S1┬ÀE3 ÔÇö The Lists
The hour retold
The tourney opens in splendor and turns, within the hour, into the hinge the whole tale swings on. The champions hold the field and the Laughing Storm's bellow rolls over the meadow, until Ser Humfrey Hardyng unhorses Aerion Brightflame cleanly ÔÇö and Aerion answers a fair fall with a lance driven through the neck of Hardyng's horse, leaving a champion crushed and broken-legged beneath the dying animal. It is the episode's thesis about the Bright Flame stated in blood: a man who believes he is a dragon wearing human skin, and who treats every slight as a burning.
Night brings the moment Dunk spends the rest of his life measuring himself against. Aerion finds Tanselle's puppet show, takes offense at a wooden dragon dying to a wooden hero, and breaks the girl's fingers one by one ÔÇö and Dunk, hearing her scream, does the single most reckless and most decent thing available to a landless nobody: he knocks a prince of the blood into the dirt and kicks the pride out of him. The reckoning is immediate. Egg's hood falls back to reveal Aegon Targaryen, Aerion's own brother, and Dunk is dragged to a cell to await a king's justice for the crime of striking a dragon in defense of a puppeteer.
What happens
- The tourney opens in splendor: the five champions hold the field against all comers, and the Laughing Storm's bellow rolls over the meadow.
- Ser Humfrey Hardyng unhorses Aerion Brightflame ÔÇö and Aerion's answer is a lance through his horse's neck, leaving Hardyng broken-legged under a dying animal.
- That night Aerion finds the puppet show: the wooden dragon offends the Bright Flame, and he breaks Tanselle's fingers for it.
- Dunk hears her scream ÔÇö and a hedge knight of no name knocks a prince of the blood into the dirt and kicks the pride out of him.
- Egg's hood falls back. The stableboy is Aegon Targaryen, Aerion's own brother ÔÇö and Dunk is dragged to a cell to wait on the king's justice.