The less kind of the courtiers said the Queen of Thorns resembled her namesake: her nose and chin came to points, they said, and her cheeks sprouted beneath the harshly decaying ruins of her hair like malignant growths. Olenna amused herself with these comments—remarked under the influence of drink that she'd hire a singer to cement her reputation, even, if it needed any help, to decline marriage invitations faster—but it left a conspicuous gap in Margaery's education.
Grandmother had given her other weapons. A woman should use her spine, Margaery remembered. Sit straight, it's better for projecting your voice or pretending you haven't whispered a thing, as situations demand. Nobles are never satisfied with bull's tongue, they'll also want yours. If you feel foolish, pray openly and piously. The daughter of our Father is the only Maiden who frightens all men. If you can't pray, hold those bones steady and your ears open. A good thief shouldn't shame herself in stealing. A wile for every meal and every bear at it, had Olenna. By her graduation Margaery had been judged adept in politics, letters, geometries, and the feigning and disguising of disinterest, and Olenna could not have salvaged more than she had from this war. When her tongue outdid swords but not the prospect of dragons, Margaery had written to Daenerys Targaryen as she swept over the wintered wreckage of the North. Thank the Seven, Daenerys had recognized her as a combatant to parley with.
Not for burning, Margaery, not with the Kingdoms' only bread secure in her family's keep, the only castle in the Kingdoms Daenerys could not set afire if she wanted anyone left to rule. Even the most awesome of beasts could be weighed against a loaf. They, Margaery and Daenerys and Sansa, were at the doors to the dragon enclosure; while its residents swallowed more provisions each month than three hundred men—an impressive sum, but paltry compared to their military worth—it had itself pilfered first a dungeon, then storerooms, then most of a grain tower.
Warded against fire. Yet. "Your word is law, Your Grace," said Sansa, "if you say it now, there aren't any Starks any longer, I'll join a convent," and Margaery stood childishly artless and smoldering behind her. She had acquainted herself many times with Sansa's beauty—bent her fingers to the brows threaded into Sansa's fine skin as tidily as if by needle, lidded over the audacious cool of her eyes and mimicked the curvature of her throat like a slingshot's—but those stolen hours had bred neither contempt nor resistance. Seeing it now pierced her, as though she had disavowed the shield-maiden Olenna so painstakingly produced.
Sansa's blood was rising in her cheeks. The Targaryen could not have crossed the sea without a mastery of currents and where they led. Margaery tried to help less out of real hope than habitual affection for Sansa's visions. "One of the minor Redwynes could find her a place. A place for Stones. There's an island only accessible once every fifteen months, a great beautiful sea between it and the land."
"Westeros has passed a hundred and fifty years with no dragons. I won't risk another epoch like it."
"Wolves could never fight dragons, Your Grace. They won't." Sansa sniffled. She looked as though she had done it only to avoid laughing, and thus, secondhand, not to cry.
"But their name could."
"I'm just a girl with a stupid father and a dead mother and a string of dead husbands and brothers. None of them protected me, and none of them would fight for me."
Margaery, noting Daenerys' startle at it: "She's an innocent."
"Just let me disappear. Please. No one will remember me, I'm good at it, please—" All while Margaery sublimated the urge to clasp Sansa's benevolently curved, thoroughly memorable waist into slow small steps imperceptible under her dress.
"Yes, I learned that about you when we looked for you." Margaery could not miss the barb. She was either in your bed or skulking in your dungeons or learning your ravens, and in your audacity you told me you didn't know where she was. Searched with me, distracting me with stories from far beyond the Wall whenever I came too close. "You vanish. You'll vanish when I look again, and Targaryens won't remember you until you march south with your bannermen." Daenerys rotated on the ball of her foot. The toes tapped down, dismissive.
Ignoring the signal took conscious effort. "The game of thrones has been played by men," Margaery murmured. "You have benefited from the unfairly low expectations men had of you, my queen. You are an exception because of your dragons. Sansa has none, and none will follow a lady into war without dragons."
"You won't stop me with platitudes about women."
"You are Daenerys Stormborn, and an exception to all rules," Margaery said, then remembered on something else unusual about her. "There were women who were exceptions for you, weren't there? Will you not bring them to court?"
"You're saying—"
"As Sansa is my exception," Margaery finished. She had plead with Daenerys more than once in less certain terms, but this time she laid the cards flat, even as she knew it would not sway a woman whose thighs had tasted the Iron Throne. "Please."
"I buried them," Daenerys said, and Margaery saw her fingers loosen consciously in their claw, like the hand of one learning to grip a sword. Her gaze slid between Margaery and Sansa. "They died honorably. In battle. I do sympathize."
"You must have given them very elaborate tombs," Margaery said, "to befit their status." Conversationally she added, "You must see the catacombs then, Your Grace, the ones right below us. Your ancestors are buried there."
"Is that so," said Daenerys, her voice frosting over.
Margaery found herself like ice: she had been so kind to the city for so many years, and now that it was gripped in hands that counted none of them, she could at last release crueler breath. A proper start, she thought. Let this new queen remember how we're alike. "I could tell you all about them, I've been given a detailed tour before. They're so full of Westerosi history, you really must see them! And you could share with me stories of your Eastern lands if you wish, you know, it's so lovely to be in a court run by a true lady again and have so many foreign tales to hear of."
"I am standing right here," Sansa said. (Margaery reached out to attempt reassurance, thought better, and steeled herself straight again. She had to believe Sansa was strong enough, too, to be dishonored by such an obvious acknowledgement of needing reassurance from Margaery, who after all had survived no more wars than she had.)
"I don't wish. You should make sure you don't get a more intimate tour of them yourself, Lady Tyrell." Daenerys strode forward, closed one hand over the handle, buttressed the other on her leathers with the firmness of someone who had decided to kill long before the conversation, had only bothered with it to send a message to Margaery, and was now frustrated that her target refused to understand. "You're overstepping. Was I not clear earlier?"
Sansa had finally begun to shiver. "You must do what you think is right," Margaery said, hoping Sansa heard her implication meant over what must be a rush of blood, the ear problem that oft accompanied fear. You mustn't leave me with a last memory of you undignified; if you die for your name, you should level your chin like a Stark as you go. A selfish hope, Margaery knew, but if Sansa was going she could only hope for herself. It was the only hope that yet carried a chance of actualization.
Daenerys wrenched the door free.
Sansa opened her mouth as if to scream, but the cry petered out without truly starting, leaving only a stilted sound like the creak of an unoiled hinge. Margaery had closed the gap between her and Sansa as the three of them, while talking, had gradually and unavoidably approached the door, and she could curl her hand and lean her thumb against Sansa's throat. Under the foreign beady eyes of the dragons she thought: fuck dignity, fuck honor. In the end she was selfish. She wanted to touch Sansa's soft clear skin before anything happened to it. Sansa, for her part, was staring transfixed at the dragons, so still Margaery could not even feel her heartbeat.
"You stand aside," Daenaerys said, and when Margaery did not move, shoved her across the collarbone. The accompanying flutter of eyelids promised later retribution for forcing her to do it. Sansa stumbled as well, tripping downwards until the stairs separated her and the dragons from Daenerys and Margaery. The subjects grown in conquest demarcated from the old queen and the new. "Dracarys!" hissed Daenerys.
The blackest of the dragons—well, even Sansa would have laughed at such a line in a song, but Margaery could swear it shook its head.
"Shh," Sansa rasped, although except for the contemplative scrape of claw on tile it was silent, the arches looming over them unfallen. If the city was busking its life further above, they could not hear it. Sansa's chin pointed up at a dragon and the blue-green silk of her dress pooled behind her like water meeting hot oil, and the whole room waited with bated breath for the sizzle. The blow. Something dramatic to justify that shh. And then Daenerys unzipped the smile that had frozen on her face and made to speak, and Sansa was rushing out Don't you feel it, and Margaery felt it indeed. Knights who lost limbs in battle, plied with enough wine, complained of their phantoms, of bracing a long-buried arm on their pommels or wives; Margaery felt leathery expanses unfurl from her shoulders and her fingers wrenched to ten times their usual length, each tipped with a long dark thorn, although there was absolutely nothing there to see when she craned her head back. Daenerys had leapt, nonetheless, onto what Margaery was sure was her wing, sighted or otherwise. Her weight bowed its skeletal lines for only a few moments, then she jumped from Margaery's head, with agility Margaery had not expected of a queen renowned more for strategy than body-work, onto another much like herself. Drogon. That was his name. Daenerys was saying something urgently in his ear.
Suddenly she could look down at the slim whippet body that was Lady Margaery. She had sunk to the ground. Controlling the woman's limbs was like—Margaery lost track of the metaphor, exhilarated by the newness of looking at her own scalp, slipping her tongue onto the crown of her own head.
Her dragon heart made known its presence, its beat hideously sedate. It could not have fueled any creature not whisked right out of legend. Is there meat, she felt herself think. It's good to meet you, aunt, but I'm starving.
Oh. Dragons ate more than men, and she was no longer soft flesh and marrow for the feasting. The faint disappointment laced in that voice demanded a response.
"Vzispeisaaarrg," Margaery got out.
She thought If it would please you as to pick me up, and was, gently, by her nape. She bowed to her new sisters to cover the violent seizing of her throat as it settled into its new design, and to Olenna for always saving her tongue. Smith, may I build strongly and rightly, she prayed. When the sun fades may I know which candles to light. What to burn, she added, hoping it not too great a presumption; Daenerys blazed, her wrist pale and possessive on Drogon's mane, but Margaery felt through the dragon that she herself was still not for the burning. She channeled Daenerys now, she realized in awe, Daenerys whose councils were famously difficult to infiltrate, but one gambit at a time. Sansa blushed pink as any rose of Tyrell, and Margaery thought giddily that if they could feed these dragons they were saved, maiden and maiden, and Daenerys would have to love them. It was inevitable, the transitive relation. Daenerys loved the dragons, and Rhaegal had claws on Sansa's shoulder like a benediction, and Viserion held Margaery so carefully his teeth did not even draw blood.
They'd earn the dragons' trust first: then, then, the dragon queen.
AN: All feedback deeply appreciated! Written for the femslashex exchange, November 2013.