Read The Mystery Knight for Free Online Page A

Knighthood required more
than chivalry and skill at arms; it required horse and sword and armor too, and
all of that was costly. “Watch your tongue,” he told Egg before he left him in
that company. “These are grown men; they won’t take kindly to your insolence.
Sit and eat and listen, might be you’ll learn some things.”
     
    For his own part, Dunk was just
glad to be out of the hot sun, with a wine cup before him and a chance to fill
his belly. Even a hedge knight grows weary of chewing every bite of food for
half an hour. Down here below the salt, the fare would be more plain than
fancy, but there would be no lack of it. Below the salt was good enough for
Dunk.
     
    But peasant’s pride is lordling’s
shame, the old man used to say. “This cannot be my proper place,” Ser Glendon
Ball told the understeward hotly. He had donned a clean doublet for the feast,
a handsome old garment with gold lace at the cuffs and collar and the red
chevron and white plates of House Ball sewn across the chest. “Do you know who
my father was?”
     
    “A noble knight and mighty lord,
I have no doubt,” said the understeward, “but the same is true of many here.
Please take your seat or take your leave, ser. It is all the same to me.”
     
    In the end, the boy took his
place below the salt with the rest of them, his mouth sullen. The long white
hall was filling up as more knights crowded onto the benches. The crowd was
larger than Dunk had anticipated, and from the looks of it, some of the guests
had come a very long way. He and Egg had not been around so many lords and
knights since Ashford Meadow, and there was no way to guess who else might turn
up next. We should have stayed out in the hedges, sleeping under trees. If I
am recognized...
     
    When a serving man placed a loaf
of black bread on the cloth in front of each of them, Dunk was grateful for the
distraction. He sawed the loaf open lengthwise, hollowed out the bottom half
for a trencher, and ate the top. It was stale, but compared with his salt beef,
it was custard. At least it did not have to be soaked in ale or milk or water
to make it soft enough to chew.
     
    “Ser Duncan, you appear to be
attracting a deal of attention,” Ser Maynard Plumm observed as Lord Vyrwel and
his party went parading past them toward places of high honor at the top of the
hall. “Those girls up on the dais cannot seem to take their eyes off you. I’ll
wager they have never seen a man so big. Even seated, you are half a head
taller than any man in the hall.”
     
    Dunk hunched his shoulders. He
was used to being stared at, but that did not mean he liked it. “Let them
look.”
     
    “That’s the Old Ox down there
beneath the dais,” Ser Maynard said. “They call him a huge man, but seems to me
his belly is the biggest thing about him. You’re a bloody giant next to him.”
     
    “Indeed, ser,” said one of their
companions on the bench, a sallow man, saturnine, clad in grey and green. His
eyes were small and shrewd, set close together beneath thin arching brows. A
neat black beard framed his mouth, to make up for his receding hair. “In such a
field as this, your size alone should make you one of the most formidable
competitors.”
     
    “I had heard the Brute of Bracken
might be coming,” said another man, farther down the bench.
     
    “I think not,” said the man in
green and grey. “This is only a bit of jousting to celebrate His Lordship’s
nuptials. A tilt in the yard to mark the tilt between the sheets. Hardly worth
the bother for the likes of Otho Bracken.” Ser Kyle the Cat took a drink of
wine. “I’ll wager my lord of Butterwell does not take the field either. He will
cheer on his champions from his lord’s box in the shade.” “Then he’ll see his
champions fall,” boasted Ser Glendon Ball, “and in the end, he’ll hand his egg
to me.”
     
    “Ser Glendon is the son of
Fireball,” Ser Kyle explained to the new man. “Might we have the honor of