Frequent nighttime flurries of snow turned to freezing rain and chilled mist hanging low over the trees of the Haunted Forest and skulking through the winding patchwork of Shadowedge houses. The sodden days were full of a menagerie of complaints about ringing out furs and frozen ankles from having to wade through the slush. It was a patterned existence, with the rain coming in waves and then trading off for the eerie mist - often multiple times in the same day.
Many of the villagers had gained horrible coughs and shivers from being wet and cold every day, which meant that Willa had her hands full. Nobody was threatening to die, but they did not seem to be getting rapidly better either. To stop the spread of sickness and keep it from becoming worse, Willa had quarantined a number of people in their homes. This, she said, was less for the health of others and more to keep the sick ones out of the rain until they had healed.
"Nobody around here ever stops and takes a rest unless I tie them to a bed and knock them out with a hammer," she often bemoaned.
Along the same vein, although without bed-tying and hammers, Willa was determined to not have any sickness outside of Shadowedge. Crassly remarking what happened the last time Dany was sick while pregnant, she had ordered Dany, Jon, and Rose not to come into the village at all.
"I'll send word if there's any news," Willa promised earnestly to a sour-faced Dany.
Though she listened and really did agree with Willa's decision, Dany had become frustratingly restless. Visiting Drogon would have ended in the same icy, flooded plight that walking to Shadowedge did, so Dany had not left the clearing on the banks of the Antler in nearly two weeks. With horrible feelings of contempt, she watched Jon trudge out of the clearing with his knife and bow whenever the rain let up to check on his traps and snag the occasional fowl. She did not envy the idea of being out in the rain trying to feed her family, only the freedom to leave the clearing.
I couldtake a walk, Dany reasoned, although it was ludicrous. Even the journey to the barn to see Embar each day, Rose in tow, was arduous in the slush and rain.
Instead, she tried to stay busy at home, working mainly on making tack for Embar with animal hides, just as she had learned so many years ago among the Dothraki. She stubbornly made the painstaking walk out to the barn each day, and was finishing up on one part of Embar's bridle on a particularly rainy day. It was evening, and the drops had not stopped clattering on the barn roof since she and Rose first set out in the drizzle. In fact, Dany believed they were much more than a drizzle now.
Rose sat in a corner of the barn, playing with a toy horse that Jon had recently made for her, happily making it walk (or hop straight into the air and tromp right down) as she said, "Neigh! Neigh! Neigh!" with each step.
Time to head back, Dany thought as she noticed her daughter's cheeks flushed with the cold. She stood up from her work, made sure that Embar had enough to eat and drink and gave her horse a loving pat on his neck.
"I'll be back tomorrow," she promised softly, looking into the stallion's wise brown eyes. "Maybe at some point we can actually go for a ride." Embar's only response was a quiet, understanding nicker.
Dany crossed over to the corner where Rose was and smiled as the toddler stopped playing to look up at her mother. "Come up, Rosie," Dany said, "Time to get in the house." Carefully, Dany leaned down and picked up Rose, who had stretched out her arms.
From the barn door, Dany could see that the rain was indeed heavier than before. For a moment, she weighed the consequences of trying to wait it out more and realized glumly that it had not really stopped all day. The last thing Dany wanted was to chance walking through heavy rain in complete darkness, even if it was just across the clearing. She balanced Rose around her hip and reached up to pull her hood on before doing the same for her daughter. Maybe it's not as bad as it looks, Dany thought unconvincingly.
Rose, who abhorred rain and acted as if the water touching her was the same as being branded over and over, was already fussing in her mother's arms at the realization of what was happening. "No!" she wailed, struggling. The wind was already showering the pair with spray.
"We have to walk through the rain to get home," Dany explained soothingly, "And it'll be warm and comfortable inside. Mama might even let you snuggle in bed with her after supper while we wait for Papa and Ghost to come home." Jon and Ghost had been out since the early morning. They usually returned around late afternoon, but Dany imagined that the worsening weather was continually holding them up.
"MM!" Rose objected, clearly not convinced.
Sighing, Dany shook her head, knowing she had no choice. "I'm sorry," she said before plunging out the door.
It was much worse than it looked. As soon as she stepped into the rain, Dany gasped from the frozen chill that instantly set deep in her bones, helped along by the wind that drove raindrops past her shield of hair and hood to drip down her neck. It felt as though the grip of winter had reached directly inside of her and taken its tightest hold.
As if the gods believed it to be a hilarious joke, the sky seemed to open up and release a deluge of frozen water that stung as it hit Dany's face. Rose's frantic actions made it difficult to keep moving. She had buried her face into her mother's neck, gripping Dany's hood with little fists and kicking her booted feet angrily.
"R-rose, p-please!" Dany managed out of her tight throat, constricted with cold. It may have been difficult to walk with a passive Rose, but it was a thousand times worse with a sobbing one.
"NO!" Rose continued to shout indiscriminately, tantrum building as she continued kicking. She nailed Dany in the back with surprising force just as they had reached the house's door, Dany wrenching it open.
"Ow!" Dany hissed loudly, slamming the door shut behind them, "Rose, that hurt!"
Nothing was dissuading the distraught toddler, and after fighting to change Rose into dry clothes, changing herself into a dry underdress, and seating her daughter for supper, Dany was deafened and feeling very frayed. What could have been minutes had taken almost an hour.
She was cold, tired, and frankly on her last nerve. Curse the rain. Curse the rain and the cold and anything wet and horrible. Rose was fussing, not crying anymore, but barely eating and carrying on between mouthfuls until she finally flailed and knocked the utensil from Dany's hand. "Rose!" she snapped, exasperated, "Now look wh- " Dany bit her tongue. The nasty retort tip of it would do no good with a toddler, much less her daughter who, at the sight of the spoon falling to the ground, had burst into tears again. Instead she stood, giving up on supper for the night, and with an again-wailing child on her hip, she stalked over to Rose's room and deposited her on the bed.
Normally, Dany would stay with Rose until she fell asleep. Jon often came, too. They would tell her a story first and then Dany would wind the soft brown curls around her slender fingers and stroke Rose's eyelashes to lull her to sleep while Jon hummed a song from his homeland. She loved when her husband hummed those songs. It was the sound of home, and she usually fell asleep as well.
But tonight all she heard was crying. She could not stand any more crying. It was as if someone was clattering a horrible bell between her ears.
Over and over and over and over.
And over and over.
And over.
She left. Even from her own bed, Dany could hear the thumping of the small bed in the other room as Rose's tantrum gained even more vigor.
Wrenching her underdress off and tossing it, Dany sunk back on her bed, mutinously naked, and pulled a fur from Jon's side over her, staring at the ceiling for a long time. Her back ached where Rose had kicked her, and she could feel the baby kicking like a reminder that in a few months, there would be more. What would happen when there were two of them on days like these? Can I really do this? Dany rubbed her hands over her stomach fretfully; she was no longer hungry.
There was no sobbing coming from the other room any longer. Rose, Dany thought, must have cried herself to sleep. She had done so a few times before, when she had been under the weather or was in a particularly bad mood...like today. But it had never been when it was just the two of them. Dany closed her eyes, willing this awful day to end.
Familiarly rough, cold fingers were tracing up and down her spine. Normally, she would have flinched away from the touch of something that cold, but instead she pressed into it with a sigh and heard Jon's "hmm" of recognition that she was awake. Dany felt Jon splay his palm across her back, rubbing out the tight muscles there as her whole body relaxed, the tension of the day melting away. Even in sleep, she must have been holding herself stiff.
Wordlessly, he snaked his arms around and pulled her closer against him. She melted into his hold, realizing how much she had missed him. The smell of cold earth and pine wreathed around her as his hands continued exploring, tracing her collarbone and down the center of her chest. Despite having definitely been drenched in the rain, Jon was still warm.
"Mm," she murmured languidly, taking Jon's hand and guiding in down from where it was draped over her chest. She could hear his chuckle as he listened to her cue and ranged over the gentle swell of her stomach, caressing his finger pads over skin that tingled as he passed over.
He ventured even lower, and Dany parted her legs invitingly. Heat bloomed within her, driven by a sudden need for his touch and extinguishing any latent cold as his hand slipped in between her legs and ghosted back and forth over her center. Pleasurable shivers quickly began rolling over Dany in waves. She felt Jon pressing delicate kisses to her neck and back as he asked for her legs to spread more, which she did obligingly. Deftly, he entered her with two fingers, beginning to slowly pump in and out as her body arched against him. "Oh," she breathed as he beckoned her.
At this, Dany felt Jon smile against her neck where he was still peppering kisses. He began to thrust his fingers with more purpose, eliciting small sounds of whispered pleasure from his wife. Dany fisted the bed as he pressed his thumb to her clit and circled it lazily until her body was so quickly trembling just on the edge of release.
Jon drove his fingers into her once more and Dany fell apart in his arms. He held her as she came around him, pressing his lips just below her jaw. When he went to move, Dany covered his hand with hers.
"I like you here," she said quietly.
For what could have been many nights, or perhaps a few minutes, they lay together, simply enjoying the feel of each other. Dany had begun to think that nothing could be more perfect than these small moments when she felt Jon begin to move ever so slightly inside her again. Rolling her eyes, although smiling, she turned over to face him and he slipped out of her, moving his arm away.
"You just couldn't stay still," she teased.
In the semidarkness, she saw him grinning, his hand still close to his mouth. His voice came out with the note of a laugh. "Aye, I guess not," he said impishly, kissing her nose and then her lips. Not willing to relinquish him yet, Dany slid her arm around Jon and threaded her fingers in his hair. Her tongue slid across his lips and she tasted the winter rain still on him. And herself. Insatiable, she chided lovingly in her mind, deepening the kiss until they both needed to come up for air.
Breathless, they broke apart, still grinning at each other. "Gods, I've missed you," Jon said, his hand coming up to play with an errant silver curl.
"Mm, I've missed you too, mahrazhkem," Dany replied, blinking lazily and enjoying the tingling feeling that came with someone playing with her hair. "And I needed this."
"I thought you might," he said. "You went to bed early tonight?"
Dany sighed, remembering the disastrous evening that had led to her falling asleep before Jon arrived home. "The day...needed to end."
Lit by the dim flicker of the fire Jon had seemingly restocked, Dany saw him nod understandingly. "She's fast asleep," he told her, "Pantless - I'd like to hear that story at some point - but asleep. I pulled a cover over her." Dany frowned at the word "pantsless," thinking of how hard Rose must have been kicking at the air to manage that.
As if he could read her mind, seconds later Jon said, "Nobody's the perfect parent, Dany. There are always going to be bad days, just like there's always good days."
"But…" Dany started, "how do I know that I'm not...not ruining her or something? And what about when there's two of them? I mean, Jon, I had to leave the room at the end. I felt like I was going to explode."
"Would it have made any difference if you'd stayed?"
"Honestly, it probably would have made it worse."
"Then maybe you made the right decision this time," Jon said. He wound her hair around his finger and let it fall, bouncing, to her cheek before doing it again. "We learn as we go along. You're still a wonderful mother. You'll see. Tomorrow it will be better. And perhaps a bit drier."
Dany looked up, straining to listen for the raindrops that had been pounding the roof earlier. "The rain stopped?"
"It was slowing down by the time I came in," he said, "Sorry if I worried you coming home so late. I was trying not to walk home blind, we can't all be Willa with her innate ability to not run into trees."
Shrugging, she replied, "I don't know, you're more apt at geography than anyone else. Either way, I wasn't too worried. I figured you'd taken shelter somewhere. No luck with the traps?"
"I caught something," Jon said, "I think it was a snow fox."
"Think?"
"The bones were stripped clean when I got there - I brought them home - and I never found the head. There's definitely a shadowcat around. I saw claw marks on a couple trees too. But everything else seems to be staying in its dens. Although I did see Drogon, for a moment, flying off towards the mountains."
"That must mean Saphira's come back," Dany said, thinking about the last time she had seen Drogon in the clearing with Willa a couple days before the rain started. "Have you noticed they never leave to hunt at the same time?"
Jon nodded, looking pensive. "Why do you think that is?" he wondered.
Looking behind her, Dany glimpsed the egg glowing mysteriously as always above the mantle. "I have my suspicions," she said. "Is there anything you didn't see out hunting?"
"Actually," Jon replied, "I saw Inniq, too, right around when I spotted Drogon. Angry as ever. He hadn't caught anything either, was blaming the dragons, though."
"Did you tell him about the shadowcat?"
"Aye, but if you think he listened, you've met the wrong Inniq." Jon furrowed his eyebrows and his voice grew serious, "I don't trust him, Dany. He's looking for any excuse to make people think that having the dragons here is the wrong choice. I ran into Kolla out hunting a few days ago and she said he's been blaming the sickness on them too, saying they spread disease. He hasn't said anything about you yet, but I imagine he's thinking about it. You saw what he was like at the meeting. No one's listening to him now - even Kolla's fed up, saying he's been a bad influence on Nerell - but most of them owe their children's lives to Drogon and Saphira. When people hear him who don't…"
"He's all hot air, Jon," Dany replied dismissively.
Jon snorted. "I'm pretty sure the scars on his face would argue with you about that. And you haven't ever been around him that much since he came to live here."
"So? I don't want to be around him that much."
"Well I don't want to either, but I have. Listen, can you just humor me and be at least slightly wary?"
Though she was sure he was being over-protective, Dany nodded and kissed Jon for added benefit. Unwilling to let her move away again, Jon wrapped his arm around her waist and tugged her closer, saying no more about dragons and Inniq.