Word comes north that the tales of Ser Duncan the Tall and his squire have been brought to the mummers' stage. Their first season, six chapters in length, told The Hedge Knight — the story of the great tourney at Ashford Meadow, held in the two-hundred-and-ninth year after Aegon's Conquest, in an age when the memory of dragons had not yet faded from living recollection.
It is a smaller tale than the wars of kings, and the better for it. A landless hedge knight of humble birth, a boy who is more than he seems, a lists-field, and a question of simple justice that swells into a trial of seven — from such modest cloth the histories weave one of their quietest turning points. Ashford is remembered not for who won the joust but for the great prince lost there, and for the crook it put in the line of succession. Those who know the tale know why it matters; those who do not have a rare pleasure ahead of them.
The mummers, it seems, were confident before a single chapter aired: the second season was commissioned ahead of the first's debut, and their players took the field in the last moon of the year past. This next telling will follow The Sworn Sword, set some year and a half later in the Reach, where Dunk and Egg take service at a modest holdfast and find that even a dry summer stream can water a war. The mummers aim to unveil it in the year after next.
If the tale has caught you, the Chronicle bids you go to the source. The Tales of Dunk and Egg are the gentlest doorway into Martin's Westeros — three novellas that ask no knowledge of kings or dragons, only a fondness for two unlikely companions on the road. Our reading order will set you on the path, whether you begin with Dunk and Egg or fold them into the greater song.