Of bears and dreams

Disclaimer: see the first chapter.

Several hours later…

It was night. It was dark. The sky was still overcast – these were the Stormlands, after all – but you could just see the moon if you looked hard enough through the fog and the clouds.

"…You know, when I was Shireen's age, I thought that the moon was the white patch on the chest of a black-furred bear that ran in the sky through the nights," Melisandre commented to Stannis in a non-sequitur manner.

"…And the sun?" Stannis could not help but to ask.

"Another bear, with a yellow chest patch," Melisandre shrugged in a way that suggested that it had made perfect sense to her. Stannis, however, could not yet let it go.

"And R'hllor?" he pressed on gamely.

"A person's faith, lord Stannis, is a different and an unconnected beast to a person's childhood beliefs," Melisandre shot her interlocutor an even look.

"True," Stannis began, when Shireen interrupted them, and not just by appearing on the scene:

"Daddy, I had a bad dream and cannot sleep. Can I sleep with you?"

"Shireen? What is wrong?" Stannis asked in a way that showed that he struggled to show that he cared, (which he did, unlike his wife, incidentally).

"I had a bad dream," Shireen repeated. "I was having trouble sleeping and so I tried to visualize a dream; there was a fox in it, and a bear. The bear took me for a spot of honey with its' cubs. The cubs were worried that there will not be enough honey for everyone. The bear got annoyed and began to roar. I woke up and cannot sleep."

"Of course you can sleep with your father," Melisandre spoke brightly and got up. "I'll see you two in the morning-"

"Daddy, can the nice lady Melisandre stay?" Shireen muttered, as she was falling asleep against her father already. "Please?" and she fell asleep.

Stannis and Melisandre just exchanged looks with each other. No one in the entire Stormlands cared as to what had happened to lady Selyse.

(Melisandre stayed, naturally).

End