Huge thanks to TopShelfCrazy for making this chapter understandable to more people and not only to the foolish author.

Thank you to the person who reviewed last chapter and to everyone who followed or favourited this story.

Thank you for reading.

Warning for some violence and gore, not very graphic.

Daenerys

The north was greater than it looked.

Viserys taught her very little about it when they were children; above all that Rhaegar died on the Trident for the woman he loved, and that she had been of the north.

And that one of the brothers of the northern lady had become the Usurper's most faithful dog, doing his bidding and licking his hands. But those were only stories full of either charm or cruelty. They represented no knowledge of the land Daenerys was now determined to cross on the back of her dragon.

When she was married to Khal Drogo, Daenerys came to doubt that Rhaegar had died for love. She had come to love and cherish Drogo with all her heart, yet she still chose not to follow him to the night lands when he lost his life.

The truth of many matters was very different from Viserys' tales. The Usurper's most faithful dog had in reality been the staunchest protector of Rhaegar's son and heir. Eddard Stark raised Jon as his own bastard son, Jon Snow. And both Rhaegar and his northern queen still lived, as if life itself were a song, from time to time.

Whenever she remembered finding her brother, Daenerys would smile.

I'm not the only one any longer, she would think, elated.

It was more than she ever hoped for.

Even the dragons seemed happier for it. While Drogon hadn't become tame and docile since he allowed one more rider to steer his flight, he had certainly grown more orderly for a wild beast. He even scorched his food with more precision, Dany observed.

Drogon adapted to Rhaegar's personality. Deep, melancholy mood swings frequently reached Daenerys from the black dragon of late. He became slow to anger, yet he still possessed an undeniable fierceness, a wrath best left alone. In that too Drogon was like her brother. Dany soon realized Rhaegar did not know how strong he was; he saw himself as weak. The realization made her wonder what Rhaegar had discovered about her that she did not know herself, in the rather short time they had spent together.

I don't have to be the queen of Westeros, she rejoiced as the dragon spread his leathern wings and greeted the morning sun by a shrill, heart-piercing cry. With the burden of duty to her house set aside, only grim thoughts of Meereen ruling itself in her absence would sometimes spoil the immense joy Daenerys had felt since she had found Rhaegar alive.

Today there were so many novelties to look upon and to consider that it was easy to chase the worries away. One day she would have to fly back to Essos, to make sure that her freedmen and women were not enslaved again. But it was not this day.

The north was like no other land Daenerys had seen.

Gulltown was only the beginning, and it was not even the true north, only an outpost of the Vale of Arryn, a bleary, insignificant town staring mutely at the narrow sea. Dany had joined her ships on the open seas while they were creeping north among high, galloping waves in the proverbially foul weather of the winter season. She commanded two of her swiftest vessels, both of Volantene design, to take anchor and wait for Ser Jaime and Lady Brienne in Gulltown. Ser Barristan was left in charge of the fleet in her absence, with orders to carry on to the Eastwatch-by-the-Sea and defend it from all foes in the name of the king.

Dany was satisfied that her maids had finished weaving her a tunic and trousers of thick white wool, to wear under the pelt of the hrakar, the great white lion killed by Drogo and gifted to her. She had purchased the wool in King's Landing with golden coins from the Slaver's Bay, showing a face of a long dead Ghiscari king with a big nose. Her Dothraki sandals stayed on the ships as well, waiting for Dany to return, or perhaps for spring, who could tell. She donned simple boots of sheepskin, with thick leather soles, hoping they would serve her well. The further north they went, the more she felt as if she could only warm her feet sufficiently on Drogon's harsh belly.

Finally, she tucked her silver hair inside a furry cap with dark grey hairs billowing from it almost as long as her own. A commoner had made a gift of it to Rhaegar, because her brother had helped deliver his son. The man claimed it was made from the skin of a unicorn from Skagos and that it would keep the head warm and steady in any winter. Rhaegar had thanked the man and passed the queer headdress to Daenerys when the newly made-father was gone. "I have no use for it, sister," he had said. "Although I sense it is precious to him, so I give it to you, for you are precious to me." Rhaegar's hair had grown so unnaturally long and thick since the winter began that his silver mane now looked warmer than any unicorn's.

Up north from Gulltown, beyond a much more beautiful city called the White Harbor on the maps, a thick layer of snow enveloped the world.

As she flew, the windswept moors and high plains that were flat and desolate, became covered by forests that loomed tall and untouched, as if human hand had never harvested a single tree from them to build a house or light a fire. The plains dwindled into craggy, dangerous shores in the east with no safe anchor for ships. Drogon flew left and right, up and down, back and forth, uncertain of the path to take.

When the dragon landed to rest, Daenerys stepped in the snow. She was tiny for a woman, yet her feet sank through the white crust in an instant, becoming unpleasantly cold, boots or no boots. The snow reached up to her knees. Drogon rolled in it, as was his way, to lose tension after a long flight. Fire filled him on the inside and he had never felt a chill.

A tender, loose branch of a pine tree begged to be touched. Dany reached for it, but the wood resisted being picked. She shook some snowflakes off it and was shocked to uncover the growing top of a sapling; the small tree was buried entirely under the snow, which must have been at least chest-deep under her feet, promising a slow, cold death if she were all alone and lingered.

Dread coiled in her stomach for the first time since she had set out from the Trident.

This is no place for us, Drogon, she thought so the dragon could hear her.

They hadn't seen a high ground yet, suitable for a dragon to make his lair. The country was all sullen flatness and an excessive number of trees. There was a strange, wild beauty to these lands; Dany chose to compare it to that of Rhaegar's queen and their younger niece, Arya. A girl brimming with anger who had nonetheless chosen to spare Daenerys when she could have murdered her in her sleep.

Why is Rhaegal here? she asked Drogon in her mind, but the black dragon gave no answer, projected no shape, made no sound. He only urged her to take a seat between his spikes. They were flying low now and Drogon was searching the countryside with merciless, burning eyes.

At the northern end of the plains, a flat mountain loomed. It was crystal white and almost as high as the Great Pyramid of Meereen, just much, much longer on both east and west. This must be the Wall, Daenerys realised, this should be my nephew's command.

There were no songs about the Wall. Or if there were Viserys didn't know them, and Mance Rayder wouldn't sing them. And Rhaegar only sang of Jenny of Oldstones of late. It was a beautiful ballad, but it only served to remind Daenerys of the emptiness in her heart. There were holes left in it by men that could not be filled by all the love of the dragons.

Daenerys would do anything for her resurrected brother. She even began to grow fond of his wife in a rather peculiar way. The same could not be said of Lyanna. The wolven queen was kind to Daenerys at first, but became distant and cold as the army moved north. Dany could tolerate her hostility as long as Lyanna reserved no such coldness for Rhaegar. As she decidedly did not; Lyanna would glow like one of those brilliantly blue winter roses whenever she was near her husband, now touching him, now not.

In sum, her good-sister was so fierce that Dany trusted her to care for Rhaegar while she was gone.

The woman and the dragon kept flying as close as possible to the soil and Dany knew they were near. As the Wall rose higher and higher in front of their eyes, the trees gave way and slowly disappeared. In the last grove of oaks before the open stretch of land facing the Wall they found scorched branches, bones and carcasses of wolves and rodents, scattered over the dirtied pall of snow.

Drogon landed quietly on the frozen ground. They still sank in, but only a bit. Rhaegal, Daenerys called, listening for the flapping of scaled wings.

No dragon came.

Her black one twisted his neck and tail. Staring at the Wall, he hissed and roared with frightening enmity. Is Rhaegal a prisoner there? Daenerys asked, guessing wildly. Is Jon?"

She urged Drogon a few times in her mind to fly over the Wall, but try as she might, he would not obey. The dragon padded the grove and the clearing in the middle, cawing like an overgrown raven. Daenerys never left his back, for protection against the cold.

The innermost tree was one that Dany had never seen yet. She had only heard Mance Rayder sing about it. It had to be a weirwood, whiter than snow, its leaves red like blood. It had an angry face carved on its trunk and its bulging eyes seemed to study Daenerys.

A face of the old gods.

Daenerys shivered. She didn't believe in any god, for she had seen them all equally brought to ruin in Vaes Dothrak, the sacred city of the Dothraki where they brought the statues of the gods they had defeated and burned. No god could stand against the onslaught of determined and well-armed men.

Still no dragon came.

Drogon breathed fire on the smallest oak bordering the clearing, to set it aflame. Then he left Dany under the white tree, with the burning tongues for company, and went for a brief hunt. When he returned, he carried a dead bear cub in his paws. Daenerys flinched, remembering Ser Jorah Mormont, regretting only so slightly that she hadn't forgiven him when he had come back to her in Meereen.

Yet her hunger was such that as soon as Drogon dropped a portion of roast bear at her feet, she didn't think twice of eating it. It was the first time she tasted animal flesh in months. She had lost all appetite for meat since she was told Drogon had killed a child, a little girl. Hazzea. The dragon made short work of half the carcass, she noticed, and wrapped the other half in snow, as if to better preserve it. He paced up and down, restlessly, hitting at snow with giant talons, searching, sniffing, puffing.

The day was very short.

The moon rose pale before dusk before the thick layer of ice and frozen soil gave way under the claws of the dragon. There, Drogon dug frantically, and Daenerys helped him with a broken stick of weirwood as much as she could.

They uncovered an entrance to a tunnel descending underground, winding toward the white tree. Drogon could not pass through, but Dany could and did.

Among the gnarled white roots there was a hollow chamber in which she found Rhaegal, barely fitting in the enclosure he had sneaked in, sprawled like a dead cat in the streets of Meereen. It looked as if he had crept in weeks ago and then just kept growing in one place which had become too small to contain him. Rhaegal was now larger than Viserion, but still much smaller than Drogon.

Drogon cawed. He's mourning, Dany finally understood the sound. But Rhaegal is not dead. The green dragon moved his head, weakly. A bronze horn buried itself in a fat weirwood root. The dragon was incapable of liberating it.

"Rhaegal, where is Jon?" she asked of her green one in her mind, caressing and disentangling the stuck horn. Rhaegal was alive and he could get better. Dragons were not easy to kill.

Drogon let out a cry akin to mewling on the outside. Dany stepped aside to avoid charred bear meat flying in her direction through the tunnel. Fighting disgust, she legged the meal to the proximity of Rhaegal's snout, thankful for the boots she was wearing. The giant jaw opened lazily, sucked in the offering and snapped closed in a too slow motion. Rhaegal turned sideways as much as the cramped space allowed. He appeared unhurt, yet there was no doubt in Dany's mind that he was very, very sick.

"What is it, Drogon?" Daenerys chose to speak aloud to the familiar black presence invading her senses. Several days had passed since she had heard her own voice. Drogon breathed tiny puffs of fire at his brother till Rhaegal stirred and lifted the bronze horn again. His head sprang up only to collapse to the ground.

"Have you found Jon?" Dany asked of Rhaegal, but the green dragon's presence was too feeble, too far away. Drogon breathed some more smoke at him but none seemed to help. Black dread surged in her mind. She knew that Jon was somewhere behind that white mountain of ice and that he was in grave danger.

"Can you take me to him, Drogon?" Dany breathed. "And return to tend to Rhegal later on?" The black dragon was behind her, trying to widen the opening of the underground tunnel with tooth and claw, to no avail. Giving up, the beast crawled out where Dany could no longer see him.

In a heartbeat, a powerful streak of dragonflame broke into the weirwood chamber from the outside, narrowly missing Dany and Rhaegal. It was too cold for any wood down here to catch fire. An opening was made so Daenerys and her green one could see the pale moon. Drogon lowered his head to the hollow underground. The black dragon nuzzled his crippled brother, leaving tiny black crystals here and there on his green scales. It was the healing way of the dragons as Dany had discovered, and it never ceased to amaze her.

When he was done, her black one gazed at her with an angry eye, inviting, inviting...

Dany hugged Drogon's head. Her arms were now far too short to reach all the way around. As she did that, the dragon nudged her to look out upon the dancing moonshine... Or rather, at the distant Wall. Her vision blurred. For a second, she was looking at the Wall through the eyes of the dragons.

On top and over the entire visible length of the great Wall of ice, there was a dark black shadow. Unnatural. Sorcerous. Like the darkness she had glimpsed that existed in the House of the Undying in Qarth. The kind that had been after her and after her dragons ever since they had hatched, willing to suck all life out of them and put them to evil uses.

"You can't fly over, can you?" she asked of Drogon.

The black dragon stared at the green one.

"Oh no," Dany thought she understood. "He did try to fly over and now he's ill." Immense black and green sadness filled her mind. "What of Jon?"

Rhaegar had commanded Rhaegal to find Jon and bring him back. The dragon must have tried to obey the order many times until he was too weak to move. She sensed a black trepidation and a green uncertainty. "Jon is behind the Wall, isn't he?" Dany spoke with growing knowledge. "Drogon, is there a way to fly around?"

The blackness in her mind suggested that there was but it didn't deem safe taking her there. "I will be the judge of that," she said in her queenly voice, suddenly eager to be gone, eager to do what her brother wanted done. What harm could possibly befall her when she was with Drogon?

Black anger merged with black melancholy. The dragon obediently backed up through the hole he made, but not before he fondled his brother's belly with reassurance. Mindlessly, Daenerys commanded Drogon. "You will take me to Jon and you will leave me there. You will return and help Rhaegal and come for me only when he's better."

Maybe it wasn't wise. She couldn't help imagining Jon noble and handsome, just like his parents. But maybe Jon was as Lyanna thought Dany might have been. Maybe Jon hurt Rhaegal by intention or by chance. Maybe he was going to murder her on the spot when Drogon was gone. Yet the command had left her lips and they were already flying.

They flew alongside the Wall, all the way east and away from the brief sunset, parallel to the magic floating over the man-made mountain of ice. From close by, the shadow didn't lurk so evil. Perhaps it was not there to protect the Wall from the dragons crossing over as Dany thought.

Maybe it was a spell woven with a sole purpose; to keep out what was on the other side.

The Wall was very long but it still had an end. It gave way to the sea; clouds and storm, raging. The breakers hit the shore in bursts of salt water that could easily engulf a dragon had he not been clever and flown high enough.

Drogon was the most cunning of her children. He would find a way where Rhaegal could not.

"Is it far?" Dany squeezed out. Rain tore at her face, cutting cold. She felt the dragon's wrath. You wanted to go, he suggested with more detail that he could normally muster. "I did," she agreed, swallowing a mouthful of rainwater. It was warmer than the snow she had drunk after her supper of bear. You still want to go, the dragon insinuated with malice and Dany knew that for the first time since he had hatched, Drogon was angry at his mother. Truly angry.

So angry that when they lost sight of the sea, he lowered his huge body brusquely, to soar over a dark forest. When he dived between the snow ridden canopies of the wintergreen trees, she had to hold on to him for dear life. And when they were close enough to the ground that the fall would not kill her, Drogon shook so violently, in spasms of rage, till Daenerys slid over and landed in crispy, maidenly unspoiled snow.

And just like that, the dragon was gone, the moon was hidden, and all around her were trees.

It was so cold that she could hardly breathe. The air shot daggers down her throat. She drew an edge of the hrakar pelt in front of her mouth and it was a bit better. Knowing she couldn't stay where she was, she moved. But there was nowhere she could go. I told him to bring me to Jon. It would be the first time Drogon did not do as she bid him since they had faced Khal Jhaqo in the vastness of the Dothraki Sea.

Drogon wouldn't betray her to her death. Would he? Lyanna had been right about one thing. The dragons, beast and human, could kill each other. She wouldn't have believed it of her children. Has there ever been a mother who would?

She leaned on the nearest tree, feeling betrayed nonetheless. The trunk was huge and brown, not beautiful and white as the weirwood above the hollow where Rhaegal had been hiding. The canopy was so spacious above Dany that an entire hut of the lamb men from Lhazar could have fitted among the needle infested branches. She had never seen trees like that. Daenerys hit the bark with her fists, helpless, her own cold rage waking. The chill felt less bitter when she was angry as well.

She walked a bit around, looked up and then down. A piece of different tree-bark, red-brown, protruded from the snow. Dany was mesmerised by it. She had to touch it although a sudden instinct counselled her against it. She was in danger anyway, Drogon had said as much. What harm could one touch do? Unkindly, she tugged at it.

The bark turned out to be a garment of sorts on a thin, long hand as black as Drogon's scales. It only had three fingers and a thumb, and long, long claws. The hand gripped Daenerys' arm and used the princess to scramble up from deep snow where it had been buried, just like the sapling Dany had seen earlier.

The creature was much smaller than her, and Dany was not a tall woman. It looked like a little girl with a mane of unkempt auburn hair, huge blue eyes and large, almost pointy ears. When it opened its mouth it had no voice, only sharp yellow teeth. Dany tried to retrieve her hand, but the creature possessed extraordinary force. Like Euron, the dragon-stealer. The teeth snapped. Her dragon blood boiled. Using every ounce of her strength, Dany wrenched her arm free. There was bleeding from her wrist where the jaws had caught up, but the cold was such that it numbed the pain.

Daenerys backed to the tree trunk. A freezing sensation took hold of her back. The dwarf monster was closing on her, baring its fangs to snap at her throat, sharpening its claws to dig out her eyes or her heart. She had never seen anything like it and she hadn't been that afraid since Viserys' death.

"Help!" she screamed her lungs out, not expecting any.

In a reply, new snow started falling. A flake ended on her head, on her nose, on her chest. The creature jumped. Dany ducked and rolled away, her movement slow and clumsy due to the savage cold. The monster's collision with the tree saved her only for a moment. She stumbled backward, landing in the snow. The hrakar pelt spread under her as a sheet, soon to be soaked with her life blood. The claws were tearing at her new woollen trousers. They would climb higher and higher and then... She could only think how her maids had laboured for nothing, for nothing at all... And the jaws were coming so close, so very close… Too close to her throat.

Dany closed her eyes.

When no pain came, she dared to open them again.

A man loomed over her, a shadow covered in furs with jets of dark, long, unruly hair hanging out of a black scarf wrapped tightly around his head and mouth. Moonshine twinkled in his eyes. They looked young, dark as pitch, shining. Three more men wrestled with the creature that attacked her. One drew a knife to begin hacking it to pieces and...

"No!" Dany said rapidly. "There are four of you. Catch it if you can. Kill it only if you must." She sensed that the creature might be able to talk. Just like Aegon's companion, Lady Jeyne, could do when she had been a walking dead, or the despicable Lord Euron who was a wight still.

"Why pray?" the young man above her said dryly. "It wasn't going to spare you."

"No," Dany had to agree, "but that doesn't mean that I am bound to make the same choice."

The young man chuckled and stepped away. Under the furs his legs were gaunt, and his face had become terribly long when he laughed. Dark hair streamed in the moonlight when he moved, hardened with frost, as widespread wings of a bat. Or a baby dragon, Dany thought.

"You heard the lady," he told his companions in a baffled voice laced with mockery. "She wants us to be gallant knights and catch her a monster." One of the other men, a balding one, climbed up the tree where Dany had fled from her attacker. In a moment he was down again with hempen rope. It took the strength of all four men to bind the creature who was wriggling, and wrestling and resisting, till all fight went out of it and its blue eyes looked quite dead.

Dany remembered a vision of such bleak blue eyes. She had had it in Essos, she knew, but she could not recall where nor what was it all about.

"There, my lady, if it please you, your own monster," the young man said, satisfied, returning his attention on her. He was not very tall or impressive in any way, much shorter than Khal Drogo or the sellsword captain Daario Naharis, and probably a little bit shorter than her brother Rhaegar. He was not older than Dany and looked as if he was still growing. Dark eyes glinted in the moonlight when he joked with her again. "And if it doesn't please you to meet more monsters, I suggest you accept our hospitality and take shelter in a tree with us."

By the time he offered her his hand to stand up, Dany didn't need the young man to tell her his name. Drogon had been true to her, as always.

Unlike Aegon, who looked like her, but who was not her nephew by blood, her real nephew looked very much like a Stark, like his mother. Yet the solemn, observant expression in his dark eyes, a glimmer of something that could be both strength and weakness, belonged solely to his father.

"My horse was frightened by... this…," she pointed at the creature. "It turned crazed and left me."

"There was no horse," a stout, wiry black-haired man with a widow peak contradicted her.

"There had to be, Pyke," the balding one said. "How else could she have gotten here? Flying?"

The third man, who looked older than Ser Barristan, only laughed at the ridiculous proposition that she could have flown. A notion formed in Dany's mind as she pondered how it was most fortunate that none of them seemed to have seen or recognised the dragon.

If she told them the truth, they'd probably think her a liar. She couldn't sense Drogon; the dragon must have gone back to Rhaegal. He'll come back for me. He'll do just as I asked. She felt guilty for thinking that Drogon could have ever betrayed her.

"We should not be far from the Eastwatch-by-the-Sea," her nephew said. "She could have come from there. Queen Selyse has brought plenty of southron women with her from Dragonstone. This one's probably one of them."

"I've never seen this one," the balding man was not easy to fool either. "Though I admit that the queen has many ladies waiting on her."

Dany said neither yes or no. The notion was now crystal clear in her head. There was only one way to do what Rhaegar had asked of her, to measure her nephew for what he truly was; he had to stay ignorant of her purpose for a while longer.

"My name is Dany," she said bravely. "I am indeed a lady in waiting. And a true knight would tell me his name by now."

"I'm only a bastard," her nephew said, "the name is Jon. Jon Snow. He's a knight," he showed the balding man, "Lord Davos Seaworth of Rainwood. That's somewhere in stormlands. He can tell you where better than I if you don't already know."

"You must have heard about the Onion Knight, my lady, if you indeed waited on the Queen Selyse," Lord Davos said.

"The Queen Selyse has only words of praise for the brave Ser Davos," Dany hoped she didn't exaggerate or wrongly pronounced the name of the unknown queen. His lordship of rainwood was becoming dour the more anyone mentioned Selyse.

Jon continued, "And Cotter Pyke here belongs to the Night's Watch. Before that, he came from the Iron Islands. You probably don't want to know what he did there."

"Nothing that would please the ladies," Pyke agreed. "I lived by the Old Way."

Dany knew from spending a very short time as a prisoner of Euron Greyjoy that the Old Way of the ironborn included reaving, killing and raping, not necessarily in that order.

"But that was before my blood ran black," Pyke put bluntly, as though he were asking her pardons for his past transgressions. Dany could not help but like the man, ironborn or not. He was a bit like Brown Ben Plumm, just younger. And she had forgiven Ben for betraying her.

"I am called Garth," the elderly man introduced himself. "It was some black crow called me that in my youth before I slit his throat. My mother died before she could name me so I had no name until that time."

Her nephew looked horribly startled by that confession of violence. Dany pitied him at once. The arm he had offered her dangled alone in the night air, unused.

She seized it to stand up. Jon's arm was pleasantly warm even through the gloves he wore. Not as warm as Drogon's paw, but it would have to do. He had a look of amazement for her own hands, which were bare and unblemished despite the cold and the fresh scratch on her right wrist. For some reason this northern winter only seriously threatened her feet. It didn't mean it was pleasant for her other parts, not by far. "Well then, Jon," she said, "better show me to that tree of yours."

Jon and Pyke helped her climb. Lord Seaworth and Old Garth dragged their prisoner, and tied the creature to hang in the lower branches of the tree. A bit further up, the men had built a flat of wood planks, branches and ropes. Daenerys soon learned you had to be careful where you sat and where you put your feet on it because the construction was anything but solid. Strangely, it was still holding under their combined weight. Not that she added much to it; Dany was a slight, slender woman.

"It's safer to rest here by night, and we travel by day. We're bound for Eastwatch." Jon explained. "And what brings a lady out on a winter night? Did the queen not warn all of you that there were snarks and grumkins about?"

Dany knew that there were white walkers just like she knew there were weirwoods, but she hadn't seen them yet either. "I guess that there are," she said, "but I've never seen one."

"It was sunny this afternoon," she ventured a wild guess. It had been sunny on the south side of the Wall. "I went for a ride with three other ladies. The day was shorter than we expected it to be. A blizzard came and I lost them." It was as good a lie as any. She wondered how far they were from the Eastwatch-by-the-Sea. If they were not close enough, her new companions would see through her pretence very soon.

"Aye," Jon sounded as if he believed her, oddly enough. "The days are getting shorter." Grimness crept in his voice. Dark eyes focused on the living dead creature hanging below them in the tree. The fingers on his right hand flexed in his glove. She could almost imagine them touching the strings of a high harp. "Never fear, my lady," he said. "We shall bring you back to Eastwatch safely."

New determination removed all friendliness from Jon's eyes. "Maybe we shall find your horse as well," he said in a different tone, and then she knew that despite his kind words he had been suspicious of her.

"I'll be looking as well," she said, purposefully feigning the voice of that young innocent girl she was not any more. She hadn't been that girl for years, maybe she never was.

Sleeping furs were stretched on the flimsy floor of the flat wood, and the night chill did not grow any less from all the talking. Dany decided to stay close to her nephew. If he groped her at night, she would learn another thing about him. She lay down between Jon and Lord Seaworth who curled next to her and immediately started snoring in earnest, indifferent to propriety. It was much warmer that way.

Jon, on the contrary, kept to the edge: he seemed to prefer needles and branches to her company. He maintained a good foot of distance between Dany and himself.

Here is one who would put a sword between us, as my poor brother Rhaegar had done when he first travelled south to Dorne with his second wife to be. He had only wanted to save Lyanna from our father then. The blade on Jon's hip was dragonglass, black, tapering, and most likely as sharp as Drogon's teeth. Yes, Dany was certain. That's what Jon would do if he wore a sword to start with, although he might not be able to maintain the distance he desires with every woman.

For in the end, Rhaegar could not save Lyanna from himself, when she no longer wanted to be saved. Dany wondered idly what Jon would do if she reached for him now. Not that she had any intention to.

Twice married and twice a widow, Dany was not intimidated by the proximity of men.

"Come closer," she told her nephew, forcing her voice to sound less like a command. She was no queen here. And she could not very well return to her brother and admit that she had let his precious son freeze because he was not comfortable with her lady's charms.

Jon stayed still as a stone.

The woods obeyed her instead of her nephew; silence withdrew and queer noises came closer. The hooting and the howling of the wind on the rise struck them out of nowhere, soon followed by the treading of many feet sloshing in the snow. The strangers approached the tiny clearing on the ground below Jon and her. The wight they imprisoned rebelled fiercely against the restraints in the gloom, eager to join the newcomers. Dany craned her head to look down.

"Don't!" Jon urged her. "You don't need to see them."

She had to, no matter what he said. She was the blood of the dragon and she would look.

The dead were many. They were uglier than Euron's army; stronger, more determined. She thought she saw a dead bear among them or maybe a giant spider. They were marching to the Wall, if Dany didn't completely misjudge all directions during flight.

Her nephew pulled her into his body on an impulse. Their companions slept peacefully, undisturbed by the nightly commotion, and it seemed to Dany that Jon and her were the only two people awake in the entire world.

"Don't look down, my lady," he told her. "They can smell our blood, the blood of the living. And if you have a gentle heart, you might scream and they will hear us. We have only one obsidian blade and there are too many of them."

Dany felt the steady thud of her nephew's heart under the layers of clothing. It thumped faster when the howling of the gale was replaced by high-pitched, inhuman cries echoing all through the forest. Suddenly, there were no more wights under their tree. There were evil spirits of mist, walking slowly, carrying crystal swords; tremendous, merciless beings with bright blue eyes, changing shapes in the winter wind. She had never missed her dragon quite as much. Drogon would make short work of these... Others... Dany hoped.

Her soul began freezing, as though it were no longer her own. Daenerys had never known fear as the one that took hold of her at that moment. Not even when she had woken a dragon in her brother Viserys, earning beatings and threats when her behaviour didn't please him.

Without Drogon's strength, she gave in to her fear. Shrinking, she buried her head in her own gloveless hands, away from both Jon's wool-clad chest and the gentle snoring of the Onion Knight. Her hands were still warm. They would be warm for a day after riding her dragon. She needed all the warmth she could gather. All life force.

"I told you not to look," Jon said, sounding stubborn like his mother.

"It's not your fault," Dany hurried to explain. "I wanted to see." She couldn't tell why it had been so important for her to look upon the face of the enemy.

Mist glided through the woods below them, heading steadily south, and all that time Dany kept shaking with fear. Jon was tense and stiff, gloved hand on his black blade, fingers flexing and unflexing. The Others marched on until the fog that had carried them dissolved and dissipated in the night, like a huge shadow of something that should not exist, cast on the world by the bitter whiteness of the snow.

And whether it was from the accomplishment of finding her nephew, from great tiredness or the aftermath of fear which still lay heavy on her being, Dany's eyelids turned into stone, dropping closed on their own accord. Without seeing, the world reduced itself to Jon's breathing next to her. The distance between them diminished and while they did not touch after his clumsy embrace, he should have now been able to share her body heat under the furs. Dany relived their encounter all over again to be sure of her conclusion.

Her nephew did not seem mad at all.

I'll tell him everything on the morrow, she thought, regretting her lack of sincerity for the first time tonight. Drogon will return and fly us back to the kingsroad. When Jon sees the dragon he'll know that I must be telling the truth.

Safe and warm on the tree, Daenerys fell asleep. It felt almost like in her childhood home in Braavos, in the house with the red door.