thunder of his lungs and the gurgle of his stomach. Alive, alive, alive.