Jon did not go out for the next few days. He stayed in the clearing with Dany and Rose, whose relationship, as predicted, had quickly mended the morning after their disastrous evening in the rain. It had taken Rose getting out of bed and toddling over to the still-sleeping Dany the next morning. She laid her little hand on Dany's cheek and said, "Mama?" and all was forgiven as soon as her mother opened her eyes.

The weather had shifted to a dry freeze, where the very vapors in the air seemed to have stopped in place. There was no wind. It almost looked as if time had frozen along with everything else. Yet the people still moved and worked while the rest of the world stayed still. The fence surrounding Embar's small paddock had frozen so deeply that several posts cracked, so Jon and Dany were working quickly to mend those.

"What about the shadowcat?" Dany asked Jon as she handed him the reddish rock he used for smoothing the sharp parts of wood. "I mean, it's not going to keep from attacking Embar just because of a few fence posts."

They were standing in the lean-to, just outside of which Dany had built a fire to keep the family warm as they worked. It was just after midday and the absence of forest sounds had made Dany particularly wary. Ghost was slumped beside the fire, barely making an impression on the frozen ground, but his relaxed presence did little to calm Dany's nerves, which seemed to grow deeper as their baby did, similar to the last time she was pregnant.

She had seen a shadowcat before, she'd been within only a few lengths of one, but the knowledge of such a terrific predator stalking the woods near their house made the hairs on her neck stand on end. Briefly, she glanced at Rose playing with her horse and wolf toys in the back corner of the lean-to. She was warmly nested in a huge snow bear fur that Tormund had given Jon not long after they had returned from the Mammoth's Head ("You think I want to sleep under something that nearly ripped my arm off?" he'd bellowed to Jon as Willa had stitched four large gashes in his arm closed). Tormund has kept the arm, scarred but completely usable, and Dany thought the fur came in rather handy.

Jon stopped sanding for a moment and looked at her sympathetically. "I doubt it will come close to the clearing," he told her. "And Ghost would warn us if it did - and probably scare it off with his rukus. They won't attack once spotted. Remember, they're curious and stealthy, not vicious."

"Just very effective," Dany sniffed. Wrinkling her nose with annoyance, Dany considered that many shadowcats had probably passed through these woods in the two years they'd lived here. And yet it was a lot more comforting not to know they were there.

Suddenly, she jumped.

Something was scraping - no, sliding? - into the clearing, straight across the ice.

"Put your foot out!"

"But I can't make a dent in the ice!"

"Just do it before you crash into a tree with your head!"

A blur of blonde hair swept past the lean-to, making Ghost scramble to his feet with surprise and promptly slip and fall. Quickly following it was a large blur of dark hair also whizzing past on the expanse of pure ice.

THUD!

With a muffled "oomf" and the sound of many layers hitting one of the posts that held up where Dany and Jon hung furs to air out on nice days. Willa laid her head back on the ice, looking dazed by the ordeal.

Enda, meanwhile, had stuck her leg out as Willa said and had halted herself against one of the few trees in the clearing. Dropping his sanding rock, Jon balanced his way over to Enda, making forceful holes in the ice as he went. His run looked awkward, like a mocking waddle of a particularly wide goose. "Are you all right?" he asked worriedly.

"I think so," Enda said, rubbing her foot. "We both slipped at that little slope right before the path leads into the clearing. It's so frozen, I couldn't make a hole to step in!"

Willa, who was still laying flat on the ice, raised a hand in the air to illustrate her statement. "And then I tried to grab her, and slipped and we just kept going. Have you ever noticed that your home is very downhill from Shadowedge?"

"Now we have," Jon said, a hint of amusement just detectable in his voice as he helped Enda to her feet. She made holes in the ice with her heels to find her balance. Once she was up, Jon made his way over Willa.

She took his hand and was hauled into a standing position. "Thanks."

Following Jon back to the lean-to, and making sure to push their feet through the ice or step into the already made holes as they went, Enda and Willa had no more mishaps.

"I trust you didn't slide over here for the fun of it?" Dany quipped, smirking.

"Ha ha," Willa replied, mockingly narrowing her eyes. "But you're right. I came to tell you that you're no longer banned from Shadowedge. Everyone's healed, no deaths. Also, Dany, I need to check up on you. And I brought Enda along so she could see how it's done if that's all right."

"Willa is teaching me about healing people and growing plants and things," Enda added proudly.

"And the proper way to slide on ice?"

Dany tried and failed to stifle her laugh at Jon's words.

"Just for that," Willa huffed, "I'm not warming up my hands before examining you."

Enda watched Willa with rapt attention as she checked over Dany. From Willa's grunts and pained look of concentration, Dany assumed that nothing was amiss. Willa had pressed her ear close to Dany's belly, closing her eyes to listen, and ran one hand around to Dany's lower back.

She flinched as it brushed up against the bruised area around her spine. "Hmm?" Willa looked up at Dany and tapped the bruise again, testing.

"Yes," Dany said exasperatedly, "You can stop now."

"What happened?" Willa asked, peering around Dany's back. "That's quite purple."

"Rose. We - er - didn't have the best of days recently."

"I can see that." Willa motioned for Dany to drop her shirt. "Everything else seems fine. You've got a quiet baby, though."

Dany raised an eyebrow. "More active than last time, I think. I started feeling the kicking earlier than with Rose."

The healer nodded. "Many mothers feel their second baby earlier than their first. But that's not what I meant by quieter." She did not offer any more on the cryptic subject, but did Dany not press her. Ever since Willa had told her about her past and her abilities as a woods witch - as more than a healer, whether or not she called herself that - Dany found that pieces of her friend that had seemed strange suddenly had an answer: why she listened to ailments and babies instead of simply examining, why people always seemed healthier in Shadowedge than those who came to visit, and why people always seemed to heal as well as possible in Shadowedge even with the worst of sickness or injury. It wasn't always perfect - Tormund still had snow bear scars - but she kept it from being catastrophic. So there was now a need to question less and observe more. And for some, to learn.

Enda, who had been silent up until this point, leaned around Willa's arm. "What now?" she asked eagerly.

Gold eyes flicked from Dany to the girl peering around her arm. "Now we wait until the next time," Willa said.

"That's it?"

Dany laughed, both at Willa's perplexed expression and Enda's seeming outrage that the exam of her stomach had not been a more exciting time. "Babies are a lot of waiting," she told the girl, "especially now when you're not sick every morning or ready to give birth. There isn't much else to do but feel them kick and let them grow."

"Savor it," Willa added, looking down at Enda. "You'll see the restless end-of-pregnancy Dany soon enough."

"I wasn't that awful!"

"Oh, aye, and my hair isn't brown!"

Before Dany could retort, the door opened with a flurry of paws, shaved ice, and Jon. The small house had doubled in capacity. Somehow, however, it felt more comfortable like this. Perhaps, Dany thought, it was because she had been without many other people for several weeks. The solitude of her travels with Jon from Dragonstone had given way to a comfortable existence within a clan, able to come and go into the heart of Shadowedge as she pleased. Being isolated had been more difficult than she had first realized.

Rose, once set down by her father, made a toddling beeline for Enda. Dany watched as Enda instinctively knelt down to get on Rose's level, the blonde girl beaming at her tiny friend.

If she had not been standing so close to Willa, Dany would not have heard the tiny cough from her friend. At first, she felt her insides curl up at the notion that Willa could be sick. She may be an incredible healer, but she'd be a horrible patient, Dany thought. Glancing at her friend, Dany saw that this was not the case, but Willa looked at Rose and Enda and gave a subtle jerk of her head towards Rose's room and then the door.

Quickly, Dany caught on. "Um, Enda?" The girl looked up from playing with Rose, which had taken the form of poking each other's noses (although Rose merely palmed Enda's face). "Do you - uh - think you might put Rose down for her nap and keep an eye on her for a bit? We'll just be outside."

"Okay," Enda said brightly, still smiling. "Come on, Rose."

As the two girls made their way to the small room in the back, Willa motioned for Dany to follow her and Dany took Jon's hand to bring him along.

"What? What's wrong?" Jon asked as Willa, carefully stepping in the foot holes previously made, headed back towards the lean-to.

When they had stopped right at the lean-to's entrance, the hand Dany clasped headed to her stomach, to which Dany shook her head. "No, it's not that," she told him, "Willa has something else she came here for. Don't you?"

The healer looked troubled when she turned around. Her snappy nature that had been on display earlier seemed sobered, almost blanched.

"It's Inniq," she said bluntly.

Beside her, Dany felt a dark change in Jon's demeanour. His dislike for Inniq was palatable. Willa continued, "I didn't want to say anything in front of Enda - it's been making her upset - but that's one of the reasons I offered to Kolla that I'd bring her with me today."

"What's he done now?" Jon asked gruffly.

"It's nothing specific," Willa replied. "He's been much worse since the rains came. You know how he is. Everything that goes wrong is someone else's fault, everything that goes right is Inniq's doing. Wouldn't be so bad if there were other people around, but so many are off on the cliffsides or bringing word to the other villages…" Willa looked awkwardly at Dany, who had frowned.

It was her leadership that had left Shadowedge with a sparse population of even-tempered individuals for the time being. Willa cleared her throat, pressing on in her story. "He's been running his mouth more. Making comments about the dragons and how helping them is a poor plan -"

"Jon said Kolla told him the same thing," Dany interrupted, "But he said she said no one's listening."

Willa grimaced. "Well, yes, but also no. Some of the children - Nerell's the one I know about firsthand - have been clinging to him like sand on wet feet. That's why I-"

"Wait," she said, interrupting again, "Nerell's been agreeing with him?"

"Listening, agreeing. I wouldn't have believed it either until I was at Kolla's and saw Enda and Nerell get into a horrible argument when he started spouting off Inniq's words."

"But - but he met the dragons!" Dany spluttered, looking from Willa to Jon and back again. Were they really talking about the same boy? The one who had been blown away with awe at meeting a dragon? The one who had described to his sister in great and precise detail every second of his encounter with Drogon? The one who had said he wanted to build trust just like Dany had? "He liked Drogon! He even touched him! Are you sure?"

Crossing her arms, Willa replied, "He also said that the dragons were the reason for all the problems we've been having. That they were vicious, evil, and had no reason to be here other than to take our food and cause trouble. And if the people who were supporting the idea that we could share our land with dragons really thought that way, they could clear out along with their damned scaly friends and find somewhere else to live."

"He said that?" Dany asked weakly.

Jon snorted. His eyes were dark and mirthless. "He repeated it," he said to Dany harshly.

She could almost read his thoughts: "Didn't I tell you that Inniq was no good?"

Still, she thought mutinously in response, words and actions are different. Her insides, however, clenched uncomfortably.

"Then Enda shouted at him to stop and knocked him over," Willa said, frowning.

Kolla, Willa said, looked harangued at this turn of events and confessed later that it was more of a regular occurrence than she wanted to admit. When they were not arguing, Enda and Nerell no longer spoke to one another. For all her goodness, Kolla was at a loss about what to do with the two feuding siblings, or about the looming presence of Inniq's vitriol that she could not seem to keep her adopted son from. It wasn't a large enough village to keep Nerell from seeing Inniq around without arousing suspicion, and many of Nerell's friends followed Inniq around too, so he was always present.

Willa shrugged. "So I offered to have Enda come learn about healing from me to take her mind off things and give Kolla a break." She looked at her boots, suddenly seeming more tired. "I'm starting to miss the other voices besides Inniq's."

"It won't be as bad once some of the volunteers return," Dany offered, perhaps trying to convince herself as much as Willa. The clenching was becoming even more uncomfortable.

"And when will that be?" Willa snapped quickly, glaring at Dany, "Tormund's been gone a month already!"

"Don't bite her head off for this!" Jon said defensively, "Nobody ever said the decisions we made were going to be easy. But you know as well as I do that they were the right ones, whatever Inniq or anyone else says."

Willa's golden eyes flicked angrily to Jon, but they softened. "Sorry," she murmured, glancing back at Dany.

She nodded in response, not wishing to say more on the subject, and looked to Jon. His thoughts were nearly unreadable, but she knew his face better than anyone. Someone's stomach was clenching harder than hers right now.

"Come on," he said to the women, ushering with an arm around both of them, "Before Enda thinks we've been outside too long."