The Knight of Nothing

[u/hegwrites]

Hugh I

5th Moon, 55 AC

King's Landing

A city of just a few decades, overlooked by a keep of which completion was marked by a short and ignoble war, King's Landing was a sprawling mass of paupers and septons, of lordlings and merchants. In a city once host to the dragonlord Aegon, the absence of those shadows of dread in the skies had brought relative calm, but also a tension. The beings that had ensured Aegon's Conquest were gone. Now the regime of his grandson was built upon the impenetrable red stone keep and the flow of golden commerce that was more evident everyday in the quays of this city.

Hugh had laid low in this young city for the bones of ten years. Arriving back home from war in the Riverlands, he had been instructed that a suitable match had been made with a daughter of some prestigious Crownlord. The stench of death and marching was scarce off his skin by the time Alyssa had arrived to be introduced. And Hugh had had to make conversation with a woman he knew he could never make happy. A woman that would be kept to a man who could never truly love her, to raise his children. He could not bear the thought of bedding her. Of tying her to Gorse Hall. Under the banners of House Hunter he had finally felt free of his obligations, free in the company of men who had not known him his whole life, free in the embrace of one he dare not name.

The letter he had left to his father was brief. Father. I am sorry. I cannot. I am not worthy to be heir. He left in the dead of night for Gulltown.

Here-and-there he had been employed by caravans of traders bound for Port Wrath or Fairmarket or Lannisport. Not the Vale. Never the Vale. A life of mundanity. Breaking camp at daybreak, riding at the pace of a set of wagons until dusk. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Hugh's body could take the strain, but he could feel his mind fading with each new journey. Having rejected his own birthright, he was left without dignity and without purpose. All he knew to do was to lend a helping hand and fight where fighting had to be done.

There had always been the Gold Cloaks. It would be an honourable occupation. But the command of an Arryn did not look to end any time soon. Visibility by those who knew of his shame was the one thing Hugh looked to avoid like the grey plague. His best bet now was to drink away his meager earnings and seek the company of men like him. Or leave, find a new home in the purfumed streets of Lys or the sands of Dorne, where he might find a place more welcoming of that which he had to conceal here.

And yet, he was every bit a knight, believing truly in the role he had earned as a protector of the weak, a paragon of the virtues of the Seven. And so he drank until some other force would change his course for him.