“My feet could only improve the taste, ser,” Egg said, wriggling his toes. But he did as he was bid.

The hedge knights did not prove hard to find. Egg spied their fire flickering in the woods along the lakeshore, so they made for it, leading the animals behind them. The boy carried Dunk’s helm beneath one arm, sloshing with each step he took. By then the sun was a red memory in the west. Before long the trees opened up, and they found themselves in what must once have been a weirwood grove. Only a ring of white stumps and a tangle of bone-pale roots remained to show where the trees had stood, when the children of the forest ruled in Westeros.

Amongst the weirwood stumps, they found two men squatting near a cook fire, passing a skin of wine from hand to hand. Their horses were cropping at the grass beyond the grove, and they had stacked their arms and armor in neat piles. A much younger man sat apart from the other two, his back against a chestnut tree. “Well met, sers,” Dunk called out in a cheerful voice. It was never wise to take armed men unawares. “I am called Ser Duncan the Tall. The lad is Egg. May we share your fire?”

A stout man of middling years rose to greet them, garbed in tattered finery. Flamboyant ginger whiskers framed his face. “Well met, Ser Duncan. You are a large one…and most welcome, certainly, as is your lad. Egg, was it? What sort of name is that, pray?”

“A short one, ser.” Egg knew better than to admit that Egg was short for Aegon. Not to men he did not know.

“Indeed. What happened to your hair?”

Rootworms, Dunk thought. Tell him it was rootworms, boy. That was the safest story, the tale they told most often…though sometimes Egg took it in his head to play some childish game. “I shaved it off, ser. I mean to stay shaven until I earn my spurs.”