Chapter XXIV: The Vale
The party returned from the execution as solemnly as they had left, headed by the Starks and the King. There was no sign of the prisoner, no living trace nor any dead. Her body had been disposed of; where, Dany could not guess and neither cared. Jon offered his hand to Lady Sansa as she unmounted the horse. Dany looked at Arya Stark, but she was already on her feet, and talking to some men in Stark clothes.
Missandei handed her the keys to the dragon cages. She had not forgotten what the Stark girl had done to her Rhaegal, and for the time, she had decided not to let any one of them near her precious children. The girl had only made Rhaegal restless, however the younger Stark had completely tamed her Viserion, completely overpowered the dragon in a way she herself as a mother never could. She could not let it happen again. Her dragons were hers to command and to tame, not someone else's, and especially not the Starks'.
Dany greeted the King with a curt bow.
"Everything went well, I believe?" She asked.
"Nothing is well about executions, Your Grace," he replied. He turned briefly to his sisters and nodded, and the girls walked inside the castle arm in arm. Dany wondered for a moment how it would have been if she had grown up with siblings of her own. Viserys was her beloved brother as a child, but time had shown her his harshness and his cruelty. Most of the times he had been unkind to her, she had wept silently and tried to imagine her other brother. Rhaegar Targaryen was kind, everyone had said so, and a true Prince. She would have loved him, and he would have loved her. But her wishes had been in vain, for he had left the world before they even had a chance to lay eyes on each other.
"I believe your sisters know of our agreement?"
Jon nodded.
"I couldn't keep anything from them. They're family." A sigh left his lips as soon as those words were uttered, and Dany wanted to urge him to say more, and it seemed like he wanted to say more. But none of them made a sound.
The Maester of Winterfell came running, his chain clinking.
"You're Grace," he huffed, and bowed his head towards both of them, but spoke only to Jon. "A letter from Yohn Royce from the Vale. The heir of the Vale, Lord Robin Arryn was found dead in his chambers this morrow. The Maester identified a snake bite. The Vale has now gone to Petyr Baelish as per the will Lord Robin had written days before his death."
King Jon took the scroll and read it at least twice.
"Baelish," he muttered under his breath.