Fic: A Year from Now (29/?)
Title: A Year from Now (29/?)
Author: MrsTater
Fandom: A Song of Ice and Fire
Characters & Pairings: Daenerys Targaryen/Jorah Mormont, Tyrion Lannister, Aegon Targaryen, Barristan Selmy
Ratings & Warnings: R, none in this chapter
Format & Word Count: WIP, 3787 in chapter 29
Summary: "Save your tears, child. Weep for him tomorrow, or a year from now. We do not have time for grief. We must go, and quickly, before he dies.” Dany takes Ser Jorah's advice, setting her unborn child, her unhatched dragons, her quest for the Iron Throne, and her relationship with her faithful knight on a very different, but no less adventurous path.
Chapter Summary: Dany finds an unlikely tutor in Tyrion, but his lessons shake the foundation on which she has build the House of Targaryen.
Author's Note: As always, thanks to just-a-dram, who, in addition to ungarbling my sentences, continues to go above and beyond the call of beta-duty in helping me untangle the ever-thickening plot. This week, a special shout-out goes to lyannamormonts, who was inspired by the fic to make this lovely graphic. Thanks so much to her, and to all my readers who have been so lovely and supportive about this fic.
Previous Chapters |
29. A History of Dragons
"My, my," said Tyrion Lannister, his mismatched eyes coming to rest on Drogon from where he stood in the doorway of Dany's cabin, Jorah looming behind him even as he stooped in the low-ceilinged ship's corridor, "look how he's grown."
"Yes…" Dany drew out the word, her fingers ceasing to stroke the fire-hot scales on the top of Drogon's head.
She'd been braced for the Imp's cheek, but could not now be certain his words were that, the maternal part of her warming at the slightest hint of a compliment being paid to her child. In the fortnight since The Bear and the Maiden Fair set sail, Drogon had outgrown her lap and achieved a height that allowed her to rest her hand quite comfortably upon head when he perched at her feet; if his growth continued at this rate, by the time they landed in Qarth he would be able to stand behind her chair and rest his chin on her shoulder. It was no stretch of her imagination that she might begin her conquest of Westeros astride his back, as her ancestor Aegon the First had ridden Balerion, the Black Dread, though Jorah argued that like all young, his growth must eventually slow.
Though what does Jorah not find to argue about of late? Realizing that her gaze had drifted up to her husband's scowling face, she flicked her eyes downward to meet Tyrion's and twitched her lips into a smile.
"It seems you were right about the meat," she said.
"Prince Drogon likes it well done, does he?"
"Blackened."
"That's no way to eat meat." Even in jest, Jorah argued. Drogon darted out his tongue, snake-like.
"I quite agree with Ser Bear," said Tyrion. "I prefer to chase mine around the plate."
"You would, lion," Jorah grumbled.
"Thank you, Ser Jorah," Dany said, drawing up her shoulders , as if to deflect his wounded glance at her form of adress; he deserved much worse from her, she assuaged her guilt, for his betrayal; he was graced with her presence far more often than he was denied it, she having allowed him to share her cabin--though not her bed, and only for Rhaego's sake, who would not close his eyes of a night without the assurance that he would open them and find his papa still near. "I will interview my prisoner in private."
She wasn't certain which she found more surprising: that Jorah obeyed with a bow and no utterance of protest, or that the Imp's protruding brow wrinkled in something like a sympathetic expression as he watched the knight go. What was she to make of this unlikely rapport between one man who had for a time informed on her and another whose brother had slain her father?
In spite of that fact, the sight of the dwarf struggling to balance on bandy legs against the motion of the ship elicited sympathy in her; she bade him to take a seat at the table, angling her own chair--on the back of which Drogon clambered up--conversationally toward his, and even offered him her own good wine, which he accepted rather too eagerly.
"I would hear what else you know of dragons." She arched an eyebrow. "Or is your expertise limited to their diets?"
"Even if it was," came Tyrion's reply from within his goblet, "it would still surpass yours. I hope your royal teats have recovered from that dangerous little brush with ignorance? I asked Ser Jorah, but he hasn't seen them in a fair while."
Dany's face flushed as hot as Drogon's flesh; she was sure if she spoke she would bring forth fire, too, but the Imp didn't give her the chance.
"It would help me to instruct Your Grace if I knew what you do know of dragons," he said, his tone suppliant, even if his posture--leaning back in his chair, fingers hooked together and resting on his stomach--was not. "What have you been told of King Aerys? And, more importantly, who told it to you?"
"I meant literal dragons, Lord Tyrion," Dany heard herself say; she could not imagine why she was still talking to this vile little man, least of all with a respectful address.
"I'm no lord. My father would not allow me even that dignity. But how can you expect to understand your children if you do not understand their forebears?"
"Very well then," said Dany, exhaling her breath slowly through her nostrils. "Although it can hardly come as a surprise to you that all I know of my father came to me from Viserys."
"Who was himself but a child when Aerys died."
"When Aerys was murdered. By your brother," Dany corrected, fully expecting him to repeat the argument he had made before about Ser Jaime's sins not being his own.
Instead, Tyrion looked at her levelly. "I propose a compromise for Your Grace. We'll say Aerys was assassinated. It doesn't necessarily imply evil intent. Jaime only stabbed Aerys in the back--" His tones sliced as sharp as the blade his brother had wielded, evoking an image of the fell deed so visceral that it made Dany flinch. "--because the choice put to him was your father, or his own, or to watch the city burn. Obviously Aerys' fatal error was in asking the wrong Lannister boy to commit patricide. Or to play with wildfire, for that matter. I set the Blackwater ablaze, have you heard?"
"I should have your lying tongue removed." Drogon hopped from the back of Dany's chair onto her shoulder as she stood; the weight of him made her slump, but she forced her posture erect. "My father would have to be mad to burn his own city."
"He burned his own leal lords," Tyrion replied, somehow making Dany feel like the small one though she was standing upright and looking down upon a seated dwarf. "Why do you think he's known as the Mad King, Daenerys?"
"He wasn't mad. The people only called him that."
"Says who? Your brother? Who wasn't mad when he unsheathed a sword in the sacred city of the Dothraki and demanded Khal Drogo give him a golden crown? You, who certainly weren't mad when you decided to burn down your house around yourself and your child?"
"Silence!"
Drogon's screech swallowed Dany's, and his wings beat the air around her as he unfurled them, though he did not fly, his talons piercing her flesh and rooting him firmly to her shoulder. Blood, hot and sticky, trickled down her skin to stain her painted leather vest, but she did not remove him from his perch; the pain he caused her was nothing compared to the stab of Tyrion's words in her heart.
Mad. They thought she was mad. She'd seen the way her maids and her bloodriders had regarded her since she stepped out of the charred skeleton of her house with the red door. Griff, Ser Barristan Selmy--not that she gave one whit for their opinion--even Jorah. Oddly not Tyrion, whatever he said now with such insolence in those mismatched eyes. Why, her own had gaped at her in disbelief, and narrowed in suspicion both by turns each time she'd looked at her face in the glass: only a madwoman would have set fire to a house in which her babe slept.
And yet…those flames had brought forth Drogon as surely as she had birthed Rhaego with the blood of her womb. If she hadn't set it, her shoulder would be void of this child. And she hadn't felt mad before the fire; her whole line of thought had seemed so logical leading up to that point. Or was that the nature of madness? Were dragons in fact born of madness?
"If my father was truly mad," she said slowly, in a low voice, "wouldn't someone have told me before now? Illyrio? Or Jorah?"
Tyrion lurched on his seat to tear a chunk of bread off the loaf at the center of the fable. "Illyrio cared more about being your brother's Master of Coin than in telling an orphaned prince the truth. And before his exile," he said around a mouthful, "Jorah was but a minor lord, bannerman to a higher lord. He knew Aerys no better than Viserys did."
The throb in her shoulder suddenly intolerable, Dany pulled the young dragon off her shoulder, wincing as his claws slid out from her flesh, and set him on the table before Tyrion.
"So Jorah pretended to be a loyal subject," she said.
"Or he protected you from what was naught to him but hearsay. Reliable hearsay, but hearsay nevertheless. That's what knights do, isn't it? Protect their ladies?"
Dany flopped down upon her chair; with her arms folded across her chest, shoulders hunched so that her hair fell over them, she knew she must give off less an air of queen than petulant girl, but she didn't care, nor did she care to hear an enumeration of all the good Jorah had done her. She knew he had protected her. That did not change the fact that he had first betrayed her.
"Even if what you say is true and my father was mad, I have never heard any such claim made about Rhaegar. Yet I think you love him no better than Aerys."
"You refer to an offhand quip I made about your brother and Lyanna Stark?"
Dany nodded.
Tyrion tore off another bit of bread and popped it into his mouth, chewing thoughtfully a moment before he spoke.
"I neither love nor hate any of the players in this mummers' show. I had not quite reached ten name days when it played out. My interest is that of the objective historian. And what history says about Prince Rhaegar is that at worst, he was a kidnapper and a raper, and at best, a libertine who humiliated and betrayed his lady wife by running away with another woman. The mother of that boy you have belowdecks. Who watched Gregor Clegane bash the boy's head against the wall before he raped her to death."
Dany gripped the seat of her chair to steady herself as the Imp's words, whether the truth or an invention meant to have precisely this effect on her, set her world even more askew than Jorah's betrayal had done. Her nails bore into the wood, and her teeth gritted together as she ground out, "Your father's doing."
Tyrion opened his stunted hands wide. "I killed my father."
"How can you boast of that vile sin?"
"You agree my father was a vile man, don't you? Why should it matter who executed justice?"
"Jorah seems to have overlooked it," Dany said, the words not coming out with quite the degree of bitterness she had heard in her mind before she uttered them. "But he sold slaves. He spied on me--"
"Until he became your protector," Tyrion said, and Dany sighed. It seemed she would have to hear about Jorah, after all, for she was too weary to send the Imp away. "Did you ever have so fierce and loyal a defender before you knew your bear?"
"He protected me because he loved me."
The pale eyebrows raised on the bulging forehead. "I should certainly hope so."
"But before that, he was willing to sell me. And he did sell other people, for so small a crime as poaching from him."
"It's a crime large enough to send a man to the Wall."
Dany ignored him. "That's not a good man, worthy of a queen's love."
Tyrion's lips curved in a slight smile instead of his usual smirk. It made him look wise, she thought. And kind. As one could only be wise and kind in the way that a man who had always lived life on the outside, watching, and who valued kindness all the more because it was so seldom shown to him. Well she understood that. There was not so great a distance between queen and khaleesi and the lonely, frightened sister of the Beggar King.
"If you don't know it already, Daenerys," he said, "you soon shall see that the world's not made up of good men and bad men. Just men."
"Perhaps that means it's time for a woman to sit the Iron Throne."
Tyrion snorted into his goblet. "My sweet sister would heartily agree with you there."
He sat hunched and silent over his wine for so long that Dany began to think he had said his piece; but just as she was about to dismiss him and say she would summon him again to talk of dragons of the fire-breathing, winged variety, he spoke again.
"You have found a man who loves you unswervingly, who would do anything for you. Do you know what a rare thing that is? I had it, once--difficult as that seems to believe. Even when I had a nose, mine wasn't a pretty face." His weird eyes darkened, and it seemed to Dany that he was looking at someone else. A ghost, in the corner of the room. "But it was taken from me, and I've searched but I know I won't ever find it again. Wherever whores go. You can't buy it, Your Grace. Not for all the gold on Casterly Rock."
~*~
Jorah's breath had not yet deepened to the even tempo of slumber when Dany, also sleepless, slipped from her bunk, her feet sinking soundlessly into the thick Myrish rug that covered the cabin floor where he slept.
As she stepped into her sandsilk trousers, his voice raked through the heavy silence that blanketed them. "Where are you going?"
Dany laced the front of her vest and glanced at the cradle to see that Rhaego, his bare rump in the air, had not stirred at the sound of voices. "For air."
It was a lie--she meant to go down to the hold, where her prisoners were being held--but Jorah believed it readily enough, as was signified by the rustle of his blanket as he shucked it aside.
"No," she said, as in the light filtering through the high windows she just made out the dark outline of his big hand reaching for the linen shirt that lay crumpled on the floor. "I do not wish for company." But for that of Ser Barristan Selmy.
Sighing heavily, Jorah dropped the shirt. But as Dany shuffled past him to the door, he caught her wrist and held her back. "We have to talk sometime, Daenerys."
She blinked, hard, as if to hide the sudden spring of tears from the silhouette before her. They had been lurking ever since her earlier discussion with Tyrion, and for some reason every time Jorah had caught her eye they advanced further so that now his touch was nearly enough to batter the crumbling dam.
"I know what you would say," she snapped, jerking free of his grasp. "It is my own words that I am unsure of."
"That's an improvement, I suppose," Jorah said as she darted out the door, Drogon flapping after her like an overlarge chicken, shutting it against whatever he said next.
It was a relief to hear nothing but the scuff of her bare feet and the scrape of Drogon's talons on the rough-hewn planks as she scurried down into the deepest underbelly of the ship to the cargo hold. The bloodrider Makho, who had been Rakharo's brother, stood guard at the door.
"Rouse the prisoners," she commanded him in Dothraki. "I would have a word."
The three men were not sleeping when Makho admitted her; beneath the shifting pool of light cast by a swaying lantern, Tyrion perched on a low stool before a cyvasse board someone had procured for him--Jorah, perhaps?--his opponent, Griff, reaching through the iron bars of a cage to move his pieces about the playing field, and looked up at her as she approached, his eyes narrowing to purple slits of disdain. She ignored him--though Drogon flicked his tongue and hissed--and came to stand before the other caged man who bowed his head in deference to her, a grey roughspun blanket slipping from his shoulders as he pushed stiffly to his feet.
"I am not certain whether I trust you, Ser Barristan," she said, though she was not a little bit touched by his attitude of respect, "but you are the only person I have ever met who knew my father. Was King Aerys called the Mad King because…" She swallowed the lump that had formed in her throat since that afternoon, but it would not be dislodged. "…he was?"
"As mad as you, Your Grace," Griff answered before the knight could speak, on his feet now, not in deference but defiantly gripping the bars of the cage. His eyes caught the lamplight. "Fire mad."
"You will stay your wagging tongue," Dany replied, "or Makho there will do as I once saw my husband Khal Drogo DO, and tear it from your throat with his bare hands, so that I may cook it up for Drogon's supper. Dragons like their meat well done, you know."
"I would be careful not to make his point for him, Your Grace," said Tyrion.
Before Dany could rebuke him, Griff lashed out, "Your Grace? I thought you acknowledged me to be Prince Rhaegar's son. Where lies your loyalty, Imp?"
"Why, outside that cage," Tyrion replied, smirking as Griff's foot shot between the bars, upending the cyvasse board.
Ser Barristan's voice crackled out amidst the roll of the carved game pieces on the floor. "Aye, my queen. As bad as the rumors of him were, in life he was worse."
It was not what he said but the way he said it, his dark eyes rich, his tone halting, more like a grandfather who hated to disappoint his granddaughter than a captive faced with delivering distasteful news to a queen, that made her believe him. That made her knees buckle beneath her so that she must grasp the bars of the cage to support herself, the tears sliding hotly down her cheeks as she pressed her forehead against the iron.
"You are not like him," Selmy said. "You take after your mother, Queen Rhaella."
"My mother?" Dany sniffed. No one ever spoke of her mother, so that she scarcely gave thought to the woman who had died to give her life.
"She loved a knight, too. Ser Bonifer Hasty, who won a tourney and crowned her his Queen of Love and Beauty. He was deemed too lowborn for her, even if she had not been promised to Aerys."
Dany's tears dried on her skin as she looked up at the wizened knight, her heart quickening in her breast. All her kin but Viserys had died before she was born, and now, for the first time, she had a sense that she knew one of them. Because she was like them. In a real and tangible way, not in the vague way in which Jorah said she was like her brother Rhaegar who, if Tyrion was to be believed, was not very like her, or who she wanted to be, at all.
"You see, Aunt?" said Griff. "Your own mother knew that it is not for a queen to follow her heart, but to do her duty. She put aside her knight and married her king."
"And suffered cruelly for it," Tyrion added. Dany looked down at him, and saw he wore the same kind and wise expression she had taken note of earlier. "According to Jaime, Aerys did not treat his wife gently."
Though Dany didn't need to have the truth confirmed by Ser Barristan--she had felt the back of Viserys' hand, after all, as well as his open palm and his curled fist, not to mention the barbed lash of his tongue, which had been worse than the physical beatings he had dealt her--she looked to the knight, anyway. He hung his head and swallowed, an expression of distaste lining his aged face further.
"The Kingsguard are privy to shameful secrets, my Princess."
"What troubles might we have been spared," Tyrion mused, rubbing his stubbled chin, "if Rhaella Targaryen had been permitted to wed the knight she loved?"
"You would never have been born, Daenerys," said Griff, glowering at Tyrion. "Nor would I."
"The latter would leave no dispute as to my right to the Iron Throne," Dany replied.
Griff's knuckles turned white as he gripped the bars of the catch. "No one has any right to the Iron Throne except to sit it and do one's duty to one's people. Ser Barristan agrees. Doesn't he?"
Selmy blanched. "I did not mean to imply that a monarch's desire is of greater import than duty."
"I would never treat you in the abominable manner in which King Aerys treated Queen Rhaella," Griff went on. "I would honor and cherish you as my queen and the mother of my heirs."
"I have a son," Dany replied. "The Stallion Who Mounts the World." She tried to imagine herself lying beneath Griff--should he be proved beyond the shadow of a doubt to be her brother's son. He was comely, to be sure, but he was a boy. Why, she must have more experience in bed than he, and that was not at all a point in his favor. When he talked of duty and honor and cherishing, she could not imagine their intercourse being as passionate or pleasurable as the act of love was with Jorah. "And I have a husband."
"Who betrayed you, and brought dishonor upon his own House and the whole of the North."
Though she'd said the same herself, she bristled to hear judgment against Jorah fall from Griff's lips. Jorah had committed no crime for himself, but for love. And if he had not been exiled, he never would have gone to Pentos and become her protector. The Usurper would have found another spy, one who would not have spared her and her child. Or if another man had taken mercy on her, the kos would not, and Rhaego would still be dead and she would be with the crones…She would have no Drogon…
"Put him aside, Daenerys!" Griff's voice broke into her musing. "Do your duty and wed me, in the noble and ancient custom of House Targaryen."
"Jorah and I spoke vows before the Seven that made us one heart, one soul, then and forever." Spittle glistened in the lamplight between the bars of the cell as she flung at him, "Cursed be the one who comes between us."
Read Chapter 30
Author: MrsTater
Fandom: A Song of Ice and Fire
Characters & Pairings: Daenerys Targaryen/Jorah Mormont, Tyrion Lannister, Aegon Targaryen, Barristan Selmy
Ratings & Warnings: R, none in this chapter
Format & Word Count: WIP, 3787 in chapter 29
Summary: "Save your tears, child. Weep for him tomorrow, or a year from now. We do not have time for grief. We must go, and quickly, before he dies.” Dany takes Ser Jorah's advice, setting her unborn child, her unhatched dragons, her quest for the Iron Throne, and her relationship with her faithful knight on a very different, but no less adventurous path.
Chapter Summary: Dany finds an unlikely tutor in Tyrion, but his lessons shake the foundation on which she has build the House of Targaryen.
Author's Note: As always, thanks to just-a-dram, who, in addition to ungarbling my sentences, continues to go above and beyond the call of beta-duty in helping me untangle the ever-thickening plot. This week, a special shout-out goes to lyannamormonts, who was inspired by the fic to make this lovely graphic. Thanks so much to her, and to all my readers who have been so lovely and supportive about this fic.
Previous Chapters |
29. A History of Dragons
"My, my," said Tyrion Lannister, his mismatched eyes coming to rest on Drogon from where he stood in the doorway of Dany's cabin, Jorah looming behind him even as he stooped in the low-ceilinged ship's corridor, "look how he's grown."
"Yes…" Dany drew out the word, her fingers ceasing to stroke the fire-hot scales on the top of Drogon's head.
She'd been braced for the Imp's cheek, but could not now be certain his words were that, the maternal part of her warming at the slightest hint of a compliment being paid to her child. In the fortnight since The Bear and the Maiden Fair set sail, Drogon had outgrown her lap and achieved a height that allowed her to rest her hand quite comfortably upon head when he perched at her feet; if his growth continued at this rate, by the time they landed in Qarth he would be able to stand behind her chair and rest his chin on her shoulder. It was no stretch of her imagination that she might begin her conquest of Westeros astride his back, as her ancestor Aegon the First had ridden Balerion, the Black Dread, though Jorah argued that like all young, his growth must eventually slow.
Though what does Jorah not find to argue about of late? Realizing that her gaze had drifted up to her husband's scowling face, she flicked her eyes downward to meet Tyrion's and twitched her lips into a smile.
"It seems you were right about the meat," she said.
"Prince Drogon likes it well done, does he?"
"Blackened."
"That's no way to eat meat." Even in jest, Jorah argued. Drogon darted out his tongue, snake-like.
"I quite agree with Ser Bear," said Tyrion. "I prefer to chase mine around the plate."
"You would, lion," Jorah grumbled.
"Thank you, Ser Jorah," Dany said, drawing up her shoulders , as if to deflect his wounded glance at her form of adress; he deserved much worse from her, she assuaged her guilt, for his betrayal; he was graced with her presence far more often than he was denied it, she having allowed him to share her cabin--though not her bed, and only for Rhaego's sake, who would not close his eyes of a night without the assurance that he would open them and find his papa still near. "I will interview my prisoner in private."
She wasn't certain which she found more surprising: that Jorah obeyed with a bow and no utterance of protest, or that the Imp's protruding brow wrinkled in something like a sympathetic expression as he watched the knight go. What was she to make of this unlikely rapport between one man who had for a time informed on her and another whose brother had slain her father?
In spite of that fact, the sight of the dwarf struggling to balance on bandy legs against the motion of the ship elicited sympathy in her; she bade him to take a seat at the table, angling her own chair--on the back of which Drogon clambered up--conversationally toward his, and even offered him her own good wine, which he accepted rather too eagerly.
"I would hear what else you know of dragons." She arched an eyebrow. "Or is your expertise limited to their diets?"
"Even if it was," came Tyrion's reply from within his goblet, "it would still surpass yours. I hope your royal teats have recovered from that dangerous little brush with ignorance? I asked Ser Jorah, but he hasn't seen them in a fair while."
Dany's face flushed as hot as Drogon's flesh; she was sure if she spoke she would bring forth fire, too, but the Imp didn't give her the chance.
"It would help me to instruct Your Grace if I knew what you do know of dragons," he said, his tone suppliant, even if his posture--leaning back in his chair, fingers hooked together and resting on his stomach--was not. "What have you been told of King Aerys? And, more importantly, who told it to you?"
"I meant literal dragons, Lord Tyrion," Dany heard herself say; she could not imagine why she was still talking to this vile little man, least of all with a respectful address.
"I'm no lord. My father would not allow me even that dignity. But how can you expect to understand your children if you do not understand their forebears?"
"Very well then," said Dany, exhaling her breath slowly through her nostrils. "Although it can hardly come as a surprise to you that all I know of my father came to me from Viserys."
"Who was himself but a child when Aerys died."
"When Aerys was murdered. By your brother," Dany corrected, fully expecting him to repeat the argument he had made before about Ser Jaime's sins not being his own.
Instead, Tyrion looked at her levelly. "I propose a compromise for Your Grace. We'll say Aerys was assassinated. It doesn't necessarily imply evil intent. Jaime only stabbed Aerys in the back--" His tones sliced as sharp as the blade his brother had wielded, evoking an image of the fell deed so visceral that it made Dany flinch. "--because the choice put to him was your father, or his own, or to watch the city burn. Obviously Aerys' fatal error was in asking the wrong Lannister boy to commit patricide. Or to play with wildfire, for that matter. I set the Blackwater ablaze, have you heard?"
"I should have your lying tongue removed." Drogon hopped from the back of Dany's chair onto her shoulder as she stood; the weight of him made her slump, but she forced her posture erect. "My father would have to be mad to burn his own city."
"He burned his own leal lords," Tyrion replied, somehow making Dany feel like the small one though she was standing upright and looking down upon a seated dwarf. "Why do you think he's known as the Mad King, Daenerys?"
"He wasn't mad. The people only called him that."
"Says who? Your brother? Who wasn't mad when he unsheathed a sword in the sacred city of the Dothraki and demanded Khal Drogo give him a golden crown? You, who certainly weren't mad when you decided to burn down your house around yourself and your child?"
"Silence!"
Drogon's screech swallowed Dany's, and his wings beat the air around her as he unfurled them, though he did not fly, his talons piercing her flesh and rooting him firmly to her shoulder. Blood, hot and sticky, trickled down her skin to stain her painted leather vest, but she did not remove him from his perch; the pain he caused her was nothing compared to the stab of Tyrion's words in her heart.
Mad. They thought she was mad. She'd seen the way her maids and her bloodriders had regarded her since she stepped out of the charred skeleton of her house with the red door. Griff, Ser Barristan Selmy--not that she gave one whit for their opinion--even Jorah. Oddly not Tyrion, whatever he said now with such insolence in those mismatched eyes. Why, her own had gaped at her in disbelief, and narrowed in suspicion both by turns each time she'd looked at her face in the glass: only a madwoman would have set fire to a house in which her babe slept.
And yet…those flames had brought forth Drogon as surely as she had birthed Rhaego with the blood of her womb. If she hadn't set it, her shoulder would be void of this child. And she hadn't felt mad before the fire; her whole line of thought had seemed so logical leading up to that point. Or was that the nature of madness? Were dragons in fact born of madness?
"If my father was truly mad," she said slowly, in a low voice, "wouldn't someone have told me before now? Illyrio? Or Jorah?"
Tyrion lurched on his seat to tear a chunk of bread off the loaf at the center of the fable. "Illyrio cared more about being your brother's Master of Coin than in telling an orphaned prince the truth. And before his exile," he said around a mouthful, "Jorah was but a minor lord, bannerman to a higher lord. He knew Aerys no better than Viserys did."
The throb in her shoulder suddenly intolerable, Dany pulled the young dragon off her shoulder, wincing as his claws slid out from her flesh, and set him on the table before Tyrion.
"So Jorah pretended to be a loyal subject," she said.
"Or he protected you from what was naught to him but hearsay. Reliable hearsay, but hearsay nevertheless. That's what knights do, isn't it? Protect their ladies?"
Dany flopped down upon her chair; with her arms folded across her chest, shoulders hunched so that her hair fell over them, she knew she must give off less an air of queen than petulant girl, but she didn't care, nor did she care to hear an enumeration of all the good Jorah had done her. She knew he had protected her. That did not change the fact that he had first betrayed her.
"Even if what you say is true and my father was mad, I have never heard any such claim made about Rhaegar. Yet I think you love him no better than Aerys."
"You refer to an offhand quip I made about your brother and Lyanna Stark?"
Dany nodded.
Tyrion tore off another bit of bread and popped it into his mouth, chewing thoughtfully a moment before he spoke.
"I neither love nor hate any of the players in this mummers' show. I had not quite reached ten name days when it played out. My interest is that of the objective historian. And what history says about Prince Rhaegar is that at worst, he was a kidnapper and a raper, and at best, a libertine who humiliated and betrayed his lady wife by running away with another woman. The mother of that boy you have belowdecks. Who watched Gregor Clegane bash the boy's head against the wall before he raped her to death."
Dany gripped the seat of her chair to steady herself as the Imp's words, whether the truth or an invention meant to have precisely this effect on her, set her world even more askew than Jorah's betrayal had done. Her nails bore into the wood, and her teeth gritted together as she ground out, "Your father's doing."
Tyrion opened his stunted hands wide. "I killed my father."
"How can you boast of that vile sin?"
"You agree my father was a vile man, don't you? Why should it matter who executed justice?"
"Jorah seems to have overlooked it," Dany said, the words not coming out with quite the degree of bitterness she had heard in her mind before she uttered them. "But he sold slaves. He spied on me--"
"Until he became your protector," Tyrion said, and Dany sighed. It seemed she would have to hear about Jorah, after all, for she was too weary to send the Imp away. "Did you ever have so fierce and loyal a defender before you knew your bear?"
"He protected me because he loved me."
The pale eyebrows raised on the bulging forehead. "I should certainly hope so."
"But before that, he was willing to sell me. And he did sell other people, for so small a crime as poaching from him."
"It's a crime large enough to send a man to the Wall."
Dany ignored him. "That's not a good man, worthy of a queen's love."
Tyrion's lips curved in a slight smile instead of his usual smirk. It made him look wise, she thought. And kind. As one could only be wise and kind in the way that a man who had always lived life on the outside, watching, and who valued kindness all the more because it was so seldom shown to him. Well she understood that. There was not so great a distance between queen and khaleesi and the lonely, frightened sister of the Beggar King.
"If you don't know it already, Daenerys," he said, "you soon shall see that the world's not made up of good men and bad men. Just men."
"Perhaps that means it's time for a woman to sit the Iron Throne."
Tyrion snorted into his goblet. "My sweet sister would heartily agree with you there."
He sat hunched and silent over his wine for so long that Dany began to think he had said his piece; but just as she was about to dismiss him and say she would summon him again to talk of dragons of the fire-breathing, winged variety, he spoke again.
"You have found a man who loves you unswervingly, who would do anything for you. Do you know what a rare thing that is? I had it, once--difficult as that seems to believe. Even when I had a nose, mine wasn't a pretty face." His weird eyes darkened, and it seemed to Dany that he was looking at someone else. A ghost, in the corner of the room. "But it was taken from me, and I've searched but I know I won't ever find it again. Wherever whores go. You can't buy it, Your Grace. Not for all the gold on Casterly Rock."
~*~
Jorah's breath had not yet deepened to the even tempo of slumber when Dany, also sleepless, slipped from her bunk, her feet sinking soundlessly into the thick Myrish rug that covered the cabin floor where he slept.
As she stepped into her sandsilk trousers, his voice raked through the heavy silence that blanketed them. "Where are you going?"
Dany laced the front of her vest and glanced at the cradle to see that Rhaego, his bare rump in the air, had not stirred at the sound of voices. "For air."
It was a lie--she meant to go down to the hold, where her prisoners were being held--but Jorah believed it readily enough, as was signified by the rustle of his blanket as he shucked it aside.
"No," she said, as in the light filtering through the high windows she just made out the dark outline of his big hand reaching for the linen shirt that lay crumpled on the floor. "I do not wish for company." But for that of Ser Barristan Selmy.
Sighing heavily, Jorah dropped the shirt. But as Dany shuffled past him to the door, he caught her wrist and held her back. "We have to talk sometime, Daenerys."
She blinked, hard, as if to hide the sudden spring of tears from the silhouette before her. They had been lurking ever since her earlier discussion with Tyrion, and for some reason every time Jorah had caught her eye they advanced further so that now his touch was nearly enough to batter the crumbling dam.
"I know what you would say," she snapped, jerking free of his grasp. "It is my own words that I am unsure of."
"That's an improvement, I suppose," Jorah said as she darted out the door, Drogon flapping after her like an overlarge chicken, shutting it against whatever he said next.
It was a relief to hear nothing but the scuff of her bare feet and the scrape of Drogon's talons on the rough-hewn planks as she scurried down into the deepest underbelly of the ship to the cargo hold. The bloodrider Makho, who had been Rakharo's brother, stood guard at the door.
"Rouse the prisoners," she commanded him in Dothraki. "I would have a word."
The three men were not sleeping when Makho admitted her; beneath the shifting pool of light cast by a swaying lantern, Tyrion perched on a low stool before a cyvasse board someone had procured for him--Jorah, perhaps?--his opponent, Griff, reaching through the iron bars of a cage to move his pieces about the playing field, and looked up at her as she approached, his eyes narrowing to purple slits of disdain. She ignored him--though Drogon flicked his tongue and hissed--and came to stand before the other caged man who bowed his head in deference to her, a grey roughspun blanket slipping from his shoulders as he pushed stiffly to his feet.
"I am not certain whether I trust you, Ser Barristan," she said, though she was not a little bit touched by his attitude of respect, "but you are the only person I have ever met who knew my father. Was King Aerys called the Mad King because…" She swallowed the lump that had formed in her throat since that afternoon, but it would not be dislodged. "…he was?"
"As mad as you, Your Grace," Griff answered before the knight could speak, on his feet now, not in deference but defiantly gripping the bars of the cage. His eyes caught the lamplight. "Fire mad."
"You will stay your wagging tongue," Dany replied, "or Makho there will do as I once saw my husband Khal Drogo DO, and tear it from your throat with his bare hands, so that I may cook it up for Drogon's supper. Dragons like their meat well done, you know."
"I would be careful not to make his point for him, Your Grace," said Tyrion.
Before Dany could rebuke him, Griff lashed out, "Your Grace? I thought you acknowledged me to be Prince Rhaegar's son. Where lies your loyalty, Imp?"
"Why, outside that cage," Tyrion replied, smirking as Griff's foot shot between the bars, upending the cyvasse board.
Ser Barristan's voice crackled out amidst the roll of the carved game pieces on the floor. "Aye, my queen. As bad as the rumors of him were, in life he was worse."
It was not what he said but the way he said it, his dark eyes rich, his tone halting, more like a grandfather who hated to disappoint his granddaughter than a captive faced with delivering distasteful news to a queen, that made her believe him. That made her knees buckle beneath her so that she must grasp the bars of the cage to support herself, the tears sliding hotly down her cheeks as she pressed her forehead against the iron.
"You are not like him," Selmy said. "You take after your mother, Queen Rhaella."
"My mother?" Dany sniffed. No one ever spoke of her mother, so that she scarcely gave thought to the woman who had died to give her life.
"She loved a knight, too. Ser Bonifer Hasty, who won a tourney and crowned her his Queen of Love and Beauty. He was deemed too lowborn for her, even if she had not been promised to Aerys."
Dany's tears dried on her skin as she looked up at the wizened knight, her heart quickening in her breast. All her kin but Viserys had died before she was born, and now, for the first time, she had a sense that she knew one of them. Because she was like them. In a real and tangible way, not in the vague way in which Jorah said she was like her brother Rhaegar who, if Tyrion was to be believed, was not very like her, or who she wanted to be, at all.
"You see, Aunt?" said Griff. "Your own mother knew that it is not for a queen to follow her heart, but to do her duty. She put aside her knight and married her king."
"And suffered cruelly for it," Tyrion added. Dany looked down at him, and saw he wore the same kind and wise expression she had taken note of earlier. "According to Jaime, Aerys did not treat his wife gently."
Though Dany didn't need to have the truth confirmed by Ser Barristan--she had felt the back of Viserys' hand, after all, as well as his open palm and his curled fist, not to mention the barbed lash of his tongue, which had been worse than the physical beatings he had dealt her--she looked to the knight, anyway. He hung his head and swallowed, an expression of distaste lining his aged face further.
"The Kingsguard are privy to shameful secrets, my Princess."
"What troubles might we have been spared," Tyrion mused, rubbing his stubbled chin, "if Rhaella Targaryen had been permitted to wed the knight she loved?"
"You would never have been born, Daenerys," said Griff, glowering at Tyrion. "Nor would I."
"The latter would leave no dispute as to my right to the Iron Throne," Dany replied.
Griff's knuckles turned white as he gripped the bars of the catch. "No one has any right to the Iron Throne except to sit it and do one's duty to one's people. Ser Barristan agrees. Doesn't he?"
Selmy blanched. "I did not mean to imply that a monarch's desire is of greater import than duty."
"I would never treat you in the abominable manner in which King Aerys treated Queen Rhaella," Griff went on. "I would honor and cherish you as my queen and the mother of my heirs."
"I have a son," Dany replied. "The Stallion Who Mounts the World." She tried to imagine herself lying beneath Griff--should he be proved beyond the shadow of a doubt to be her brother's son. He was comely, to be sure, but he was a boy. Why, she must have more experience in bed than he, and that was not at all a point in his favor. When he talked of duty and honor and cherishing, she could not imagine their intercourse being as passionate or pleasurable as the act of love was with Jorah. "And I have a husband."
"Who betrayed you, and brought dishonor upon his own House and the whole of the North."
Though she'd said the same herself, she bristled to hear judgment against Jorah fall from Griff's lips. Jorah had committed no crime for himself, but for love. And if he had not been exiled, he never would have gone to Pentos and become her protector. The Usurper would have found another spy, one who would not have spared her and her child. Or if another man had taken mercy on her, the kos would not, and Rhaego would still be dead and she would be with the crones…She would have no Drogon…
"Put him aside, Daenerys!" Griff's voice broke into her musing. "Do your duty and wed me, in the noble and ancient custom of House Targaryen."
"Jorah and I spoke vows before the Seven that made us one heart, one soul, then and forever." Spittle glistened in the lamplight between the bars of the cell as she flung at him, "Cursed be the one who comes between us."
Read Chapter 30