SOMETHING WICKED IN THE WATER
m.list
#SYNOPSIS. Ser Duncan discovers something lurking beneath a quiet lake, expecting a large water beast — he instead finds himself strangely enamored with an odd, merling creature
#CHARACTERS. Ser Duncan The Tall, Aegon Targaryen
#WARNING(S). Dark romance
The lake had no name on any map Dunk had ever seen, and he had seen precious few maps in his life. It was simply there, nestled between two low hills like a secret the land had been keeping to itself, the surface so still it looked like hammered tin in the fading afternoon light.
Egg had spotted it from the road and declared they were stopping, which Dunk could not rightly argue against given that the boy had mud caked into his hair from a fall three days prior that neither of them had fully managed to wash out. So the horses were tied to a low branch, Egg was told to sit and stay, and Dunk waded in alone.
The cold hit him at the knees first and he nearly turned back, but the heat of the day had settled deep into his skin the way it did after long hours on the road — sitting in it, sweating through it, wearing it like a second gambeson — and the cold was a relief against that, sharp and clean and good in the way that simple things were good.
He went deeper. It crept up his thighs, his stomach, his chest, and he exhaled long and slow as it swallowed the heat whole, the ache in his shoulders loosening by degrees, the dust and sweat of three weeks on the road lifting off him like something he had not realized he was still carrying.
He stood there chest deep with his eyes closed and his head tipped back and the last of the sun warm on his face, the rest of him cold and grateful for it. It was the closest thing to peace he had felt in some time. He might have stayed like that a good while longer, if not for the sound that did not belong to any bird he had ever known.
He turned his head by degrees, water shifting around his chest with the movement, and scanned the far bank where the light was thinner and the reeds grew tall and tangled at the water's edge. Nothing. Just the stillness of the lake and the distant sound of Egg sulking on the bank behind him, kicking his heels against a tree root the way the boy did when he had been told to stay put and disagreed with the instruction.
His brow creased. He looked down at the water and saw nothing but his own submerged hands. The ripples spread outward from where he stood, each one breaking against his chest like a whisper. Then — a glint. Silver beneath the surface, quick as a blade caught in sunlight, darting just fast enough to leave the water smooth and undisturbed behind it. He leaned forward slightly, squinting.
It was pale and luminous, catching what little light filtered down through the water and giving it back tenfold, the way he imagined pearls did, though he had never been close enough to one to know for certain.
He had heard of pearls. Ser Arlan had described them once — small and perfectly round and worth more than a hedge knight would see in a lifetime of riding — but Dunk had never been close enough to a wealthy enough person to know if the description was true.
He reached down anyway, slow and careful, fingers closing around something small and smooth against the lake bed. He brought it up. Held it in his palm. It was no bigger than his thumbnail, sitting in the cup of his big scarred hand like it had no business being there, which it didn't. He turned it in the light. It gleamed the way expensive things gleamed — bewitching
How could something so small be so costly? He could not understand why they cost what they did. It was small enough to lose between the floorboards. Small enough to swallow by accident. And yet Ser Arlan had once told him a single pearl could buy a decent horse, and Dunk had filed that information away in the part of his mind reserved for things that were true and also deeply unfair.
Pretty, he thought, in the simple honest way he thought most things. Just a pretty little thing.
He was still turning it over in his palm, watching it catch the last of the light, when the water in front of him moved. He looked up.
A pair of eyes watched him from just above the surface. Big eyes and very still, the way deep water was still, unblinking and level with the waterline so that he could see nothing else — just eyes, and above them a crown of silky shair spreading across the surface like seafoam. They watched him with an expression he could not name and did not have time to try to name because his brain had already arrived at the relevant information.
A woman
There was a woman in front of him
The color left his face so fast he felt it go.
"I—" he started, and immediately spun around so his back was to her, which achieved very little given that he was chest deep in water and had nothing on his person that would help matters. His hands moved uselessly. He was a very large man and there was nowhere to put himself. "I didn't — I beg your pardon, my lady, I didn't know — I'm not — I wouldn't have—" He pressed a hand over his face, “ Seven hells. I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I'm — I'm an idiot, I'm thick as a stump, I didn't see you, I swear it on my honor, I didn't—"
He was still facing the opposite bank, one hand over his face, the pearl clutched in the other, the back of his neck burning red in a way that had nothing to do with the sun. He could hear the water moving behind him. Small sounds. Close.
"I'm sorry," he said again, to the reeds, “ I'm — I beg your pardon. Truly. I didn't know anyone was — I wouldn't have — I'm not—" He stopped. Tried again. "My name is Dunk—Ser Duncan the Tall. I'm a knight." He said it the way he always said it when he didn't know what else to say, like it was an answer to a question he hadn't quite heard. "I'm honorable. I want you to know that—“
He stood there with his hand over his face and the pearl biting into his palm and the water very quiet behind him and then — something touched the back of his shoulder. Two fingers. Light as anything. He went rigid from his heels to the base of his skull.
He turned around.
She was right there, close enough that he took a short involuntary step back and found the lake bed uneven under his foot and lurched, arms out, and very nearly went under entirely. He found his footing. Barely. He straightened up to his full height with as much dignity as the situation allowed, which was not a great deal, and looked at her face and kept his eyes there and did not look anywhere else because he was Ser Duncan the Tall and he was honorable and Ser Arlan had not raised a fool—
The first thing Dunk registered was how small she was. She barely came up to his chest—no, not his chest, because he was standing in water up to his chest, and she was—oh gods, she was there, entirely unclothed, the water lapping just below the gentle swell of her breasts, the pale curves of them catching the last amber light of the setting sun. Droplets clung to her skin, sliding slow and lazy down the slope of one nipple, dark pink and peaked from the chill of the water. His throat clicked when he swallowed.
She tilted her head, watching him watch her, her smile curling wider at the corners of her mouth. That was when he saw them—sharp little points of white just barely pressing into her lower lip.
Ser Arlan had raised a fool.
He looked at her face. Just her face. He was looking at her face.
He became aware that his mouth was open again.
He closed it.
Heat rose up his neck in a slow, merciless climb, flooding beneath his skin until even his ears burned. It felt near as scalding as the forge fires he had once stood too close to as a squire — only there was no stepping back from this. The flush spread across his cheeks, dark and unmistakable against wind-roughened skin that had known sun and steel but not this.
His mouth had gone dry.
Gods, it was dry.
He swallowed and found nothing there but the thick scrape of his own throat, as though the lake had stolen every drop of moisture from him and left him standing stupid and parched in the shallows. His tongue felt too large, clumsy against his teeth.
His eyes — traitors that they were — had gone wide as a boy’s.
Dunk tried very hard to remember how men behaved around maidens. Proper maidens. Maidens who wore pretty dresses and had pretty things and did not bathe naked in lakes.
He was fairly certain it involved being proper—
Not staring as though he had been struck over the head with a mace.
His heart had begun beating in a heavy, uneven rhythm against his ribs, each thud loud in his own ears. He attempted to square his shoulders — a knight’s posture, steady and respectable — but the water lapped treacherously at his chest, reminding him in no uncertain terms that he was bare as the day he was born.
Seven hells
A maiden — even a bold one — would have shrieked by now. Thrown her hands over herself. Splashed backward in outrage. Called down curses or brothers or both.
He did not know whether he ought to be grateful she was not screaming and summoning half the countryside — or deeply troubled that she was not.
Gods
She was beautiful
The fairest maiden he had ever laid eyes on. And Dunk had seen pretty women in his travels — at fairs, at inns, in castle yards bright with banners and silk. He had thought some of them lovely in their way.
None of them could compare to her.
No candle could match that sort of light.
Dunk had never been a man much sought after by the gentler sex. For all his efforts to speak softly and move carefully, he was still enormous — broad as a door, scarred, looming without meaning to. He knew he could be intimidating. No matter how small he tried to make himself, how mindful of his size, few maidens ever approached him.
He had grown used to that.
But she did not look afraid.
She did not look as though he frightened her at all.
It was only then, in his gawking, that he noticed the rest of her. Pearls threaded through all that silver-white hair in long draping strings, dozens of them, pale and luminous and worth more than everything he owned twice over.
And something else — a veil of sorts, so fine he could see straight through it, the kind of fabric so delicate he didn't know what to call it or how it had been made, held together by tiny pearls knotted throughout like stars in a pale sky, floating on the surface of the water around her. And at the center of her forehead, hanging from a single thread, a teardrop pearl that rested between her brows.
He looked down at the single pearl sitting in his open palm.
It looked very small suddenly.
"Did you drop this?"
He held the pearl out toward her on his open palm and kept his eyes fixed somewhere around her forehead, at the little teardrop pearl hanging there, which was a safe place to look and did not require him to look at anything else. His arm was very straight. He was holding it out at full extension, as if the extra few inches of distance would help matters, which it did not.
"I found it," he said. "On the lake bed. I thought — I didn't know it was — I wasn't trying to take it." He could hear himself talking and could not seem to stop, "I'm not a thief. I want you to know that as well. Honorable, like I said. I'm — if it's yours you should have it back”
She looked at his outstretched hand
She looked at his face
He was doing his very best. He was keeping his eyes on her forehead and his arm straight and his face was still doing the burning thing regardless. He was not a man of the nobility. He could never be. He had grown up in the streets of Flea Bottom where nobody had the luxury of modesty and he had spent his years since on the road.
Sleeping under hedges and eating what he could find, and the sum total of his experience with women of any kind was limited to innkeepers' wives who called him love when they handed him his supper and serving girls who refilled his ale without looking at him.
She looked at his outstretched hand for a long moment.
Then she reached out and gently, with two fingers, folded his hand closed around the pearl.
Dunk stared at his own fist.
He looked up.
She was smiling again. That small sharp smile with the points of her teeth just barely visible and her eyes bright and pleased and her head tilted.
His hand was still warm where her fingers had touched it. He stood there holding the pearl in a closed fist and trying to work out what to do next when he made the mistake of opening his hand again.
"I really think it might be yours," he said earnestly, and held it out a second time.
The smile dropped.
It did not fade. It did not fall slowly the way smiles usually fell. It simply stopped, like a candle pinched out, and what replaced it was something else entirely. Her ears — he had not looked closely at her ears before, had been very deliberately not looking at anything closely — spread outward and fanned wide, long and fin-like, spreading like the sails of a ship catching a sudden wind.
Her lips pulled back. All the way back. And there were her teeth — not just the two small sharp points he had glimpsed before but a full row of them, jagged and irregular and overlapping slightly.
She was not smiling
She was very much not smiling
A sound came from her — though he couldn't believe such a sound could come from a lady — it was low, clicking and sharp, like a warning felt against his bones, and she had drawn herself up in the water in a way that made her seem larger than she was, her eyes gone dark and flat.
The droplets of water cascading down her skin where glittering scales were much more prominent now, catching the last of the light like armor, like something that had always been there beneath the surface of her skin waiting for exactly this moment to make itself known.
They ran along her collarbones, down her shoulders, trailing into the water where he could only imagine they continued, and they were beautiful and terrible in equal measure the way a drawn blade was beautiful and terrible.
He was, he reflected dimly, an enormous fool.