FIC: Blood of My Blood (Jorah/Dany) for ozmissage
Recipient: ozmissage
Title: Blood of My Blood
Author: mrstater
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Jorah Mormont/Daenerys Targaryen
Word Count: 4148 words
Summary: "You feel you've received your just punishment, is that it? That I should now welcome you back into my good graces with arms open wide to embrace you?" Jorah finds his way back to the Dragon Queen.
Warning: graphic references/images of slavery, sexuality
Blood of My Blood
The bear paced his cage.
True enough, no iron bars surrounded him, not even in the window, and the chamber allowed him to stand at full height, or to lie down if he wished and stretch his broad frame and long limbs without touching red sandstone walls of the pyramid. No manacles encumbered his wrists, no shackles limited his strides.
Most importantly, no collar bound his neck, naming him Yezzan zo Qaggaz's dancing bear.
But it might as well, Jorah thought, pausing in the center of the darkened chamber, the moonlight that fell through the window illuminating his face in the looking glass.
Washed with strong lye soap, dressed in new clothes made in the Westerosi fashion and not the mismatched detritus of dead sellswords from every corner of the earth, Barristan Selmy had seen to it that Ser Jorah Mormont looked the part of a knight again. That he would face the queen--whenever she returned…if she returned--cloaked with dignity if not the colors of his noble house. Yet Selmy had not looked into Jorah's eyes as he confined him here as a highborn lord instead of in the dungeons in the bowels of the pyramid with Brown Ben Plumm and the other commanders of the Second Sons, but rather at the ones burnt into the flesh of Jorah's cheek.
He rubbed at his wrists, felt the stricture of the cold heavy metal around his throat when he swallowed, his own gaze drawn to the demon's mask leering at him from the looking glass. Pride had undone him time and time again, but he'd never been a vain man; he knew he had not been handsome even before the slavers' iron ruined his flesh. This fact had hardly been a concern, until Daenerys did not desire him.
Mother, the freedmen and women of Essos called her. Breaker of Shackles. It boded well for his fate that she harbored compassion for all those poor wretches held in bondage. But if she looked at him in pity…
He would rather die chained in the filth of his cage.
With a roar, the exile Lord of Bear Island put his fist through the glass.
~*~
The queen returned to Meereen astride her great black dragon, at the head of a khalasar. Jorah knew it before Ser Barristan came to his chamber bearing the news, having woken at dawn to the thunder of ten thousand score hooves and the cloud of their dust rising over the walls of the city. Through it she had flown, a gleaming speck of silver on Drogon's back.
What did surprise him was that she summoned him within the very day of her return; he had not expected to rank so high on her matters of import. Nor, he found as Strong Belwas led him to the ebony bench from which she presided over her court, her feet not quite touching the floor as she sat propped on silken cushions, was she quite the sight for sore eyes that Jorah dreamt of so many a night since she'd sent him from her side.
Only a fine silver fuzz shining on her sunburnt scalp remained of her beautiful hair--singed off by her own dragon, no doubt, when she'd tamed him in the fighting pits. Though the sight of her bald head took him back to that long ago dawn when the smoke of Khal Drogo's pyre had cleared to unveil her, naked and unburnt, the mother of dragons, and Jorah had fallen to his knees before her power and her primal beauty, she appeared not so fierce now, nor so commanding of awe. Her Dothraki garb hung loosely on her lean frame--no, not lean, gaunt, as she had been in the Red Waste--and she gazed out at him from hollows shadowed the same purple as her eyes. Clearly, she had been ill.
So beloved was the queen by the wretched of Meereen that rumors had reached even Yezzan zo Qaggaz's slave pens that the Silver Lady herself had stretched out her own hands to bathe the fevered brows and quench the parched throats of the dying of Meereen. Jorah had worried but little for her health, thinking her immune to the bloody flux; he remembered swinging down from his saddle to offer her his waterskin after she had vomited in the Dothraki Sea in the early days of her pregnancy, and she'd claimed that it was the first time in her entire life that she had been sick. Jorah had heard tell of the sturdy Targaryen constitution, but he also had seen with his own eyes how the Pale Mare did not discriminate about whom she took as her rider, carrying the lowliest slave to the highest master to heaven or hell.
That Daenerys had not ridden to her death did little to loosen the knot into which his stomach tied itself. She could walk through fire and not be burnt, but she was still mortal; else why would she be surrounded by armed men? But her Unsullied and Ser Barristan the Bold had not protected her well enough, and Jorah--not only another sworn sword, but blood of her blood--had been bound from her in her hour of need, through his own fault as much as those who had captured him before he could return to his place at her side.
The thought of his enslavement made him suddenly aware that the queen's lilac eyes scrutinized him as acutely as he studied her. They touched the mark on his cheek, of course; Jorah felt her gaze as the red-hot iron that had branded him with the demon's mask, though it did not linger so long. He wanted nothing so much as to hang his head in shame, but he clung to his words--Here I Stand--as Daenerys continued to take him in, feeling naked as he had been upon the auction block, as exposed as when he had been splayed out in the whipping racks to be flogged. He searched her expression, dreading any sign of pity in the curve of her mouth or the twitch of her eyebrows, as he had seen at her side as she set free the captive children of Essos; yet he found himself equally unsettled by the unflinching mask she wore. Was she unmoved by the abuse he had suffered, the indignities he had endured? Did she look at him and see only justice?
"How did you injure your sword hand, ser?" Daenerys spoke, at last, her voice a sharp bright blade cutting through the muzzle of silence.
"I broke a mirror."
"They say that brings bad luck."
Jorah felt the corner of his mouth twitch. "Could my luck possibly get any worse than it already has?"
Strong Belwas laughed, the bark ringing out in Daenerys’ hall. A rumble of grim amusement passed among a few of the other guards, but the queen herself merely arched a pale eyebrow; her forehead appeared higher without soft tendrils of her hair curling around it.
"Your luck, Jorah? Or your choices?"
He bowed his head. "Khaleesi, I--"
"It would seem you've chosen poorly yet again."
Jorah's lowered gaze took in the protruding bones of her ankles between the straps of her sandals as she slid forward on the cushions to place her feet on the floor; his eyes followed the upward motion of her legs as she stood, settling on the jut of her hipbones above her low-slung sandsilk trousers and medallion belt. Before he could stop it, a memory flashed before his eyes of her stepping into those trousers, of her asking him to hand her that belt, before he pulled her into his arms, crushing her bare breasts to his chest and curling the silken silver threads of her hair around his hand on her shoulder when he had kissed her that night aboard her ship Baelerion.
When she had welcomed his lips upon hers and invited his tongue into her sweet mouth and kissed him back.
When, for a few blissful minutes, he had believed she might return the love he could no longer stop himself offering to her as freely and fully as he had given her his sword.
He blinked to clear the image from his mind, and saw Daenerys as she was now, small breasts concealed by her painted vest, her head balder than his. But as he met her eyes, he saw that they, too, looked inward, to the past. When she spoke, her voice trembled--though whether with sorrow, or with barely controlled rage, or another emotion entirely, he could not say.
"The last time you stood there, I swore that if you set foot in this city again, Strong Belwas would tear off your head." She took another step nearer to him, her chin lifted as if she intended to intimidate the burly knight with her stance. "Before this audience I sentenced the traitor Brown Ben Plumm to death, alongside my own husband Hizdahr zo Loraq, who attempted to poison me."
You would already be a widow, my queen, if I had been at your side to stop the attempt. Jorah held his tongue, though bitter bile clung to it, as the words Daenerys spoke to him at his last trial roiled in his head: I know you betrayed me. I know a poisoner tried to call my son, because of you.
"I made an oath to serve and obey you," he said, his voice a rasp, "and to die for you. If you should claim my life, the gods will have answered my one prayer, to look once more upon your face." He swallowed. "Only make it a clean death, my queen. By Ser Barristan's blade, if you have any pity, not Belwas' hands. I have watched him at meat."
Though Belwas' grip tightened on Jorah's arm, the eunuch's oafish chuckle resonated in his barrel chest.
"I thought you prayed for home, ser."
Daenerys' voice was soft, yet her words struck him as the flat of a blade; Jorah bowed his head as he had that other time, when he confessed for what he had sold her secrets: Varys said…I might go home.
"There isn't much to do in a slave yard than re-evaluate which prayers have gone seven years unanswered, and which are the most likely to be granted in whatever time remains." Straightening his shoulders, Jorah raised his head and looked her once more in the eye. "Bear Island lay half a world away even if I had not been chained in a cage. You resided just behind a city wall, and held the keys."
She turned from him, stalking back to her dais. "I also hold an army of Unsullied. The Stormcrows. And now a khalasar. Not to mention three full-grown dragons."
Two of which still roam free, Jorah thought but, wisely, did not say.
"Tell me, Ser Jorah," the queen said, resuming her seat on her bench, keeping to the edge so that her feet touched the floor. "What use do you think I have for these Second Sons whom you have returned to my hand?"
"Dragon fodder, for all I care," Jorah said. He started to take a step nearer to her, but Belwas' hand tethered him. "You don't need me to tell you there's not a loyal whoreson among them. It wasn't the sellswords I thought you might find useful." Not strictly true; he hadn't known she would return to the city with a khalasar, and had sought to bolster the number of her troops. "So if you decide to cast them into the pit, be sure the dwarf is not among them when you do."
Daenerys' eyebrows knit. "The dwarf?"
Jorah could not hold back a smile. "Aye, Khaleesi. Tyrion Lannister."
"Tyrion…" Her voice trailed away.
"The Kingslayer's brother."
"I know who Tyrion Lannister is." Daenerys' voice snapped like a whip, reminding everyone in her hall who wielded the authority. "Rumors reached me that he slew his own father and fled across the Narrow Sea. His sister who styles herself the Queen Regent has a price on his head." The queen narrowed her eyes on Jorah. "Is that how you fell in with slavers? You were carrying him back to Westeros, where Queen Cersei might grant you the pardon her husband the Usurper promised?"
"There is only one queen from whom I would beg pardon."
Her nostrils flared. "In either case, you admit that you thought to buy your life with that of another person's."
"He's a kinslayer, Daenerys."
"Do you never learn?" she cried, her voice climbing to a pitch that broke with emotion, her eyes gleaming. She blinked back the tears--if it was tears that glimmered--and tore her gaze from Jorah to address her white-cloaked Lord Commander. "Ser Barristan, take the bear back to his cage. And bring me Tyrion the Imp."
~*~
The bear's shadow crept along the chamber wall, lengthening and shifting with each shudder of the candle stub. Soon it would gutter one last time and burn out, plunging him into darkness. Jorah did not fear the dark, but he misliked the reminder that he had no choice in the time and manner of its coming, that he had traded one form of captivity for another.
That he would have been a freer man had he not fled Ned Stark's justice in the first place.
Emitting a low sound in his throat, he shambled heavily to the table and stretched out his injured hand over the flame, pinching the wick between thumb and middle finger. He inhaled sharply through his nose at the transfer of fire within his skin as he snuffed out the flame, but welcomed the sting as proof that not all was beyond his control.
The hiss, however, drowned in the rattle of metal outside the chamber door, followed by the clunk of the bolt rolling over in the lock. As the door creaked open on its hinges, the transparent grey ribbon of smoke in the dark was expelled by the glow of another candle. Jorah's bandaged right hand crossed instinctively to his left hip, where his sword ought to have hung, but of course it was not there. Not the good steel he had carried from Bear Island into his exile--that was lost to him forever, stripped from him by slavers--not even the far inferior weapon supplied by the Second Sons' armory.
Not that he had need of it, as the slight figure that stood framed in the darkness belonged to Daenerys.
"Khaleesi," he said, folding his hands together in front of him, the fingers of his left hand encircling his right wrist. "Have you come to tell me my fate? Or to deal it yourself?"
Hers was the only hand of justice from which he would not run, even if he had been at liberty to do so. He would live or die by it. In the wide world there was no other. She was the world.
Of course, he could not but hope that her coming here to him, rather than having him hauled before her court, clad as she was in a bedrobe of persimmon-colored silk and soft embroidered slippers, meant that she had another fate in mind for him than punishment.
"The Imp tells me you owe him your life," she said, stepping further into the room, the light of her candle encircling him as the door fell shut upon the darkness. She removed the stub of melted wax from the stand on the table and replaced it with her own.
"I owe much to many men. Unlike the Lannisters, I have not been so consistent at paying my debts."
"He said that if it were not for him, you would have been bought for the fighting pits."
"Aye," Jorah admitted, glancing away.
The scabs that had barely begun to form across his knuckles and the back of his hand tore as he clenched his fingers tight into a fist, fresh blood adhering the linen dressings to his wounds. He hadn't defended himself against the accusation she'd made against him before her court; on the surface there was no defense: he had brought her the Lannister in the hope of proving his loyalty.
What Daenerys did not seem to understand was that the love he bore her as a woman, not only as his queen, did not negate his service to her. If he did not love her, he would have had no reason not to trade the Imp to Queen Cersei in exchange for Bear Island. Loving Daenerys made him serve her better because it made him better.
Of course, if Tyrion had also told her that Jorah had handled him as gently as the slavers, the argument would be rather unconvincing. So he did not make it.
Though even the very best of men, surely, would be hard pressed not to give the Imp a solid blow to silence that ceaselessly running mouth. And Jorah harbored no delusions of being the best of men.
"It would seem your luck has been better than you led me to believe," Daenerys said, a hitch in her voice that drew his gaze again.
But he lifted his eyes to find hers now downcast, her head bowed as if in shame. Though what could she have to be ashamed of? Her robe was overlarge for her girlish build, but Jorah glimpsed enough of her knuckles at the bottom of the hem to tell that her hands, too, were balled into fists, clutching at the excess fabric inside the sleeves.
"The fighting pits were open because of me," she went on, her tones of anguish emphasized by her fists beating her own thighs as she now paced the room. "I had shut them down, freed the poor wretches who had been bought to die there, but then I allowed Hizdahr to persuade me to re-open them. All for the sake of peace that was never going to last. He gave me the follies to celebrate our marriage. To mock me, before he poisoned me."
The tremble in her voice could only be rage, Jorah thought; she had, after all, ordered her treacherous husband executed. When she turned around to face him, however, her eyes were luminous with sorrow.
"If I had seen you in that pit, Jorah, unarmed against a wild beast…"
She raised one hand, her sleeve falling back over her thin pale arm as her fingers uncurled and reached out to touch his branded cheek. Though he had longed for her touch above all else, Jorah flinched away.
He could not stop the touch of her gaze.
"I am not surprised you made an unruly slave," she said, quietly, her hand falling to her side. "Oh, Jorah--why did you not swallow your foolish pride and submit to me when you had the chance?"
"You'd have made a gentler mistress, would you?"
Her eyes flashed, and for a moment he thought she would strike him, her palm cracking against the loathsome mark. Better her wrath than her pity, he thought, digging his heels into the floor, standing his ground.
The blow never arrived. Instead, Daenerys turned away from him, her frame folding in on itself as she lowered herself to sit at the edge of the bed, hugging her knees to her chest beneath the pinky-orange silk.
"The Imp also told me that the slavers never broke you. That you only gave up when you heard that I had taken a husband."
Jorah had thought he'd known what heartbreak was, when Lynesse forsook their marriage vows to be Tregar Ormallen's concubine. Even the loss of the woman for whom he'd given up everything had not cut the heart and soul clean out of him, leaving him a mere husk of a man with a striped back and branded cheek. Word that the queen had fled the city--and its king--had been a balm, even more so the news that her husband would soon be dead by her own command. But for Daenerys to speak to Jorah of the agony he had endured, believing her to be well and truly lost to him, left his heart raw, oozing like his knuckles beneath the bandages and burst scabs.
"But here you stand," she continued, smiling a little, "and I do not see a broken man. I see the same bear who has always dared to look me in the eye and speak plainly. Who kissed me…loved me."
The slap he earlier expected from her hand came now, from the memory of her voice. He'd told her he loved her, once--and she recoiled from him with a cry: Do not say that word!
Why did she now speak of what was then so undesirable to her? Unless it was not so, any longer…He closed his eyes against the sting of his sharp indrawn breath; it hurt to hope, near as much as it hurt to have none…
"Do you remember when I returned from the sewers when we took Meereen?" he asked, at length. "You told me you'd hoped I'd drown in slavers' filth."
He spat out the words, as if he could rid himself of the humiliation they had wrought, the spray of it flashing in the candlelight as it landed upon Daenerys' cheek. She didn't move a finger to wipe it away.
"I didn't think I could be brought lower than I was at that moment," he went on, "but now I have been slavers' filth. Do not believe even I am so bull-headed as to miss the irony. The slaver enslaved."
"So you feel you've received your just punishment, is that it? That I should now welcome you back into my good graces with arms open wide to embrace you?"
"How low must I be brought to satisfy you?" Jorah bellowed. "Lower than this?" He loomed over her, pointing to his ruined cheek, which would forever carry his shame. "I gave you my loyalty while Khal Drogo yet lived. I gave you my love with no hope that you would ever be free to give me yours in return."
Daenery's hand caught his, her fingers closing around it. Her pale chapped lips twitched into a smile that would not quite hold, for the trembling of her chin.
"You never spoke me gently," she said. "Do you know even when I imagine what you would say to me, you are my gruff bear?"
Jorah snorted. "And when you imagine my counsel, Khaleesi, do you still ignore it?"
He tried to pull his hand away, but she held fast as iron, tugging him to her until his shins bumped against the edge of the bed. Only then did she release him--to pat the empty spot on the sagging mattress beside her as she shifted to the end. It was an order Jorah could not disobey, no matter how much he would have preferred to sit at her other side, where she could not see his brand. But they both faced straight ahead, into the light, as she spoke.
"As I wandered in the Dothraki Sea, delirious with fever, it was you I wanted. Not my faithful Ser Barristan. Not my lover Daario." Jorah gritted his teeth at that, but he relaxed when her shoulder brushed his arm. "Not even Khal Drogo, my sun and stars. Just you, Jorah."
The mattress shifted as she turned to look at him; he kept his eyes ahead.
"And here you are," she said. "You speak of my hope that you would die in the sewers of Meereen." Her voice might have been tinged with regret, but Jorah couldn't be sure."Then you must also remember my belief that the gods spared you for some purpose."
"Not yours, you said."
"Then why do they bring you to me, every time?"
Jorah grunted. "Like a good dog?"
"Like blood of my blood."
Daenerys' voice was a warm whisper against his ear as she leaned in to kiss his cheek. Before her lips could touch the scarred flesh, Jorah turned his head, so that her mouth was a breath from his.
"I give you my love, Daenerys. Repay it with nothing--but not with pity."
When she drew away, Jorah's heart plunged, and he silently cursed himself for not grasping at what he could have. But she only leaned back just far enough to meet his gaze as she said, smiling gently, "Dragons plant no trees."
Jorah's brows furrowed. "Khaleesi?"
"That was what your voice whispered to me, on the Ghost Grass. But perhaps there is one thing a dragon may allow to grow."
The tips of her fingers softly touched his cheek--the one the slaver's iron had not touched--and turned his face to hers.
And kissed him.
Title: Blood of My Blood
Author: mrstater
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Jorah Mormont/Daenerys Targaryen
Word Count: 4148 words
Summary: "You feel you've received your just punishment, is that it? That I should now welcome you back into my good graces with arms open wide to embrace you?" Jorah finds his way back to the Dragon Queen.
Warning: graphic references/images of slavery, sexuality
Blood of My Blood
The bear paced his cage.
True enough, no iron bars surrounded him, not even in the window, and the chamber allowed him to stand at full height, or to lie down if he wished and stretch his broad frame and long limbs without touching red sandstone walls of the pyramid. No manacles encumbered his wrists, no shackles limited his strides.
Most importantly, no collar bound his neck, naming him Yezzan zo Qaggaz's dancing bear.
But it might as well, Jorah thought, pausing in the center of the darkened chamber, the moonlight that fell through the window illuminating his face in the looking glass.
Washed with strong lye soap, dressed in new clothes made in the Westerosi fashion and not the mismatched detritus of dead sellswords from every corner of the earth, Barristan Selmy had seen to it that Ser Jorah Mormont looked the part of a knight again. That he would face the queen--whenever she returned…if she returned--cloaked with dignity if not the colors of his noble house. Yet Selmy had not looked into Jorah's eyes as he confined him here as a highborn lord instead of in the dungeons in the bowels of the pyramid with Brown Ben Plumm and the other commanders of the Second Sons, but rather at the ones burnt into the flesh of Jorah's cheek.
He rubbed at his wrists, felt the stricture of the cold heavy metal around his throat when he swallowed, his own gaze drawn to the demon's mask leering at him from the looking glass. Pride had undone him time and time again, but he'd never been a vain man; he knew he had not been handsome even before the slavers' iron ruined his flesh. This fact had hardly been a concern, until Daenerys did not desire him.
Mother, the freedmen and women of Essos called her. Breaker of Shackles. It boded well for his fate that she harbored compassion for all those poor wretches held in bondage. But if she looked at him in pity…
He would rather die chained in the filth of his cage.
With a roar, the exile Lord of Bear Island put his fist through the glass.
~*~
The queen returned to Meereen astride her great black dragon, at the head of a khalasar. Jorah knew it before Ser Barristan came to his chamber bearing the news, having woken at dawn to the thunder of ten thousand score hooves and the cloud of their dust rising over the walls of the city. Through it she had flown, a gleaming speck of silver on Drogon's back.
What did surprise him was that she summoned him within the very day of her return; he had not expected to rank so high on her matters of import. Nor, he found as Strong Belwas led him to the ebony bench from which she presided over her court, her feet not quite touching the floor as she sat propped on silken cushions, was she quite the sight for sore eyes that Jorah dreamt of so many a night since she'd sent him from her side.
Only a fine silver fuzz shining on her sunburnt scalp remained of her beautiful hair--singed off by her own dragon, no doubt, when she'd tamed him in the fighting pits. Though the sight of her bald head took him back to that long ago dawn when the smoke of Khal Drogo's pyre had cleared to unveil her, naked and unburnt, the mother of dragons, and Jorah had fallen to his knees before her power and her primal beauty, she appeared not so fierce now, nor so commanding of awe. Her Dothraki garb hung loosely on her lean frame--no, not lean, gaunt, as she had been in the Red Waste--and she gazed out at him from hollows shadowed the same purple as her eyes. Clearly, she had been ill.
So beloved was the queen by the wretched of Meereen that rumors had reached even Yezzan zo Qaggaz's slave pens that the Silver Lady herself had stretched out her own hands to bathe the fevered brows and quench the parched throats of the dying of Meereen. Jorah had worried but little for her health, thinking her immune to the bloody flux; he remembered swinging down from his saddle to offer her his waterskin after she had vomited in the Dothraki Sea in the early days of her pregnancy, and she'd claimed that it was the first time in her entire life that she had been sick. Jorah had heard tell of the sturdy Targaryen constitution, but he also had seen with his own eyes how the Pale Mare did not discriminate about whom she took as her rider, carrying the lowliest slave to the highest master to heaven or hell.
That Daenerys had not ridden to her death did little to loosen the knot into which his stomach tied itself. She could walk through fire and not be burnt, but she was still mortal; else why would she be surrounded by armed men? But her Unsullied and Ser Barristan the Bold had not protected her well enough, and Jorah--not only another sworn sword, but blood of her blood--had been bound from her in her hour of need, through his own fault as much as those who had captured him before he could return to his place at her side.
The thought of his enslavement made him suddenly aware that the queen's lilac eyes scrutinized him as acutely as he studied her. They touched the mark on his cheek, of course; Jorah felt her gaze as the red-hot iron that had branded him with the demon's mask, though it did not linger so long. He wanted nothing so much as to hang his head in shame, but he clung to his words--Here I Stand--as Daenerys continued to take him in, feeling naked as he had been upon the auction block, as exposed as when he had been splayed out in the whipping racks to be flogged. He searched her expression, dreading any sign of pity in the curve of her mouth or the twitch of her eyebrows, as he had seen at her side as she set free the captive children of Essos; yet he found himself equally unsettled by the unflinching mask she wore. Was she unmoved by the abuse he had suffered, the indignities he had endured? Did she look at him and see only justice?
"How did you injure your sword hand, ser?" Daenerys spoke, at last, her voice a sharp bright blade cutting through the muzzle of silence.
"I broke a mirror."
"They say that brings bad luck."
Jorah felt the corner of his mouth twitch. "Could my luck possibly get any worse than it already has?"
Strong Belwas laughed, the bark ringing out in Daenerys’ hall. A rumble of grim amusement passed among a few of the other guards, but the queen herself merely arched a pale eyebrow; her forehead appeared higher without soft tendrils of her hair curling around it.
"Your luck, Jorah? Or your choices?"
He bowed his head. "Khaleesi, I--"
"It would seem you've chosen poorly yet again."
Jorah's lowered gaze took in the protruding bones of her ankles between the straps of her sandals as she slid forward on the cushions to place her feet on the floor; his eyes followed the upward motion of her legs as she stood, settling on the jut of her hipbones above her low-slung sandsilk trousers and medallion belt. Before he could stop it, a memory flashed before his eyes of her stepping into those trousers, of her asking him to hand her that belt, before he pulled her into his arms, crushing her bare breasts to his chest and curling the silken silver threads of her hair around his hand on her shoulder when he had kissed her that night aboard her ship Baelerion.
When she had welcomed his lips upon hers and invited his tongue into her sweet mouth and kissed him back.
When, for a few blissful minutes, he had believed she might return the love he could no longer stop himself offering to her as freely and fully as he had given her his sword.
He blinked to clear the image from his mind, and saw Daenerys as she was now, small breasts concealed by her painted vest, her head balder than his. But as he met her eyes, he saw that they, too, looked inward, to the past. When she spoke, her voice trembled--though whether with sorrow, or with barely controlled rage, or another emotion entirely, he could not say.
"The last time you stood there, I swore that if you set foot in this city again, Strong Belwas would tear off your head." She took another step nearer to him, her chin lifted as if she intended to intimidate the burly knight with her stance. "Before this audience I sentenced the traitor Brown Ben Plumm to death, alongside my own husband Hizdahr zo Loraq, who attempted to poison me."
You would already be a widow, my queen, if I had been at your side to stop the attempt. Jorah held his tongue, though bitter bile clung to it, as the words Daenerys spoke to him at his last trial roiled in his head: I know you betrayed me. I know a poisoner tried to call my son, because of you.
"I made an oath to serve and obey you," he said, his voice a rasp, "and to die for you. If you should claim my life, the gods will have answered my one prayer, to look once more upon your face." He swallowed. "Only make it a clean death, my queen. By Ser Barristan's blade, if you have any pity, not Belwas' hands. I have watched him at meat."
Though Belwas' grip tightened on Jorah's arm, the eunuch's oafish chuckle resonated in his barrel chest.
"I thought you prayed for home, ser."
Daenerys' voice was soft, yet her words struck him as the flat of a blade; Jorah bowed his head as he had that other time, when he confessed for what he had sold her secrets: Varys said…I might go home.
"There isn't much to do in a slave yard than re-evaluate which prayers have gone seven years unanswered, and which are the most likely to be granted in whatever time remains." Straightening his shoulders, Jorah raised his head and looked her once more in the eye. "Bear Island lay half a world away even if I had not been chained in a cage. You resided just behind a city wall, and held the keys."
She turned from him, stalking back to her dais. "I also hold an army of Unsullied. The Stormcrows. And now a khalasar. Not to mention three full-grown dragons."
Two of which still roam free, Jorah thought but, wisely, did not say.
"Tell me, Ser Jorah," the queen said, resuming her seat on her bench, keeping to the edge so that her feet touched the floor. "What use do you think I have for these Second Sons whom you have returned to my hand?"
"Dragon fodder, for all I care," Jorah said. He started to take a step nearer to her, but Belwas' hand tethered him. "You don't need me to tell you there's not a loyal whoreson among them. It wasn't the sellswords I thought you might find useful." Not strictly true; he hadn't known she would return to the city with a khalasar, and had sought to bolster the number of her troops. "So if you decide to cast them into the pit, be sure the dwarf is not among them when you do."
Daenerys' eyebrows knit. "The dwarf?"
Jorah could not hold back a smile. "Aye, Khaleesi. Tyrion Lannister."
"Tyrion…" Her voice trailed away.
"The Kingslayer's brother."
"I know who Tyrion Lannister is." Daenerys' voice snapped like a whip, reminding everyone in her hall who wielded the authority. "Rumors reached me that he slew his own father and fled across the Narrow Sea. His sister who styles herself the Queen Regent has a price on his head." The queen narrowed her eyes on Jorah. "Is that how you fell in with slavers? You were carrying him back to Westeros, where Queen Cersei might grant you the pardon her husband the Usurper promised?"
"There is only one queen from whom I would beg pardon."
Her nostrils flared. "In either case, you admit that you thought to buy your life with that of another person's."
"He's a kinslayer, Daenerys."
"Do you never learn?" she cried, her voice climbing to a pitch that broke with emotion, her eyes gleaming. She blinked back the tears--if it was tears that glimmered--and tore her gaze from Jorah to address her white-cloaked Lord Commander. "Ser Barristan, take the bear back to his cage. And bring me Tyrion the Imp."
~*~
The bear's shadow crept along the chamber wall, lengthening and shifting with each shudder of the candle stub. Soon it would gutter one last time and burn out, plunging him into darkness. Jorah did not fear the dark, but he misliked the reminder that he had no choice in the time and manner of its coming, that he had traded one form of captivity for another.
That he would have been a freer man had he not fled Ned Stark's justice in the first place.
Emitting a low sound in his throat, he shambled heavily to the table and stretched out his injured hand over the flame, pinching the wick between thumb and middle finger. He inhaled sharply through his nose at the transfer of fire within his skin as he snuffed out the flame, but welcomed the sting as proof that not all was beyond his control.
The hiss, however, drowned in the rattle of metal outside the chamber door, followed by the clunk of the bolt rolling over in the lock. As the door creaked open on its hinges, the transparent grey ribbon of smoke in the dark was expelled by the glow of another candle. Jorah's bandaged right hand crossed instinctively to his left hip, where his sword ought to have hung, but of course it was not there. Not the good steel he had carried from Bear Island into his exile--that was lost to him forever, stripped from him by slavers--not even the far inferior weapon supplied by the Second Sons' armory.
Not that he had need of it, as the slight figure that stood framed in the darkness belonged to Daenerys.
"Khaleesi," he said, folding his hands together in front of him, the fingers of his left hand encircling his right wrist. "Have you come to tell me my fate? Or to deal it yourself?"
Hers was the only hand of justice from which he would not run, even if he had been at liberty to do so. He would live or die by it. In the wide world there was no other. She was the world.
Of course, he could not but hope that her coming here to him, rather than having him hauled before her court, clad as she was in a bedrobe of persimmon-colored silk and soft embroidered slippers, meant that she had another fate in mind for him than punishment.
"The Imp tells me you owe him your life," she said, stepping further into the room, the light of her candle encircling him as the door fell shut upon the darkness. She removed the stub of melted wax from the stand on the table and replaced it with her own.
"I owe much to many men. Unlike the Lannisters, I have not been so consistent at paying my debts."
"He said that if it were not for him, you would have been bought for the fighting pits."
"Aye," Jorah admitted, glancing away.
The scabs that had barely begun to form across his knuckles and the back of his hand tore as he clenched his fingers tight into a fist, fresh blood adhering the linen dressings to his wounds. He hadn't defended himself against the accusation she'd made against him before her court; on the surface there was no defense: he had brought her the Lannister in the hope of proving his loyalty.
What Daenerys did not seem to understand was that the love he bore her as a woman, not only as his queen, did not negate his service to her. If he did not love her, he would have had no reason not to trade the Imp to Queen Cersei in exchange for Bear Island. Loving Daenerys made him serve her better because it made him better.
Of course, if Tyrion had also told her that Jorah had handled him as gently as the slavers, the argument would be rather unconvincing. So he did not make it.
Though even the very best of men, surely, would be hard pressed not to give the Imp a solid blow to silence that ceaselessly running mouth. And Jorah harbored no delusions of being the best of men.
"It would seem your luck has been better than you led me to believe," Daenerys said, a hitch in her voice that drew his gaze again.
But he lifted his eyes to find hers now downcast, her head bowed as if in shame. Though what could she have to be ashamed of? Her robe was overlarge for her girlish build, but Jorah glimpsed enough of her knuckles at the bottom of the hem to tell that her hands, too, were balled into fists, clutching at the excess fabric inside the sleeves.
"The fighting pits were open because of me," she went on, her tones of anguish emphasized by her fists beating her own thighs as she now paced the room. "I had shut them down, freed the poor wretches who had been bought to die there, but then I allowed Hizdahr to persuade me to re-open them. All for the sake of peace that was never going to last. He gave me the follies to celebrate our marriage. To mock me, before he poisoned me."
The tremble in her voice could only be rage, Jorah thought; she had, after all, ordered her treacherous husband executed. When she turned around to face him, however, her eyes were luminous with sorrow.
"If I had seen you in that pit, Jorah, unarmed against a wild beast…"
She raised one hand, her sleeve falling back over her thin pale arm as her fingers uncurled and reached out to touch his branded cheek. Though he had longed for her touch above all else, Jorah flinched away.
He could not stop the touch of her gaze.
"I am not surprised you made an unruly slave," she said, quietly, her hand falling to her side. "Oh, Jorah--why did you not swallow your foolish pride and submit to me when you had the chance?"
"You'd have made a gentler mistress, would you?"
Her eyes flashed, and for a moment he thought she would strike him, her palm cracking against the loathsome mark. Better her wrath than her pity, he thought, digging his heels into the floor, standing his ground.
The blow never arrived. Instead, Daenerys turned away from him, her frame folding in on itself as she lowered herself to sit at the edge of the bed, hugging her knees to her chest beneath the pinky-orange silk.
"The Imp also told me that the slavers never broke you. That you only gave up when you heard that I had taken a husband."
Jorah had thought he'd known what heartbreak was, when Lynesse forsook their marriage vows to be Tregar Ormallen's concubine. Even the loss of the woman for whom he'd given up everything had not cut the heart and soul clean out of him, leaving him a mere husk of a man with a striped back and branded cheek. Word that the queen had fled the city--and its king--had been a balm, even more so the news that her husband would soon be dead by her own command. But for Daenerys to speak to Jorah of the agony he had endured, believing her to be well and truly lost to him, left his heart raw, oozing like his knuckles beneath the bandages and burst scabs.
"But here you stand," she continued, smiling a little, "and I do not see a broken man. I see the same bear who has always dared to look me in the eye and speak plainly. Who kissed me…loved me."
The slap he earlier expected from her hand came now, from the memory of her voice. He'd told her he loved her, once--and she recoiled from him with a cry: Do not say that word!
Why did she now speak of what was then so undesirable to her? Unless it was not so, any longer…He closed his eyes against the sting of his sharp indrawn breath; it hurt to hope, near as much as it hurt to have none…
"Do you remember when I returned from the sewers when we took Meereen?" he asked, at length. "You told me you'd hoped I'd drown in slavers' filth."
He spat out the words, as if he could rid himself of the humiliation they had wrought, the spray of it flashing in the candlelight as it landed upon Daenerys' cheek. She didn't move a finger to wipe it away.
"I didn't think I could be brought lower than I was at that moment," he went on, "but now I have been slavers' filth. Do not believe even I am so bull-headed as to miss the irony. The slaver enslaved."
"So you feel you've received your just punishment, is that it? That I should now welcome you back into my good graces with arms open wide to embrace you?"
"How low must I be brought to satisfy you?" Jorah bellowed. "Lower than this?" He loomed over her, pointing to his ruined cheek, which would forever carry his shame. "I gave you my loyalty while Khal Drogo yet lived. I gave you my love with no hope that you would ever be free to give me yours in return."
Daenery's hand caught his, her fingers closing around it. Her pale chapped lips twitched into a smile that would not quite hold, for the trembling of her chin.
"You never spoke me gently," she said. "Do you know even when I imagine what you would say to me, you are my gruff bear?"
Jorah snorted. "And when you imagine my counsel, Khaleesi, do you still ignore it?"
He tried to pull his hand away, but she held fast as iron, tugging him to her until his shins bumped against the edge of the bed. Only then did she release him--to pat the empty spot on the sagging mattress beside her as she shifted to the end. It was an order Jorah could not disobey, no matter how much he would have preferred to sit at her other side, where she could not see his brand. But they both faced straight ahead, into the light, as she spoke.
"As I wandered in the Dothraki Sea, delirious with fever, it was you I wanted. Not my faithful Ser Barristan. Not my lover Daario." Jorah gritted his teeth at that, but he relaxed when her shoulder brushed his arm. "Not even Khal Drogo, my sun and stars. Just you, Jorah."
The mattress shifted as she turned to look at him; he kept his eyes ahead.
"And here you are," she said. "You speak of my hope that you would die in the sewers of Meereen." Her voice might have been tinged with regret, but Jorah couldn't be sure."Then you must also remember my belief that the gods spared you for some purpose."
"Not yours, you said."
"Then why do they bring you to me, every time?"
Jorah grunted. "Like a good dog?"
"Like blood of my blood."
Daenerys' voice was a warm whisper against his ear as she leaned in to kiss his cheek. Before her lips could touch the scarred flesh, Jorah turned his head, so that her mouth was a breath from his.
"I give you my love, Daenerys. Repay it with nothing--but not with pity."
When she drew away, Jorah's heart plunged, and he silently cursed himself for not grasping at what he could have. But she only leaned back just far enough to meet his gaze as she said, smiling gently, "Dragons plant no trees."
Jorah's brows furrowed. "Khaleesi?"
"That was what your voice whispered to me, on the Ghost Grass. But perhaps there is one thing a dragon may allow to grow."
The tips of her fingers softly touched his cheek--the one the slaver's iron had not touched--and turned his face to hers.
And kissed him.