I am so very grateful to TopShelfCrazy for betaing this chapter.
Sadly, there has been no reviews on the previous chapter with Arya's POV. If anyone is still reading this story on this site, I'd really like to hear what you think.
Daenerys
The dead had caught their scent.
A numerous host of wights had been following Dany and her companions for half a moon's turn already. They never found them, but every night it became more difficult to hide. The land was slowly changing, from more forested to slightly less. Most trees were no longer evergreen or high enough, nor were their boughs sufficiently strong to offer protection when the darkness came.
Fortunately, the dead child guiding them could sense the enemy and outrun it, for the time being. The eagle helped as well. The invisible sentinel of the sky, she would fly in front, showing the safest path away from danger, if not always the easiest one to cross.
Avoiding pursuit, they climbed the icy slopes of the low hills and then slid down, grateful for the runners of the cart; they could all ride on it when the terrain descended and their joined weight increased the speed of the sledge as they navigated it amidst thick groves of evergreen shrubbery and young, bare, leafless trees, half-covered in snow. First they moved north, then west, and then...
South again.
It seemed to Dany that, in the North, one always ended up going the opposite way from where one intended to go.
When they wanted to go south to the Wall, the forces of nature pushed them back north. When Jon chose to go north, after what might have been a fool's errand, or a vague hope for victory, the enemy was pushing them back south.
Dany wished that magic swords grew on trees.
If they had, they would have found one by now instead of horrible pine tree fruits they had been eating.
The cones made an awful porridge, more tasteless and bitter than the acorn paste they lived on in the first days after Drogon had left her. Old Garth revealed himself to be tremendously skilled in making meals of finely cut tree bark, pine needles and semi-frozen pine tree fruits. He boasted seeing four winters come and go, and only the first one could be called winter in his reckoning.
He had survived them all.
"So you will see the end of this one as well," Dany decreed, her voice only slightly higher-pitched than when she would decide about petitions from her comfortably cushioned queen's bench in Meereen.
"Of course not," Old Garth was offended. "No one will live to see the end of the Long Night."
Dany was flabbergasted. "But then, why...?" She couldn't word her question fully.
"Why am I struggling to make food every day?" the old man asked placidly, hands full of needles for another meal of the same. "Why should knowing I'll die soon stop me? I'm not yet done living."
It was an interesting way to behold one's future and Dany was not at all certain she could share it.
If food was repetitive, drink was even more so. There was no mead after the night in the rounded village hut before they headed north.
They could only get drunk on snow.
Had there been fermented mare's milk that the Dothraki loved so well and Dany always hated, she would have gorged on it and enjoyed the taste. She wondered what her nephew would think of that Dothraki delicacy.
More often than not she caught herself wondering aimlessly what her nephew's kiss would taste like. Before being a princess or a queen, Dany was still a girl, and kissing was what girls often thought about, twice widowed or not. The childlike corpse had never been the most pleasant or talkative companion when Dany shared the sledge with her, and the men hopped on and off, tired and mostly taciturn from the pulling effort.
And now even the corpse was walking while Dany was stuck in one place, as a useless burden that could not be discarded.
I'm getting weaker and colder every day, she thought miserably, stretching her legs up and down, overwhelmed by pointless sorrow. Jon explained to her this meant that the Others were not far behind their host of the slain; it was a wildling wisdom he had learned in Hardhome, he said.
She couldn't very well imagine kissing Old Garth, Lord Davos or Cotter Pyke, could she? Well, Pyke, maybe, if there had been no one else. He wasn't old enough to be her father like Davos, or her grandfather like Garth. But Pyke was ironborn and after meeting Euron Greyjoy, the dragon-stealer, Dany had no love for the krakens, true or bastard born. It would please her greatly to fly to the island of Pyke with Drogon, engulf it in flames, and let it sink like old Valyria.
Dany tried to justify her fancies by telling herself that Jon was simply the most handsome man available. She liked her men pleasing to the eye, albeit taller and stronger. More daring. Jon was sweet, but he didn't appear to be made of the stuff of heroes.
Not at all.
Her nephew was stubborn, sullen and not splendid in any way Dany imagined the famous Targaryens of old Viserys had told her about in her childhood. Yet he is the blood of Aegon the Conqueror, and perhaps of Aemon the Dragonknight, just like I am.
The north went on and on, blanketed in snow.
The cold was such that despite being a widow with woman's desires, Dany couldn't bring herself to imagine anything else than kissing. The mere thought of undressing made her clench her teeth and shiver so hard that it hurt. She would spend the remainder of her days wiggling her toes not to lose them to frostbite. It is known, her Dothraki handmaidens would doubtlessly conclude.
Their search for the magic sword had no magic to it at all, or maybe the child guiding them had seeped all the magic from the world to hold onto its unnatural life.
"A door," Old Garth translated patiently several days ago, "she's looking for the door and so are we. Or we can't cross into me old lands safely. Not even with her and the big bird as help."
The old man always kept his distance from the wight, and Dany knew Jon, Davos and Pyke kept watch over Old Garth at night, afraid that he would burn the dead girl if he could. The wildlings were rather adamant about burning their dead, Dany had learned.
Lord Davos often just stared at the trees. He spoke very little and just like Pyke, he would have been more at home on the deck of a ship than on a speeding sledge. But the iron-islander had been on the Wall for many years so he must have gotten used to all the trees. Davos hadn't. Dany could sympathize with that.
She hadn't been this helpless since crossing the red waste.
If she had to walk, she would have perished. If the men she was with decided to turn against her, she would lose the battle. If the eagle tried to claw her eyes out, there would be nothing she could do but let it happen. Either way, she would die.
Here, more north than north, she was no queen. She was not princess, nor khaleesi, nor the Mother of Dragons. She was just a girl who could not walk because her legs were freezing. Dany felt as weak and insecure as before Viserys sold her to Khal Drogo, expecting a horde of forty thousand Dothraki screamers as a payment. Every day they moved further away from the sea, and Dany's hope to see Drogon again and to fly, dwindled amidst fresh drifts of endless snow.
She stopped looking at the sky.
Without my dragons, I am nothing, she thought, irritated.
Amazingly, she was still alive.
Dany wondered if Drogon merely listened to her command but Rhaegal was so sick that the black dragon had to cure his green brother for a very, very long time. The notion did not seem likely. The dragons' power of regeneration was considerable. She had witnessed it with Drogon blowing black crystals over his own wounds after their battle with Khal Jhaqo and his bloodriders, which had won Daenerys the allegiance of forty thousand Dothraki screamers of her own.
With every passing day, Rhaegal's health was much less a good reason for Drogon's continued absence. Maybe the ancient magic she had seen hovering over the Wall lingered also over the vastness of snow she was forced to cross, preventing Drogon from reuniting with her.
Or maybe he simply does not want to come.
Her dragon had been angry with her. He may have abandoned her of his own free will.
When she didn't think about her missing dragons, Dany began to despise herself for being a coward. I failed Rhaegar. She should have told his son the truth as soon as she was reasonably convinced Jon was no madman and deserved no less.
Maybe I should kiss him first. Learning the pillow tricks from a Lyseni handmaiden, Doreah, who had died in the red waste, brought Daenerys the priceless gift of Khal Drogo's love, but it wasn't enough to keep Daario only in her bed. Dany dismissed the idea as a way to gain Jon's confidence. I might just scare him off.
With every day of keeping her lips tightly sealed it was becoming more difficult to talk, ever since that first day when the eagle's distress startled Dany into submission and silence. Jon had made a hateful remark about his mother, and Dany had no doubt that she had been flying with her eagle at that moment.
Having Queen Lyanna as a witness was making the choice of what to say to Jon, and in which manner, exceedingly difficult for Dany. As a consequence, revealing his origin to her nephew slowly became a daunting, insurmountable task. To do it now seemed as queer as when mother and sisters of noble Hizdahr zo Loraq wanted to inspect Dany's womanly parts before marriage.
The only difference was that she wasn't marrying Jon Snow...
Jon Targaryen, she corrected her thoughts, not willing to give offence.
Yet she kept calling him by his bastard name in her mind because it corresponded to the man she was starting to know. Winter affected him far less than Dany; it somehow fortified his resolve to endure, to whatever end. He made conversation with the other men, as if they were riding on a pleasure barge, and not on the rickety sledge in the middle of nowhere. He also did more than half of the necessary pulling.
If it wasn't for her nephew, they would have stopped going anywhere by now, laid in the snow and waited for their death. Dany started to believe that if anyone was going to survive the Long Night, it was Jon.
Sadly, since that night in the village, he avoided Dany as if she had been the Queen of the White Walkers on a throne of ice, and not his aunt. He never asked about Mance Rayder or Arya as she had half expected him to do.
Jon's measured, cold demeanour reminded Daenerys strongly of his mother, although the princess now suspected that Lyanna's progressive loss of love for her on the kingsroad was merely a show. The queen needed time to recall her eagle back to her whenever Rhaegar decided to send his sister and the dragon they shared to look for his and Lyanna's son.
The bird of prey was frequently hunting far away, or so Lyanna told everyone, when it could very well be that the she-eagle had been searching for Jon, on command of her human mistress. And the black, white-headed eagle could hide easily under the impressively long tail of the black dragon. Dany wondered if her brother knew what his wife had been doing, and believed he did not. But why would she hide that from him? The royal couple adored each other, that much was obvious. It made Dany both content and unhappy, content for her brother and unhappy for herself. For Dany, love came and went, it never endured.
Any love of mine is not meant to last.
The Mother of Dragons could now fully agree with Lyanna's actions. That's what I would have done if I were a warg, and if donning eagle-skin was the only way to be with the child that was lost to me.
All her children were lost to Daenerys now, and she was lost as well, following her nephew through the confines of the world.
For all her inner turmoil, empty stomach and cold feet slowly killing her, she never uttered a word of grievance. Dany was the blood of the dragon and she would show no weakness. Jon sometimes looked at her with frozen curiosity, waiting, as if he wished she would denounce her lack of well-being. She never did.
More days of whiteness passed, days of little food, short winter days of constant fear.
The dead were never far behind.
Until one day the eagle was gone since early morning, the wight appeared worried, and the stench of death was strong in the air, despite the enormous chill that reigned in the world, masking all smells. The evening was drawing closer and the first stars were rising gently in the sky, deaf and mute to trouble in the lands they shined on. The company made almost no progress that day, in any direction, right or wrong.
Everywhere around them was snow.
Always light of body, Dany feared she would melt as a snowflake in the sun. Except that there had been no sun for days, and the sorrow caused by the proximity of the dead lay heavy on her soul.
She closed her eyes and tried hard to think of the humming of water in the garden with the persimmon tree on top of Great Pyramid of Meereen, under different stars, in oppressive heat, as the river Skahazadhan flew lazily in the distance. Dany didn't think she'd ever see that tree bear its sweet orange-red fruits again. Her head was spinning. She realised she had forgotten to eat in almost two days. The taste of pine tree fruits had become repulsive beyond measure. She could not eat them any more.
She could not.
"We are moving strongly to the west now," Pyke judged by the position of one particular constellation in the sky. The Ice Dragon, Dany remembered. An apt name for a star burning over the white waste...
"We could be very close to Castle Black if we headed directly for the Wall," Jon agreed. "So maybe I'll find my little brother after all. And my old sword."
"My king could have returned there by now," Davos added with calm hope.
Old Garth had nothing good to say about the Wall.
Dany had understood by then that Lord Davos worshipped the pretender Stannis Baratheon with the fervour most men reserved for their gods. She hoped no one would ever give her that kind of loyalty in her precarious kingdom on Slaver's Bay if she ever returned to it.
Deities mostly ended up abandoned in Vaes Dothrak, and Dany had never had any wish to go there and join the dosh khaleen, the crone widows of the khals who died ages ago.
They had been frantically searching for a tree to camp at night, almost feeling the foetid breath of the dead on their backs, when they ventured into a grove of nine white trees with carved red faces. The eyes and mouths were like blistering wounds on the white bark, every set different than the previous one; and every single face stern, sullen, angry or sad.
They must have been drunk on snow because there wasn't anything else to be had, and her nephew began hallucinating.
"I died here," he announced with solemnity, looking every inch alive, his dark hair lightened by frost in faint starlight, a brilliant touch of silver on black.
Dany wondered what he meant.
"You don't seem dead to me, Lord Snow," Pyke said with finality. "And we were right. Castle Black is less than a day ride from here."
"This is no way to the Lands of Always Winter, girl!" the ironborn accused the strange child suddenly, without warning. "This is where the Sworn Brothers of the Night's Watch who honour the old gods come to say their words!"
The corpse girl that guided them simply sat under the largest tree and wept. After, she whispered, and the words sounded almost like singing, in a tongue not even Old Garth was able to understand. Then, she turned to more habitual guttural hissing, deep from the back of her tiny throat.
"A tale is needed," Old Garth said, forehead wrinkled as cabbage leaf from trying hard to understand her. The wildling occasionally cursed the girl for speaking the Old Tongue worse than an ill-mannered, angry giant. "A fabulous tale to make men cry. Or to make the gods... weep... To open the gate of the gods..." Garth swiftly deciphered the rest.
Dany's companions started telling all kinds of tales under the first evening stars as the scent of death grew stronger. A broken horn sounded shrilly in the forest, not far. A bear grunted and it was probably not a living one.
Pyke spoke at length of the Drowned God in his watery halls, and Lord Davos of Symeon Star-Eyes and Serwyn of the Mirror Shield. Old Garth said plainly a short story about the last of the giants and then he cried. Jon chose cruel, sad stories from the North Dany had never heard of, like the ones about the Rat Cook and Gendel's children, stories in which everyone perished.
As they listened to Jon's stories, it started to snow.
The dead were closing on them, and the living could imagine their disfigured faces in the shimmering of starlight over snow. Maybe we should climb up the weirwoods, Dany thought. But from below they could see clearly that the space between the branches would be too large to mount the platform for sleeping. Besides, the majestic trees started branching too close to the ground, and where a man could climb so easily, a wight or his master might be able to follow. And on a starry night, the dark shapes of Dany and her companions would stand out against the auburn leaves, when the celestial lights brightened fully the white expanse of snow.
What story could I tell? Daenerys wondered. About Queen Naerys and Prince Aemon the Dragonknight?
"I know a story, a true story," Dany was suddenly illuminated and fed up with lying. The eagle had not been with them that entire day. She paused to wonder if the bird's absence meant that some trouble had come to Rhaegar and Lyanna on the kingsroad. Maybe Drogon had to help them. What if they have more need of dragons? Drogon left her only once since she became his rider in Meereen, and that was when Rhaegar's queen had been in mortal danger of being burned alive.
It's now or never, Dany concluded.
Rhaegar, I pray that he doesn't hate you or his mother. Or me. It would irk her if Jon loathed her, for elusive reasons. She was not really attracted to him, was she? The thought of kissing him was born out of monotony and despair, she supposed.
Dany forgot her cold feet, hopped off the cart, and cleared her throat.
"It's a tale about a noble boy born in the same year that I came to the world on Dragonstone amidst salt and smoke," she remembered what she had been told about her birth, and thought she could hear the cracking of the weirwood roots that could not be heard beforehand.
"On Dragonstone, my lady?" Lord Davos asked with curiosity, "Are you King Stannis' kin?"
"A distant one," Dany reacted. "His grandmother was a Targaryen. And the founder of the House Baratheon may have been a bastard of my house. Or not. No one knows, not truly."
Lord Davos widened his eyes and bowed his head in sudden fear.
He knows, Dany smiled dryly, feeling almost a queen again despite the extreme fragility of her body.
Rhaelle, the daughter of Aegon V the Unlikely married Lord Stannis' grandfather, and Orys, the founder of the House Baratheon, may have been the bastard brother of Aegon the Conqueror, and had been the famous Aegon's best friend.
Jon didn't understand.
"Was the boy a prince?" her nephew mocked her, resentful toward her as usual whenever he directed her a brief word. He knows I have been lying to him. "There are always handsome princes in stories that the ladies like," Jon tried to make a jest, but to Dany it sounded hollow. She was just too tired for quips.
"He would have been," Dany said looking straight in a dark grey, suspicious eye. "But he had been raised a bastard or he would have been a dead prince by now. His father had another son, and that boy's skull had been squashed to a wall. Except that a faithful servant of the boy's father swapped the babies. The crime was made no less by it. An infant still died, and they covered him in a crimson cloak. An innocent little princess and her mother were murdered as well," Dany felt tears swelling in her eyes. Little Rhaenys' death was never something she could think about in earnest and maintain her composure. I would have been put to sword like Rhaegar's daughter if I stayed in Westeros as a child.
She felt gnawing hunger in her stomach. One of her feet turned numb no matter how hard she tried to move it. Her nephew stared avidly at her now, as though he were about to eat her for supper.
White bark cracked, from a tale that could make the gods weep, or merely from inhuman cold, who could tell?
Jon stared at Daenerys with huge black eyes, of a much darker shade than his mother's. "A bastard boy, you say," he muttered, beginning to understand against his will.
"The Usurper's dog- my pardons, the Warden of the North, Lord Eddard Stark, told everyone that the little prince was his bastard. But the child was not of his body, though it shared the same blood. The infant was his sister's son..." speaking was the only thing that kept Dany from falling face forward in the fresh snow. "Lady Lyanna left her child with Lord Eddard, feigning her own death in childbed."
"She feigned death?" her nephew sounded mildly amused.
A fissure opened in the roots of the white tree behind Jon, right under where the wight-child had been seated, blabbering softly in her unknown sing-song language. The girl hissed at Dany and started sinking slowly into the ground. The eagle was mercifully still away. Daenerys took it as an encouragement to go on.
"If it was as you say," Jon proceeded with great caution, never seeing the change behind his back. "If the mother did not die... Why hasn't she ever returned to see the child?" he asked, a mask of disinterest on his features.
"Lord Eddard saw Lady Lyanna once more before he returned north, thinking she was someone else who knew the truth about the birth of the young prince," Dany hurried to explain. "So he told the unhappy mother that her baby had died, mistaking her for another noble lady of Dorne. He did it to protect the little prince. And his sister, the prince's mother, she despaired and nearly took her own life. You see, she was freshly widowed and she thought she lost a child. In the end she left Westeros. She felt it to be her duty to raise her husband's other baby, the one who would have been smashed to a wall if a faithful servant did not save him..."
Dany was about to cry. She could understand exactly how Lyanna must have felt because Dany was a widow and she did lose a baby.
Lyanna had lived for Aegon and Dany hatched dragons...
Swallowing tears, the princess spoke, "If this is not a story to make the gods weep, I don't know what is."
"My father's sister had a husband? Speak plainly!" Jon was angry now. "Who was the mother and who the father? A she-eagle and a he-eagle?"
The fissure in the roots enlarged. Only the head and shoulders of the dead child were still visible above the frozen soil. Dany wondered how she would have reacted if someone told her now that Aerys and Rhaella were not her parents. Not very well, she decided, I might be tempted to burn the messenger if Drogon was still around.
Maybe it was for the best that the dragons were safely away.
"As I said, the boy's mother was a wolf, not the father as the boy thought," Dany said quietly, finding that once you started it was not so hard to tell the truth. Maybe if she repeated it enough times, he would believe her. "Yet she flew with the eagle in her dreams, instead of running with the wolf as you do."
"Do I?" Jon asked menacingly, his expression gloomy and thunderous, his disquiet growing. Dany noticed how Lord Davos and Pyke now stared at Jon as if he were some beast. Old Garth didn't seem to care. The wildlings and at least some of the northmen knew about the wargs, Dany remembered. The men from the south of the Seven Kingdoms mostly did not.
"And the father? What of him?" Her nephew noticed none of their companions' reactions. His cheeks turned livid green, and his face very long. Their guide disappeared in the hole under the tree. A passage would soon open fully, there was no doubt in Dany's mind. She hoped that the magic sword was not far down the drain. Her strength was leaving her, and only the cold remained. She would not go very far.
"His father is a dragon, like I," Dany said. "My brother Rhaegar. He's the king now and he's on the way to the Wall with such army as he could muster. I was taught he died on the Trident, but he yet lives."
"Why would he do that? Stannis is the only king who ever came. And only because he had nowhere else to go," Jon claimed bitterly.
"My brother sees it as his duty to defend his kingdoms," Dany said, offended. How could it be otherwise? Dany had felt the obligation to protect the slaves she freed. Rhaegar was no different. "But his heart's desire is to see his son."
Jon was muted.
The snow stopped falling when Dany dared present herself.
"I am Daenerys Stormborn, of the House Targaryen," her words were weak, and the dragon voice she could sometimes summon was gone. "And I am the Mother of Dragons, but my children have all left me."
Pyke and Old Garth stared at her now, just like Davos did before, only their eyes did not betray understanding. They think of me as mad, Dany realised. She chuckled. How appropriate. The mad daughter of the Mad King. And she had never felt more reasonable in her life.
Her nephew finally heard the cracking of the wood. He turned around and laughed darkly when he saw the crevice in the tree, more sullen than ever before. Dany realised Jon didn't believe her either. So be it. She shrugged. At least we have a place to hide until he does.
At the edge of oblivion, Dany found Jon's resounding laugh terribly handsome. Would he kiss me back if I kissed him now? It was not as if she could make a single step to reach him, being about to collapse in the snow, but a pleasant daydream might keep her on her feet a while longer, she hoped.
"Princess," at least Lord Davos treated her with respect. "If any of this is true, King Stannis should be told."
"He shall know when he meets Rhaegar," Daenerys said with indifference, to better hide that she could barely stand."I have no love for Lord Stannis,"
"That is part of the problem," Davos agreed enthusiastically, "no one ever had love for him."
The horn of the enemy sounded again, from different direction.
The Onion Knight sniffed the air. "It might be prudent if we all shelter now, and decide what to do on the morrow," he said. Heeding his own counsel he scrambled to the fissure through the knee-deep snow. Garth and Pyke moved to follow. Dany stood semi-frozen, unable to move.
Jon accused her when the others had stepped away, "My father's sister was kidnapped and raped. If she indeed had a child, he would still be a bastard."
"She was indeed kidnapped, twice, but never raped," Dany protested. "She married my brother in the godswood of Highgarden of her own will. And they met and fell in love in the woods near Winterfell before she was ever betrothed to Robert Baratheon, when Rhaegar travelled North in the year of false spring."
The hole in the tree gaped open behind her nephew, inviting them in. The wind began to howl. Pyke put his head out of the precipice into which he had already lowered himself. "Come on! It's too dark to linger! They are coming!"
"Jon," Dany said tenderly and was unable to continue talking. Her tongue must have frozen as well.
"What is it, pretty liar?" Jon asked, when he saw no more words were forthcoming. Dany felt strangely warm from the name he gave her, though it wasn't flattering.
"Could I have a mouthful of acorn paste, please," she managed to ask politely, starving. She would have eaten the poisoned golden locusts if someone had served them at that moment. She wondered if that was how hungry Drogon felt before he ate the child, Hazzea... "It's awful, but still much better than pine tree fruits..."
She could barely see through her eyelashes any longer, floating between dream and reality, utterly spent. Jon was gone from her field of vision. Strong arms gripped her, and she couldn't tell to whom they belonged. The shadows twirled under the white trees and she didn't want to be brought in there. Ser Jorah once carried her into a tent where the dead were dancing and her baby died in her womb.
"No!" she tried to scream but her voice came out weak. "Jon!" she called out, begging. She still didn't tell him about the dragons. If I look back, I am lost. "I'll be back," a voice of her nephew whispered. Dany hit the man carrying her with her fists, but her efforts were futile.
An angry tree-face glared at her.
It would be so easy to just die of cold, she thought as the world dissolved into nothing.
xxx
The smell of charred meat startled Daenerys awake. A tiny piece of it floated in front of her mouth on a pine-tree stick. At least it's not the fruit. She opened her mouth slowly, chewed, took another bite. Old Garth was feeding her like an infant, one little piece of meat after another.
She didn't know how much time had passed since she fainted. The walls of the underground chamber were made of gnarled and twisted weirwood roots, forming intricate, eerie patterns. Red sap dripped from places where roots were broken, forming tiny pools of drying crimson liquid on the ground.
Ghost was back; the wolf must have brought its prey under the weirwoods, a small elk. Jon was slumped between several large white roots a few steps away. Trapped and resting uneasily, he stared forward with unseeing eyes. Like Rhaegal, Dany couldn't resist the comparison. He wasn't eating and he seemed as exhausted as she had been before her meal.
She waddled to him gingerly, like a child making its first steps.
"Come and eat," she said.
"I've eaten," his smile was cold, like a wight's. Or Lyanna's, when she pretended to mistrust Dany more than she truly did. "When did you eat?" Dany didn't understand. "Oh!" she exclaimed.
Blood, and not the sap of the weirwood wounds, dripped down from the corner of Jon's mouth, from a tiny cut, or a bite. He must have bitten himself in a wolf dream.
"Eating in your dreams won't fill you," she told him, reproachfully, believing that was what he must have done as well. She had heard Queen Lyanna counselling young Robert Arryn not to spend too much time in the body of his falcon, and admonishing him as sternly as a good mother could to always, always consume food as a man when he woke. After recent, more extensive acquaintance with her eagle, Dany wondered if the queen ever followed her own counsel.
"Maybe it won't, but I'm not hungry now," her nephew said, not listening to Dany's borrowed advice. "You eat," he gestured at the rest of the wolf's kill roasting over the fire. Dry weirwood branches cracked cheerfully between the tongues of flame, losing their whiteness to yellow, orange and red.
"It was for you that I went," Jon confessed in a whisper, "you passed out from hunger. I never did it intentionally before. Run with my wolf, I mean."
"Oh," Dany said, astonished. "How long did I sleep?"
"Most of the night," Pyke answered when Jon would not. "We couldn't wake either you or Jon until the wolf came. Lord Davos is gone. He stole the cart when Jon fell asleep. I should have seen it coming! A smuggler cheated on the reaver!" Cotter shook his head in disbelief. "He mounted his ragged cloak on a staff and sailed down the ice in the nightly wind! He will be in Castle Black by now if the Others did not take him, and we haven't moved from this damn corridor!"
Old Garth was relieving himself of his necessities in one of the shadiest corners, and Ghost just growled. Dany was particularly grateful for the cold subduing the smells at that moment. None of them had washed for a long while. Had they been in Meereen, they would have caught the bloody flux by now.
She strolled back to the fire and brought a piece of charred elk meat to Jon's mouth on a weirwood stick.
"Dragons are the only animals who eat their food cooked," she lectured her nephew. "Like men. Did you know that?" His lips parted and she almost, almost kissed him. There were still a few drops of blood on his mouth, red like fire. Jon chewed and downed the food. Dany felt stronger from the sound, as if helping him was nourishing for her as well.
"Maybe you were right not to eat pine needles," he said after a while, well-mannered and sincere, sulking set aside. "They leave a lot to desire."
"Desire," Dany parroted, staring at his lips. She brought another piece of cooked elk to them. This time she touched his lips with her fingers. Under the tree roots it was slightly warmer than on the outside, and the idea of discarding wool and furs was no longer so utterly unimaginable. If none of them was to see the dawn after the Long Night, what difference did it make if they-, Dany stopped her thoughts brusquely. Her nephew didn't look as if he could do anything in bed. Or out of it. He must be exhausted from a wolf dream. Even his words flowed with difficulty.
"Dany, you have a gift for storytelling," he said quietly. "Out there, I almost felt like a prince for a moment. Would that I had a dragon to fly us out of here."
The truth struck her then, clear as fresh snow; he has a different kind of courage...
For Drogo, it was normal to kill rival khals, and desert lions. For Daario, it was normal to kill anyone his company was hired to fight against. They were not afraid, the world was simple for them, and they never second-guessed.
Jon's bravery was different, like Ser Barristan's. Violence did not come naturally to him, yet he could do what was necessary. To defend the weak. Her. Dany. A lying girl, not a princess or a queen. He didn't believe she was who she was, that much was plain.
Yet he looked as if he had almost lost himself in his wolf to find her sustenance.
"You still think I'm just some girl," she said, incredulous, part flattered, part offended.
"Yes. Posing to be a handmaiden of Queen Selyse," Jon affirmed stubbornly. "Davos said he never saw you, so you must really be lowborn. A pot-scrubbing kitchen girl."
"He had never seen me because I am Daenerys Targaryen," she said, chin high under the hairs of the unicorn covering her head and her Valyrian colouring. "And I lived in exile all my life."
"Dany," he said and yawned, nearly dozing off, "enough of tales. You opened the door in the trees. Save your fantasies for opening another one."
His lips.
"Have you ever kissed a girl, Jon Snow?" Dany asked, seized by a terrible suspicion that her nephew had never done it. It was a wrong thing to ask. Jon appeared a hundred times more miserable than before. And a bit more awake.
"I did," he said. "And then she died." The admission cost him. His dishevelled black head dropped down to his chest, his hair spilled as a shroud over the black boiled leather and furs he was wearing.
"I won't die if you kiss me," Dany whispered. "I swear." She squatted and leaned into him. Light-headed, she pushed his forehead back up with her own, not caring that they had company. Garth and Pyke were conversing next to the weirwood fire, not paying them any attention.
The kiss was worth the long journey in snow and the anger of her dragon. It felt as if he had been thinking about kissing her as much or more than she did.
Drogo rarely kissed her and Daario would quickly pass from kisses to bold explorations and folly of the senses. Her nephew was part bold, and part shy. He tasted of snow. He took her face in his hands, and for the first time since they met he wore no gloves. The right hand felt different than the other. She snatched it, curious all of a sudden to know why Jon flexed it all the time.
Burned, it is burned!
"This can't be," she said, disappointed, staring him down.
Jon Snow frowned. "You started this," he told her. "What's wrong?"
"You are no true dragon," she accused him, petulant. Fire could hurt Jon, like Viserys. Who is Rhaegal's rider then? Three heads has the dragon... But Rhegal did heal Jon. Why? None of the dragons with tooth and claw were there to tell her for certain if her nephew could ever ride one or not.
"I told you when we met, I think," he said, "I'm only a bastard."
Stony acceptance stood written over his face. Dany snapped back to reality and saw it for what it was; he took her last words as a rejection of him as a man. He didn't seem angry about it, only... a bit sad.
"If I am some serving girl, then you are one handsome bastard," she told him, continuing where they stopped. She met no resistance. The second kiss tasted of fire, well hidden beyond many layers of ice.
Ghost interrupted them. The enormous wolf stuck his head between them before he lay down at his master's feet, like a good puppy... or a ferocious guardian of his companion's heart.
Not a dragon, or not entirely, Dany couldn't stop thinking about Jon. A wolf... a warg...He said he died here, what could he possibly mean? There must have been some truth to it, for, unlike Dany, Jon could be considered pretty, but never a liar.
A monster, like I.
She realised someone else was missing. Their dead guide was gone. "Where is she?" Dany didn't have to explain to Jon who she meant.
"She scampered away, just like Davos, while I slept," her nephew's bitterness won over his weariness and any desire for further kissing. "So much for my sword and my stupidity to believe in such a promise. There are several narrow passages leading further underground from where we are, but Garth didn't see which one she took. And the way out to where we came from is closed. We are trapped down here. Ghost barely made it back on time."
You mean that you barely made it on time, Dany thought about the stubborn young man who had just kissed her very well, just like Ser Jorah once claimed she should often be kissed. Would you have been able to return to your body if Ghost stayed out?
For some reason Dany did not regret being trapped. She felt safer and less cold underground. Her legs were again her own.
"Maybe she'll come back," Dany hoped aloud.
"To be sure" Jon said ironically, "just as I'm the lost prince from your tale."
"You might very well be the prince that was promised," Dany reacted honestly.
"Bastards are never promised," Jon disagreed feebly, "they're born out of mistakes." And as if he had poured all his cares safely out of his soul with that conclusion, he succumbed to peaceful sleep, his handsome dark head landing in his wolf's snow-white fur.
Dany settled next to Jon, in a dark corner of the hollow hill. She scratched the soft fur behind Ghost's ears. The animal whined, almost with satisfaction, allowing her closer to his master.
She stayed awake for long, staring at the shadowy walls of the hollow hill, listening to the wind raging above. The white walkers must have been moving on the outside, or she would not have felt so much fear creeping into her heart.
We will all die in unspeakable darkness as Old Garth said, a voice was telling her. She did her best to refute those unpleasant views. Or were they certainties?
We don't know what will be, she responded firmly in her mind, staring at the last flames of the weirwood fire until they all died out and only unspoiled darkness remained. The fissure between the roots had closed behind them as if it had never existed. They were buried deep under the frozen ground and the solemn white trees watched over them.
The Others told no tales to make the gods cry.
The trees would not let them pass.