Chapter Text
He met the man Durrandon at one of Tanselle’s fancy dinner events, deep into ‘Leventhmoon with snow yet heaped on the street corners from the plowing. Duncan was not meant to accompany Tanselle; that was Rafe’s honor. He thought he’d borne the disappointment well enough. He’d the idea, vague, they ought to trade off who was to escort Tanselle.
“Some girl’s on the phone,” Arlan told him. He carried the phone into the kitchen with him, the cord untangling in his wake.
Dunk was up to his elbows in suds washing near every dish Arlan owned in the sink. They were disgusting bachelors, said Rafe, who ate all her meals off paper plates and depended on Dunk visiting her flat to see the garbage run out to the chute.
“Oh, s’Rafe?” He hefted his head to one side so Arlan could fit the phone between his right shoulder and ear.
Arlan snorted horse-like and said, “Too nice for Rafe,” then wandered scratching at his arse to the sitting room.
Dunk said, “Huh?” into the phone, but Arlan had returned to the battered armchair.
“Dunk, I need you,” said Tanselle directly into his ear.
He fumbled a knife under the bubbles, scoring two fingers on the left hand. Only by clenching his jaw and crushing his eyes shut did he manage not to yell. He missed what Tanselle said next, grabbing as he did at a hand towel off the rack.
“Dunk? Duncan?”
“Yeah,” he said, “yes, right. Yeah. I’m here,” squeezing the towel hard around his fingers. He could feel the edges of skin catching on terry cloth. “Sorry. You said?”
“Rafe isn’t available, not any longer,” said Tanselle. “She’s to cover a shift on the morrow. Please say you’re free.”
“What, for the gallery? Or, what’s it, dinner.”
He held the phone pinned against his cheek and dared a look under the towel. Thanks be to the Seven: neither cut was terribly deep. Only the laceration to the middle finger had really bled. Brightly scarlet blood, diluted with water and soap from the sink, slipped from the cut. He rolled the towel over his fingers and resumed pressure.
“Yes, or rather, both,” Tanselle was saying as Dunk did this. “The gallery opening isn’t for another three days but Lady Alerie’s hosting the dinner for, oh, VIPs. Very important—”
“Patrons,” they said together. Tanselle laughed and carried on.
“You know, the sponsors and lords and what have you. And before that an hour to peruse the art. While they sip Pentosi champagne and I sweat in a corner.”
“All them and you meant to bring Rafe?” asked Dunk with something near to humor, meaning as well ‘and you mean to bring me?’
Tanselle said, “You can’t abandon me to them, Florian,” and so idiot that he was Duncan agreed.
As arranged they met outside the gallery. Dunk showed ten minutes late for the time they’d agreed upon, and t’was little comfort to think Rafe would have arrived no prompter. The Denys Costayne Gallery occupied an elegant glass-walled building posted back from the street on a hill. The lot, cunningly terraced and brimming in summer with flowers, appeared larger than it was in truth.
Tanselle was stood just out the gate, black braids artfully arrayed atop her head, in an enormous black puffy coat. She’d worn a pair of silver lamé kitten heels.
“Sorry,” he said, “I’m sorry. Accident back—” He waved.
“What, and you ran here!” Tanselle grinned at him. Her nose wrinkled with it. She’d worn silver earrings sculpted to look like geese, and they knocked against her long brown neck as she made a performance of examining him. “Look at you. Not even a sweat.”
“Too cold to sweat.”
He’d worn a baffled and battered coat on over his only somewhat formal sports jacket. The jacket fit well but the coat’s arms fell short of his wrists, and so he’d felt winter biting at him all five blocks.
“Well,” said Tanselle. She gave him that enigmatic smile, the one that made dark secrets of her eyes. “You look very handsome. And dry.”
“You look, um.” He struggled, as he always seemed to struggle. “You look well,” Dunk said.
Her brow crooked. Amused, then. He was grateful to amuse. Glad, even. Tanselle offered him her arm and he tucked it gently in his own. Then off they were to the executioner’s block. She smelled sweetly, a new floral tease upon her usual Warrior-blessed fragrance, like dark soil turn’d over. Dunk knew better than to go at another compliment. He’d cut worse than his fingers.
At the coat check, they handed off their outer garments to a deeply unimpressed clerk. Tanselle caught sight of Dunk’s hand. “Duncan! What happened to your fingers?”
He had been fighting not to stare openly at her gown, a navy blue sheath with a paler coordinating overlay at the bodice. At her knees the skirt flared and split at the back. Her calves, as she walked, flashed.
“What? Er.” He’d tucked the gloves into his coat’s pocket. Now he flexed the fingers in question and looked at them as though they might come up with an excuse. The fore finger had scabbed but he’d wrapped a plaster about the middle finger.
“Tripped,” he said. Dunk tried to make eye contact. His eyes slid in the direction of her left shoulder and the earring swaying heavily above it. “I was holding scissors.”
“You cut your fingers holding scissors,” said Tanselle. Her brows arched with delicacy, near as cutting as the knife.
“Well,” said Duncan to her right ear, “I was running.” He was thinking of the smooth curve of her calf, how the muscle bunched then eased as she moved.
“Running with scissors!”
A fog moved away from him. He said, “The year ones were fighting,” and felt the knife again.
“Oh,” said Tanselle, “so they were safety scissors,” and Dunk simply stood there.
The clerk said, “If you wouldn’t mind,” frigidly. Tanselle said, “Oh, excuse us, I’m so sorry,” and took the tickets from him. The two of them hurried off so the rest of the queue, all much more richly dressed, might check their furs, brushed wools, so forth.
The hallway connecting the check to the main gallery was an enclosed spiral staircase, illuminated with brass filigree lanterns. Canary yellow drapes, lushly embroidered with black roses, served as door.
“I don’t believe you,” Tanselle whispered, not cruelly. “You’re embarrassed and I don’t know why. I only want to say that I’m sorry about your hand.”
He shook his head, hung it some so he might look at his feet. “No. I shouldn’t have lied. It was stupid of me.”
“And don’t say you’re stupid,” Tanselle said. “Now lift your chin and remember: it’s an open bar.”
A laugh startled out of Dunk. He said, “The last thing your lady needs is Flea Bottom trash drunk in her gallery.” They passed through the drapes with Tanselle saying, “No, the last thing she needs is Dornish trash,” so they giggled together like children.
The third floor of the gallery sported an open plan design, so pedestals and walls might rise and fall in accordance with the needs of an exhibit. Honeycombed white walls, arranged as hedge maze, separated groups of pedestals from each other and from large standing sculptures. Electric bulbs hid in unique glassworks, positioned so as to cast long or layered shadows.
Dunk wandered along the outskirts of the show with Tanselle, looking at the artist portraits and biographies wrapped about the outside walls. Tanselle tucked her arm through Dunk’s arm again. Her elbow pinched his forearm.
Fahmy, Tanselle: on the wall an elegant semi-candid of she, sunlight a friend lighting the turn of her cheek, the soft tip of her nose. She held his arm tightly to her side. Looking at Tanselle side-long, at her silver geese and the darkness of her braided hair, Dunk cupped her hand in his own.
She nodded answer to the unspoken you all right? First wobbling, then certainly; and Tanselle drew in a deep breath and let it eke between her teeth. She squeezed his hand.
“Do you mind if I take a moment?”
“Nah,” said Dunk. “I don’t mind. You know, might have left my wallet in my coat.”
She gave his hand another grateful squeeze. He left her there, long and lovely in blue, poised beneath a green glass sculpture of a shell lit from within. Idly Dunk wandered about the outside walls the way they’d come, looking closer at a few of the portraits and dodging the few finely dressed patrons interested in those who’d made the art.
He scratched at his sore finger. Tanselle of the black lashes. Tanselle, wiping the plaster from her long and slender fingers. Sighing some, he shook the itch from his hand. Then to the coat check with Dunk, so he wouldn’t prove a liar twice over. Cooler air might clear his head, too.
He shouldered through the drapes. Doors to a lift, half-hid in the wall, closed on a trio of beautifully dressed Tyrosi, their outrageously dyed hair unmistakable. Dunk looked in astonishment on the careful patterning of the doors, making it so the lift was all but unnoticeable with the doors closed.
“Reach architects do so love their clever tricks,” said a man waiting a foot away at the desk. “I say they just want the rest of us caught on the back foot. Easier to—” He made a quick gesture, as if twisting a blade, generally, at the lift. “Stab a man if he’s off his balance.”
Dunk, still boggled by the disguised lift, said, “You don’t look stabbed,” and then stood staring. The man blinked shockingly brown eyes up at Dunk. He’d pretty lashes and dark brows, and his eyelids had shiny copper paint rubbed across them. A carefully groomed beard made a jutting point at his chin. He smelled apricot-seed bitter. All the skin at Dunk’s nape turned over with goose pimples.
“Warrior’s teats,” said the man, eyes flicking across Dunk. “Do you think slouching will stop anyone from stabbing you?”
“Sorry, ser,” said Dunk.
“Why are you apologizing to me? I’ve hardly.” He made that knifing gesture again, toward Dunk’s waist. Stupidly, Dunk sucked his belly in.
They both paused, Dunk reddening, the man tipping his head slowly back as though he thought he might pin Dunk to the walls with his eyes, as a collector might a rare specimen of moth. An earring of small copper plates chimed as it swung at his neck. He was dressed in a tight mustard yellow vest atop a billowing sleeved woman’s blouse, black as his high-waisted straight leg trousers. The man’s shoulders rolled like those of a big cat.
Still very stupid, Dunk said, “D’you need the clerk?”
“Are you the clerk?”
“No,” said Dunk.
“Then I don’t need the clerk,” said the man, flicking his limp fingers at Dunk and looking away.
What? thought Dunk. He made to go.
“And where are you going,” said the man. “Are those the manners your mother taught you in the crib?”
“I don’t have a mother,” said Dunk. Even as he said it he felt the scowl rising in him, at his own foolishness.
Silence gripped them. Dunk had the hope he might turn and discover Tanselle at the drapes, come to save him.
“Who,” said the man slowly, relishing each word it seemed to Dunk, “the fuck are you?”
Dunk said, “My friend,” and jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Begging your pardon.” He fled as the clerk at last returned from the mysteries of the coat closet.
The man said, marveling, “You dewy cunt,” and then the clerk had him and Dunk was halfway up the stairs, praying helplessly with every step that the man was leaving rather than arriving, and that fewer people would look Dunk over from shoe to crown. Enough Tanselle had given him a once-over. He’d no need for strange men to pick at him. Under the bitter the man had smelled of marzipan, chilled.
He found Tanselle a number of turns into the constructed maze. The walls did not truly stand as a maze, as each ring had a number of cut-outs allowing entry to the next ring in or out, but the honeycombing of the walls made for disoriented sightlines.
Her head lifted from consideration of a bust: a woman, classically sculpted from Tarth marble, with enameled hair. Tanselle smiled at him. An odd tension low in his thighs eased. Dunk tapped his head to one side.
Tanselle said, “Much better. Did you find your wallet?”
“Ah, yeah,” said Dunk. He cleared his throat and ran two fingers down his tie, unfashionably wide. “Um. So where’s yours at?”
Tanselle led him in another, smaller ring and along a leftward curve. Other artists displayed worked with metal, stones, even ephemeral materials such as paper and hard candy. Tanselle worked in emulation of her uncle, she’d once said: wire skeletons jointing carved wood. She used driftwood, preferably from the southern coast of Dorne, and polishes and paints to illustrate along the wood.
Her sculpture occupied a lone pedestal. Although he hadn’t watched Tanselle work on this piece, he had the idea he’d seen it before. A slender torso stood atop the pedestal: the suggestion of a back, turned at the shoulder. An arm, out-stretched but crooked at the elbow. The wood rose in imitation of a neck, with a half-realized jaw cut off raggedly at the throat.
“Natural dyes instead of paints.” Tanselle had folded her hands neatly together at her waist. Her elbows hitched on her hips. “Walnut, pomegranate. I cheated with the indigo.”
With color she’d spotlighted the muscle groups, emphasizing curves and hollows in the driftwood. Dunk paced about it. He never knew how to speak of art. It put a lump in his throat. At a museum he might look on a painting knowing he didn’t understand it but feeling as if the brush had his skin in the bristles and the artist were pulling him into the art.
Tanselle’s sculptures made him feel that way. Overcome, wondering like a boy. He stood a step to Tanselle’s right and looked at that broken chin raised high, the slope of the narrow shoulders.
“It’s Rafe,” he said, surprised.
“You can tell that?” Tanselle said, as surprised.
“Well, yeah, ‘course I can,” said Dunk. “That’s my sister.”
Tanselle hummed. She would not look at him, only gazed at her sculpture of Rafe caught in a typical Rafe-ish gesture. Dunk took another step to the right, and another, so that he might look at both the sculpture and Tanselle in one go.
The brush caught its hairs in his chest. He felt it drag a long and terrible stroke up through his throat and his back, between the shoulder blades gone stiff. Nothing at all occurred to Dunk. He only knew something he hadn’t known before.
The orange blossom sweetness of her fragrance sharpened in his mouth. He swallowed the melancholy. “Suppose I see why you asked Rafe.”
Tanselle scoffed, but she touched her elaborate braids to reassure. “She couldn’t come. It really isn’t anything important.”
Dunk wandered to her side again. Gently, he nudged her with his elbow. “If you told her. She’d have come.”
“Why? I haven’t anything to tell her. I haven’t,” she stressed. “Please. Just let’s not.”
He offered his hands, palms up to the ceiling. Thank you, she mouthed; and she held his hand in her long fingers with the tidy nails, painted silver and scattering light as she clasped his palm. Prettier even than the day they had met, within the children’s theatre: she Jonquil upon the stage in white crepe crown and polyester-satin gown, Dunk a fool hired as usher for the season. How lucky to watch, even if someone else awaited her in the wings.
The center of the sprawling third floor space was reserved for the dinner: seven large, round tables, six arranged about the seventh, honored, at which Lady Alerie Hewett and her noblest guests arrived with meandering dignity.
Duncan sat at the inside of one of the tables, at a place named for RAFE BLACKWATER. Taking the name card between thumb and finger, Dunk showed it to Tanselle. She grimaced.
“I’m sorry. Lady Alerie had them printed ages ago.”
He had meant for Tanselle to laugh. “Don’t you worry about it,” said Dunk. “I only thought it funny. Imagine me, Rafe. Probably best she’s short.”
Tanselle did laugh then, quietly and into her glass of water. She snatched the name card from his hand and bent to her clutch, looking for the fountain pen she always carried on her person.
Pleased, Dunk looked about the room. Soon the speeches would begin and then, thank gods, the meal, although it was never a proper supper at these sorts of things.
His eyes caught on a flash of dusky red-gold: the man from the coat check, now sporting a pinch-waisted jacket with architecturally angled shoulders. He shook hands with Lady Alerie’s escort. The lighting showed clearest here at the maze’s heart, not shadowed as at the coat check or strange amidst the art. So lit, the man’s black curls had a lick of grey in them. They, the curls, twisted about a thin, hammered copper diadem with an odd repeating pattern. Like antlers, Dunk thought, or thorns locked together.
It occurred to him he stared when the man, grinning at something or other a man in Highgarden colors had said, turned and caught Dunk at it. Dunk’s head snapped about. He glared unseeing at the place setting.
“There,” said Tanselle. She set the name card, turned inside out, at the back of his plate. DUNCAN ARLANSSON, she’d written in her looping hand. He touched his thumb to it. The ink, a deep marine blue, smeared across the O.
Now was Dunk grimacing. The place setting had a black napkin folded on the plate, in the shape of a rose, for to unfold and use to wipe his thumb. The rose, so crisp, he hated to pull apart. All the other napkin-roses were pristine, but Dunk had a napkin he could not possibly refold and so he went ahead and laid it across his lap.
The speeches started shortly after. The usual prattle; he gave it little mind. If Tanselle clapped, he clapped, and when Lady Alerie spoke briefly of Tanselle’s work as creative assistant he clapped all the louder, so much so that Tanselle nudged him.
“She ought to say something about your art,” he muttered to Tanselle, and she nudged him once more, albeit fondly.
A wistfulness stole over Dunk, looking at Tanselle looking in turn at Lady Alerie. The fine crimped black hairs at her nape caught light, held it dearly so she glowed. He swallowed through the lump again, and he glanced at Lady Alerie to pretend at alertness.
The man was sat at the honored table. Not tidily: he leaned back in his chair as Lady Alerie spoke, with his right arm cast out along the back of the chair beside him. No plus one. In near profile, he looked stronger somehow. Square-jawed, the line of his nose clean unlike Dunk’s twice-broken snout.
Dunk took a pull from his water glass. The last speech, he contemplated the napkin in his lap. Then the catered dinner.
As he’d thought: meager portions. He could never quite understand how it was the wealthy could spend so much money on so little food. A light appetizer of green beans roasted in olive oil, lemon, and with slivered almonds accompanied a chilled leek-and-cream soup served in a small bowl.
The main course followed. The venison medallion, seared rare in a red wine sauce with blackberries, tasted lovely and took three bites. Five mushrooms in a garlic-cream sauce; a handsome green pepper stuffed with thyme, minced onion, cheese.
A short man with a pleasant square face and a sheep’s head of hair said, “Hungry?” to Dunk, from a chair over.
“I’m all right.”
“Here, I don’t care for venison.” He leaned over the red-haired woman seated between the man and Dunk with the plate.
The woman said, “Raymun,” and swatted at him; and Dunk took the plate because he knew not what else to do.
Tanselle said, “Finish this pepper for me,” and plucked the whole pepper from her plate to drop on Raymun’s, which was now Dunk’s. She treated the three of them to her most enigmatic smile.
“I’m vegetarian,” said the fellow by way of explanation. “And you look like you could eat a few deer by yourself.”
“This bull is Raymun,” said the red-haired woman with another light swat at him. It turned, sinuously, into an embrace, her hand rising up his shoulder and then across his back. “I’m Rowan.”
“My lady wife, so to speak,” said Raymun cheerily. “Raymun and Rowan Fossaway. And you two are…”
“I’m Tanselle.” They both leaned over the table to shake hands, Raymun and Tanselle, he short and she tall. “And this is my friend. Duncan.”
“Dunk,” he said, reflexively. Rowan’s pretty eyebrows made crescents. She sipped politely at her wine.
“Dunk!” said Raymun. “Well, that’s a name!” But he said it in such a way that Dunk couldn’t mind.
Rowan, done assessing Dunk, looked to Tanselle. “You’re Lady Alerie’s assistant. You made that lovely sculpture, of a woman’s torso.”
Tanselle ducked her chin, pleased, then straightened. “I entered a blind contest. No nepotism.”
“I wouldn’t presume. And even if t’were I couldn’t blame a soul,” said Rowan. “Not without my hair catching fire.”
“Bit of a ginger joke,” said Raymun sotto-voce to Dunk.
He wanted to press Rowan about it, to reassure Tanselle she’d every right to her spot; but Tanselle had caught something in Rowan’s words, a joking tone or other. Often to Dunk it were as though everyone else knew another, secret language he did not.
Raymun said to Dunk, “You know, they never serve the right proportions of food at these things.”
“Oh, so you’re the point of contact with Costayne!” said Tanselle to Rowan.
They all chattered over one another a mo’ and then Rowan tapped Dunk on the arm and said, “Be a dear and swap seats with me. Less shouting.”
“Who’s shouting?” protested Raymun. “She is right, though. She usually is. How long have you two been together?” he asked once everyone had settled into their new place.
“We’re,” said Dunk, “that’s not. It isn’t. No.”
Raymun said, “No, my mistake.”
“Not to say that I. Uh.”
“Always running my mouth, I am!”
Tanselle and Rowan were talking animatedly with one another, the only spot of grace given Dunk. He and Raymun sat each looking at the plate Dunk had stacked on top of his own plate.
Then Raymun said, “You seen that statue of a bloke with a pile of grapes for a cock?” and Dunk said, “Yeah, what was that about?” and Raymun said, “Meant to be commentary most like but you’d think they could have left his balls out of it,” and everything after that went easily.
Dunk finished Tanselle and Raymun’s meals. Someone else across the table passed him their mushrooms.
“I can’t eat fungi,” she said. “Fungi form root networks in the soil that resemble the human brain.”
“That’s interesting,” said Dunk.
“It’s disgusting,” she said. He ate the mushrooms.
At some crucial hour the bar opened. Tanselle tasked Dunk with fetching a tumbler of Felwood whiskey, and he added a glass of sparkling white wine, “imported from Lys at great cost,” claimed the bartender.
The milling about the gallery part of the evening resumed. Several times Dunk heard a man laughing in a way that carried. He would turn, as anyone would at that loudness, and always he saw the man from the coat check grinning, teeth a white slash, entertaining a small group of people. The groups changed. His laugh never did.
A particularly striking trio of plaster-cast statues drew attention.
“Herreck of Harlaw. The island,” said Tanselle to Dunk, who had looked once at the trio and said only, “What?”
“He’s a challenging artist,” said Raymun affably.
The statues were of anonymous human figures with exaggerated sexual organs, each physically sculpted as if mid-coitus. The artist had painted lurid pop-art illustrations of copulating persons, and beasts, mythical and real, and among these panels of evisceration and things rotting, things drowned.
“Challenging’s one way to say it,” said Dunk.
Raymun went on: “His commentary on the Harlaw sold for nearly a million dragons.”
“Nine hundred eighty thousand,” said Rowan.
“Mind like the king’s vault, this one.”
“Did you?” questioned Tanselle of Rowan. She nodded, and Tanselle sighed. “I never did get through to Wynch. Even Lady Alerie couldn’t.”
Said Rowan, “I have my ways,” and winked audaciously so that Tanselle smiled despite what melancholy clung to her.
Dunk, still looking at the statues, each trapped in a private struggle with pleasure, said, “It’s interesting,” as he hadn’t about the mushrooms: in earnest. “I don’t know that I get it but.”
At his back the man said, “Did you know the Iron Islands still criminalize sodomy?” All their heads turned. He flashed a crooked smile; his eyes lidded. “Sodomy of course including, oh. A man with the Maiden’s blessing using his snatch. Or a woman with the Warrior’s fathering a child.”
Raymun shook his head. “It’s barbarism.”
“The Reach only de-criminalized it ten years ago,” said Rowan.
“Aye,” argued Raymun, “but not prosecuted in a hundred.”
The man made eye contact with Dunk. Reachmen, he mouthed. He gave Dunk a wink even as Dunk tried to decide whether to look away or to smile. The man pivoted to Tanselle.
“Well done, Miss Fahmy. Lady Alerie credits you for that delightful set from the Summer Isles.”
Tanselle ducked her head. “Thank you, Ser Durrandon, but really, it’s all just knowing someone who knows someone.”
“Alerie insists she won’t hire you out. Shame.”
The corner of Tanselle’s mouth tucked. She said, “I really don’t see how a columnist needs an assistant,” in her usual measured way of speaking, so it hardly raised insult. Dunk braced.
The man, Durrandon, flicked his hand. “Oh, every person suckling off the teat of a trust fund needs an assistant. ‘Portrait’ is exciting,” he said to her, as Dunk was relaxing the muscles in his back. “But not your first exhibited piece?”
Tanselle said, “No, and thank you. I haven’t too many opportunities yet.”
Dunk turned to her. He wished he weren’t still so aware of Durrandon, a glimmering copper line interrupting the periphery. “You’re really good, Tanselle. You ought to be showing more.”
“Your man has the right of it,” said Durrandon breezily. “Surely you’ll have all the galleries cooing at your feet by next year. Lyonel Durrandon.”
He offered his hand to the lot of them, but as a proper lady might: a languid hand, drooped from the wrist, the back presented. Raymun laughed and played up the awkwardness, turning his hand palm up to grasp. Rowan pressed her fingers to his. Tanselle had a patient look; plainly she knew of Durrandon, his amusements.
The hair on his wrist was heavy and black, where it peeked out from the cuff. His fingers were long, the knuckles like blocks and haired too. That faint licorice and almond smell was on him. He smiled catlike at Dunk.
Dunk took his hand. He turned their hands together, so they were shaking properly. Lyonel allowed him. His smile deepened. The man’s palm was dry and long, like his fingers; these held Dunk in place for a breath, a strange breath. That was long, too.
“Um,” said Dunk. “Duncan. Arlansson.”
“Which, dear?” His thumb trailed slowly over the round of Dunk's thumb, the flesh at the base.
A flush stroked his neck. He said, “Dunk.”
“That’s ridiculous,” said Durrandon.
“Sorry.”
“No, it’s all right. Duncan, was it? Or Ser Arlansson?”
“Gods, no,” said Dunk, his skin creeping. “Dunk is. I mean, Duncan. Ser Durrandon.”
“Lyonel,” said Lyonel. His dark gaze flittered. Dunk had his hand yet clasped in his own, but when he made to drop it, Lyonel tightened his own grip and leaned nearer. “The Seven above made you tall, if you can credit Them for anything. Be tall, Ser Duncan, or I’ll have you branded.”
He pushed away from Dunk and let him go. “Alerie, my dear. Wherever did you find Miss Fahmy? Tell me or I shall have to write a very disparaging account of the evening.”
Lady Alerie Hewett had a towering mound of silver-grey hair cossetted and teased atop her head. “Durrandon, you old hart, a lady never dispels her mystery. And I won’t have you stealing the best assistant I’ve known. Tanselle, don’t listen to a word this man says.”
Everyone was laughing, or at least Durrandon and Hewett were laughing. Tanselle had on her mellow laugh, the one she used for events, and Rowan a delicate tinkle Dunk thought as much a shield. Raymun looked attentive but when Dunk glanced at him, Raymun gave him a rueful half a grin. You and I, eh, said the grin; and Dunk, his own mouth stiff, tipped his head as if to say sure.
The truth was he felt as if he stood on the outside of all of them. Even knowing as he did that Tanselle put on a face for Lady Alerie, how it wore on Tanselle the faux-chummy proprietary way in which the lady treated her: but that made him feel as if he were even further outside.
Dunk touched Tanselle’s elbow. Her earrings flashed and danced. “Sorry,” he said, soft. “Need some air. You want another drink?”
“No, I’m all right,” she murmured. “Go in one row then walk left. There’s a door, you’ll see.”
He nodded to her and said something or other to Raymun. Then he headed as she’d directed through the milling patrons, all so beautifully dressed. The lights in their bespoke glass sculptures made an alien dream of every thing.
The promised door opened to a bay of glass windows looking over the back of the property. Recessed overhead lighting illuminated the makeshift hallway without extravagance. Here in winter the sun had well-set. Night coated this stretch of King’s Landing, the park out back of stiff evergreen pine black beneath the thin yellow pall of light pollution. Car lights flickered further out, and then rose the great steel edifices demarcating the skyline.
He pressed his forehead to the cold glass. He wished Rafe were there. He wished he weren’t. Idiot, thought Dunk. “You only need to be here for her,” he said to the window. What manner of friend he to think so of his own misery? His face burned hotly. Any child could play-act. Egg hunted for reasons to play at being someone else.
Selfish: Dunk would that the restaurant had scheduled him this eve. He could take orders and serve plates and keep an eye on Daeron that he didn’t drink himself silly. Egg would try out voices on the phone for the take-out orders, till his aunt Cleria scolded him for it.
“Are you a craven?” he asked his reflection. He studied his own face. A washed out creature looked back at him. Something worse than a craven. He turned his back to it.
The bar was three mobile carts, draped in elegant Costayne colors, and manned by two young and glowing servers. I’m not like them, he wanted to say to the bartenders: I’m like you, I take the jobs I get. He said, “Can I, er. Two of the Felwood whiskeys. Yeah. Thanks,” and tucked a folded ten stag bill into the fellow’s hand.
“Hey, cheers!”
“Yeah, right, thanks again, mate.”
He wound his way through the exhibits, nursing one of the whiskeys. The liquor bit his tongue. Smoky, that was the word people used for whiskeys if they liked them; and they would say things like oaky, aged, call them peaty or nutty or malted. He’d liked the Lysian wine. Sweet it was and bright.
And here stood Tanselle again, tall and gleaming in blues before a statue in the traditional Northern milieu. She listened attentive to Lady Alerie but she hadn’t bent to the woman, no matter how the top of Alerie’s elaborately piled hair only just cleared Tanselle’s shoulder. Something of how Dunk stood caught Tanselle’s eye. With a little economical motion, she shifted her head so she might meet his gaze. She shared the most delicate crook of her mouth. It dimpled her cheek. You and I, again. He wanted it so dearly his chest ached.
He saluted her with his whiskey and showed her the second tumbler. Her nose wrinkled. She shook her head minutely. The goose winked.
Around and around, that evening. Few people spoke with him, though plenty noted his height. The usual double-take, each time. None so crudely as Lyonel at the coat-check. Thinking of the man he looked about for him; but Durrandon had gone off somewhere, or else the movements of the soiree led them in opposing circulation. Dunk set an empty tumbler upon a tray, carried by a caterer feting pastries hardly larger than Dunk’s thumbnail.
Looking at a paper sculpture, Dunk scratched idly at his palm with that thumbnail. He thought again of the man’s wrist. The cuff of his pinched jacket, and beneath, that black blouse with the swelling sleeves. The thick hairs. He wore extravagant rings of gold and dark stone. For an absurd moment when Lyonel offered his hand, Dunk had thought he ought to kiss the hair-dusted knuckles.
Heat spidered up his nape. He couldn’t say as to why the man lingered on him. Well built, but rangier in the hip, and but a handful of inches the shorter. Wealthy, pushy. How he’d spoken to Dunk and then to Tanselle. Dunk’s belly was heavy as lead.
He made his thoughts turn to Tanselle. Thinking of Tanselle, he thought of Rafe. Melancholy washed over him. He curled his toes against it. Like a shadow, or a forlorn dog, he trailed Tanselle as she performed for guests, for her boss. Now was she the artist. Now, the assistant.
The hours lengthened and then contracted. Guests in glittering fitted clothing trickled from the floor. Wine glasses, abandoned, sat on plinths in the lee of sculptures. Lady Alerie traded her gossamer smile and laugh for a business-like demeanour. Gallery staff hovered at the edges, beginning to clean.
Dunk touched Tanselle’s elbow. “Need any help?”
“No, no,” she said absently. She was craning about looking for someone else amongst the honeycombed walls. “It’s only cleaning, once we’ve scared off the stragglers. Where is Margaert? Really.”
“Could help clean.”
She settled on her heels. That nose-crinkling smile, she turned on him. His throat lumped.
“Oh, Dunk. No, you’ve been lovely.” Tanselle rose, only slightly, to press a chaste kiss to his jaw. “Thank you so for coming. I know it was short notice, and…”
He said, “I’m only sorry I’m not Rafe,” meaning it, and without bitterness. He hoped without bitterness.
Her eyes were always so clear. Just then, a cloud crossed them. A gentling of her manner made heavier the solemn, wistful weight on his shoulders. She said, “Thank you for coming, Dunk.” Ghost-like she touched his jaw, on the other side from the kiss.
Dunk cleared his throat. He shifted his weight to his back foot, and her fingers fell. He said, “So I’ll see you?”
“Of course,” said Tanselle.
They bid each other a good night. Tanselle would take a ride with Raymun and Rowan to her apartment, as it was en route to their own flat. Raymun was like to ask for Dunk’s number; would he mind? Not at all. Raymun seemed a friendly sort. Tanselle ought to be mindful of the ice in her heels. Oh, has Dunk navigated King’s Landing in heels in winter often?
This semblance of normalcy settled around him. He carried it with him as he descended the spiraling staircase, slow and with his hands in his trouser pockets, thinking. Drink made softer the world, or at least this moment in the world, the moment in which he lived flowing into the next from the one before. All the strange and gleaming lights of the gallery lingered in his eyes.
At the check he collected his coat. A pair of elegant older women shared a laugh in the glass-fronted lobby. The lobby’s lights were golden-bright and startling in contrast with the gentler lighting of the stairs, the gallery. They made a black wall of the glass.
He shrugged into his coat. The women gave him a dismissive once-over. Dunk nodded his head to them, feeling: not ashamed, but tired in the worn elbows of his coat, the threads fraying on either side of the rumpled zipper. He ducked his chin and pushed out into the cold night.
Not so cold as he’d expected. The evening had warmed as it progressed. No doubt t’was still harshly winter, certainly his breath still misted when he exhaled surprise; but when he thought of the meanness of the earlier day, this was a welcome warmth.
As he crossed the path to the gate, following the steps down the terraces, the wind picked up out of the building’s guarding bulk. Dunk shivered; there was the cold. Two figures by the gate coalesced out of the shadows. One was the guard posted at the gate to allow guests out. The other, stood on the sidewalk outside the gate, he could not define. Smoke trailed in a familiar haze; the stranger had a cigarette, lit.
Then he was through the gate and the man was Lyonel Durrandon in a cream yellow coat nipped at the waist and trimmed with mounds of black fur at the neck. Durrandon glanced at Dunk. The cigarette dangled from his bare hand. A red ember smoked lazily.
As a desk toy, Dunk bobbed his head at the man. Durrandon was placid, observant. At the nod, he quirked a thick eyebrow. Faint lines creased his forehead. The corner of his mouth dimpled. It rumpled his upper lip, peeled the lip from his teeth.
“Thought you’d be, oh, cleaning glasses and lending your noble arm to Miss Fahmy,” drawled Lyonel.
Unthinking, Dunk said, “She doesn’t need me.” He flushed. Hitching his shoulders near his ears, he pushed south along the sidewalk towards the station, blocks away.
A litany of small sounds: the whispered drag on a cigarette, the exhalation of smoke. Around them bit the little wind, cold off the bay. Then footsteps, crisp, as Lyonel followed, drew even. Dunk turned just so at the waist, looking.
“Car park,” the man explained and wafted his hand, trailing smoke, about height with his own waist. The wind snatched at it, drew it away. He sauntered as he walked, untouched by the cold and his curling hair tumbling each step.
Dunk grunted. He hurried on. A hook had sunk in his belly. A line tethered him.
Lyonel kept pace with him. He was tall, his brow even with Dunk’s nose. Even without the heel to his boots he wouldn’t stand much shorter than Dunk. The line in Dunk’s belly coiled tighter, tightest yet when Lyonel tipped his head back and exhaled a column of purple-dark smoke. Caught on the wind, it brushed clove-sweet across Dunk’s lips.
He stopped abruptly, before the opening to an alley. Lyonel continued three steps then half-pivoted on a heel to look, amused, ever amused, at Dunk. He’d the cigarette pinched between two fingers. As Dunk watched, Lyonel raised it to his mouth; pink tongue flashed; he sucked at it again and sighed out smoke, blown now sidelong so Lyonel was obscured from the streetlights.
Car park, the man had said. He was an idiot to question. All evening you’ve followed me around, thought Dunk, and thought too of toddling in Tanselle’s wake wanting for: what? More, too much.
“What is it you want from me?” asked Dunk, more plaintive than angry.
The smoke had billowed off. Lyonel’s brows arched. His black lashes were fanned widely. He stared at Duncan as if he, Dunk, had picked his own head from his shoulders and punted it across the street. Dunk’s breath came quickly. The ends of his ears were numbing, but in his face he felt the heat of his flushing.
Lyonel said, “You really don’t know,” in tones of wonder.
“No, I don’t.” Dunk set his jaw. “And I’d appreciate if you’d say so, and if not, just leave me be.”
With the streetlights picking out amber and honey in his eyes, Lyonel looked unblinkingly at Dunk. He fondled the cigarette between his fingers again. Then he took one last drag, a long pull that made Dunk’s neck burn. He dropped the cigarette to the sidewalk, to crush under his toe. It rasped noisily.
“Mm. Be a shame to just leave,” said Lyonel, intimately. “No, I’m afraid you’ve misunderstood me. I don’t want anything from you. Although I shouldn’t say no to reciprocation.”
Embarrassed of how red he’d gone, Dunk said, “Reciprocation of what.”
“I won’t shame you for saying no,” said Lyonel. “Well. Not much. And anyway we’re not likely to meet again.”
“Lyonel,” said Dunk, exasperated.
Lyonel smiled that cat in the cream smile, lean and heavy-lidded under the sodium light. Dark beard so neatly tended, his arching throat was clean-shaven: a golden column. He said, “I’d like to suck your cock.”
If the air weren’t so dry that eve, he might have choked on spit. But in the gallery Dunk had drunk more of that fizzing Lysene wine than he ought have, those two tumblers of whiskey. His tongue just sat there, dry. He blinked twice, thrice, and then pointed at himself.
Lyonel’s face lit with laughter. “Who else? You absurd creature. I’ve spent the last two hours dancing with you, and you, what? What is it? Didn’t notice?”
Dunk said, “I noticed,” and hunched his shoulders at how his voice sounded, all low and burnt. A heat clung to his thighs. He shifted his weight against it.
“Fuck me,” said Lyonel, still glimmering on the edge of a laugh. “Did you really think I meant to stab you?”
“No,” he admitted. “Just thought you wanted to. You know. Laugh at me.”
Lyonel’s smile lingered, but he grew not solemn, perhaps pensive. Looking at Dunk, still, with his eyes dark and his lashes darker, falling like mist to his cheeks then rising again.
“It was kindly meant. But I see now you’re of a delicate kind.” He touched Dunk’s sleeve as Duncan made to put his back to Lyonel. “No, no, that wasn’t mocking. I mean it, truly. There’s no shame to be had in wanting a gentle touch.”
“Just don’t understand why you’d.” He clamped his jaw shut, lest he say another word to reveal him a fool without compare.
Lyonel’s fingers cupped Dunk at the elbow. They wandered, picking like spiders, about the joint. Lyonel stroked his forearm once, longly, with all the length of his fingers. His palm hesitated warmly, not ever pressing to Dunk.
“Say no, and I’ll, what was it you said? Leave you be. Or else say yes,” murmured Lyonel, nearing, his fingertips tracing the back of Dunk’s gloved hand, “and I’ll show you.”
Dunk licked his lips. No spit in his mouth, no mercy to the motion. Only Lyonel lowering his gleaming eyelids again.
“Show me what, exactly,” ventured Dunk.
The smile spread honey-like across Lyonel’s mouth. He said, “That would be telling,” and inclined his head toward the alley.