Fic Entry #1: Five Women Jorah Mormont Never Lacked For (and One He Did)
Author: mrstater
Title: Five Women Jorah Mormont Never Lacked For (and One He Did)
Pairings: Jorah Mormont/Erena Glover, Jorah Mormont/Lynesse Hightower, Jorah Mormont/Whore, Jorah Mormont/Daenerys Targaryen, Jorah Mormont/OFCs
Prompt(s): this image
Word Count: 5482
Rating & Warnings: M for sex, infidelity, prostitution, miscarriage, slavery
Summary: "I never lacked for women. I had my share of fishwives and crofter’s daughters, before and after I was wed." The women Jorah loved and lost, from Bear Island to Meereen. [pre-canon through ADWD]
Five Women Jorah Mormont Never Lacked For (and One He Did)
I. Ursa
Jorah Mormont was not a handsome lad.
At fifteen, stripped to the waist on a rare blazing hot day as he and the men of the island erected a new watch tower, he discovered that one need not look like Brandon Stark to catch the eye of a pretty girl.
She approached him shyly at first, eyes downcast as she took care not to slosh the bucket of water she toted in both hands, but when Jorah poured it over his head and emerged, spluttering and pushing his shaggy dark hair out of his eyes, he found her gawking unabashedly. She watched the water roll over his broad shoulders and cling, glittering, to the hair that had begun to thicken across his chest and trail in a line down his belly until it disappeared into his breeches…which suddenly seemed too tightly laced.
"It's hot work, m'lord," she said, her eyes meeting his. Blue-green. A color more common to the sea surrounding Bear Island than to the eyes of the people who inhabited it.
"Aye."
The girl's cheeks were flushed--with exertion, Jorah hoped, rather than embarrassment at the state of his manhood under her attention; her brow and upper lip and the hollow of her breasts that peeped out above the top of her dress were aglow with sweat. He dragged his roving eyes back up to her face and thought he ought to say more, though his mouth felt very dry and his tongue seemed to have swollen as thick as his cock and stuck to the roof of his mouth, unable to form words.
"You had nothing to drink," she said. "Are you thirsty?"
He managed a nod.
"I'll fetch m'lord some more." Turning, her honeyed braid swinging at her hips, she flashed him a smile over her shoulder that made him start after her into the woods.
"Allow me." Jorah intended to grab the bucket from her, but he was yet too gangly to be gallant and caught her hand instead.
She looked up at him with dancing eyes and, blushing, he tried to let go; but her small hand maintained a surprisingly strong grip on his much larger one.
So Jorah walked hand-in-hand with her--Ursa was her name--and she was the first girl he loved beneath the sheltering pines.
II. Erena
Jorah Mormont was not a handsome lad.
At seventeen he was a foolish one, daring to ask his lord father whether Lord Glover's little sister Erena--to whom the Old Bear had betrothed him in a flurry of ravens exchanged between Bear Island and Deepwood Motte--was pretty. Have you seen your face in the glass? was the only reply Jeor made. That did not bode well, Jorah thought, but he held out hope until he saw his bride-to-be with his own eyes. They'd met once or twice as children, of course, House Glover being the nearest neighbors of House Mormont; she hadn't left much of an impression on his boyish memory, but he had not seen her since she'd flowered into womanhood.
The first time he did so was the night before he was to wed her, which resulted in more ill-advised grumbling to his sire as they made their way through the halls of the Glovers' fortress to the guest chambers.
"She's not pretty."
"The lass didn't look near to swooning at the sight of you, either," the Old Bear growled. "I daresay she'll blend in well enough among the women back home. And I thought you were partial to blondes?"
Jorah snorted. Erena's hair more closely resembled straw than spun silken flax, and there was no vitality about her, no sign of the robustness that he had always liked in the girls back home.
"I'm not sure she's in the pink of health," he said. "Don't you think she looks a bit peaky, Father?"
"You're accustomed to hairier women, I expect. Or girls who spend too much time working alongside men out of doors. They do things more properly at Deepwood Motte. Erena will make you a suitable wife."
That was precisely what Jorah was afraid of. One look at the Glover girl had been enough to tell him that she would never approach him boldly to instigate the act of love. He remembered Ursa's mouth, so hot against his lips, coaxing them apart with her tongue, and her skilled fingers unlacing his breeches to guide his cock into her; she'd been so wet and ready for him, without his even having to woo her. She had a husband now, but that had not put an end to their trysts, and there had been other girls as well, other crofters' daughters keen to slip off with him into barns, who laughed with him after as they plucked hay from each other's hair.
"And gods only know you need a proper lady's influence." The Old Bear's gruff voice drew him back to the present as they stopped before a doorway; the wooden walls of Deepwood Motte were so like their long hall back home and doubtless one reason why their unimaginative fathers felt this a good match, in addition to the Glovers being convenient allies in the event of harassment from the Ironmen. "The thing is, Jorah--I'll not be going back to Bear Island after your wedding. I'm going North. Taking the Black."
Jorah gawped at his father. "But that means you can't be--"
"Lord of Bear Island. Aye." His big hand--so broad and hairy it was more a paw, really--fell heavily on Jorah's shoulder. "You're a man grown, my son, and soon enough you'll have sons and heirs of your own. It's only right that they should learn to be Lord Mormont from their father. As you learned from yours. Here We Stand, eh?"
"Here We Stand."
So at break of day, Jorah stood beneath the blood red arms of a heart tree, and cloaked his new Lady Mormont with the black bear rampant against a green field of jagged pines.
III. Della
Jorah Mormont, Lord of Bear Island, was not a handsome man.
His lady wife was not a beautiful woman. These facts did not, however, diminish his intention to be a good husband to her. A faithful husband.
That was, after all, the essence of House Mormont's words: Here We Stand.
Loyalty.
Good faith.
Yet there Jorah stood, not quite a year since he and Erena were declared one flesh, one heart, one soul, desiring to be in the arms of another woman.
Della, black of hair and eye--and the wife of another man--was not even the sort of woman he would have imagined straying with. He'd seen her a thousand times on the island as children, had fished with her husband, Brus. Never till now, happening upon her by the shore early, while the boats were still out, had he stopped and taken note of her.
Objectively, while she was certainly comelier than his wife, she was not the most beautiful woman he'd laid eyes on…or laid with. Her dusky coloring matched that of so many Bear Islanders, himself and his kin included, her nose turned up at the tip, and she had a thin, crooked mouth. But her figure was good, hips flaring out beneath her tight-laced bodice and breasts full above it, almost threatening to spill out as she knelt mending fishing nets; her complexion, though swarthy, was clear, tinged with pink, either reflecting the dawn hues or her toil. The nets seemed to be giving her a bit of trouble, tangling together and snaring pebbles and broken shells from the ground. Was it the contrast of Della's vigor with his own wife's current languor that lent attraction? Jorah could not say, but in any case he felt compelled to bend and assist her.
"Thank you, m'lord," she said when the nets were free. A most proper response, but her eyes sparkled up at him with a playful insolence that made his heart quicken in his chest as it had not beat since he wed. "Mayhaps I'll send a raven to King Aerys telling him the Lord of Bear Island deserves a knighthood for succoring a damsel in distress."
He remembered that she'd liked to tease him about the notions of knights and ladies he'd been so wont to spout as a boy at play, but now he didn't blush. As much, anyway.
"Ah yes--" He lowered himself to the ground beside her, the pebbly shore catching at the seat of his trousers. He drew his knees up, resting his forearms on them. "It's always been my life's ambition to be dubbed Ser Jorah Mormont, Knight of Fishes."
"A suitable title for a Bear Islander."
Jorah swung his gaze from scanning the waves for Brus' fishing boat, which he'd found as a speck in the distance; it would be a good while yet before Della's husband and his crew returned from hauling in the day's catch. Her thin, slanting lips were invitingly red, though Jorah wasn't sure whether they or the juts and dips of her neck as her head fell back in laughter begged more to be kissed.
"Talking of ravens," she said when she had stopped laughing, "what news from Castle Black?"
Though it was not uncommon for the island folk to ask after their former lord, Jorah glanced away, eyes stinging. He'd written to Jeor that the bride he'd chosen for him had conceived; he would have to write again that the babe had come too soon, stillborn, and that Erena was ill.
"It's cold," he said quickly, not wanting to think about that; though he intended levity, his voice was gruff with emotion. "His damned raven wants corn."
"I miss seeing that bird perched on the Old Bear's shoulder when he walked through the village."
"You'd most likely be the only one."
Della shrugged, her shoulder brushing against his. "The raven always alerted us that he was coming, so we could always be sure not to look like we were up to no good. You'd think the lord's own son would know that trick."
Jorah chuckled and rubbed his hand over his beard, the rasping sound drowned by the waves lapping at the shore. "My trouble is I've never been a terribly convincing liar."
Instead of the continued banter he expected, Della's eyebrows drew together above the bridge of her snub nose and her lips pressed into an even thinner line as she studied him silently. Certain she could not miss the underlying mood that had brought him down from the confining walls of his hall, Jorah squared his shoulders and braced to be offered condolences about the babe, to have inquiries after Erena's recovery, which seemed to be slower even than the midwives and Aunt Maege predicted.
Again, Della surprised him, unfolding to stand in a sweep of grey roughspun skirt against his sleeve. "What about a knighthood for bravery?"
"What fell thing would my lady have me brave?" Jorah asked, following suit.
She regarded him from the black depths of her eyes as if she were trying to work this out for herself. Or more like she knew just what she saw, and it was he who could not make head nor tail of his own heart and mind.
At length, with her crooked, kissable smile, she answered, "Why, the cold, m'lord."
His mouth hung agape as she unlaced her bodice and shrugged her arms out of it, tossing it further up the shore out of the way of the waves, then tugged her skirt down over her hips and kicked it aside, too, as she stepped out of it. Jorah's eyes and mouth opened wider still as she waded out into the water in only her thin shift and he saw plainly that she wore no small clothes, hardened brown nipples and the patch of hair between her legs showing through the unbleached clinging linen.
"I've braved colder waters than these, in winter," he boasted, wasting no time shedding his own clothes. He wobbled a little as he stood on one foot, then the other, on the shifting sand to pull off his boots and stockings, and he failed to cast tunic and shirt far enough up to avoid a salt water dousing, but he cared not, stooping only to pluck sword belt and Longclaw out to lay safe on a boulder, and plunged in after her.
The water was cold; his toes curled inward as his muscles began to cramp almost at once. He welcomed the distraction that pain provided from the ache that had gripped his chest in the days since Erena miscarried.
As he reached Della's side, her shift and the tail of his shirt floating up around their waists, a wave broke hard against them, threatening to knock them down with its force, or to suck their feet out beneath them with the ebb. He and Della both stood their ground, his bracing hand at the small of her back unnecessary; she scarcely flinched as the spray hit their faces face like needles of ice.
Beautiful or just pretty and strong and home, Jorah saw a queen before him, the sea at her command and crowning her in its jewels. Droplets clung to her skin, shimmering in the brightening morning light, the sun having burst over the tops of the trees up the shore at last. One rolled down her upturned nose and clung to the tip, and he could not stop himself reaching out to swipe it away with the pad of his thumb. When he had done so, his thumb moved from her nose over her cheekbone as the other fingers of that hand curled around her neck, weaving into the hair bundled at her nape. He stepped nearer to her, felt her chin tilt upward against the side of his hand, and studied her red, slightly parted lips. He thought she wanted to be kissed as much as he wanted to kiss her, but he met her eyes first, and read the expectation there before he bent his head and obliged them both.
As his lips met hers, not at all tentatively, Della twining her arms about his neck and pressing herself against him--he felt the hardened points of her nipples and the soft mound between her thighs through her sodden shift--Jorah heard faintly the whisper of her teasing words about chivalry and succoring ladies. Back in his hall, his lady languished in bed where she had endured the pain of a babe torn from her womb, and then from her arms; would he now deal her the pain of having a faithless husband as well?
He kissed Della harder, meeting her tongue with his own, cupping the firm fullness of her arse in his hand and pushing her hips against his cock. He had bled these many months, too, his heart deprived of the only thing it had ever beat for: impulsive passion had governed his youth, and the Old Bear had not understood that he was not fickle for desire's sake, but for the desire of love. To his surprise, news of his impending fatherhood had been a balm; and his plain-faced bride had seemed a beauty to him when he laid his palm upon the swell of the babe beneath her belly and kissed the nipples that would give suck to the fruit of her womb.
But it was the child he'd loved, not her. And now the child was gone.
So Jorah gave himself to Della's embrace while his son slept forever beneath the pines.
IV. Lynesse
Ser Jorah Mormont was not a handsome man.
At three-and-thirty, newly knighted--for valor in battle, the first through the breech at the Siege of Pyke--he discovered that one need not look like Rhaegar Targaryen to wear the favor of a highborn and beautiful lady in a tourney, or to win her hand in marriage. It wasn't even necessary for pleasing her in bed.
Though bed, it seemed, was the only place on Bear Island that Jorah could please his new Lady Mormont. Consequently, they spent a deal of time there. But a lord, even a minor one of a poor island, could not be every moment in the arms of his wife. He must find some other way of keeping her happy here in his hall--something that would not empty his already depleted coffers, thanks to the harper and Southron cook he'd taken into his employ--not to mention the fine new clothes and jewels she'd insisted on before their recent visit to Winterfell.
His plan, ironically, required more time in bed. They'd just made love on waking, but rather than get up and wash and dress and leave the refuge of their bedchamber, Jorah lingered over her, kissing her red hardened nipples, stretching his hand, from the tip of his thumb to the tip of his little finger, across the span of her hips. For the first time in years, he remembered the joy and wonder he had found when he thought Erena would give him sons--two of the babes had been; the other bled away too soon to know its sex.
It would not be so for Lynesse. She was young and strong…and how he loved her. How much more his love would increase, as she did with his child in her.
Smiling, he kissed down the valley between her breasts until he came to her navel, and kissed that as well.
Lynesse parted her legs on either side of him. "I'm ready for you again, my sweet bear, if that's what you're thinking."
His breath caught in his chest, and so did his heart, as he lifted his head from her flat, pale stomach to look her in the eye.
"I was just thinking…What if that time I put a babe in your belly? That would make you happy, wouldn't it, sweetling?" As Bear Island failed to do.
Catelyn misliked Winterfell at first, too, Ned Stark had told him, not because Jorah solicited his liege lord's advice--a man had his pride, and Ned had been vocal in his disapproval of the match. It seemed Lynesse had told Lady Stark that Bear Island did not suit her, and Catelyn begged her husband speak to him; Ned had done her bidding, though it had embarrassed him as much as it did Jorah. Once the children came along, she found she could make her home anywhere. And you have one advantage I did not, of already having your lady wife's love.
Jorah's lady wife's legs went slack on the feather tick, and she made a face not dissimilar to the ones inspired by the old cook's stews and roasts.
"I should say not! A fat belly and sagging tits and a loose cu--"
"That is not the way of it!"
"My sister Denys says it is. It did not make her happy, and it will not make me happy. Would it make you happy, Jorah, to have a used-up cow for a wife?"
Though her lack of enthusiasm dismayed him, Jorah tried not to let it show. He lay facing her on his side, legs entwined, and cupped her face in his hands as he looked her full in the eyes.
"When I first beheld you, I thought you were the goddess come down to earth."
She beamed at his compliment, as she always did no matter their quarrel, and she looked more ethereally beautiful than ever. Jorah swallowed. Was it right to ask anything more of this woman when he was already blessed above all other men that she had deigned to be a poor lord's wife?
"You will always be so to me, no matter how many babes you bear--and the Mother is a goddess, as well as the Maiden."
"And so is the Crone," Lynesse muttered with a scowl. But the expression quickly changed to a wide-eyed imploring one as she mirrored Jorah's position, holding his face in her small, soft hands, her thumbs stroking his stubble. "You married a young wife. Surely you don't want to spoil me so soon."
"I have already spoiled you," Jorah said, rolling her onto her back and straddling her again. He tried to be cross with her, but found himself kissing her instead, and hardening as the tip of his cock brushed the warmth between her open thighs.
Even as her body yielded to his, he knew that he was the one who would surrender this argument, as he had all the others. For the sake of her happiness he would tell her that for now, of course, she was right, of course; there was a long time yet before they must worry about children.
So Jorah spilled his seed on Lynesse's belly, and told himself that so long as he had her love, it did not matter that he had no heir for his hall of pines.
V. The Whore in Selhorys
"M'lord is a handsome man."
At two-and-forty, it was not the first time Jorah had set foot in a brothel, but it was the first time he'd been desperate enough to ask for a whore.
He dragged his gaze up from the pint he was nursing in the shadowy corner and fixed his bleary gaze on the naked girl standing before him, with teardrops tattooed upon her cheek.
"I'm paying you to fuck me, not to lie to me," he growled at her in the same bastard dialect of Valyrian with which she had addressed him, and grasped her narrow hips, pulling her to stand between his knees.
If the whore found his treatment of her rough, it was not evident in her smile as she placed her hands on his shoulders. In any case, as his fingertips brushed the curves of her buttocks, he felt raised lines of hardened scars across her skin. She had known worse. Much worse. Even so, he relaxed his grip on her, nuzzling her breasts as she climbed into his lap. The rasp of his beard left red marks across her pale Lyseni skin.
Lys.
Lynesse.
Lies.
His mind stumbled drunkenly from thought to thought as her long hair fell down her back and over the backs of his hands. Silver hair. Wasn't he paying her precisely to lie to him?
Her hands trailed down his shoulders, over his arms, across his chest. "But I don't lie, m'lord," she purred, her tattooed cheek brushing against his as she leaned in to murmur in his ear. "A man's face need not be fair to be handsome."
Jorah laughed--a harsh and humorless sound to even his own ears. "No, a man need not have a face like Tregar Ormallen or Daario Naharis to buy a beauty in a brothel."
"M'lord knows Tregar Ormallen?" asked the whore, changing to the dialect of Lys; as she sat up in his lap, surprise erased seduction from her face, and Jorah saw she was of an age with Daenerys. With Lynesse, when he met her. The goddess come down to earth. Maiden. Mother. "The merchant prince from my city?
The merchant prince drove him from her city. Jorah turned, sloshing his ale as he lifted the flagon from the table, and drained it.
"Am I paying your tongue to wag?"
"Forgive me, m'lord," she said.
Her breath was hot against his neck, and so were her lips, sucking at his earlobe. Jorah's cock twitched weakly against the laces of his breeches, and he closed his eyes and gritted his teeth--not against the pleasure, but against the sudden flash of memory of a honey-haired maid who admired the lanky muscles of an ugly fifteen year-old lad. Lordling.
"I'm no lord," he slurred. And who are you, the proud lord said, that I should bow so low?
Why had he not bowed to her, to his Silver Queen? She'd sent him to the sewers. She would see him brought lower…But she would have raised him up again. The whore's hands slid down his chest, dallying with the laces of his tunic, before moving lower, to unclasp his sword belt.
"I was a lord once, and I never lacked for women…"
"You do not lack for one now."
The whore rocked her hips down into his, and her breasts swung tantalizingly before his face as she twisted in his lap to hang his sword belt on a peg in the corner beside his chair.
But he did. He sat passive beneath the whore as she writhed and squirmed in his lap, working much harder than she was being paid to elicit a response from his uncooperative cock. Jorah lacked for love, lacked for a son, lacked for--
A thumping on the brothel's rickety staircase drew his attention and the whore's. He narrowed his eyes to peer through the shadows and saw that the drunken sod who'd cartwheeled down and somehow managed to roll almost gracefully onto his feet was of diminutive stature.
And, despite the trickery of the candlelight and the misshapen head and grotesque absence of a nose, he could see that the dwarf sported a mop of golden hair and one green eye that instantly marked him for who he was.
So Jorah shoved the whore aside and, at point of his sword, pushed Tyrion Lannister through the brothel door into the streets of Selhorys, where there were no trees.
VI. Daenerys
Ser Jorah Mormont was not a handsome man.
The demon's mask tattooed on his cheek made him uglier than ever he had been.
I honor and respect and cherish you-but I do not desire you, Jorah Mormont.
If she had not then, she surely never would now. It made no matter.
At two-and-forty he had most likely lived to see his last name day; he would be carried off by the pale mare that ran rampant this side of Meereen's walls of many-colored bricks or, if not that, sold to the fighting pits that were to open again soon, if the rumors were true. Or, as every bruised and bloodied inch of his body reminded him, they might simply beat him to death.
And Daenerys had taken a husband.
In the corner of the slave pen where Jorah hunched, naked but for a breechclout, arms between drawn-up knees in the futile attempt not to see the shackles that bound him wrist and ankle, he lifted his face and peered out through slits of his swollen eyes up where the slavers had looked down on them that morning and jeered at the captives.
No use sniveling for your mother, they taunted--for ever since the slave vessels delivered their human cargo within sight of the pyramids of Meereen, they had whispered that they could not be long in bondage; the Silver Queen, the Breaker of Shackles, Mhysa, would not allow her children to languish so near the gates of her conquered city. Daenerys Targaryen won't come to break your shackles. She cares more for the olive grove she's planted than for you wretches. This day she weds Hizdahr zo Loraq, Fourteenth of that Noble Name…Scion of Ghis…Blood of the Harpy…
They came for Jorah, then, and dragged him up for the flogging that had become a daily occurrence. For the first time, he did not fight his captors, was not unruly as the demon's mask marked him. He endured the beating in silence, numb to the cracks of the whips and thuds of cudgels for the despair that clutched his heart: Daenerys was staying.
He was nearly deaf, too, though not quite, to the wailing of his fellow enslaved when he was shoved unceremoniously into the pen afterward, his nose and lips bleeding and his back raw as a side of meat. He caught snatches of their disbelief--whispers, of course, his visage a reminder of what their masters would do to those who would not submit. Mhysa would not do this thing; the Mother of Dragons would not consort with the Harpy. It was a lie, an invention of the slavers to make their misery more complete. To break them.
Lies did not torture, Jorah knew. Only truth had that power. Somewhere, he'd heard it said that truth could set men free. It had broken him.
"She said we'd end up here." Tyrion Lannister stood at Jorah's side, at eye level for once, if Jorah was inclined to look at him; he had not noticed his approach, nor heard the jangle of his chains as he waddled over with even greater difficulty than usual, though the Imp was better acquainted with shackles than Jorah. "I refer of course to the widow of the waterfront. Or dare we call her Vogarro's whore?"
Let me crook a finger and you may find yourself traveling to Meereen chained to an oar in the
belly of a galley.
The Imp prattled on. "I don't mean to imply that I in any way blame you for our…circumstances…"
He hesitated, and Jorah was not so blind that he did not notice in his periphery that Tyrion shuffled a step backward in anticipation of a blow. Not very long ago at all, Jorah would have dealt it to shut him up, but now was past all caring what anyone said to him.
"Despite what they say about curiosity and the cat, ser, I must ask: why did you refuse to tell her the truth of why you sought Daenerys? Why not simply admit it was because you love the queen? It certainly would have made for a better story than all that tripe about serving, defending, and dying."
Because the last time I uttered those words aloud, Daenerys had me dragged from her sight by Strong Belwas.
At length, realizing his curiosity was leading nowhere, to either the little Lannister lion's advantage or otherwise, he stepped closer to Jorah and lowered himself awkwardly to the muddy floor of the slave pen beside him.
"Will you least indulge me in the tale of woe of how a Northman comes to love the Mad King's daughter? There is so little of interest here, and I need something sweet to take my mind off the stench of shit from the latrine ditch."
It was the last thing Jorah wanted to think of now, but he did so often that the answer sprang readily to his mind--though thankfully not to his tongue.
He'd known it the night he thought she would die in childbed with her son--as surely as he'd known he did not love Erena when she did with his. Which meant he must havecome to love Daenerys sometime earlier than that. While Khal Drogo's son grew in her belly and she grew from a frightened child-bride into a fierce khaleesi. A queen. His queen.
Hizdahr zo Loraq's queen, now. But she would never bear his son, either, if the Lhazareen witch's prophecy held true. When the sun rises in the west and sets in the east. When the seas go dry and mountains blow in the wind like leaves. When your womb quickens again, and you bear a living child…
Jorah had never believed Daenerys' womb would quicken again, after what she endured in childbed. Still he had loved her, kissed her, offered his hand. It did not matter to him if she bore him a child, for he had been there when she brought forth the dragons in fire and in blood--the goddess come down to earth--had watched her suckle them at her breasts. She was Mother of Dragons, Mhysa. To him she was more than wife, and he had been her good right hand.
What do you pray for, Ser Jorah?
Home.
I pray for home, too.
Together, they would have gone there.
But Daenerys had forgotten where home was, for all her sighs and assurances to him that she had not. Abandoned her claim to her true country. Put down roots here. Where three hundred years ago dragons scorched the earth and burned the trees to ash, she had planted new ones whose roots soaked up the slow stinking brown waters of the Skahazadhan, of which her husband, Blood of the Harpy, was master.
"Well," said Tyrion, struggling to his feet in a rattle of chains. Jorah felt his eye on the slavers' mark on his cheek. "At least when you see the Queen again, she'll know you fought for her."
Without turning his eyes from the Great Pyramid of Meereen, from which he had shambled, dazed, after his banishment, he muttered low under his breath. "When I see the Queen again. And when you find out where whores go."
So the Imp shuffled off in his shackles and Jorah sat, waiting for death to take him. Because dragons plant no trees.
Title: Five Women Jorah Mormont Never Lacked For (and One He Did)
Pairings: Jorah Mormont/Erena Glover, Jorah Mormont/Lynesse Hightower, Jorah Mormont/Whore, Jorah Mormont/Daenerys Targaryen, Jorah Mormont/OFCs
Prompt(s): this image
Word Count: 5482
Rating & Warnings: M for sex, infidelity, prostitution, miscarriage, slavery
Summary: "I never lacked for women. I had my share of fishwives and crofter’s daughters, before and after I was wed." The women Jorah loved and lost, from Bear Island to Meereen. [pre-canon through ADWD]
Five Women Jorah Mormont Never Lacked For (and One He Did)
I. Ursa
Jorah Mormont was not a handsome lad.
At fifteen, stripped to the waist on a rare blazing hot day as he and the men of the island erected a new watch tower, he discovered that one need not look like Brandon Stark to catch the eye of a pretty girl.
She approached him shyly at first, eyes downcast as she took care not to slosh the bucket of water she toted in both hands, but when Jorah poured it over his head and emerged, spluttering and pushing his shaggy dark hair out of his eyes, he found her gawking unabashedly. She watched the water roll over his broad shoulders and cling, glittering, to the hair that had begun to thicken across his chest and trail in a line down his belly until it disappeared into his breeches…which suddenly seemed too tightly laced.
"It's hot work, m'lord," she said, her eyes meeting his. Blue-green. A color more common to the sea surrounding Bear Island than to the eyes of the people who inhabited it.
"Aye."
The girl's cheeks were flushed--with exertion, Jorah hoped, rather than embarrassment at the state of his manhood under her attention; her brow and upper lip and the hollow of her breasts that peeped out above the top of her dress were aglow with sweat. He dragged his roving eyes back up to her face and thought he ought to say more, though his mouth felt very dry and his tongue seemed to have swollen as thick as his cock and stuck to the roof of his mouth, unable to form words.
"You had nothing to drink," she said. "Are you thirsty?"
He managed a nod.
"I'll fetch m'lord some more." Turning, her honeyed braid swinging at her hips, she flashed him a smile over her shoulder that made him start after her into the woods.
"Allow me." Jorah intended to grab the bucket from her, but he was yet too gangly to be gallant and caught her hand instead.
She looked up at him with dancing eyes and, blushing, he tried to let go; but her small hand maintained a surprisingly strong grip on his much larger one.
So Jorah walked hand-in-hand with her--Ursa was her name--and she was the first girl he loved beneath the sheltering pines.
II. Erena
Jorah Mormont was not a handsome lad.
At seventeen he was a foolish one, daring to ask his lord father whether Lord Glover's little sister Erena--to whom the Old Bear had betrothed him in a flurry of ravens exchanged between Bear Island and Deepwood Motte--was pretty. Have you seen your face in the glass? was the only reply Jeor made. That did not bode well, Jorah thought, but he held out hope until he saw his bride-to-be with his own eyes. They'd met once or twice as children, of course, House Glover being the nearest neighbors of House Mormont; she hadn't left much of an impression on his boyish memory, but he had not seen her since she'd flowered into womanhood.
The first time he did so was the night before he was to wed her, which resulted in more ill-advised grumbling to his sire as they made their way through the halls of the Glovers' fortress to the guest chambers.
"She's not pretty."
"The lass didn't look near to swooning at the sight of you, either," the Old Bear growled. "I daresay she'll blend in well enough among the women back home. And I thought you were partial to blondes?"
Jorah snorted. Erena's hair more closely resembled straw than spun silken flax, and there was no vitality about her, no sign of the robustness that he had always liked in the girls back home.
"I'm not sure she's in the pink of health," he said. "Don't you think she looks a bit peaky, Father?"
"You're accustomed to hairier women, I expect. Or girls who spend too much time working alongside men out of doors. They do things more properly at Deepwood Motte. Erena will make you a suitable wife."
That was precisely what Jorah was afraid of. One look at the Glover girl had been enough to tell him that she would never approach him boldly to instigate the act of love. He remembered Ursa's mouth, so hot against his lips, coaxing them apart with her tongue, and her skilled fingers unlacing his breeches to guide his cock into her; she'd been so wet and ready for him, without his even having to woo her. She had a husband now, but that had not put an end to their trysts, and there had been other girls as well, other crofters' daughters keen to slip off with him into barns, who laughed with him after as they plucked hay from each other's hair.
"And gods only know you need a proper lady's influence." The Old Bear's gruff voice drew him back to the present as they stopped before a doorway; the wooden walls of Deepwood Motte were so like their long hall back home and doubtless one reason why their unimaginative fathers felt this a good match, in addition to the Glovers being convenient allies in the event of harassment from the Ironmen. "The thing is, Jorah--I'll not be going back to Bear Island after your wedding. I'm going North. Taking the Black."
Jorah gawped at his father. "But that means you can't be--"
"Lord of Bear Island. Aye." His big hand--so broad and hairy it was more a paw, really--fell heavily on Jorah's shoulder. "You're a man grown, my son, and soon enough you'll have sons and heirs of your own. It's only right that they should learn to be Lord Mormont from their father. As you learned from yours. Here We Stand, eh?"
"Here We Stand."
So at break of day, Jorah stood beneath the blood red arms of a heart tree, and cloaked his new Lady Mormont with the black bear rampant against a green field of jagged pines.
III. Della
Jorah Mormont, Lord of Bear Island, was not a handsome man.
His lady wife was not a beautiful woman. These facts did not, however, diminish his intention to be a good husband to her. A faithful husband.
That was, after all, the essence of House Mormont's words: Here We Stand.
Loyalty.
Good faith.
Yet there Jorah stood, not quite a year since he and Erena were declared one flesh, one heart, one soul, desiring to be in the arms of another woman.
Della, black of hair and eye--and the wife of another man--was not even the sort of woman he would have imagined straying with. He'd seen her a thousand times on the island as children, had fished with her husband, Brus. Never till now, happening upon her by the shore early, while the boats were still out, had he stopped and taken note of her.
Objectively, while she was certainly comelier than his wife, she was not the most beautiful woman he'd laid eyes on…or laid with. Her dusky coloring matched that of so many Bear Islanders, himself and his kin included, her nose turned up at the tip, and she had a thin, crooked mouth. But her figure was good, hips flaring out beneath her tight-laced bodice and breasts full above it, almost threatening to spill out as she knelt mending fishing nets; her complexion, though swarthy, was clear, tinged with pink, either reflecting the dawn hues or her toil. The nets seemed to be giving her a bit of trouble, tangling together and snaring pebbles and broken shells from the ground. Was it the contrast of Della's vigor with his own wife's current languor that lent attraction? Jorah could not say, but in any case he felt compelled to bend and assist her.
"Thank you, m'lord," she said when the nets were free. A most proper response, but her eyes sparkled up at him with a playful insolence that made his heart quicken in his chest as it had not beat since he wed. "Mayhaps I'll send a raven to King Aerys telling him the Lord of Bear Island deserves a knighthood for succoring a damsel in distress."
He remembered that she'd liked to tease him about the notions of knights and ladies he'd been so wont to spout as a boy at play, but now he didn't blush. As much, anyway.
"Ah yes--" He lowered himself to the ground beside her, the pebbly shore catching at the seat of his trousers. He drew his knees up, resting his forearms on them. "It's always been my life's ambition to be dubbed Ser Jorah Mormont, Knight of Fishes."
"A suitable title for a Bear Islander."
Jorah swung his gaze from scanning the waves for Brus' fishing boat, which he'd found as a speck in the distance; it would be a good while yet before Della's husband and his crew returned from hauling in the day's catch. Her thin, slanting lips were invitingly red, though Jorah wasn't sure whether they or the juts and dips of her neck as her head fell back in laughter begged more to be kissed.
"Talking of ravens," she said when she had stopped laughing, "what news from Castle Black?"
Though it was not uncommon for the island folk to ask after their former lord, Jorah glanced away, eyes stinging. He'd written to Jeor that the bride he'd chosen for him had conceived; he would have to write again that the babe had come too soon, stillborn, and that Erena was ill.
"It's cold," he said quickly, not wanting to think about that; though he intended levity, his voice was gruff with emotion. "His damned raven wants corn."
"I miss seeing that bird perched on the Old Bear's shoulder when he walked through the village."
"You'd most likely be the only one."
Della shrugged, her shoulder brushing against his. "The raven always alerted us that he was coming, so we could always be sure not to look like we were up to no good. You'd think the lord's own son would know that trick."
Jorah chuckled and rubbed his hand over his beard, the rasping sound drowned by the waves lapping at the shore. "My trouble is I've never been a terribly convincing liar."
Instead of the continued banter he expected, Della's eyebrows drew together above the bridge of her snub nose and her lips pressed into an even thinner line as she studied him silently. Certain she could not miss the underlying mood that had brought him down from the confining walls of his hall, Jorah squared his shoulders and braced to be offered condolences about the babe, to have inquiries after Erena's recovery, which seemed to be slower even than the midwives and Aunt Maege predicted.
Again, Della surprised him, unfolding to stand in a sweep of grey roughspun skirt against his sleeve. "What about a knighthood for bravery?"
"What fell thing would my lady have me brave?" Jorah asked, following suit.
She regarded him from the black depths of her eyes as if she were trying to work this out for herself. Or more like she knew just what she saw, and it was he who could not make head nor tail of his own heart and mind.
At length, with her crooked, kissable smile, she answered, "Why, the cold, m'lord."
His mouth hung agape as she unlaced her bodice and shrugged her arms out of it, tossing it further up the shore out of the way of the waves, then tugged her skirt down over her hips and kicked it aside, too, as she stepped out of it. Jorah's eyes and mouth opened wider still as she waded out into the water in only her thin shift and he saw plainly that she wore no small clothes, hardened brown nipples and the patch of hair between her legs showing through the unbleached clinging linen.
"I've braved colder waters than these, in winter," he boasted, wasting no time shedding his own clothes. He wobbled a little as he stood on one foot, then the other, on the shifting sand to pull off his boots and stockings, and he failed to cast tunic and shirt far enough up to avoid a salt water dousing, but he cared not, stooping only to pluck sword belt and Longclaw out to lay safe on a boulder, and plunged in after her.
The water was cold; his toes curled inward as his muscles began to cramp almost at once. He welcomed the distraction that pain provided from the ache that had gripped his chest in the days since Erena miscarried.
As he reached Della's side, her shift and the tail of his shirt floating up around their waists, a wave broke hard against them, threatening to knock them down with its force, or to suck their feet out beneath them with the ebb. He and Della both stood their ground, his bracing hand at the small of her back unnecessary; she scarcely flinched as the spray hit their faces face like needles of ice.
Beautiful or just pretty and strong and home, Jorah saw a queen before him, the sea at her command and crowning her in its jewels. Droplets clung to her skin, shimmering in the brightening morning light, the sun having burst over the tops of the trees up the shore at last. One rolled down her upturned nose and clung to the tip, and he could not stop himself reaching out to swipe it away with the pad of his thumb. When he had done so, his thumb moved from her nose over her cheekbone as the other fingers of that hand curled around her neck, weaving into the hair bundled at her nape. He stepped nearer to her, felt her chin tilt upward against the side of his hand, and studied her red, slightly parted lips. He thought she wanted to be kissed as much as he wanted to kiss her, but he met her eyes first, and read the expectation there before he bent his head and obliged them both.
As his lips met hers, not at all tentatively, Della twining her arms about his neck and pressing herself against him--he felt the hardened points of her nipples and the soft mound between her thighs through her sodden shift--Jorah heard faintly the whisper of her teasing words about chivalry and succoring ladies. Back in his hall, his lady languished in bed where she had endured the pain of a babe torn from her womb, and then from her arms; would he now deal her the pain of having a faithless husband as well?
He kissed Della harder, meeting her tongue with his own, cupping the firm fullness of her arse in his hand and pushing her hips against his cock. He had bled these many months, too, his heart deprived of the only thing it had ever beat for: impulsive passion had governed his youth, and the Old Bear had not understood that he was not fickle for desire's sake, but for the desire of love. To his surprise, news of his impending fatherhood had been a balm; and his plain-faced bride had seemed a beauty to him when he laid his palm upon the swell of the babe beneath her belly and kissed the nipples that would give suck to the fruit of her womb.
But it was the child he'd loved, not her. And now the child was gone.
So Jorah gave himself to Della's embrace while his son slept forever beneath the pines.
IV. Lynesse
Ser Jorah Mormont was not a handsome man.
At three-and-thirty, newly knighted--for valor in battle, the first through the breech at the Siege of Pyke--he discovered that one need not look like Rhaegar Targaryen to wear the favor of a highborn and beautiful lady in a tourney, or to win her hand in marriage. It wasn't even necessary for pleasing her in bed.
Though bed, it seemed, was the only place on Bear Island that Jorah could please his new Lady Mormont. Consequently, they spent a deal of time there. But a lord, even a minor one of a poor island, could not be every moment in the arms of his wife. He must find some other way of keeping her happy here in his hall--something that would not empty his already depleted coffers, thanks to the harper and Southron cook he'd taken into his employ--not to mention the fine new clothes and jewels she'd insisted on before their recent visit to Winterfell.
His plan, ironically, required more time in bed. They'd just made love on waking, but rather than get up and wash and dress and leave the refuge of their bedchamber, Jorah lingered over her, kissing her red hardened nipples, stretching his hand, from the tip of his thumb to the tip of his little finger, across the span of her hips. For the first time in years, he remembered the joy and wonder he had found when he thought Erena would give him sons--two of the babes had been; the other bled away too soon to know its sex.
It would not be so for Lynesse. She was young and strong…and how he loved her. How much more his love would increase, as she did with his child in her.
Smiling, he kissed down the valley between her breasts until he came to her navel, and kissed that as well.
Lynesse parted her legs on either side of him. "I'm ready for you again, my sweet bear, if that's what you're thinking."
His breath caught in his chest, and so did his heart, as he lifted his head from her flat, pale stomach to look her in the eye.
"I was just thinking…What if that time I put a babe in your belly? That would make you happy, wouldn't it, sweetling?" As Bear Island failed to do.
Catelyn misliked Winterfell at first, too, Ned Stark had told him, not because Jorah solicited his liege lord's advice--a man had his pride, and Ned had been vocal in his disapproval of the match. It seemed Lynesse had told Lady Stark that Bear Island did not suit her, and Catelyn begged her husband speak to him; Ned had done her bidding, though it had embarrassed him as much as it did Jorah. Once the children came along, she found she could make her home anywhere. And you have one advantage I did not, of already having your lady wife's love.
Jorah's lady wife's legs went slack on the feather tick, and she made a face not dissimilar to the ones inspired by the old cook's stews and roasts.
"I should say not! A fat belly and sagging tits and a loose cu--"
"That is not the way of it!"
"My sister Denys says it is. It did not make her happy, and it will not make me happy. Would it make you happy, Jorah, to have a used-up cow for a wife?"
Though her lack of enthusiasm dismayed him, Jorah tried not to let it show. He lay facing her on his side, legs entwined, and cupped her face in his hands as he looked her full in the eyes.
"When I first beheld you, I thought you were the goddess come down to earth."
She beamed at his compliment, as she always did no matter their quarrel, and she looked more ethereally beautiful than ever. Jorah swallowed. Was it right to ask anything more of this woman when he was already blessed above all other men that she had deigned to be a poor lord's wife?
"You will always be so to me, no matter how many babes you bear--and the Mother is a goddess, as well as the Maiden."
"And so is the Crone," Lynesse muttered with a scowl. But the expression quickly changed to a wide-eyed imploring one as she mirrored Jorah's position, holding his face in her small, soft hands, her thumbs stroking his stubble. "You married a young wife. Surely you don't want to spoil me so soon."
"I have already spoiled you," Jorah said, rolling her onto her back and straddling her again. He tried to be cross with her, but found himself kissing her instead, and hardening as the tip of his cock brushed the warmth between her open thighs.
Even as her body yielded to his, he knew that he was the one who would surrender this argument, as he had all the others. For the sake of her happiness he would tell her that for now, of course, she was right, of course; there was a long time yet before they must worry about children.
So Jorah spilled his seed on Lynesse's belly, and told himself that so long as he had her love, it did not matter that he had no heir for his hall of pines.
V. The Whore in Selhorys
"M'lord is a handsome man."
At two-and-forty, it was not the first time Jorah had set foot in a brothel, but it was the first time he'd been desperate enough to ask for a whore.
He dragged his gaze up from the pint he was nursing in the shadowy corner and fixed his bleary gaze on the naked girl standing before him, with teardrops tattooed upon her cheek.
"I'm paying you to fuck me, not to lie to me," he growled at her in the same bastard dialect of Valyrian with which she had addressed him, and grasped her narrow hips, pulling her to stand between his knees.
If the whore found his treatment of her rough, it was not evident in her smile as she placed her hands on his shoulders. In any case, as his fingertips brushed the curves of her buttocks, he felt raised lines of hardened scars across her skin. She had known worse. Much worse. Even so, he relaxed his grip on her, nuzzling her breasts as she climbed into his lap. The rasp of his beard left red marks across her pale Lyseni skin.
Lys.
Lynesse.
Lies.
His mind stumbled drunkenly from thought to thought as her long hair fell down her back and over the backs of his hands. Silver hair. Wasn't he paying her precisely to lie to him?
Her hands trailed down his shoulders, over his arms, across his chest. "But I don't lie, m'lord," she purred, her tattooed cheek brushing against his as she leaned in to murmur in his ear. "A man's face need not be fair to be handsome."
Jorah laughed--a harsh and humorless sound to even his own ears. "No, a man need not have a face like Tregar Ormallen or Daario Naharis to buy a beauty in a brothel."
"M'lord knows Tregar Ormallen?" asked the whore, changing to the dialect of Lys; as she sat up in his lap, surprise erased seduction from her face, and Jorah saw she was of an age with Daenerys. With Lynesse, when he met her. The goddess come down to earth. Maiden. Mother. "The merchant prince from my city?
The merchant prince drove him from her city. Jorah turned, sloshing his ale as he lifted the flagon from the table, and drained it.
"Am I paying your tongue to wag?"
"Forgive me, m'lord," she said.
Her breath was hot against his neck, and so were her lips, sucking at his earlobe. Jorah's cock twitched weakly against the laces of his breeches, and he closed his eyes and gritted his teeth--not against the pleasure, but against the sudden flash of memory of a honey-haired maid who admired the lanky muscles of an ugly fifteen year-old lad. Lordling.
"I'm no lord," he slurred. And who are you, the proud lord said, that I should bow so low?
Why had he not bowed to her, to his Silver Queen? She'd sent him to the sewers. She would see him brought lower…But she would have raised him up again. The whore's hands slid down his chest, dallying with the laces of his tunic, before moving lower, to unclasp his sword belt.
"I was a lord once, and I never lacked for women…"
"You do not lack for one now."
The whore rocked her hips down into his, and her breasts swung tantalizingly before his face as she twisted in his lap to hang his sword belt on a peg in the corner beside his chair.
But he did. He sat passive beneath the whore as she writhed and squirmed in his lap, working much harder than she was being paid to elicit a response from his uncooperative cock. Jorah lacked for love, lacked for a son, lacked for--
A thumping on the brothel's rickety staircase drew his attention and the whore's. He narrowed his eyes to peer through the shadows and saw that the drunken sod who'd cartwheeled down and somehow managed to roll almost gracefully onto his feet was of diminutive stature.
And, despite the trickery of the candlelight and the misshapen head and grotesque absence of a nose, he could see that the dwarf sported a mop of golden hair and one green eye that instantly marked him for who he was.
So Jorah shoved the whore aside and, at point of his sword, pushed Tyrion Lannister through the brothel door into the streets of Selhorys, where there were no trees.
VI. Daenerys
Ser Jorah Mormont was not a handsome man.
The demon's mask tattooed on his cheek made him uglier than ever he had been.
I honor and respect and cherish you-but I do not desire you, Jorah Mormont.
If she had not then, she surely never would now. It made no matter.
At two-and-forty he had most likely lived to see his last name day; he would be carried off by the pale mare that ran rampant this side of Meereen's walls of many-colored bricks or, if not that, sold to the fighting pits that were to open again soon, if the rumors were true. Or, as every bruised and bloodied inch of his body reminded him, they might simply beat him to death.
And Daenerys had taken a husband.
In the corner of the slave pen where Jorah hunched, naked but for a breechclout, arms between drawn-up knees in the futile attempt not to see the shackles that bound him wrist and ankle, he lifted his face and peered out through slits of his swollen eyes up where the slavers had looked down on them that morning and jeered at the captives.
No use sniveling for your mother, they taunted--for ever since the slave vessels delivered their human cargo within sight of the pyramids of Meereen, they had whispered that they could not be long in bondage; the Silver Queen, the Breaker of Shackles, Mhysa, would not allow her children to languish so near the gates of her conquered city. Daenerys Targaryen won't come to break your shackles. She cares more for the olive grove she's planted than for you wretches. This day she weds Hizdahr zo Loraq, Fourteenth of that Noble Name…Scion of Ghis…Blood of the Harpy…
They came for Jorah, then, and dragged him up for the flogging that had become a daily occurrence. For the first time, he did not fight his captors, was not unruly as the demon's mask marked him. He endured the beating in silence, numb to the cracks of the whips and thuds of cudgels for the despair that clutched his heart: Daenerys was staying.
He was nearly deaf, too, though not quite, to the wailing of his fellow enslaved when he was shoved unceremoniously into the pen afterward, his nose and lips bleeding and his back raw as a side of meat. He caught snatches of their disbelief--whispers, of course, his visage a reminder of what their masters would do to those who would not submit. Mhysa would not do this thing; the Mother of Dragons would not consort with the Harpy. It was a lie, an invention of the slavers to make their misery more complete. To break them.
Lies did not torture, Jorah knew. Only truth had that power. Somewhere, he'd heard it said that truth could set men free. It had broken him.
"She said we'd end up here." Tyrion Lannister stood at Jorah's side, at eye level for once, if Jorah was inclined to look at him; he had not noticed his approach, nor heard the jangle of his chains as he waddled over with even greater difficulty than usual, though the Imp was better acquainted with shackles than Jorah. "I refer of course to the widow of the waterfront. Or dare we call her Vogarro's whore?"
Let me crook a finger and you may find yourself traveling to Meereen chained to an oar in the
belly of a galley.
The Imp prattled on. "I don't mean to imply that I in any way blame you for our…circumstances…"
He hesitated, and Jorah was not so blind that he did not notice in his periphery that Tyrion shuffled a step backward in anticipation of a blow. Not very long ago at all, Jorah would have dealt it to shut him up, but now was past all caring what anyone said to him.
"Despite what they say about curiosity and the cat, ser, I must ask: why did you refuse to tell her the truth of why you sought Daenerys? Why not simply admit it was because you love the queen? It certainly would have made for a better story than all that tripe about serving, defending, and dying."
Because the last time I uttered those words aloud, Daenerys had me dragged from her sight by Strong Belwas.
At length, realizing his curiosity was leading nowhere, to either the little Lannister lion's advantage or otherwise, he stepped closer to Jorah and lowered himself awkwardly to the muddy floor of the slave pen beside him.
"Will you least indulge me in the tale of woe of how a Northman comes to love the Mad King's daughter? There is so little of interest here, and I need something sweet to take my mind off the stench of shit from the latrine ditch."
It was the last thing Jorah wanted to think of now, but he did so often that the answer sprang readily to his mind--though thankfully not to his tongue.
He'd known it the night he thought she would die in childbed with her son--as surely as he'd known he did not love Erena when she did with his. Which meant he must havecome to love Daenerys sometime earlier than that. While Khal Drogo's son grew in her belly and she grew from a frightened child-bride into a fierce khaleesi. A queen. His queen.
Hizdahr zo Loraq's queen, now. But she would never bear his son, either, if the Lhazareen witch's prophecy held true. When the sun rises in the west and sets in the east. When the seas go dry and mountains blow in the wind like leaves. When your womb quickens again, and you bear a living child…
Jorah had never believed Daenerys' womb would quicken again, after what she endured in childbed. Still he had loved her, kissed her, offered his hand. It did not matter to him if she bore him a child, for he had been there when she brought forth the dragons in fire and in blood--the goddess come down to earth--had watched her suckle them at her breasts. She was Mother of Dragons, Mhysa. To him she was more than wife, and he had been her good right hand.
What do you pray for, Ser Jorah?
Home.
I pray for home, too.
Together, they would have gone there.
But Daenerys had forgotten where home was, for all her sighs and assurances to him that she had not. Abandoned her claim to her true country. Put down roots here. Where three hundred years ago dragons scorched the earth and burned the trees to ash, she had planted new ones whose roots soaked up the slow stinking brown waters of the Skahazadhan, of which her husband, Blood of the Harpy, was master.
"Well," said Tyrion, struggling to his feet in a rattle of chains. Jorah felt his eye on the slavers' mark on his cheek. "At least when you see the Queen again, she'll know you fought for her."
Without turning his eyes from the Great Pyramid of Meereen, from which he had shambled, dazed, after his banishment, he muttered low under his breath. "When I see the Queen again. And when you find out where whores go."
So the Imp shuffled off in his shackles and Jorah sat, waiting for death to take him. Because dragons plant no trees.