8.

The stench of manure assaulted Jorah's nostrils before he'd stepped halfway through the barn door. He paused, the horse shit combining with the straw covered floor and the mud packed walls of rough hewn logs and the flicker of lanterns to take him back for a moment to Vaes Dothrak. He could have sworn he felt the heat of the Dothraki Sea, though he knew it could not be so or Jhogo and Rakharo would not be bundled up in the fur lined boots and gloves and hooded cloaks that they so despised. Even so, they looked more in their own element than he'd seen them since the khalasar departed Westeros, talking and laughing as they fed and rubbed down their horses.

Jorah lifted a hand to rub the back of his neck, which prickled as he thought of Aggo, who remained back in the hall to guard Daenerys. Because you can hardly suffer to be in the same house as her, let alone the same room. But as his gaze settled on Jorelle leaning against a rake just inside the stall where Jhogo worked, he shoved aside guilt at his own shirked duties.

He strode fully into the barn and the door shut behind him with a bang, the chatter breaking off sharply as everyone swung around to see who had entered. At the sight of him, they all whipped back to resume their chores with fervor and in silence. Like children caught up to mischief, Jorah thought, unable to stifle a low sound in his throat. They scarcely were more than children, only Rakharo having seen twenty name days.

"Jory," he said. "I would have a private word with Jhogo. Yer akka, Rakharo," he added when the older Dothraki hastily draped the bright woven blanket over his horse and, smirking, moved toward the door.

As Rakharo's face fell, Jhogo's eyes met Jory's and glimmered. She leaned on her rake again, looking on as if she found this all terribly amusing, and Jorah remembered one of the reasons his father had always seemed irritated with his sister and her children: they had the most ill-timed senses of humor.

"Jorelle," he repeated her given name, more gruffly this time.

All playfulness seemed to drain from her face as she straightened up and returned her rake to its hook on the wall of the barn. She paused halfway through the door to glance back at Jhogo, her forehead dimpling in concern between her thick brows. The look contained such obvious affection that it tugged at something in Jorah—his young cousin shared more in common with him than only his name—and as he caught the door behind her he nearly told her not to worry, he only wanted a word with the lad at this point, not his balls, but decided against it, not certain whether that was actually the truth.

When Jorelle was outside, he shut the barn door and planted himself in front of it, arms crossed in front of his chest in his most intimidating stance. Not that Dothraki bloodriders were easily intimidated. Jhogo came out of the stall with his usual horseman's swagger and stood beside Rakharo.

"What were you talking about with my cousin just now?" he asked them in Common, the more difficult for them to lie or tell half-truths if they were so tempted.

Even so, Jhogo looked him straight in the eye and said, "We just talk."

"What about?" Jorah repeated, grinding out the syllables.

Rakharo answered for his friend. "The she-bear wish to know if blood riders miss home. If regret to stay with khaleesi."

"I tell her this is not known to Dothraki," Jhogo said. "Dan Ares Queen is qoy qoyi. Dothrakhqoyi live if khaleesi live. Die if she die. Where she is home I am home."

The young warrior's words puffed in the air from the force of feeling with which he uttered them, and for the first time since he set food in the stable, Jorah felt the cold. His lungs burned as if he'd breathed too deep of the cold empty air; icy fingers wrapped tight around his heart. What do you pray for, Ser Jorah?

A wicker from one of the horses drew him out of his reverie.

"Why…?" His voice came out choked, and he paused to cough. "Why did my cousin wish to know this?"

"She not say," Rakharo replied, and Jhogo added, with a shrug. "She just…make talk? Being…you say polite?"

"She might have been just as polite to the handmaids," Jorah snarled, the momentary sadness giving way to anger once more—much to his relief—as he saw through Jhogo's attempt at brushing off his questions. "Were you flirting with her?"

He had advanced toward the Dothraki as he said this, but though they did not cede any ground to him they did look at each other with confused frowns. Jorah's temper cooled slightly as he wracked his brain for words that would translate: there was no word in Dothraki for flirtation.; Iit was not something they did. Which was really the point of this interrogation.

Drawing up his shoulders again, he felt as though he loomed over the sinewy youths, though they were in fact almost of a height.

"It has come to my attention that the two of you were making jokes about my cousin."

Unexpectedly, the usually fearless Jhogo went red, though he kept his lips pressed tightly together while Rakharo snorted but also kept silentdid not say anything. Jorah gritted his teeth. He ought to have asked the handmaids—they would have known exactly what he was after and told it to him willingly.; Jhiqui, in particular—perhaps because she still harbored feelings for Rakharo and resented his preference for Irri—always took such a childish glee in seeing any of the others receive a reprimand. For a moment Jorah considered changing tacks and speaking with the girls, but immediately he discarded the idea; they were worse gossips than old women, and would go straight to Jorelle afterward. Or worse, Daenerys.

And he'd had more conversations with women than he cared to of late.

"Rakharo?" he asked. "Do you know anything about these japes?"

Teeth flashed white between the black drooping tails of Rakharo's mustachio as he laughed aloud. "Jhogo say Jorelle not look like bear. He stare at her odayai-"

"Rakharo say under dress she could have much hair like Jorah Andahli."

At his side, Jorah's fingers clenched into a tight fist, he muscles in his arm twitching to deal a blow. It wouldn't be the first time he'd fought a Dothraki who mocked him—he remembered a rider left to bleed in the dust of Lhazar for jeering at his armor—but it would be the first he'd struck one of these Dothraki. Slowly, releasing a long steaming breath through his nose, he uncurled his fingers, flexing them. He didn't intend to start now, not only because he liked Rakharo, but because he had no wish to add thrashing blood of Daenerys' blood to his list of sins. This was about his kinswoman's honor, not his own pride.

He settled for eyeing Rakharo for a moment, showing him his displeasure, before he turned to Jhogo.

"I assume you're discussing what's under my cousin's dress because she's pretty."

Despite Jorah's gravity, Jhogo's expression took on a dreamy haze, and he reverted to his native tongue. "Me ray thelis tih."

She has blue eyes? If Rakharo had not sniggered, Jorah would have thought he'd misheard.

"I hope that your mooning over them means you understand that this is Westeros, where it is a crime to take a woman without her permission." Jorah grasped Jhogo by the front of his cloak and pulled to him so that the young man was almost nose-to-nose with his glower; the bloodrider's eyes went round in horror, but were fixed on the garment that had allowed this . "If you even thought of taking my cousin in the Dothraki way, I would not wait for the law to administer justice. I'd happily lop your head from your shoulders. After I'dve gelded you."

"If Jhogo think of taking she-bear in Dothraki way, she geld him first," said Rakharo, and Jhogo nodded.

"Man submit to woman here."

Jorah released the cloak. "What makes you say that?"

For a man who had just been threatened with death and dismemberment if he looked at a girl the wrong way, he looked at Jorah as if he were a simpleton, spreading his hands wide. "Where all the men?"

Thinking he might be in danger of proving Jhogo correct about the position of male and female on this island, Jorah tramped through the deep drifts of snow through the woods in search of Jorelle. He found her a mile or so from the hall, looking every bit a young bear as she crouched on the ground beside a snared rabbit—and even more so when she raised her head and looked at him with a frown that may as well have been accompanied by a snarl. The flash of blue as the pale winter light slanted through the bare branches overhead and caught her eyes reminded him of Jhogo's words that had made him seek his cousin in the first place.

"Has Jhogo laid a hand on you?"

He watched Jorelle in profile, her the muscle flexing beneath her cheek as she freed the rabbit's head from the loop. He was clenching his own jaw, he realized, deliberately relaxing it, and he was not the only one of them who was annoyed. When she stood, however, the gleam in her eye was not now from the sun.

"No," she replied, dropping the rabbit into a bag that hung at her hip by a strap across her chest, over the crisscrossed straps of her cloak, "but I heard Daenerys laid a bit more than that on you."

"Her grace," Jorah corrected—through his teeth again.

Jory only turned with a shrug and trudged further into the woods, in the direction of a set of tracks to check her next snare. "She said I might call her Daenerys," she flung back over her shoulder, along with her thick dark braid.

"Don't change the subject."

Jorah followed, his longer stride catching him up to his cousin so that he had to shoot out his arms to catch her by the shoulders when she turned so abruptly that he nearly barreled over her. She scowled at his hands until he removed them, then folded her arms across her chest and looked up at him in a way that was reminiscent of the looks Maege used to give him when he was a boy. Here man submit to woman.

"What if he has?" Jory demanded. "Are you going to cut off his balls and feed them to the bears?"

"Probably," he muttered, though he knew she was mocking him.

"Then what? Will you demand to know what poor sods Aly fucked to get her babes?"

"Do you want to end up like her? A babe in your belly by a man who'll be leaving in a few days, who you'll never set eyes on again, like as not?"

"The gods are good to give me you to advise me about me about love!"

The words had scarce flown from Jory's lips than she clapped her hand over her mouth, as if to recall them. Too late; they had already hit their mark, Jorah wincing before he could school his face into a stolid mask. Her gaze bent, intent suddenly on the toe of her boot as she kicked a fallen twig, the dried leaves that clung to it scratching against the packed snow.

"And I could, you know. See Jhogo again, I mean." Meeting Jorah's eye, she said, "The Queen has asked me to go back to King's Landing when you depart."

She could not have knocked the breath out of him more acutely than if she'd punched him in the gut.

"As what? A she-bear in waiting?" His return blow was a wrong-footed, wild swing which served only to stir Jory's simmering aggravation.

"Perhaps as a new bear for her guard," she retorted, teeth bared and spittle shimmering in the air, "since the current one keeps dodging his duties."

They stood there for a moment, glowering at each other through the fog of their rapid breath, until Jorelle wheeled around, cloak flapping against her leathern breeches, and stalked off. Jorah watched her until she disappeared into a thicket, debating whether to return to the hall, where he would be hard pressed to avoid the Queen—or to avoid shouting at her about this information she had seen fit to withhold from him—when his cousin's voice pierced the silence of the wood.

"Well? Are you going to help me with the traps or not?"

Jorah found her beside another snare, though this time she stood rather than knelt beside it, and he quickly saw why. The rabbit had not been strangled, and kicked about frantically in a vain attempt to escape. His cousin twitched her eyebrows and drew a rod from her belt, which she extended to him.

"I thought she-bears weren't squeamish," he said, taking it from her.

"Funny, I thought the same about he-bears."

Her playfulness almost made him grin, though the corners of his lips tugged decisively downward as he bent to grab the struggling—and now screaming—rabbit by the scruff of its neck. He gave it a quick bash on the head with the rod which instantly silenced it—though the legs twitched once…twice…thrice…before the creature finally went slack in his grasp.

As Jory took it to slip into her sack, she said, "The Queen did say I might be a lady in waiting. Or a squire, if I prefer."

"I've no need of a squire."

Jorelle's blue eyes rolled skyward. "Oh, in that case I'd best stay home, for you're the only knight in King's Landing."

Jorah led the way deeper into the wood, remembering where the best places to set snares had always been. Sure enough, they came soon to another trail of small paw prints.

"Do you wish to be a squire?" he threw over his shoulder to Jory, who panted as she struggled to keep up with his strides, which he did not measure for her.

"I know not. I had hoped you would advise me. How does King's Landing suit a Bear Islander?"

This set of tracks led them to a bloody patch of snow where a fox or bird of prey had found their quarry first.

In truth, it suits me not at all, he nearly admitted to his cousin as they crouched together clear away the viscera and tufts of fur and the soiled snow. He did not tell her that he felt as stifled by the citadel as the Queen had.

"It is Westeros," he said, "and therefore suits me better than any other place I've been in the past decade."

Except for the Dothraki Sea. I was something like happy there, riding with Daenerys. Things had been simpler then, he her trusted companion.

Who had also spied on her. Sold her secrets…her child…

"You seem adaptable, though," Jory's voice cut through his musings as she cut a length of new cording with a small knife to make a new snare. "You're a friend of Dothraki, of a dragon. And it seems I am, as well. Or could be."

"A royal court requires a different sort of adaptability than to a culture or customs. You must be aware that danger can—and will—lurk in every quarter."

"Then luckily I have a ready sword hand." She twirled the knife between her fingers before sheathing it again in her belt.

"It's not your sword that must be sharp and ever alert at court, girl, but your wits. It's a game. An endless, exhausting game."

"Mayhaps that is why I should go," said Jory, matter-of-factly as she rose, brushing off the palms of her gloves against the front of her breeches. "So you will know you can depend on having one person who plays the game on your side." Her gaze sought his as he, too, pushed upright, grunting as his knees crackled from sitting in a crouch. "The Queen asked me in great part for your sake, you know."

She meant it kindly, accompanied with a sweet, encouraging smile, but to Jorah it felt like a new scab ripped off, and he gritted his teeth accordingly.

"So great a part that she never troubled herself to ask whether I thought a kinswoman at court would suit me or not? So much that she was only too happy to discuss what I need behind my back?"

"Then I suppose it won't interest you to know what else she said about you behind your back."

He replied by turning his back on her and starting up the embankment in the direction of the hall. Though Jorelle's footsteps did not follow him through the snow, her voice did.

"She loves you, Jorah."

That arrested him, quite against his will, and he found himself reaching for the trunk of a slender tree to lean against as she continued.

"As far as I can tell, she has done for a long time—"

"No," Jorah ground out, shaking his head.

"-but only now does she begin to recognize it. I should think you of all people would understand how the notions one has of what love is and isn't can change."

"Meddling women," he muttered. "I'll thank you to mind the affairs of your own heart." He glanced just far enough over his shoulder to glimpse, in his periphery, Jory's smirk.

"I'd thank you to do the same, but since you haven't, I'll say my piece. You have a chance, Jorah. Don't spoil it by lashing out at Daenerys like a wounded bear."

The next evening's meal was as tense as the one that preceded it, as indeed every occasion had been between the Queen and her Lord Commander for the past two days. Whatever had changed in Dany's mind the previous day made no matter when her knight would barely look at her, much less hear anything she might wish to say.

If anything could be said to mend what she had done.

Tonight it seemed as though she and Ser Jorah were not the only ones who wished to avoid one another. Irri and Jhiqui sat as far apart as they could manage, Jhogo would not look at anyone at all, and Lyanna's stern face was darker than ever, her gaze shooting daggers at whoever had the misfortune to meet it.

Jorelle seemed still conflicted over the invitation Dany had posed the previous afternoon; the girl had quietly acquiesced when the Queen had invited her to take the seat at her left side, but had barely looked her way. Instead she focused on the men opposite her – whether it was Jorah or Jhogo she was annoyed with, Dany could not tell, but neither of them would meet her eyes.

Halfway through the meal the silence became too much for Dany to bear. She turned to Jory at her left side – safer than attempting conversation with the man at her right – and began the first subject that came to her mind.

"You know, in Kings' Landing–"

"At that again, are you?"

Dany had spoken quietly, intending only Jorelle to hear her, but in the dead silence of the hall her voice must have carried two seats over to Lyanna.

"Whispering your Southron promises in my sister's ear…" she continued. "Haven't you taken enough from us already?"

Jory was suddenly beet red. So you told your sisters?

"Watch your tone, girl. That is the Queen of Westeros." Hearing Jorah speak for the first time in days was a welcome shock, though the words were grudging and his gaze never left the table.

"I'll say what I like in my mother's hall." Lyanna rose from the table, her posture as threatening as a thirteen year-old's could possibly be – which was a good deal, apparently, as the girl took after her mother. "It's you who have no right to speak here, Ser. Not after what you did. You behave as though you are one of us still, after you spent all we had on some harlot and fled your rightful punishment like a gods-damned coward. You think you can just walk back into this hall and all is forgiven, as though clutching at the skirts of this…this…usurper who has the nerve to style herself our Queen washes you clean of your sins?"

At the word usurper, every eye at the table froze on Lyanna. Even the Dothraki had learned what that word meant; Dany heard Jhiqui's gasp, and saw Rakharo's hand fall to the arakh at his hip. She dared not look at Jorah – his head had snapped up at harlot, and she feared his already fierce anger might turn her to stone if she met the glare he had trained on his cousin.

Aly hissed her sister's name, but the girl barreled on unimpeded.

"No! I will not be silent anymore! It was bad enough when you lot bent the knee to Stannis Baratheon, and now you're going to sit here and treat with Mad Aerys' daughter? Have you forgotten your loyalties completely? Have you forgotten how her father burned your liege lord alive and slaughtered his son, how her brother kidnapped Lyanna Stark? She claims to be the rightful ruler of Westeros, but Aegon and his Valyrian blood have never belonged here – they have no right to call themselves our rulers, we of the blood of the First Men, simply because they brought fantastical beasts to burn all that we have built–"

"Are you quite finished?" Dany had not raised her voice, but years of mocking from those who had not thought her fit to rule had taught her the exact tone to cut through shouting, and every head, including Lyanna's, turned to her.

She continued evenly, careful not to let the woken dragon battling in her chest control her words.

"You, Lyanna, are one of the few at this table who has never seen a battle. Perhaps if you had – if you had heard the sounds men make as they die, or seen fields littered with the blood of those who were once fathers, brothers, and sons – you might know the value of peace."

The girl's eyes went huge with shock, but her mother and sisters remained unusually calm. Dany cared little at the moment; it was too late now to stop herself from barreling on, even had the she-bears bared their teeth.

"My ancestors were of Valyria, it is true. They took seven kingdoms that were foreign to them, as your beloved First Men took it from the Children of the Forest, as the Andals took it from the First Men in turn, and on and on. What Aegon the Conqueror brought was three hundred years of peace. A kingdom united to serve the needs of all, until one of your precious Starks ran off with my fool brother and shattered all that was built. When I returned to this land it was more death than life, torn apart by men shouting for honor and rights and the blood of the First Men. I rained fire down, yes, to cleanse the blood that I will remind you I had no part in shedding, and with it re-forged what was broken."

For just an instant she caught Ser Jorah's eyes, and was gratified to see that for the first time in days they held something besides anger – still some anger, yes, but also a strange mixture of shock and pride. Together, she thought, we forged them together. Am I still your queen, then, if nothing else?

Dany continued, "You may disapprove of my reign, child, you may think me a foreigner and a pretender, but as you do so be glad that what you speak are only words and not battle cries, and remember that others have sacrificed their blood – be it ancient and noble or not – so that you may shout at the Queen of Westeros from behind a table while you and your remaining sisters sleep safely in your bed each night, and no more sisters and daughters, brothers and sons, ride to early graves."

Lyanna's fists were white at her sides – again, Dany was struck by how many of Jorah's unconscious mannerisms his cousins displayed – but she and her sisters were deathly silent. The Queen had to remind herself that the room was full of her bodyguards; though whether Ser Jorah would leap to her defense against his own blood she could not be absolutely certain, especially when he was already so furious with her.

Fortunately, Maege's youngest daughter quickmerely stormed from the room, Erena fleeing in tow.

Her absence hardly lessened the tension in the hall. Now no one – but for little Ned, who searched every face at the table in confusion – lifted their gaze from the plate before them, chewing in silence. Jorah moved nary a muscle, neither to touch the remainder of his meal nor to cease staring at the empty seat his cousin had abandoned. Should I have defended him as well? She had wanted to, truly, but suspected that fighting his battles for him would only fuel his resentment.

After several endless moments, he finally rose from the table and turned to leave. Dany managed to grab his forearm before he could escape, and though her grip was light she felt her knight flinch at her touch. He stood like a stone at her side as he waited for the Queen to speak, but did not turn.

That annoyed her. She had hoped he would at least continue to behave as her Lord Commander, not like a petulant child.

"Ser Jorah. I would speak with you. Alone."

"Your grace, I do not–"

She sighed. "That was not a request, ser."

He stiffened even more at the blatant command, his brow narrowed as he turned his face to her at last. Dany hated to pull rank in front of his kin, but he had given her little choice.

I would not need to command you if you would behave.

She released her knight's arm and stood to follow him out of the hall, wondering which of them was dreading more the conversation to come.