Fic: A Year from Now (23/?)
Title: A Year from Now (23/?)
Author: MrsTater
Fandom: A Song of Ice and Fire
Characters & Pairings: Daenerys Targaryen/Jorah Mormont
Ratings & Warnings: R for references to sex and violence in this chapter
Format & Word Count: WIP, 2907 in this chapter
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: Jorah no longer has any secrets from Daenerys.
Author's Note: As usual, I extend my thanks to my beta, just_a_dram, but to the rest of you faithful readers, I feel I owe an apology. You'll see why when you read…Just note that this is not the final chapter!
Previous Chapters |
23. Traitor's Kiss
"Do you think what Illyrio said is true?"
Staring up at the comet that glowed so faintly in the night sky as to be more pink than red now, more like a scar than the Bleeding Star, Dany had been silent for such a long time that Jorah had begun to think she'd forgotten he'd come out to the garden with her.
In truth, he'd never wanted so much to be forgotten by anyone as by Dany, now that she knew the truth of what had brought him into her service. Except, perhaps, when he'd wished Eddard Stark would forget that one of his bannermen had sold slaves…Or when he'd hoped Tregar Ormallen would forget that his chief concubine's husband owed him more money than he could possibly repay even as the poor Lord of Bear Island, much less as a sellsword.
Sighing, Jorah kicked at a stray pebble that had made its way out of a flowerbed onto the footpath of paving stones. Was love such a heinous crime that the list of people to whom his life was forfeit grew longer at every turn?
Not that Dany had passed judgment on him for the crimes he'd committed against her.
Yet.
Thus far, all her fury had been reserved for Illyrio Mopatis. Upon learning of his conspiracy with Lord Varys to make her a pawn in the Spider's game of thrones, she had summoned her guards with such a mad fire crackling in her violet eyes that Jorah had leapt to his feet, prepared to throw himself between the swords and the magister to stop the young queen from doing something brash that would imperil her life, never mind her bid for the Iron Throne. To his horror, the beautiful, girlish face that he loved so had seemed to shift into the visage he had never seen but oft imagined when the ravens had come on winter winds carrying whispered tales of northmen burned by the Mad King.
Daenerys, thank the gods old and new, was not her father's daughter and heard the sense Jorah spoke to her. She ordered Illyrio to get out of her sight and not to set foot on her property again unless sent for; though he had but little to fear from a queen with one knight and fewer than a dozen household guards at her command, he had scurried like a fat rat from a sewer. A wise choice--for while a Targaryen, like a young dragon, might appear harmless, one never knew when it might find its fangs and fire.
Her silence on the matter of Jorah's role, however, was no more reassuring to him than her rage at Illyrio's, and he was unsure how to answer her question without incriminating himself unnecessarily.
"Illyrio said a lot of things," he replied. "Which do you doubt?"
"All of it." Dany paused, allowing Jorah's heart just enough time to soar with hope before she snapped its wings with a sigh and a few softly spoken words. "And none of it. Could my brother's son truly have been alive all these years?"
"It is certainly possible that Lord Varys switched babes to protect Prince Aegon."
"Why did he not save the little princess, as well? Was not Rhaenys blood of the dragon as much as he?"
Dany folded her arms across her middle in a protective stance which Jorah had seen before, many times, during her pregnancy. He wanted, as he had on those other occasions, to take her in his embrace, to place his own hands over hers to assure her that no harm would befall her or her child or anyone she loved so long as he drew breath. But she did not turn to him as she had used to even then, and despite the truth that the gods and the law of the land made him her lord and husband, he felt that his hands were still bound as surely as they had been when she was khaleesi to the most powerful horselord in all the world and Jorah a mere knight in her service. So he made no movement from where he stood behind her in the shadows, his hands clasped before him, and hoped that the sound of his voice could give her comfort enough, though he had no words to offer that were not crim.
"Princess Rhaenys was not the heir."
"Nor am I--so it would seem."
Jorah saw rather than heard another sigh as her shoulders rolled further forward, her head bowing. Dany, bowing. Daenerys, to whom every knee should bow, her hair crowned in silver by the moonlight. Her only doubt in coming to Illyrio for an army had been that he would withdraw his support of her house because she was a woman. Not once had it occurred to her, or to Jorah, that she was not the last Targaryen or next in line for the Iron Throne.
And Jorah could not even be relieved that this blow must be the greater by far than the other she had been dealt, and might make her forget what she had heard of his betrayal. For Dany's hope of the Seven Kingdoms had been his hope of Bear Island. Without her throne, he had no home.
And, given Varys' other plans, Jorah had no Dany, either.
"It is more likely that the boy whom Varys would now pass off as Aegon is an impostor," he said.
"The boy, as you call him, is my senior by two years. Why would Varys and Illyrio want to marry me to him if he were not truly Aegon?"
"To silence the skeptics with the support of the next Targaryen in line."
"Little wonder Illyrio was not best pleased to learn of my marriage."
Jorah gritted his teeth, and his knuckles cracked as he curled his fingers into fists. The septon in Valyria had pronounced him and Dany one heart, one soul, one flesh, but Jorah doubted very much that Varys and Illyrio cared a great deal about parting a husband and wife in twain, or feared the curse of doing so. If such men as them had a different husband in mind for Dany, then Jorah would be but an annoyance, easily disposed of. He was still a wanted man in the Seven Kingdoms, and could be put to death on those grounds alone as soon as ever he set foot on Westeros, without Illyrio or Varys having to dirty their hands at all.
But Jorah's ire at his own insignificance gave way to an idea of how he might turn the situation to his advantage. For though Dany was possessed of a far sweeter nature than any Targaryen had a right to be, she still had a dragon's pride, and no more enjoyed being ill-used than he. Perhaps a reminder of how little her wishes for her own happiness mattered to them would secure Jorah's place in her life, regardless of the circumstance that had brought him into it.
"I'm not a man to suffer fools," he said, "but I feel I rather owe my life to this bloody idiotic rescue mission, as I likely no longer stand between you and this Aegon, real or pretend."
"If he's dead," Dany said, "then it's your fault for writing to Lord Varys that the kos killed Rhaego and took me to the dosh khaleen, and likely as not, they'll kill you anyway, out of revenge."
She turned around, facing him for the first time in the course of the conversation. Her hair, bathed in the red light of the torches that lined the gardens and reflected the red of her gown, lashed her shoulder, bringing to Jorah's mind the image of a whip of flame.
"I might even command them to do it."
"I can explain….Daenerys--"
He reached for her, but a mad sound, which he recognized belatedly as a laugh, flung itself from her lips and arrested his movement.
"You can explain how you befriended a lonely, frightened young bride who'd never had a true friend in all her life, only to spy on her? By all means, do."
They had quarreled before, many times--almost more times than they had agreed, Jorah thought--but never had Dany achieved quite this tone of mockery. He tried to swallow the hot indignation that rose up like bile in his throat and to remember that he was in the wrong and that he could not but expect her anger. But she sounded too like Viserys, too like a young girl who truly wanted an explanation and not a queen who dared him to give one.
"Only for a time," he said. "But I stopped, when I realized I loved you."
"And when was that?"
Her eyes were like swords in the moonlight, slicing through doublet and tunic, skin and sinew and breastbone to pierce his heart and lay bare every hidden secret. Jorah hung his head as she read the truth as easily as if it had been written there in the common tongue. He was not ashamed that she knew that it had been the threat of losing her that had made him recognize that he loved her, but that he had not known her worth from the start, as all true knights loved their ladies in the songs.
"It doesn't matter," she said, her voice dropping to a lower, but no less dangerous pitch, trembling with the controlled rage that roiled like water about to break free of a bubbling pot. "What matters is that you are no better than Jaqho and Pono and the other kos who would have thrown Rhaego to the dogs. You are no better than Gregor Clegane who bashed an infant boy's head against a wall until he died, or Amory Lorch who stabbed Rhaenys fifty times, or the Usurper Robert Baratheon, who--
"--were only playing the game of thrones."
Jorah was willing enough to take responsibility for his crimes against her, but he was not about to stand by and let her make him the whipping boy for all those who would have wounded her, or for those who had committed atrocities against members of her house. Certainly he wouldn't let her assign worse sins to him than those of which he was guilty.
She would sin, too; all the greater as queen.
"You win or you die, Daenerys, and your children, too."
She looked shaken at this, and Jorah realized that at some point he had taken her by the shoulders and actually given her a shake. He did not let release her, nor even relax his hold on her, for fear she would turn her back on him again, or flee; though he did draw a drew a deep calming breath before he went on, speaking in low, deliberate tones.
"If you would be queen, it will mean killing Robert's children--the Princess Myrcella and the little King Tommen, and Stannis' daughter--and the babes of any other rivals who would one day make war on Rhaego's claim--"
"STOP IT!"
Dany's hands flew up like thin, pale dragon's wings to clap over her ears; Jorah wished he could do the same as his own rang with her shriek echoing off the garden walls, but instead he moved his hands from her shoulders to catch her wrists.
"I won't hear this, I won't!" she cried, struggling against him as he tried to pry her hands from her ears. "Let me go!"
Jorah didn't dare, lest the momentum of her struggle throw her off-balance and lead her to fall, but suddenly she went still and rigid in his grasp.
"Let. Me. Go. Ser."
It was not the fire in her eyes, or her command, or even the growl in which she had spoken it that made Jorah's fingers uncurl from around her wrists and his feet stumble backward from her.
Ser, she'd called him. His own wife. Not once since they wed had Dany addressed him by his old title. Not even in anger.
His blood pounded in his head at the same tempo as her breasts, pale as death or ice, heaved above the blood red Myrish lace of her bodice, so that her voice seemed a disembodied, far-off thing.
"This is my game of thrones you speak of, and I do not play it by the rules by which your Usurper King played his."
"I had no great love for Robert. I never served--"
"No. You never served anyone but yourself. Which makes you more despicable than any of these players."
Her eyes darted away as though she could not bear to look at him, and she stepped around him to go back to the house. Jorah turned, but did not move to follow, nor did he reach to stop her from going, though his fingers twitched to catch her by the arm.
"I played no game," he called after her. "I only wanted to go home."
The whisper of silk as she turned back was followed by a tearing sound as the train of her gown caught on a low growing rose bush that had not received proper attention from a gardener and spilled out onto the footpath. Even that image was not so cutting as her voice.
"And to buy your lordship and your poor hall of timber on your frozen island, you sold my life, and the life of my child…"
Her voice choked, and for an instant the torchlight gleamed in her eyes as if they had welled with tears, but then a blink--hers or his, he couldn't be sure which--and they were only luminescent Targaryen once more, and had command of her voice as well.
"Seven gods, Jorah! You've loved Rhaego as your own son. You loved me, and made me love you in return, and you married me, all the while knowing what you'd done. Yes, my prince, do explain that to me, because I cannot understand how I could love a man capable of such treachery and wickedness."
"You loved Khal Drogo."
Dany winced. It wasn't a fair stroke, Jorah knew, but she had struck below the belt herself. The small stones of the garden path crunched beneath his boots as he strode toward her. "He slaughtered suckling babes and little children at play. He raped their mothers. He--"
"--is dead. As you soon may be. Sooner than you might think, if you continue on this course."
Jorah knelt. He saw Dany's chest swell beneath the red lace in her moment of triumph, only for her to look rather crestfallen as he reached out to free her silken train from the rosebush rather than bend his gaze submissively.
"You have always known exactly who I am," he said as he slowly stood again so that he loomed over her. "That I was exiled, stripped of my lands, my title, my sword, sentenced to death because I sold men's lives to pay for my own. I may not have enumerated on all my sins, but I did tell you there was nothing I would not do for love. And you married me anyway, knowing full well I was no white knight. So do not lie to yourself, Daenerys Targaryen, that you were an innocent girl taken in by a scoundrel who played you false."
"But you are. You have."
Now there was no question that her voice trembled or her eyes filled with tears, though the picture she painted was far from weak, wreathed in flame as she was with the torch burning behind her.
"You persuaded me not to come to Pentos where Illyrio would reveal your treachery, and when you saw that I would not be dissuaded, you made me your wife so that I would be bound to you when I learned it. I may have made myself blind to your other faults, but I truly was in this."
She blinked, but rather than push the tears back, the act made them fall. Jorah reached out to brush them away with the backs of his fingers; thank the gods, she did not flinch from his touch.
"I finally had your love," he murmured. "I couldn't bear the thought that I might lose you."
But when he cupped her face in his hands, she drew back her shoulders and raised her chin in defiance.
"You married me to secure me, but even the bonds of marriage can be broken. As you well know."
Jorah's hands fell to his sides, the tips of his fingers leaden. "You…wish to dissolve our union?"
He had thought of many ways she might punish him, most of them ending his life. Not once had he thought she would leave him. A fate far worse than death--and Dany knew it. Surely she could not be so cruel as Lynesse had been, this sweet girl who wanted to play the game of thrones without hurting the innocent.
Though innocent was the very last word anyone would use to describe Jorah Mormont.
Dany's hesitation, at least, told him she didn't know what she was going to do with him or their marriage.
It was a small comfort, however.
For she said in a tone that bespoke all the sadness in the world rested upon her slender shoulders, "I wish that you truly were the man I thought you were."
Read Chapter 24
Author: MrsTater
Fandom: A Song of Ice and Fire
Characters & Pairings: Daenerys Targaryen/Jorah Mormont
Ratings & Warnings: R for references to sex and violence in this chapter
Format & Word Count: WIP, 2907 in this chapter
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: Jorah no longer has any secrets from Daenerys.
Author's Note: As usual, I extend my thanks to my beta, just_a_dram, but to the rest of you faithful readers, I feel I owe an apology. You'll see why when you read…Just note that this is not the final chapter!
Previous Chapters |
23. Traitor's Kiss
"Do you think what Illyrio said is true?"
Staring up at the comet that glowed so faintly in the night sky as to be more pink than red now, more like a scar than the Bleeding Star, Dany had been silent for such a long time that Jorah had begun to think she'd forgotten he'd come out to the garden with her.
In truth, he'd never wanted so much to be forgotten by anyone as by Dany, now that she knew the truth of what had brought him into her service. Except, perhaps, when he'd wished Eddard Stark would forget that one of his bannermen had sold slaves…Or when he'd hoped Tregar Ormallen would forget that his chief concubine's husband owed him more money than he could possibly repay even as the poor Lord of Bear Island, much less as a sellsword.
Sighing, Jorah kicked at a stray pebble that had made its way out of a flowerbed onto the footpath of paving stones. Was love such a heinous crime that the list of people to whom his life was forfeit grew longer at every turn?
Not that Dany had passed judgment on him for the crimes he'd committed against her.
Yet.
Thus far, all her fury had been reserved for Illyrio Mopatis. Upon learning of his conspiracy with Lord Varys to make her a pawn in the Spider's game of thrones, she had summoned her guards with such a mad fire crackling in her violet eyes that Jorah had leapt to his feet, prepared to throw himself between the swords and the magister to stop the young queen from doing something brash that would imperil her life, never mind her bid for the Iron Throne. To his horror, the beautiful, girlish face that he loved so had seemed to shift into the visage he had never seen but oft imagined when the ravens had come on winter winds carrying whispered tales of northmen burned by the Mad King.
Daenerys, thank the gods old and new, was not her father's daughter and heard the sense Jorah spoke to her. She ordered Illyrio to get out of her sight and not to set foot on her property again unless sent for; though he had but little to fear from a queen with one knight and fewer than a dozen household guards at her command, he had scurried like a fat rat from a sewer. A wise choice--for while a Targaryen, like a young dragon, might appear harmless, one never knew when it might find its fangs and fire.
Her silence on the matter of Jorah's role, however, was no more reassuring to him than her rage at Illyrio's, and he was unsure how to answer her question without incriminating himself unnecessarily.
"Illyrio said a lot of things," he replied. "Which do you doubt?"
"All of it." Dany paused, allowing Jorah's heart just enough time to soar with hope before she snapped its wings with a sigh and a few softly spoken words. "And none of it. Could my brother's son truly have been alive all these years?"
"It is certainly possible that Lord Varys switched babes to protect Prince Aegon."
"Why did he not save the little princess, as well? Was not Rhaenys blood of the dragon as much as he?"
Dany folded her arms across her middle in a protective stance which Jorah had seen before, many times, during her pregnancy. He wanted, as he had on those other occasions, to take her in his embrace, to place his own hands over hers to assure her that no harm would befall her or her child or anyone she loved so long as he drew breath. But she did not turn to him as she had used to even then, and despite the truth that the gods and the law of the land made him her lord and husband, he felt that his hands were still bound as surely as they had been when she was khaleesi to the most powerful horselord in all the world and Jorah a mere knight in her service. So he made no movement from where he stood behind her in the shadows, his hands clasped before him, and hoped that the sound of his voice could give her comfort enough, though he had no words to offer that were not crim.
"Princess Rhaenys was not the heir."
"Nor am I--so it would seem."
Jorah saw rather than heard another sigh as her shoulders rolled further forward, her head bowing. Dany, bowing. Daenerys, to whom every knee should bow, her hair crowned in silver by the moonlight. Her only doubt in coming to Illyrio for an army had been that he would withdraw his support of her house because she was a woman. Not once had it occurred to her, or to Jorah, that she was not the last Targaryen or next in line for the Iron Throne.
And Jorah could not even be relieved that this blow must be the greater by far than the other she had been dealt, and might make her forget what she had heard of his betrayal. For Dany's hope of the Seven Kingdoms had been his hope of Bear Island. Without her throne, he had no home.
And, given Varys' other plans, Jorah had no Dany, either.
"It is more likely that the boy whom Varys would now pass off as Aegon is an impostor," he said.
"The boy, as you call him, is my senior by two years. Why would Varys and Illyrio want to marry me to him if he were not truly Aegon?"
"To silence the skeptics with the support of the next Targaryen in line."
"Little wonder Illyrio was not best pleased to learn of my marriage."
Jorah gritted his teeth, and his knuckles cracked as he curled his fingers into fists. The septon in Valyria had pronounced him and Dany one heart, one soul, one flesh, but Jorah doubted very much that Varys and Illyrio cared a great deal about parting a husband and wife in twain, or feared the curse of doing so. If such men as them had a different husband in mind for Dany, then Jorah would be but an annoyance, easily disposed of. He was still a wanted man in the Seven Kingdoms, and could be put to death on those grounds alone as soon as ever he set foot on Westeros, without Illyrio or Varys having to dirty their hands at all.
But Jorah's ire at his own insignificance gave way to an idea of how he might turn the situation to his advantage. For though Dany was possessed of a far sweeter nature than any Targaryen had a right to be, she still had a dragon's pride, and no more enjoyed being ill-used than he. Perhaps a reminder of how little her wishes for her own happiness mattered to them would secure Jorah's place in her life, regardless of the circumstance that had brought him into it.
"I'm not a man to suffer fools," he said, "but I feel I rather owe my life to this bloody idiotic rescue mission, as I likely no longer stand between you and this Aegon, real or pretend."
"If he's dead," Dany said, "then it's your fault for writing to Lord Varys that the kos killed Rhaego and took me to the dosh khaleen, and likely as not, they'll kill you anyway, out of revenge."
She turned around, facing him for the first time in the course of the conversation. Her hair, bathed in the red light of the torches that lined the gardens and reflected the red of her gown, lashed her shoulder, bringing to Jorah's mind the image of a whip of flame.
"I might even command them to do it."
"I can explain….Daenerys--"
He reached for her, but a mad sound, which he recognized belatedly as a laugh, flung itself from her lips and arrested his movement.
"You can explain how you befriended a lonely, frightened young bride who'd never had a true friend in all her life, only to spy on her? By all means, do."
They had quarreled before, many times--almost more times than they had agreed, Jorah thought--but never had Dany achieved quite this tone of mockery. He tried to swallow the hot indignation that rose up like bile in his throat and to remember that he was in the wrong and that he could not but expect her anger. But she sounded too like Viserys, too like a young girl who truly wanted an explanation and not a queen who dared him to give one.
"Only for a time," he said. "But I stopped, when I realized I loved you."
"And when was that?"
Her eyes were like swords in the moonlight, slicing through doublet and tunic, skin and sinew and breastbone to pierce his heart and lay bare every hidden secret. Jorah hung his head as she read the truth as easily as if it had been written there in the common tongue. He was not ashamed that she knew that it had been the threat of losing her that had made him recognize that he loved her, but that he had not known her worth from the start, as all true knights loved their ladies in the songs.
"It doesn't matter," she said, her voice dropping to a lower, but no less dangerous pitch, trembling with the controlled rage that roiled like water about to break free of a bubbling pot. "What matters is that you are no better than Jaqho and Pono and the other kos who would have thrown Rhaego to the dogs. You are no better than Gregor Clegane who bashed an infant boy's head against a wall until he died, or Amory Lorch who stabbed Rhaenys fifty times, or the Usurper Robert Baratheon, who--
"--were only playing the game of thrones."
Jorah was willing enough to take responsibility for his crimes against her, but he was not about to stand by and let her make him the whipping boy for all those who would have wounded her, or for those who had committed atrocities against members of her house. Certainly he wouldn't let her assign worse sins to him than those of which he was guilty.
She would sin, too; all the greater as queen.
"You win or you die, Daenerys, and your children, too."
She looked shaken at this, and Jorah realized that at some point he had taken her by the shoulders and actually given her a shake. He did not let release her, nor even relax his hold on her, for fear she would turn her back on him again, or flee; though he did draw a drew a deep calming breath before he went on, speaking in low, deliberate tones.
"If you would be queen, it will mean killing Robert's children--the Princess Myrcella and the little King Tommen, and Stannis' daughter--and the babes of any other rivals who would one day make war on Rhaego's claim--"
"STOP IT!"
Dany's hands flew up like thin, pale dragon's wings to clap over her ears; Jorah wished he could do the same as his own rang with her shriek echoing off the garden walls, but instead he moved his hands from her shoulders to catch her wrists.
"I won't hear this, I won't!" she cried, struggling against him as he tried to pry her hands from her ears. "Let me go!"
Jorah didn't dare, lest the momentum of her struggle throw her off-balance and lead her to fall, but suddenly she went still and rigid in his grasp.
"Let. Me. Go. Ser."
It was not the fire in her eyes, or her command, or even the growl in which she had spoken it that made Jorah's fingers uncurl from around her wrists and his feet stumble backward from her.
Ser, she'd called him. His own wife. Not once since they wed had Dany addressed him by his old title. Not even in anger.
His blood pounded in his head at the same tempo as her breasts, pale as death or ice, heaved above the blood red Myrish lace of her bodice, so that her voice seemed a disembodied, far-off thing.
"This is my game of thrones you speak of, and I do not play it by the rules by which your Usurper King played his."
"I had no great love for Robert. I never served--"
"No. You never served anyone but yourself. Which makes you more despicable than any of these players."
Her eyes darted away as though she could not bear to look at him, and she stepped around him to go back to the house. Jorah turned, but did not move to follow, nor did he reach to stop her from going, though his fingers twitched to catch her by the arm.
"I played no game," he called after her. "I only wanted to go home."
The whisper of silk as she turned back was followed by a tearing sound as the train of her gown caught on a low growing rose bush that had not received proper attention from a gardener and spilled out onto the footpath. Even that image was not so cutting as her voice.
"And to buy your lordship and your poor hall of timber on your frozen island, you sold my life, and the life of my child…"
Her voice choked, and for an instant the torchlight gleamed in her eyes as if they had welled with tears, but then a blink--hers or his, he couldn't be sure which--and they were only luminescent Targaryen once more, and had command of her voice as well.
"Seven gods, Jorah! You've loved Rhaego as your own son. You loved me, and made me love you in return, and you married me, all the while knowing what you'd done. Yes, my prince, do explain that to me, because I cannot understand how I could love a man capable of such treachery and wickedness."
"You loved Khal Drogo."
Dany winced. It wasn't a fair stroke, Jorah knew, but she had struck below the belt herself. The small stones of the garden path crunched beneath his boots as he strode toward her. "He slaughtered suckling babes and little children at play. He raped their mothers. He--"
"--is dead. As you soon may be. Sooner than you might think, if you continue on this course."
Jorah knelt. He saw Dany's chest swell beneath the red lace in her moment of triumph, only for her to look rather crestfallen as he reached out to free her silken train from the rosebush rather than bend his gaze submissively.
"You have always known exactly who I am," he said as he slowly stood again so that he loomed over her. "That I was exiled, stripped of my lands, my title, my sword, sentenced to death because I sold men's lives to pay for my own. I may not have enumerated on all my sins, but I did tell you there was nothing I would not do for love. And you married me anyway, knowing full well I was no white knight. So do not lie to yourself, Daenerys Targaryen, that you were an innocent girl taken in by a scoundrel who played you false."
"But you are. You have."
Now there was no question that her voice trembled or her eyes filled with tears, though the picture she painted was far from weak, wreathed in flame as she was with the torch burning behind her.
"You persuaded me not to come to Pentos where Illyrio would reveal your treachery, and when you saw that I would not be dissuaded, you made me your wife so that I would be bound to you when I learned it. I may have made myself blind to your other faults, but I truly was in this."
She blinked, but rather than push the tears back, the act made them fall. Jorah reached out to brush them away with the backs of his fingers; thank the gods, she did not flinch from his touch.
"I finally had your love," he murmured. "I couldn't bear the thought that I might lose you."
But when he cupped her face in his hands, she drew back her shoulders and raised her chin in defiance.
"You married me to secure me, but even the bonds of marriage can be broken. As you well know."
Jorah's hands fell to his sides, the tips of his fingers leaden. "You…wish to dissolve our union?"
He had thought of many ways she might punish him, most of them ending his life. Not once had he thought she would leave him. A fate far worse than death--and Dany knew it. Surely she could not be so cruel as Lynesse had been, this sweet girl who wanted to play the game of thrones without hurting the innocent.
Though innocent was the very last word anyone would use to describe Jorah Mormont.
Dany's hesitation, at least, told him she didn't know what she was going to do with him or their marriage.
It was a small comfort, however.
For she said in a tone that bespoke all the sadness in the world rested upon her slender shoulders, "I wish that you truly were the man I thought you were."
Read Chapter 24