The Mystery Knight was originally published in 2010, some seven years after the first appearance of The Sworn Sword. I think I would have liked the third Dunk and Egg novella a bit more if the gap between them in my reading had been, if not quite the full seven years, more than the week or so that it was in practice. The Mystery Knight is a perfectly cromulent adventure story in Martin’s Westeros with some moments of lovely storytelling, but reading all three novellas close together struck me as a less enjoyable experience than reading them with considerable separation would have been. This is not Martin’s fault, exactly; he wrote them as opportunity, time and inspiration arose. That meant that he wrote them years apart. The publisher, sensibly, has collected them into a single volume so that readers don’t have to hunt down three small books.

The problem for me was that things that should be rare occurrences keep happening. In the first novella, Martin reveals that Egg is more than just a stable boy with a completist fan’s knowledge of the heraldry of the Seven Kingdoms. At the end of The Hedge Knight he is given an item that will prove his true identity, but he is commanded not to reveal it except under the most pressing of circumstances. Dunk knows his secret as well. In one of the few ways that Egg shows typical behavior of a pre-adolescent boy, he suggests “using his boot” on regular basis. The problem is that he does in fact use it in both of the novellas set in the time after he receives it. If there were half a dozen more Dunk and Egg stories where the two of them escaped from scrapes without resorting to this last resort, then its use really would carry weight because readers would be aware of how dire the situation had become. But when Martin is two for two in calling up what is supposedly an emergency escape, the impression he creates is that it’s not such a big deal.

Likewise with trial by combat. In Westerosi culture, trials by combat are theoretically available as a way for the gods to settle the disputes of humans. In Martin’s descriptions of how the Seven Kingdoms work, they are rare compared to judgements rendered by lords within the feudal hierarchy, or other court procedures. They figure in the resolution of all three Dunk and Egg novellas. There’s nothing wrong with invoking an ancient right to solve a problem, and a battle for high stakes can certainly make for tension-filled storytelling. When it keeps happening, though, it’s no longer a surprise. This was probably more of a problem for me, reading the third novella some seven days after the second, than it was for Martin, writing seven years later. Other readers may want to take a bit of a break between stories so that the twists and turns appear to have more novelty.

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