5.

"You neglected to tell me about Erena."

Ser Jorah had met Daenerys in her chamber after speaking with his kinswomen, and she had greeted him with an accusation as he perched on the bed beside her.

"Did I?"

"Yes. You told me there would be four daughters." Four daughters minus the one who died, she thought, but Dany was not nearly foolish enough to ever mention that within these walls - or in front of her knight.

"I suppose I did forget Aly's children," he admitted. "Forgive me, your grace, it has been many years, and my kinswomen seem to breed at a rather alarming rate."

Dany laughed at that. "So they do." And often chose predictable names – Maege's youngest was named for Rickard Stark's long-deceased daughter, Jorelle had earned the family prefix passed down through generations, and Aly's two were named for Jorah's first wife, Erena Glover, and for the liege lord beheaded by Joffrey Baratheon some four years ago.

"And I was not here to meet the boy."

That soured Dany's mood in an instant. "You were with me." A continent away, with another pregnant woman, whose child he could not have saved. "He is Rhaego's age, or nearly."

"I noticed," Jorah replied, very quietly.

She had realized it while the boy trailed Alysane through the corridors earlier that day, leading Daenerys and the Dothraki to their rooms.

Little Ned was dark like the rest of his kin, his chubby features not quite yet smoothed out into the features of an older child. He clung to his mother's hand, but stared curiously back at the queen and her retinue. When he met Dany's eyes she smiled warmly back, and was pleased to see the boy grin in return.

His mother noticed the exchange and turned to the Queen as well.

"Do you have children of your own, your grace?"

"No. I…" Dany swallowed nervously, unsure if the conversation was already too intimate to share with a near-stranger, but against her better judgment she barreled on. "I was pregnant once, but my son was…stillborn." At least she could avoid retelling the entire debacle. At this point Jorah's cousin might only think her emotionally unstable; were she to begin discussing maegi and blood sacrifice she feared his kin would declare her as mad as her father.

"He would be about your boy's age, had he lived."

The other woman nodded, her face stone. What did I expect her to say? Am I truly so nervous that I have begun spouting my life's history at a stranger?

Dany was in the midst of contemplating whether Westeros had ever known such a socially inept ruler when Aly finally spoke again.

"I lost one, some years ago. Between the two you have seen."

Stunned by the admission, Dany could only mutter a small "oh" in response.

"You never truly forget," Aly had added. They had not spoken again; upon showing the Queen to her chambers, Maege's heir had lumbered off with her boy, leaving Daenerys alone to puzzle over their brief conversation.

Now, with Jorah, she wondered about the truth of his cousin's words.

She had reached to cover her stomach at her own mention of Rhaego, an old instinct she had never managed to shake, but her bear had stopped her this time, pulling back her wrist and placing it at her side.

Dany remembered the tale he had told her in Vaes Tolorro. Do men ever forget? Or is it only the mothers who remember?

"Do you think of your babes, Jorah?" she asked, ignoring the odd sensation along her arm where he had gripped it moments before. "The ones that might have been?"

"Aye. Though not as often as I once did. That boy, though…" Her knight clenched his jaw when he paused, as she knew he often did when forced to speak about things he would rather keep silent."When Erena was alive, it was Maege bearing all the children in the house. Soon after I brought Lynesse here, Aly and her mother were both pregnant at nearly the same time, and I thought perhaps my wife would soon join them. I suppose, in time, I grew used to seeing babes in my hall that ought to have been my own."

Dany wondered if Lady Arianne would soon wed and begin to breed, if there would be cries and scattered footsteps in the halls of her palace before long. She could hardly expect her entire court to be free of them.

The hand Jorah had placed at her side went to his beard of its own accord, trailing along the stiff jawline beneath.

"Does it get easier?"

He swallowed slowly, considering, and it was a long time before his answer came.

"No."

Perhaps then it was for the best that she had not remarried, and did not intend to remarry. Who would wish for such pain a third time? Dany had never breathed a word to Hizdahr zo Loraq, her husband, nor her lover Daario, of the maegi's curse. She was my mistake, and it is my burden to bear. Best not inflict barrenness on some unsuspecting man, some poor noble boy expecting his heirs to inherit the kingdoms.

Arianne had not known all that she was suggesting when she had urged the Queen to take a paramour.

But Jorah had. He had heard Mirri Maz Duur's words as clearly as Dany herself, and had still asked to be her husband.

Because he wanted to marry you, echoed the nagging voice that had taken root in her mind since Barristan Selmy had revealed the traitor in her midst, or to shield himself from your fury before all his lies could come undone?

The thing that had haunted her most about his betrayal, the thing that still lingered after all was said and done and shouted across palace chambers, was that she would never truly know if the man who had been her closest friend, her right hand, her confidant in her darkest hours, had ever been more than a carefully constructed façade.

He must have been – must be – she had reminded herself time and again, else why would he be with her still? Yet the voice lingered, murmuring its questions.

His face was warm beneath her palm, the muscles still tensed. Dany realized she had been silent for quite some time, that her knight had been staring at her, waiting.

"Khaleesi?"

It was the choice of khaleesi, rather than your grace, that loosened her tongue.

"If Varys had not instructed you to protect me," she muttered softly, "would you still have rescued me from the wineseller?"

Jorah pulled away from her fingers, a flash of irritation breaking across his eyes.

"Of course."

When Dany remained silent, neither agreeing with nor contradicting his answer, he pressed on. "You believe that, don't you?"

Do I? She sighed. "I suppose if I did not, it would be foolish to have named you Commander of my Queensguard."

It was an evasive answer, and she could tell he knew it. Yet how could she ever be completely certain?

What is done is done. Even if it had all been false, there was no way to change it. And she had made him Lord Commander, and would have to trust in his protection or be constantly looking over her shoulder, seeing spies in every corner. As my father did. Daenerys had made countless promises, to herself and to her people, not to become the ruler Aerys had been.

So that is that, she decided. No more doubting.

She nearly opened her mouth to tell Jorah as much, but he cleared his throat and spoke first.

"I had rather hoped we were past all the difficult questions."

Dany smiled. "Perhaps if you were less difficult…"

That earned her a sly grin. She was relieved he had taken her remark in jest, rather than sulking over her mistrust. He is at ease here, she realized. He is home.

A quiet rapping came from the doorway; Jorah leapt up at once to allow his cousin to enter the room. It was the second-youngest of Maege's daughters, Dany thought – Jorelle?

"Mother asked me to fetch you for supper," she murmured.

Dany rose from the table and followed, taking Ser Jorah's arm as she had in Winterfell but clinging perhaps a bit tighter than she had a week ago. For a moment she thought he might have noticed, as his eyes turned downward to catch hers, but before they met, Jorelle spoke up from Dany's left side.

"So…did you truly hatch three dragons?"

The eyes of all Jorah's kinswomen fixed on the Queen as a serving boy placed the choicest sizzling filet of fish before her. Daenerys glanced down at it, then back up, an uncertain smile on her lips as she found her hosts watching her. Clearly, she knew no more what to make of them than they of her, and Jorah found himself unable to begin eating until he knew how this scene was going to play out.

"Plainer fare, no doubt, than what you're accustomed to in King's Landing," Maege said.

"We used to have a Southron cook," said Lyanna, darting her eyes sidelong down the table at Jorah. "Ouch!"

Her hand disappeared beneath the table to rub her thigh as she glowered up at Jorelle, beside her, who ground out through her teeth, "Shut up, or I'll do it again." It being pinch her, presumably.

"Not at all, Lady Maege," Daenerys said, slicing into her food. "Your hospitality is much appreciated, especially in these lean times. Also you must not forget, as so many people do, that when my brother Viserys and I wandered as exiles after the rebellion, we had to beg for our bread."

Jorah saw his aunt's eyes narrow slightly on Daenerys, clearly interpreting her remark as a calculated reminder of what House she claimed and which House Mormont had followed, and he choked on his meat as his first thought was the very same. After all, he had explained to her, it was not that simple-but then he noticed the Queen had become pale and her eyes and mouth went round like that of the fish before her, and he breathed easily again, knowing she had simply misspoken. Though the size of the enthusiastic portion she shoveled onto her fork in her zeal not to insult her hosts alarmed him that she might choke.

"Anyway," she said, "there are times when I miss the simple food to which I was accustomed when I rode with Khal Drogo's khalasar."

She glanced at Jorah, seated at her right, as though for help, and he twitched his eyebrows at her over his beer. "And to think there was a time when you could scarcely chew dried horse meat without gagging."

Her eyes shone with her quiet laugh, and his own smile stretched in response. How long had it been since they reminisced about those months they had ridden together in the Dothraki Sea? She had been the first true friend he'd known in his years of exile, which made the hurt all the greater that his betrayal made her doubt their friendship. But her words today made him hope, perhaps, that they had come to a turning point, that things between them might return to what they had been.

"After eating an entire raw heart," she said, "dried seems a meal fit for a queen."

"You ate a raw horse heart?" asked Lyanna, who wheeled in her chair and glared again at another pinch from Jorelle.

"You ate a raw horse heart, your grace," Jorelle corrected her.

"I did."

Daenerys looked scarcely less pleased with herself for it than she had the night of the ceremony-though she was picking at her fish with her fork, much as she had picked at the food at the feast that had followed in her honor. Though in light of their earlier conversation, and the glance she'd just stolen at little Ned sitting on Aly's lap, one chubby hand clutching his curly hair as the other shared the food from his mother's plate, he wondered if it was not the unappetizing memory that stole her desire for food. A different hunger gleamed in her eyes.

"Why?" Lyanna asked, adding hastily, scooting on the bench away from her elder sister in anticipation of a pinch and bumping into Erena. "Your grace."

Daenerys drank long from her wine goblet before she answered, her smile too bright. "I think that story is better told when we're not trying to eat. Don't you agree, Ser Jorah?"

"I do, Khaleesi," he replied, and wished he could do more than that to reassure her. He glanced under the table and saw her hand in her lap, white knuckled as her fingers clutched at her skirt. Before he could second guess himself he placed his own over it and gave it a brief squeeze. Almost immediately he released her, but Daenerys grasped his hand, holding it firmly in place against her leg until his cousins resumed their mealtime chatter around them and he leaned in to ask her if he might have his hand back so he could eat.

"Oh," she said, flustered. "I'm sorry."

"I wouldn't have asked, but I wield a fork no better left-handed than I do a sword."

"I've seen you manage well without utensils."

"I only thought to make a good reflection upon my Queen, but of course if your grace would prefer me to eat like a bear…"

The remainder of the meal persisted in similar fashion, the bantering mood continuing even afterward, when they dragged their chairs and benches before the fire at the end of the hall to drink and have more tales of the Queen and her Lord Commander's adventures across the Narrow Sea.

"There was a time when I feared my dragons might make a meal of my bear," Daenerys said, perched daintily at the edge of a bench, as she'd grown accustomed to holding court in her pyramid in Meereen and continued in the Red Keep, Jorah standing just behind her to the right, as he had.

Maege chuckled. "It does make a good meal, when you can get it."

"They're all hunkered down in their dens for winter now," Lyra said, "or we'd have feasted your grace with roast bear."

"And saved you the heart," Alysane added, raising her tankard to the Queen with a grin.

"Please,," said Jorelle, on the bearskin rug with her knees drawn up beneath her skirt just as Jorah had earlier pictured her, hugging her knees to her chest as she looked up at them with amusement glimmering in her bright eyes. "Tell us of my cousin's adventures with the dragons. Or misadventures, as they may be."

Daenerys glanced up at Jorah. "You needn't stand guard over me here, ser," she told him, patting the space beside her on the bench as she scooted to the edge.

"Mayhaps it was myself I thought to guard," he mock-protested even as he obeyed, "against your embarrassing tales."

"And what is embarrassing about being one of the only men in living memory to have held a dragon?"

In the rustic hall, ruddy and shadowed in the shifting firelight, the onlooking faces of his dark-haired and dark-eyed aunt and cousins nearly as swarthy as those of the bloodriders and handmaids, it was easy to believe they were back in Vaes Dothrak. Daenerys had begged Jorah's company at the feast following the heart ceremony, he still her one friend though that night had won her the love of the tens of thousands of her husband's great khalasar.

"We were wandering through the Red Wastes of Essos after they were hatched," her voice drew him out of his musing, "and they'd had naught to eat for weeks but milk-"

"Dragons not drink milk!" Little Ned slipped off his mother's lap and approached the Queen.

"Not when they're grown, no," Daenerys said. "But when they're hatchlings, they do. Just like little bear cubs."

The boy squirmed and squealed as her hand went out to tickle his belly. As she took him up into her own lap, she looked at her audience again. "They suckled at my breasts."

Maege's head fell back with her laugh, which crackled like the logs in the fire, though she stopped abruptly when Aly nudged her. "I don't think the Queen meant that to be a jape, Mother."

"Is it true, Jorah?" asked Jorelle.

He was glad for the uncertain light in the hall and that he was already too warm from sitting so near the fire as his traitor mind easily produced the image of Daenerys sitting naked as her name day among the ashes of Khal Drogo's funeral pyre and the young dragon giving suck…her left breast bared in her Qartheen gowns…her nipples hardened against his chest as he kissed her on Balerion.

"It is," he said, his voice husky. "I saw it with my own eyes."

Lyra sniggered. "I bet he did."

"The most harmless stories become embarrassments when my cousins are the audience," Jorah muttered.

"And I thought giving my babes suck was painful when once they'd teethed," Aly said in low tones to her mother, who nodded and winced. She looked up and addressed the Queen. "You truly are the Mother of Dragons."

This seemed to please Daenerys-though Jorah had a passing though that perhaps she missed her dragons at the Wall as she missed Rhaego. He had not detected any particular yearning in her voice when she told Jorelle how she hatched them, but all the same he knew the maternal feelings she harbored for the beasts were genuine.

She said, "Perhaps I ought to have the doors of the throne room remade with a similar carving to the lady on your gate."

"There's too many teats and not enough teeth in this story," Lyanna muttered. "I thought it was meant be about Jorah being nearly eaten."

She was sulking, plucking at the wiry hairs of the bear rug until her mother swatted her on the back of her head and told her to stop before the beast ended up bald.

"Strangely enough, your cousin lost a bit of hair on this occasion," Daenerys said, and Jorah rolled his eyes and motioned for a serving girl to bring him more beer as his cousins sniggered about how he had enough to spare and was that why he was balder atop his head than when they saw him last?

"I had been trying to feed them small bites of horseflesh," the Queen's story went on, "but they refused to eat. Choosy beggars."

"Like that one," Aly said, pointing to her boy, who doubled over giggling in Daenerys' lap as her fingers tickled his belly again.

The story she told was not quite as Jorah remembered. The events were the same-there was no other meat to be found in those inhospitable lands but that of the horses which fell from exhaustion and lack of water-but when Daenerys spoke of despairing that her dragons ever taking nourishment she did so lightly, omitting the worry that had left her beautiful young face as haggard as starvation. Just as all had seemed lost, Viserion flapped his cream and gold wings and flew from her shoulder to perch on Jorah's forearm. Which was most unusual, as the dragons had as little to do with the other members of Daenerys' khalasar as they did with horse meat.

Aly nodded appreciatively. "That's babes for you. They cling to you till you go near mad for someone else to hold them and give you a moment's peace to yourself, then one day they refuse to sit in Mama's lap." She winked at Ned, whose head of wild hair rested against Daenerys' shoulder, the lids of his eyes drooping.

Jorah felt a rush of affection at the way his cousin spoke to Daenerys as one mother to another. The carving on Bear Hall's gate was, indeed, a true representation of the women who occupied it.

"What was it like?" asked Jorelle. "To hold a dragon? Did you feel as if legend had come to life?"

Another time he would tell the girl what it had been to see the Daenerys arise from the ashes and to be pierced by the dragons' song so that he could do naught but fall to his knees before her, the Dragon Queen his liege forever. For now, he kept to the tone she set for the tale.

"They say dragons are fire made flesh," Jorah said. "My flesh was almost made fire as the creature reared back his head and coughed out flame. And then he bit me."

"Only a small flame," Daenerys said indignantly over the laughter of the she-bears, "and Jorah took no harm beyond having the hair scorched off his forearm."

"And a scar in the shape of the dragon's teeth." Jorah set his mug aside and rolling up the sleeve of his tunic to reveal his skin.

Leaning in, Daenerys scrutinized it, grinning as she remarked, "The hair's grown back so well I cannot see if there is a scar or not."

Jorah snorted. "Her grace took the incident as lightly when it occurred. All she said was, "Oh! I think Viserion tried to roast you, my bear!"

His kinswomen howled, and Daenerys' lilac eyes glimmered with mirth as she met Jorah's gaze. "You should be honored, ser. It was at that moment I remembered that Viserys told me once that dragons, like people, preferred their meat cooked. You saved my dragons from starvation."

As her fingertips idly stroked his skin, he felt the usually tense muscles at his neck and shoulders relax for the first time since they began their Northward journey. He had not been sure he would find peace at home, and certainly had never occurred to him that her restlessness in the city might find its cure here, because at the root of it lay her unresolved troubles with him.

She had been right to bring him here. So long ago she had promised him she would.

Daenerys' word was true.