The Hedge Knight — Dunk VII
Night. Tanselle's puppet dragon offends the Bright Flame, and he breaks her fingers for it. Dunk hears the scream, knocks a prince of the blood into the dirt — and a hooded stableboy cries out that he is Aegon Targaryen.
The chapter retold
Night, and the hinge the whole saga turns on. Aerion finds Tanselle's puppet show, takes offense that a wooden dragon should die to a wooden hero, and breaks the girl's fingers one by one to punish the insult. Dunk hears her scream — and does the single most reckless and most decent thing a landless nobody can do: he hauls a prince of the blood out of the crowd and beats him into the dirt.
The reckoning is instant and total. In the chaos Egg's hood is pulled back and the stableboy is revealed as Aegon Targaryen, Aerion's own younger brother, and Dunk is seized and dragged off to a cell to await a king's justice for the crime of striking a dragon. The saga's warmest friendship and its first catastrophe arrive in the same breath — the truth of who Egg is, spilled at the exact moment it can least help the man who took him in.
This movement: The Tourney
- The champions hold the field; the Laughing Storm's bellow rolls over the meadow; Prince Baelor watches everything and says little.
- Aerion Brightflame, unhorsed fair by Ser Humfrey Hardyng, kills the champion's horse with a deliberate lance and leaves him broken beneath it.
- By torchlight the Bright Flame finds the puppet show, decides a wooden dragon is treason, and breaks Tanselle's fingers.
- A hedge knight of no name beats a prince of the blood into the mud — and the stableboy's hood falls back on Aegon Targaryen's shaved head.