BRIENNE
Her room was small and practical and adjacent to Lady Sansa's, with a door between them that she had propped open on a wedge of wood the first night and had not closed since. This was not standard arrangement for a sworn sword. It was Brienne's arrangement, which she had made without asking, on the belief that it was easier to apologise for a precaution than to explain to the Prince why one had not been taken.
Brienne woke before dawn, as she had always woken, and dressed in the dark by habit, her mail over the padded undershirt, sword belt strapped and her boots worked tight.
The sounds from the adjacent room told her Lady Sansa was still sleeping. The direwolf was not however. Brienne could hear the soft rhythmic sound of the wolf's breathing, awake and aware, a sound she had learned to distinguish from sleep within the first two days on the road. Lady tracked her movement through the open door and returned to stillness when she registered who it was. They had developed an understanding, the wolf and her.
Brienne sat in her chair by the window and watched the sky lighten over the city of kings and thought, as she thought most mornings, about what she needed to do today.
The answer was the same. Be there. Watch. Anticipate.
The maids arrived with the washing water at the second hour, four of them, familiar with their work and with each other. They moved around Lady Sansa with the practiced efficiency of servants who had been dressing little highborn girls since they were old enough to be trusted with the task — unbraiding, washing, combing, selecting, adjusting — all the while Lady Sansa sat very still in the way she had developed and was still developing to match the image of the queen she hoped to become. She was getting better at it every day.
Brienne stood at the door and watched the room without appearing to watch it, which was a skill she had spent years developing and which most people assumed she did not possess on the belief that a large, ugly woman could not ever be subtle.
"What are your plans for today, my lady?" Brienne asked, when the maids had finished and were gathering their things.
"Septa Mordane first," Lady Sansa said, examining her reflection in the polished glass, her hand on the prince's necklace. "An hour of lessons. Then I'm to have tea with Lady Desmera in the gardens." She caught Brienne's eyes in the glass. "Lord Paxter's daughter. Joffrey thought we would get along."
"I'll come," Brienne said at once.
"Of course you will." But Lady Sansa smiled when she said it, which meant she did not mind.
The gardens of the Red Keep were pleasant in the morning hours before the heat of the day settled over the city. Brienne had grown up on Tarth, where the sea wind came in off the water and even summer had a clean quality to it that King's Landing had not managed to replicate, but the gardens were the nearest thing to tolerable she had found — green and orderly, smelling of roses and turned earth, with the sounds of the city muffled by the walls.
They arrived before Lady Desmera. Lady Sansa arranged herself on the bench with the unconscious elegance that spoke of hours of practice. Lady settled at her feet, the servants brought out the refreshments, and Brienne took her position three paces back and to the left and became, as much as a woman of her size could become, part of the background.
She did not mind the background. She had spent most of her life in it, one way or another.
She thought, as she sometimes thought when she had nothing else to occupy the watching part of her mind, about the Tarth feast.
The king's court had come on progress through the Stormlands three years past. The court had been making many progresses, at the crown Prince's behest it was whispered, but few would have thought to make a stop on Tarth.
Lord Selwyn had gladly hosted them in the hall at Evenfall with no expense spared. The best food, the best wine, the best music, every servant and household knight turned out and presentable, her father's face wearing the careful pride that told all he had never dreamed of hosting a king and hoped that this would be enough.
Brienne had worn a dress. She seldom did, but the king and his family were gracing their halls, and as such she was given no other option. Donning a dress was always accompanied by a period of being looked at, and being looked at was always accompanied by the particular quality of attention that her face and her height and the breadth of her shoulders attracted.
Brienne had learned to read that attention very precisely over the years. She could distinguish between the fleeting and genuine surprise, the cruelty dressed as teasing, and the simple pity that she found, if anything, worse than the other two. She had expected these responses.
She had not expected the prince.
He had been eleven years old, shining in the torchlight, with a courtesy so total and so unforced that she had not known what to do with it initially. She had been fourteen, in a dress that she hated and a body she despised.
The king's son had asked her to dance. She had explained that she was perhaps not the most accomplished dancer, which was an accurate if incomplete assessment of the situation, and he had said that was all right, he would lead and she could follow, which she did, and they had managed a creditable turn around the hall without incident, and when it was over he had bowed to her and spoke the words that had stuck to her all this time.
You are truly beautiful, my lady
She had thought he was surely mocking her. The face she turned on him must have shown it, because he looked up at her with those gold eyes and said, simply:
"I mean it. They might not see it." He had gestured to everyone gathered around the hall. "All that matters is that you do, and that you know I do as well."
She had not known what to say. She still didn't know what she had said in response to that.
The next morning in the yard he had sparred with her. He had asked to, which she had thought might be the joke behind the compliment — make the large ugly girl dance, then make her look foolish in the yard when you found out she trained with the sword. But he had been serious, and skilled, and when they had finished and she had matched him point for point, being careful not to bruise a prince of the realm, the prince had stood with his hands on his knees catching his breath.
Brienne thought he would have been annoyed that his plan had failed and that he had not been able to disarm a woman, but she had thought wrong.
Instead Joffrey favoured her with a sweet smile and kind words. "You're incredible. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise."
"T-thank you, my prince." Brienne stuttered out.
He simply shook his head. "I believe you would make a great knight, my lady. May I write to you? Perhaps we can exchange tips?"
Of course she had agreed.
The prince had given her hope and kindness so easily it felt like she was drowning. The maid of Tarth had carried those words for three years, and every time a letter came, no matter the contents her heart was fit to bursting.
Lady Desmera Redwyne had finally arrived with her brother Hobber walking a few paces behind, a pleasant-faced young man who had the easy manner of someone who had been at court many a time before and was comfortable here.
He took up a position at a diplomatic distance that suggested he had been briefed on his role — present enough to satisfy propriety, absent enough to allow his sister an actual conversation.
"My lady Sansa," Lady Desmera said, with a curtsy that was graceful without being obsequious. She was perhaps fifteen, with the Redwyne auburn hair, freckles beyond count and the sharp observant eyes of a family that had been trading wine for generations and had learned to read people the way maesters read ledgers. "It is good to finally meet you properly. Hobber has been talking at length about Prince Joffrey's betrothed since the announcement."
"I have not! Don't lie to the lady." Hobber noted from his diplomatic distance.
"You said she was so beautiful you'd be willing to give up your sword," Desmera teased."Which is high praise from Hobber."
Lady Sansa laughed, and Lady Desmera smiled, and something settled between them with the ease of two people discovering they are going to get along.
Brienne watched. This was her work here today. Not the sword, not yet, but the watching. Learning which faces turned toward Lady Sansa with genuine warmth and which with the performance of it. Lady Desmera's warmth appeared genuine, but that did not make it so.
"My brother Horas is in the yard," Desmera said. "He mentioned the prince was training this morning."
"He trains every morning," Sansa noted, she almost swooned. "Sometimes he trains in the evenings as well."
The two ladies spoke of how life was like in the reach and the north, how it felt to be surrounded by so many brothers. Their favourite colours, foods, dresses. They giggled at how stupid and pigheaded boys could be to Hobbers displeasure. Eventually their talk turned to court.
Desmera talked about court with the fluency of someone who had been here before. She spoke about the singers, the mummers, the particular social geography of the Red Keep and how it shifted depending on who was in favour and who was not. She spoke about what Lady Sansa should expect — which ladies would be warm, which would be performing warmth for other reasons, which lords' wives were worth knowing and which were best admired from across a room.
"There have been whispers about the betrothal for years," Desmera said, with directness, having decided that plain speech was more useful than delicacy in this case. "Even so, it didn't stop lords from trying. My father brought me to court twice before this, hoping for me to turn prince's head." She smoothed her skirt. "He still hopes, I think. I told him the betrothal was settled but fathers hear what they wish to hear."
"And what do you think?" Lady Sansa asked carefully, sipping her tea.
"I think—" Desmera paused, deciding how much honesty was appropriate. "I think I would not mind marrying him of course. Not only for the crown. I have spent time at court. I have seen how he manages things. Every visit I have been treated well." She looked at Lady Sansa directly and sighed forlornly. "He would be a good husband, I believe. A fair one. You are a fortunate woman, my lady."
In another life, Brienne thought wistfully, before she could help herself.
She stopped the thought there. She was good at stopping those thoughts. In another life, in a story, in the kind of tale that did not exist anywhere outside of books, a girl like her might sit across from a prince who said you are truly beautiful and I believe in you and that might mean something other than courtesy extended to a lord's daughter on a royal progress. But this was not that story. Brienne was large and plain and the daughter of a minor lord, and the prince had a betrothed who was genuinely beautiful and kind and who loved him with her whole heart, which was the right order of things.
She was here. She was at his court. She protected his future wife.
It had to be enough. It was more than she had expected, and Brienne knew she must be grateful.
"Then if it is not the prince, has your father decided on your hand?" The prince's betrothed asked.
"Some years ago there was talk of Tarly." Redwyne explained.
"The Lord steward? Samwell?" Sansa asked.
"The very same." Desmera nodded. "He used to quite… plump." They shared a giggle. "He's not so bad on the eyes now, but after what my brothers did to him…" Hobber coughed and turned his face away.
"In any case, my father has not expressly said anything. In his eyes, until you and the prince are wedded, there is still an opportunity. Betrothals can be broken. But even so, he forgets about Margery." Said Desmera.
Sansa took a bite of a lemon cake. "I take it you mean Margery Tyrell?"
Desmera nodded. "Some still whisper that she ought to have been betrothed to the prince instead of— forgive me, my lady, I'm not saying—"
"No, it's quite all right," Lady Sansa said. She was practising her composure, and it was holding. "I've heard the whispers. What is she like, do you know?"
"I know a little." Desmera considered. "She's like her brother, but softer. The same quality of being comfortable in every room, but where Ser Loras wears it like armour she wears it like a gown. People want to please her. Even people who know that they're being charmed." A slight pause. "She would have been a formidable queen."
No doubt she thought so as well, Brienne thought.
"I am curious to meet her," Lady Sansa said after a time.
"You will," Desmera said. "The Tyrells are not the sort to stay away."
Joffrey arrived with Ser Jon at his shoulder and Ser Loras a step behind, and Horas Redwyne materialising from wherever he had been keeping himself, all of them with the slightly windswept look of men who have been in the yard. They were talking as they walked, laughing at something or other, their camaraderie on display for all to see.
The prince's eyes found Lady Sansa first, as they always did, and the shift in his expression was small, but Brienne had learned to note changes big and small.
"My ladies," The prince said, with a slight bow. "I see the two of you have found each other."
"We have, your grace," Desmera said, rising with a curtsy and a smile that was entirely genuine and entirely complicated simultaneously. "Lady Sansa is a wonderful conversationalist."
"She is, at that." Joffrey said. He looked at Lady Sansa. "Would you like to see the city?"
Lady Sansa's face lit with delight before she caught it and tried to keep it composed. "I would like that very much, my prince."
He turned to Desmera with an expression that was genuinely apologetic. "Forgive me — I should have arranged this better, but I had planned to show her the city when we arrived." He looked at the nobles gathered around him. "We shall all go together another time, I promise."
"Of course, your grace." Desmera's voice was gracious and meant it, whatever else she felt. "We have time enough."
They encountered Grand Maester Pycelle in the corridor near the great hall, shuffling in the direction of his chambers. He stopped when he saw the prince, came close and whispered something in his ear, Brienne could not make out the words. Joffrey listened, nodded once, and the maester shuffled on.
The prince fell back into step. His expression had not changed, but something in it had become slightly more settled, if that was possible.
"We'll stop at the Street of Steel at some point," he said to Lady Sansa, as they came out into the yard. "I want to commission something for you."
Lady Sansa looked at him, blue eyes swirling with curiosity. "What kind of something?"
"A dagger, my lady."
She blinked. "I have Lady. And Brienne."
"Both of which are excellent," Joffrey agreed. "And I intend to keep you so well protected that you never need anything else. But a blade can be life, if everything else goes wrong." He softened slightly. "Besides, I wanted it to be from me. I could have given you anything from the armoury, but I figured another true gift was in order."
Lady Sansa looked at the dagger at his own hip with the attention she gave to everything that was his. "Was that a gift?"
He drew it smoothly and held it out, flat across his palm. Brienne's eyes went to it at once. The blade had the faint rippled quality of folded steel, the dark and distinctive sheen of something that was not ordinary metal. Her breath caught slightly.
Valyrian steel. She was certain of it. She had seen Valyrian steel twice before — once at a tournament, Lord Randyll carried it on his back for all to see and once at Evenfall, a small knife her father kept in a locked case and never used. She would not have forgotten that colour.
"It was a gift from my father." The prince announced softly. "Come, my lady. The litter is waiting."
The litter took them all throughout the city of kings. They were escorted by a mix of Baratheon and Lannister men at arms, with Ser Boros and Ser Jon riding out in front, his white direwolf at his side.They did their best to keep the small folk who were too excited away.
The lady Sansa had been all smiles throughout, listening as her betrothed spoke of each street and the history of it, or as he made observations on the people they passed by.
A dwarf on stilts was making is way through the crowd, insulting those gathered as he when. There were children screaming, running, laughing. A mummer was enacting some play, farmers were stationed on the side of the street bellowing out their wares and their prices which seemed to change from one moment to the next.
When they arrived, Tobho Mott's shop on the Street of Steel smelled of coal and hot metal and the particular sharp scent of quenched iron.
Mott was a master of his craft. You could see it in the economy of his hands, and in the works littered up and down the shop. When Tobho came out to greet them, the smile on his face was warm and lacked the surprise one would expect when finding a prince at one's door.
"Your grace." A low bow. "An honour as always."
"The usual quality, my good man." Joffrey told him, and described what he wanted. The blade, the weight, the length appropriate for a lady's hand. "The pommel should be a blue winter rose. The best you can make."
Mott nodded, making note of the specifications. "Three weeks, your grace. Perhaps four."
"Three is better." Not a demand. Just an honest preference.
"Three, then." Mott smiled slightly. He looked at Lady Sansa with the assessing eye of a craftsman estimating a commission. "It will suit her."
The prince had moved over to observe one of Mott's helms.
"How is the boy?" Joffrey asked, when he looked up. His tone was different though something softer, quieter.
"Doing well," Mott said, with a slight emphasis on the word well that conveyed more than the word itself. "The riverlands suit him. The smith he is apprenticed to says that he has a natural gift."
Joffrey nodded once. He did not ask another question and Mott offered no more detail, and they went out into the street, and Brienne stored the exchange away.
The orphanage was the last stop of the afternoon, tucked into a side street near the edge of Flea Bottom in a building that had been a storehouse once and had been converted with more care and funds than its neighbourhood suggested it should have received.
The woman who ran it came to the door before they had finished knocking, which meant she had been watching for them — she was perhaps fifty, with the wiry competence that suggested she had been doing this work most of her life.
The children darted out after her with screams of;
Joffrey! The prince! It's the prince!
There were perhaps thirty of them, ranging from very small to nearly grown, and their welcome for the prince was not performed and not trained. They came forward in a rush without caution or care.
The crown prince crouched down and talked to them, asking about their day, if they had eaten, if anyone was sick, if anyone new had arrived. A Lannister man of arms came forward with sweets and pasteries to much cheering.
Brienne was watching the children, some of them were getting closer than she'd like to her lady but she judged it to just be idle curiosity. Joffrey can alone most times it seemed and he had likely never brought a lady with him.
Sansa seemed to in enjoy the attention, a few girls were asking how she did her hair.
Joffrey had made some of the children around him laugh, and it was in that moment when she saw and heard it. A queer gurgling sound.
Not all of them, but a few. Scattered through the group — younger ones, mostly, though not entirely. Their shoulders shook. Their mouths moved, and that queer gurgle came out instead of laughter. When one of them opened their mouth Brienne felt her stomach drop, there was a stump where the tongue should have been.
Lady Sansa had seen it too. Brienne heard the small sound she made, involuntary, and saw one hand move toward Lady's head as the other covered her mouth.
"Why…" Lady Sansa said quietly, to the prince, looking as if she were about to cry, when they moved to the side.
Joffrey's face had something in it that she had not seen there before. Not anger, it was colder than that. "I have my suspicions," his voice was low when he spoke. "I shall deal with it soon."
He spoke to the caretaker for several minutes, asking about supplies, about what they needed, about whether the arrangements he had made and what he'd brought today were sufficient. The caretaker said they were, with a gratitude that had clearly been there for years. He listened to her with the full attention he gave everything, and when they left he was quiet for a time.
Brienne could think of no reason for anyone to remove the tongues of children so young. But Brienne could not think of any reason for why people did many things they did either. She could only hope the prince would handle it as he seemed intent on doing.
"Will you dine with me tonight my lady?" The prince asked, once they had returned to the castle.
Her lady blinked, her mind still on the orphanage and the children. "Of course, my prince. I beg you allow me a moment to change clothes."
Joffrey nodded, using a hand to help her from the litter. "As you wish, my lady. Join me when you're ready."
The solar was warm when they arrived for dinner, a fire already built and burning, and his grace was at the hearth, stoking the flames. He looked up when they entered and smiled at Lady Sansa, and she smiled back in the particular way she smiled at him—carefree and happy. Brienne took her position and did her best not to watch them.
She watched the room, the door, the window, to give them some semblance of true privacy.
Brienne let her eyes rest on the fire for a moment.
There was something in there apart from the logs. From where she stood it seemed a thick tome. What remained of the cover was curled and blackened at the edges, but legible enough that she could make out, in the fading light of the fire, the remnants of a title pressed into the leather.
…Lineag… and …stories of t… Great Houses of…
The rest was ash.
She looked at it for a moment. She looked at the prince, who was pouring wine for Lady Sansa and saying something that made her laugh, taking her mind a way from the somber end to their trip, with his back entirely to the fire. Then she looked back at the flames.
This was not her puzzle to solve. She was a sword, not a cipher. Her work was the door and the window and the room, and the woman sitting across from the prince laughing at whatever he had said, the woman who was going to be a queen and who deserved to get there safely.
She looked at them together — the golden prince and the auburn-haired girl he was going to marry, the fire warm behind them, the city outside the window settling down for the night with its secrets and whispers.
She was here. She had been believed in by someone worth being believed in, and she had been given a purpose that was real and a charge who was worth protecting, and she was part of something that mattered.
It was more than she had once thought she would have. It was enough.
She settled into her chair, her hand near her sword hilt out of habit, and watched the door, and the window, and the room.
She did not look at the fire again.
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DDragonman
DDragonman
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Jun 10, 2026
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DAENERYS
The Mother of Mountains rose behind Vaes Dothrak like a promise made in stone. Dany had grown used to looking at it. After weeks on the Dothraki sea with nothing above them but the sky, she had thought a mountain might feel like a wall, something that enclosed and pressed down. Instead she found it steadying. It was simply there, as it had been there for ten thousand years before she came and would be there for ten thousand after she was gone, indifferent and permanent and enormous. On the days when the khalasar pressed her in too close, when Viserys's moods were darkest and the smells of the camp thickest and her body ached from the riding, she would look at the mountain and think of all it had seen.
It has seen worse than this. It has seen everything. It endures.
Dany had become certain that she might endure aswell.
It surprised her, this thought. It was nothing she would have believed three moons past, when she had wept on her silver the night of her wedding, with her brother's fingers digging into her leg and the eyes of the whole khalasar on her. That girl felt very far away now, and Dany was not entirely sure she missed her.
Ser Jorah rode at her left. Viserys had been at her right for the first part of the morning, but he had fallen back— not far enough back to be out of sight, which would have been a mercy, but far enough that Dany could pretend not to hear him muttering.
His cheek had mostly healed. The cut she had given him with the medallion belt had been deep enough to leave a mark, and he touched the ridge of it sometimes when he did not know anyone was watching, as if offended that it would dare scar and mar his perfect skin.
Dany had not apologised. She found she was not sorry.
"You are quiet this morning, Khaleesi," Ser Jorah Mormont said.
"I was thinking about the mountain," she said.
He looked at it. He had the look of a man who had seen it many times and was trying to see it as she did, through fresh eyes, and finding he couldn't quite manage it. "It is larger than it seems from a distance," he offered.
"Most things are," she said.
They rode in silence for a time. Dany had wanted to stretch her legs and in a few moons time it would be ill advised for her to ride her silver.
The godsway stretched ahead of them, lined with its plundered gods and stolen heroes, stone kings watching them pass with eyes that had been looking at riders for a thousand years. A headless colossus rose on her left — she had heard the Dothraki call it a gift from the city of Qohor, taken when the city fell — its broken neck pointing at the sky. She always looked away from the headless ones.
She heard hooves behind her quickening, and glanced back to find Viserys pushing his horse forward unsteadily. He was in a foul temper even for him, his thin face tight with the particular fury that came from the awareness of being mocked without being truly certain enough to know and with no clear way to respond to it.
The Dothraki who had seen him walking had not forgotten, no matter that he'd now been allowed a horse again. She could hear the whispers as they passed. Khal Rhaggat. The Cart King.
Her brother rode up beside her and said nothing for a moment, which meant he was deciding how to begin.
"How long," he said, "do you imagine your horse lord intends to keep me waiting?"
Dany kept her eyes on the road. It was always the same question. "The Khal will honour his promise in his own time."
"His own time," Viserys repeated softly, his face tightening in fury. "In his own time. Yes. Very good. And the Seven Kingdoms can wait, and the Usurper can sit fat and comfortable on my father's throne, and I can ride in a cart like a cripple and eat horsemeat and sleep in the grass, all in his own time!"
Ser Jorah's face did not change. He had learned not to let it, in Viserys's presence, not to let his disdain show. Only his eyes moved — a brief glance at Dany, questioning. When she gave him nothing, the knight spoke.
"Your Grace," Jorah said, "Khal Drogo—"
"Do not speak to me of the Khal, you fool." Viserys spat. "Do not instruct me about my own wife's husband, and what he intends or doesn't intend. You are an exile who hawks his sword to whoever will buy it. The Dragon does not require your counsel. Remember your place!"
The Dragon, Dany thought. Always the Dragon. She had grown up with that word, had heard it so many times it had ceased to mean anything — the Dragon wakes, the Dragon does not beg, the blood of the Dragon — and somewhere in the last three moons it had curdled in her, turned from something that inspired and fear into something that made her tired.
There are no more dragons, the Last died on the trident. She thought, looking at the only brother she had left. A snake without fangs.
"Viserys," Dany begged quietly. "Please." She did not wish him hurt again.
His eyes came to her and narrowed. Viserys had been looking at her differently for weeks now — taking measure of something, calibrating. She had changed and he knew it and he hated it.
"Please," he mocked, in a child's voice and in the common tongue. "Please, sweet brother. Please don't embarrass me in front of the savages."
Why must he be this way? "I only—"
"You only think you are a Khaleesi now," he said. His voice had gone soft in the way that had used to frighten her. Viserys' arm snapped out to snatch the reigns of her silver. The bear knight went for his sword. "You think because you carry that horse child in your belly and Drogo grunts when he ruts you, that you have become something. Do you believe you are powerful, sweet sister? You are not. You are the price I paid for my army. You are nothing more than that, sister. Do not dare forget it."
Her brother let go, pulled his horse to the left and was gone, and the silence he left behind was loud and heavy with meaning.
Ser Jorah frowned, let go of his blade and said nothing.
Dany looked back at the mountain and breathed.
"Could he do it?" she asked, after a time.
"Khaleesi, of whom do you speak?" Jorah said carefully.
"Not Viserys." She watched a pair of Dothraki riders canter past on the left, their long braids flying. "If it were not Viserys. If it were someone else who led them, someone—" She paused, and placed a hand on her stomach. The bump was still small, barely visible. "Someone worthy of it. Could the Dothraki truly take the Seven Kingdoms?"
Ser Jorah's face went somewhere thoughtful. She had learned to wait when he looked like that — he was genuinely thinking, not performing it, not constructing an answer she would want to hear like he did for Viserys.
"When I first came among them," the Northman said at last, "I saw half-naked barbarians and thought a thousand knights could rout ten times as many. I was a fool." He glanced at a knot of riders watching them from the roadside. "They are not soldiers in the way we think of soldiers. They do not hold lines or take orders or wait for signals. But they are born on horseback and they fight on horseback and the sight of forty thousand of them coming across open ground would break the nerve of most armies before a single blow was struck." He paused. "If Robert Baratheon were fool enough to meet them in the open field."
"Is he?" Dany wondered. "A fool?"
"He is brave," Jorah said. "And he is strong. Strong men sometimes make the same mistakes as fools." He looked at her. "Why do you ask, Khaleesi?"
Dany thought about how to answer. The child moved in her belly, she felt a flutter, and she left her hand against him. "I was wondering what my son will inherit," she said. "What will be left for him."
It was not the whole truth. But it was true enough.
The hollow hill was dim and cool when they returned, lit by oil lamps whose light moved softly against the earthen walls. Dany settled onto her sleeping mats and let Irri and Jhiqui remove her riding clothes, the sweet relief of getting out of the hot leather immediate and total.
"A bath," she said. "Please."
The water was brought hot, as she preferred, and she submerged herself while Irri worked the dust from her hair with gentle hands and Jhiqui sang something low and rhythmic in Dothraki that Dany could almost understand now, almost but not quite, the meaning always just beyond her reach.
Doreah moved about the edges of the room, setting things in order. She had been quieter these past few days — not unhappy, not absent, just somehow slightly muted in a way that Dany had noticed and had not been able to account for.
She looked well. Her skin was clear, her eyes bright. But something in her manner was changed and Dany had meant to ask about it and had not, because there was always something else.
I will ask her tonight, Dany decided. The water was comforting. Or tomorrow.
"Khaleesi," said Jhiqui, in her rough accented Common Tongue, "your son is strong today."
"He is," Dany agreed, feeling him move again beneath the water.
"He will be a Khal of Khals," Irri said, with absolute certainty. No doubt to her it was known. "The stallion who mounts the world. It is known."
"It is known," Jhiqui echoed.
Dany smiled. She had heard those words so many times now that they had begun to feel like the truth rather than the saying of it — it is known, as if the knowing were a thing already done, already settled, already recorded somewhere beyond the reach of contingency. She found she liked it. There was comfort in it. Even if the thing was not yet true, the saying of it made a kind of space for it to become true, and that space felt like something.
She got out of the bath and Irri towelled her dry and helped her into clean linen, and Jhiqui combed out her wet hair while Doreah set out the meal.
The food smelled good. Her moon and stars had sent a portion ahead from the evening's provisions — goat roasted with sweetgrass and firepods, honeyed and fragrant, with flat bread and a bowl of the eastern fruit she still didn't have a name for, the deep red ones with the hundreds of seeds inside. There was mare's milk, cool in a ceramic cup, and a flagon of something sweet that she did not recognise.
"What is this?" she asked, lifting the flagon and smelling it.
"A gift, Khaleesi," Doreah said simply, not quite meeting her eyes. "From the women of the dosh khaleen, who welcome the mother of the stallion to Vaes Dothrak."
Dany considered the flagon. It smelled of honey and something else, something floral she could not identify, pleasant and slightly heady. She had learned to be careful of Dothraki preparations she did not recognise — Drogo had laughed at her, gently, the first time she had refused to drink something without knowing it was first, and Irri had explained that a khaleesi who could not trust the food in her own tent was no khaleesi at all.
But Dany had grown up trusting nothing, with sixteen years of caution and old habits sat deep.
From the Dosh Khaleen, she thought. The old women. The mothers.
They had welcomed her warmly when she had gone to pay her respects, those ancient scarred women with their white hair and their long memories. They had touched her belly and spoken over her in Dothraki too old and formal for Jhiqui to fully translate, and their eyes had been kind. There was nothing in those eyes to fear. Dany relaxed.
She poured a cup and drank.
It was sweet. Sweeter than she had expected, with the honey very present and the floral note underneath it settling after the first sip into something warmer, something that moved through her chest and down into her limbs like the first warmth of a fire on a cold morning. The child fluttered and shifted, slow and contented.
She ate.
The food was good. She had discovered that she was hungrier than she'd expected. The ride had been long and the confrontation with Viserys had cost her more than she liked to admit, and her son took what he needed regardless of everything else. Dany ate the goat and most of the bread and a portion of the fruit, and drank a second cup of the honey drink because it was pleasant and the first had warmed her so nicely.
Irri was talking. Something about the market tomorrow, about the silk merchants from Yi Ti that she had heard would be there. Jhiqui agreed or disagreed, Dany wasn't entirely following, but the sound of their voices was comfortable, familiar, the sound of her evenings now.
She realised she was very warm.
It was a pleasant warmth, not the sweating discomfort of the Dothraki sea but something gentler, something that had begun in her chest and was spreading outward through her arms and down her legs, a heaviness that was not quite tiredness. She felt just at the edge of sleep.
"Irri," Dany heard herself call. Her voice came out softer than she meant it to.
"Khaleesi?"
"I think I shall sleep early tonight."
Irri and Jhiqui exchanged a look she did not have the energy to decipher. Doreah was already moving to the sleeping mats, smoothing them, setting things to rights. Her movements were very precise. Very careful.
She is always so careful, Dany remembered, as she moved to lay down. She was trained to be careful.
The oil lamps moved against the walls in their slow soft way, and her son settled inside her, and the warmth spread further, and Dany felt her eyes growing heavy in a way that was very easy to give into. She reached out and found the dragon egg where Irri had set it beside her — the black one, alive with scarlet swirls, heavier than it had any right to be and just as warm as she felt.
She held it between her breasts.
Home, she thought, though she could not have said exactly where home was — not the manse in Pentos, not the Dragonstone which she did not remember, not the Redkeep that she had never set foot in, not any of the dozen rented rooms in a dozen Free Cities that had been the whole of her geography.
One thing came to mind. Ser William Darry. A house with a red door. The smell of lemon trees. When Viserys was kind.
She had always thought that was the thing she wanted most — to go back there, to that particular smell, to whatever version of herself had lived in that house before everything became running and exile and Viserys's moods. She thought she wanted that. She had told herself she wanted that.
But lying here now, in the cool dim hill, with the mountain outside and her son moving softly beneath her hand and the weight of the egg against her chest, she thought: No. Not there. Not back. Forward.
Dany wanted to see what came next. Dany wanted to see her son's face. Dany wanted to ride her Silver at full gallop with the plains opening up ahead of her, with her moon and stars beside her.
She wanted to understand what the dosh khaleen had said when they touched her belly, the words that even Jhiqui couldn't quite translate. She wanted, she thought with a dim surprise, to know more of it. More of this world that she had been shown only the edges of, this enormous world that was nothing like what she had been told it was.
She wanted to know what came next.
The warmth was very deep now. She could hear Irri and Jhiqui still talking, distantly, their voices coming from very far away, as if she were already somewhere else. She could feel the egg against her chest by her heart, that impossible weight, the scales smooth, it seemed to beat with her.
I am the Blood of the Dragon, Dany thought.
The words had always been her brother's, a declaration he made against the world. She thought about it differently now. Not a declaration. Something quieter. Just a thing that was true, in the way that she was here and the mountain was there and the child was hers and the night was warm.
She closed her eyes and dreamed. The house had a red door, and the lemon trees smelled sweet, and the light was the particular gold of a morning she could not quite place, and she walked toward it, felt something calling her, a voice that sounded suspiciously like Viserys telling her to wake up, but then her hand was on the door, the red paint warm under her fingers, and she forced it open, about to step through…
Dany slept and dreamed and did not wake