Bear Hall was exactly as Ser Jorah had described it to her: little more than a wooden longhall with two stories, a few rooms clinging to the sides, stone towers at the corners of its gate, and of course the infamous carving of a warrior woman above the entrance.

The hall was full of warrior women as well. Lady Maege stood at the head of the party flanked on each side by her four daughters, all as dark and fierce-looking as their mother. And their cousin, Dany thought, with a nervous glance at her knight. He was a pale as she had ever seen him, his fingers gripping the pommel of his sword as though it were a cane propping him upright.

The trek through the Wolfswood to Deepwood Motte had taken only four days, the sea voyage from there to Bear Island about half that time. Her Dothraki looked a bit haggard after crossing the Bay of Ice, but none more so than Ser Jorah. He had said barely a word to her since they had left Winterfell; had she understood his moods less well she might have assumed he was still sulking over what had happened at the feast, but Dany was rather certain he was dreading the wrath of a pack of she-bears.

Her bear was a fearsome warrior, but as she studied his kinswomen Dany began to understand why he had protested this journey.

If only I had had them with me in Essos, she thought idly, they might have cowed entire khalasars.

Jorah had described four daughters, but Dany realized there were five girls facing them. The oldest bore the greatest resemblance to her mother – and to Jorah - and clutched the hand of a small boy, barely more than a babe. Two were Dany's age, or near enough, and the youngest two were just at the cusp of womanhood, one perhaps a bit nearer than the other. He failed to mention the two extra children. He hardly could have known about the babe, but…which of the two youngest girls was Maege's youngest? Were they both hers? Dany tried to assemble the years in her head – he had to have known about them both, hadn't he?

The Lady of Bear Island was the first to step forward, but instead of bowing before the Queen as Daenerys had expected, she turned to face her Lord Commander. Jorah stood stone still as his aunt studied him, but Dany could see the tightness in his jaw, the way he tried to tilt his head so that his branded cheek faced away from her. Not that it mattered – the scarring on the opposite side was no more pleasant to look at, especially with half his left ear gone.

Either way, I've returned him the worse for wear.

The quick stab in her chest may have been guilt or fear; Dany could not say which. Bear Hall was completely silent, as though time had paused to await Lady Maege's will.

When she came at Jorah, Dany nearly gasped in horror, but the older woman only pressed her head to her nephew's chest and wrapped short arms around his waist.

Jorah looked as shocked as anyone at first, but when he realized he was not being harmed he rested his chin atop Lady Maege's head and returned her embrace. Still no one spoke, though some of the tension in the room had lessened. Dany felt as though she were intruding on a private family matter and ought to leave, but where else could she go? She had not yet been formally introduced to the occupants of Bear Hall.

Her knight was muttering something inaudible that must have been an apology into his aunt's hair, but Maege was perfectly still, her face hidden in the folds of his cloak.

Dany felt oddly jealous witnessing their reunion; she had wanted to do the very same thing as she had wandered the Dothraki Sea alone and delirious, but the reality of Jorah's return had been so very different.

After he had turned up in her city and made his plea before her court, Dany had kept him in a room for three days, alone, while she questioned Tyrion Lannister and drew the courage to face her former knight herself.

"Why?"

That had been her only word – the only one she could manage to squeak out through the bile threatening to creep into her throat – when she had finally entered his chamber. No greeting, no preamble, only a few steps through the door she had allowed to slam shut behind her and one word.

He had been perched on the edge of the narrow mattress that dominated the room and rose when he heard the door open. Though she would not lift her gaze from the floor, Dany could nearly picture the shocked expression on his face without seeing it. She waited, arms crossed, for a reply.

"Your grace?"

"No. No. I want none of your pretending to misunderstand me when you know perfectly well what I am asking you." She had meant to speak only that one word, "why", and leave when she had an answer, but just the note of confusion in his voice had woken her dragon, and now the words came of their own accord, and louder than she meant to utter them.

"And I swear to any gods that may hear me, if you lie to me ever again, about even the least significant matter, I will give Strong Belwas the head I promised him. And none of your careful omissions, either. From this moment on when I question you I demand the complete truth or you will rue the day you choose to set foot in my city again. Is that clear, ser?"

He responded slowly, all the warmth gone from his voice.

"Yes, your grace."

"Why?" she repeated.

"Varys offered me a pardon. So that I might go home."

"That much I already know."

"What else would you have me say, your grace?"

"I…" Dany tried to form an answer, but it was too late to stop the tears from burning down her temples.

"Khaleesi…" His voice was much softer than before, and through her downturned gaze Dany saw his foot lift from the floor and return again, as though he had meant to go to her but thought better of it.

"How could you?" She tried and failed to return to an even tone and instead eked out little more than a whisper. "You lied to me the entire time. The entire time. I trusted you above all others, I made you my right hand and let you command my armies, I named you friend. How could you look me in the face, every single day, and know you had sold me for a pardon? That everything was a lie? How could you…you said you loved me…" She could feel her mouth open and shut like a fish gasping on land, but the words had dried up.

The air was thick and silent for what must have only been seconds, but felt to Dany like an age. When his voice finally broke the air, she had to strain to hear it.

"What would you have me say?"

Dany swallowed hard.

"Nothing," she spat. "There is nothing I would have from you."

She wheeled around and opened the door, letting it shut again as loud as before. As she stormed back to her chamber she felt certain that speaking to him at all had been a mistake, that allowing him to keep his head had been a mistake, but that night as she chased sleep she thought of more questions that wanted answers, dozens and dozens of questions, and only one man who could answer them.

So the next evening she went and asked them, and the next evening after. After the second night the questions came easier, though the answers were still hard. Often, as the week wore on, their conversations ended in shouting and door-slamming, and always with Dany simply walking out, sometimes as Jorah was still speaking. Mid-week he began to yell back at her, though he never moved more than a foot past the bed, and she never took more than a few steps past the doorway.

By the seventh night she had gotten everything out of him – every detail, every thought, every action she had not witnessed from the time he had left Westeros to the day she had first questioned him. Even his exploits with Tyrion, which she had already heard from the Lannister himself, she made him repeat. Even the night on Balerion – though that was one of the times she had simply turned and left mid-sentence.

On the seventh night she stepped through the door and realized she had no more questions, so she had assumed her most queenly demeanor and informed the knight of her decision.

"Ser Barristan will find you a place in the Queensguard. Conditionally," she amended, cutting off his attempt to respond. "You will swear no oath and receive no steel from me until you have proven your worth again. You will not advise me or participate in military councils; you will take your orders from Ser Barristan and follow them to the letter. To the letter. Do you understand?"

"Yes, your grace."

She had tried to look at his face then, but the sight of the demon brand that marred it brought the bile rushing to her throat again. He earned his fate, Dany reminded herself, I will not pity him.

With a nod she had left, and that was that. At first she had thought herself a weak-minded fool, forgiving a traitor, and even in Kings' Landing as he had regained his place in her court and her confidence she had felt foolish for continuing to care so much for a man who had lied to her for so long.

But here stood Maege Mormont, the Lady of Bear Island, embracing him. As though it were all that simple.

Jorah seemed suddenly, finally, to remember that he was in service of the Queen of the Seven Kingdoms. He cleared his throat and stepped out of his aunt's arms, nodding his head in Dany's direction. Maege followed his gaze, taking notice of Daenerys for what appeared to be the first time, and immediately straightened.

"Of course. Forgive me, Your Grace – I am Lady Maege Mormont, the Lord of Bear Island, and behind me my daughters and grandchildren." Dany was immensely grateful when she began to introduce each woman in turn; Jorah had told her all the names many times but they were so many that she was not at all confident in her memory. "Aly, my eldest daughter and heir." Lady Maege gestured to the stocky woman with the child. "And her boy Ned, who will be Lord after her. Beside her are her eldest, Erena, and my youngest, Lyanna." Lyanna must have been the taller girl, the one wearing a deep scowl much like the one Ser Jorah reserved for her suitors. Your daughter and granddaughter are of an age. That explained the extra body. Dany shot a dark look at her knight, who returned it with one of confusion.

"And these are my middle daughters, Lyra and Jorelle." The one she had called Lyra only nodded, but Jorelle smiled shyly at Dany and bowed.

Daenerys smiled graciously, gave the usual courtly thanks, introduced her bloodriders and handmaids. It all seemed even sillier than usual, spitting hospitable platitudes when there was so much unsaid between Ser Jorah and his kin. It was odd not to be the center of attention for once; she was uncertain whether she found it annoying or liberating but was relieved when Lady Maege finally allowed her an escape.

"Aly can give you the lay of the castle. I would speak with my nephew, if your grace can spare him a few hours."

"Certainly," the Queen replied politely.

It had been kind of her to make it seem a sacrifice when in truth Dany wanted nothing more than to bolt from the hall before any claws emerged. As the eldest she-bear led Dany and her Dothraki from the hall, she looked back over her shoulder at her Lord Commander, hoping she was not leaving him behind as prey.

Jorah watched as the little boy-Aly's son, Ned-followed along after the Queen and her retinue with the impetuous curiosity of a bear cub. The look of one, too: dark-haired, short and sturdy of limb. Somehow, in all the years of dreaming of the moment when he returned home, Jorah never considered that there might be new faces to greet him. It made him miss the familiar but forever absent ones all the more. Hearing Maege introduce Aly, my eldest daughter and heir was like a dagger.

"When was the boy born?" he asked hoarsely.

"He's four," snapped the girl Maege had introduced as Lyanna. To his shame, he had not immediately known which of the two youngest was her and which was Aly's daughter. If she'd been this ferocious, he would have recognized her at once; even as a little girl Lyanna had demonstrated a fierce protectiveness of anything she considered her own, and well he could believe that would include looking after a nephew as she would her own cub. She made him feel like a male intruding on undisputed female territory-which would have made him feel right at home if only he could detect a hint of affection beneath her hostility. Was it little wonder, though, that she regarded him thus, scarred as he was and branded as a brute? Dangerous, Lady Arianne had described his look, and the people who cringed back from him seemed to agree.

"Ned just had his name day," said Jorelle, her voice gentler than her little sister's, tinged with the wistful note that heartened Jorah for being just as he remembered.

More like him than merely in name, she alone of Maege's daughters was a dreamer. Her elder sisters used to go near mad when deep snows confined them to the hall, but Jorelle never seemed more content than when she was curled up in his lap before the fire, begging for him to read from his books of knights and ladies, or to tell her of his adventures in the wars. She was the only one who sighed rather than scoffed when he told how he wooed and won Lynesse, and at times seemed as in love with his Southron bride as he. Though Jorelle was now of an age with Daenerys, he could easily imagine her knees drawn up beneath her skirt of green wool, lost in the yellowing pages of a romance.

Did she realize what a pretty young woman she'd grown into? Taller than the rest, her build bore a closer resemblance to Dacey than to Maege and Aly and lent her an elegance even though she was simply dressed. Her blue eyes set her apart from the others, too, and the dark plait fell down her back almost to her waist. Did she have lovers, like Aly? Did she love an island lad?

Jorah gave her a small smile. "If I'd known, there is something I would have brought him for a name day gift. I'll send it when I return to King's Landing." "It's a Dothraki-"

He stopped short with the sudden realization that if he had not been exiled, he might have presented his cousin's son to their household as proudly as if he were the heir of his own loins, the first male Mormont to come into the world since his birth. Instead, at almost the same time half a world away, he'd buried the tiny, twisted corpse of Daenerys' babe, dead through his own fault.

"Cousin?" At Jorelle's light touch upon his arm he attempted to rearrange his expression into a grin, though he suspected it was more a grimace as he turned to Lyanna.

"You knew no more than four name days when I saw you last," he said. "You've surely-"

"Grown?" Lyanna shrugged away from his hand, which had gone out instinctively as though to tousle her hair and fell limp at his side as she went on. "Yes. I had to. We all did, after you beggared and abandoned us."

She lunged toward him and he hopped back-ridiculously, he Lord Commander of the Queensguard, thrice his cousin's age and near thrice her size, as well-as if to dodge the whip-like lash of her words. She continued to deal her verbal blows.

"I'd known no more than ten name days when I defended Bear Island against the Kraken while my sisters marched to war for King Robb. When Stannis Baratheon demanded our fealty I told him to go fuck himself."

"She wrote him a letter, she means," Lyra spoke for the first time, looking a little amused.

Jorelle, however, scowled and folded her arms across her chest. "Fuck himself is a paraphrase."

"Though I expect it's exactly what Lyanna desires to say to me," Jorah said, quietly, meeting the girl's accusatory gaze though the back of his neck prickled red-hot with his shame.

She opened her mouth, but beside Jorah, Maege cleared her throat, and the girl wavered. "Well…I won't greet you with open arms like Mama."

"I don't expect you to."

"Good, because I don't like to do the expected," Jorelle said, and threw her arms around him in an embrace that caught him a little off-balance; even more surprisingly, she stretched up on her toes to peck his cheek-though the one not marred by the demon's mask. As she drew back, she said, "I'll say I want to hear all your stories of your travels."

"But that is expected," Jorah teased, giving her a final squeeze before releasing her.

"I want to hear the one about what happened to your ear," Lyra said, and Jorelle hissed at her to shut up, punching her in the arm.

"A Dothraki arakh," Jorah replied. At the confusion dimpling his cousin's brow, he explained. "The curved blade you might have noticed at the Queen's bloodriders' hips."

"And what happened to the Dothraki wielding the arakh?" Lyra stumbled slightly over the foreign word, and under her breath Jorelle tested it, too.

"I killed him."

"In defense of the Queen?" Jorelle's eyes shone, clearly thrilled by the adventurous tale which she was so sure must contain romance, too. Surely he could not be so transparent?

Jorah nodded, but couldn't bring himself to utter the affirmative aloud. He'd fought Qotho for Daenerys, it was true, but then he had carried her into that accursed tent and killed the babe in her womb.

"You always talk such foolery, Jory," said Lyanna rolling her eyes before pinning Jorah with her sharp gaze. "And what happened to your face?"

The silence that followed seemed strange after Jorelle reprimanded Lyra for asking about his ear. Curiosity, he supposed, trumped courtesy. Anyway, he'd known the moment would come when he would have to tell them. Better to have it done with at the start of his visit home. Necessary, even. He was an old hand at reciting his story by now, having stood before Daenerys and told her-everything. No lies. No omissions. Every humiliating detail about his captivity in Meereen. Admitting the simple truth to his aunt and cousins could not be so bad as that. Shoulders squared and head high, still he could not quite look directly at any of them.

"A slaver's branding iron happened to my face." The silence of his kinswomen seemed to deepen, and so did his voice. "I did not kill the slavers."

The weight of the continued silence made it difficult to keep his gaze up, his head up, even as he recited his words in his head-Here I Stand-but just as the heaviness seemed almost too much, as those whispered words that separated him from Daenerys more surely than any distance or a cage of iron bars, Lyanna spoke.

"You…were a slave?"

"Aye."

"There, girl, you see?" Maege's big worn hands settled on her daughter's shoulders. "The gods did him justice."

"Mama," Jorelle whispered, looking at him with sorrow, but Jorah felt the twinge of a smile at the corners of his dry lips.

There. Maege had said it. Daenerys had been thinking it-everyone who knew his sorry tale had been thinking it, he most of all-but no one had said it. Daenerys had shouted all manner of things at him, but never that. Leave it to Maege. A woman of few words, but the few were never minced. Her daughter feared the truth would wound him further, and it did-but only as the sting of raw flesh when his shackles came off, as the softened calluses on his palm when his hand closed around the pommel of a sword for the first time in months.

She said nothing more until the two of them were seated at a crude table in the sparse room that would be Maege's while Daenerys occupied the lord's chambers, a plate of oatcakes and ten years' worth of conversations between them.

"Is that how you came into the service of the Dragon Queen, then?" Maege asked, then drank from her unpolished pewter mug of warm spiced ale. "Breaker of Chains, we've heard her called. Did she break yours?"

If only his exile had led him to salvation rather into deeper sin. If only he did not have to disappoint his aunt further by admitting it.

"No, I served the Queen first. Then my crimes caught up with me."

"Crimes?"

"It's a long story," he said, not because he was unwilling to tell it but because he knew Maege was disinclined toward lengthy conversation.

"Summarize," she said around a bite of oatcake, swiping the crumbs from her chin.

Jorah snorted into his mug. That makes a change, he thought, wearied by the mere memory of the hours and days he and Daenerys talked and shouted until they had neither words nor voices to utter them.

Hunched over the table, the chair tilted on its uneven legs, he considered his reply for some moments.

"I sold my home for Lynesse," he said at length. "After I lost her, too, I sold Daenerys for home."

Maege leaned back in her chair and studied him. "You betrayed the Mad King's daughter, and she spared your life?"

He nodded, though there had been times during his captivity when he thought death would have been a kinder fate. Not least of all when they told him she had taken a husband.

"Twice," he said.

Mage drained her cup, then caught his eye again as she placed it heavily on the table. "You've been forgiven much. It almost makes me believe I'm not mad for forgiving you, if the Dragon Queen can." She gave a grim chuckle. "Then again, a Targaryen isn't the best plumb line for sanity."

"Daenerys is nothing like Aerys," Jorah growled, and his aunt looked taken aback. "She is just and kind and…" He caught himself, self-conscious under Maege's steady gaze. He looked down at his hands, clasped together. "And I'm not certain she has forgiven me. Not entirely."

"Then perhaps she's a wiser woman than me. What was that your father used to say? The things we love…"

"…destroy us every time." The words that had echoed in his head for the last week rang in his ears as he spoke them aloud.

"I don't mean you, boy," said Maege; Jorah's brows pulled together in confusion but he didn't dare look up at her. Instead he watched her hand reach across the table to grip his, smaller but as toughed as a man's by her long toil at home and at war. In his place. Yet for all the gruffness of her speech, her touch contained the gentleness that only a mother possessed.

"And Jeor was wrong," she said. "Or mayhaps he was right, but…I'd rather be torn apart for love than run from it. Gods only know how little time we're allowed." She sniffed, raggedly, and released him to wipe her nose on the back of her hand. "I'm only sorry you were never able to make amends with him."

Jorah straightened up and looked his aunt full in the face, the words that spilled from his mouth as uneven as the legs of the chair that rocked back with the shift of his weight. "Do you think Father would look at me and see me as you do, a man whose debt is paid? Do you think he'd accept the white cloak I took instead of a black?"

"I gave up trying to think like my brother a long time ago. And he did the same with me." She became serious. "Your father would understand."

That wasn't the same, but it was the truth, and it was all Maege could give him. He closed his fingers around the cool handle of the tankard and drank the now tepid ale.

"Do you know how he died?"

"No. Nor what happened to Longclaw."

"Longclaw?"

"I sent it to him at the wall," Maege said. "After you left."

Longclaw lost? That was an unexpected blow. Jorah had never thought to wield it again, of course, yet some foolish part of him had also clung to the promise Daenerys made. Ser Jorah Mormont, first and greatest of my knights, I have no bride gift to give you, but I swear to you, one day you shall have from my hands a longsword like none the world has ever seen, dragon-forged and made of Valyrian steel.

"Excuse me," he said, getting dizzily to his feet. "I must go and see if I may be of any service to the Queen."