Chapter Text

The dreaming wolf

Morgha! Drakarys Pōntoma Zālaza, zālagon qrīdrughagon pōja ñelly! Drakarys Morgha!

She was sleek, serpentine-like in her dream, a great fire wyrm with four legs spaced across a body long as Balerion was towards the end of his days, yet two great wings exited her back that blotted out the sun. Her long whiskers sparked with electricity that ran the length of her vermillion body as she belched a fire the color of her scales. She was adorned with an armor of glittering Valyrian steel that extended across her chest and middle back and covered her tail, legs, and thighs. In the night sky, she must have looked like one of those knights of old Andalos who had taken the western continent by storm when her sires' sire's sire was still in the egg. And the ships upon the landlocked sea that dared to fire their bolts? Above her, Vaenarya screamed and cackled like a mad woman. Her rider's blood was up, and the immense beast ordered to send these men of water and cold back to the hells that spawned them. Now was a time for death and war!

Out of nowhere, the salt seas rose, and she found herself face to face with a column of water.

And then she knew only pain.

Arya woke with a start suppressing a scream as she lost her balance and fell forward, crashing through branches and slamming into the grass and dirt below. Stupid dreams Grandmother called them dragon dreams and said they were magical, that they allowed her to see things that never were, might yet be, or that happened years and years ago. But be wary of them, my love, for many of our ancestors, were driven mad because of them.

They were stupid; just because you dreamed of something happening didn't mean it would happen. Who took dreams seriously? Of all the dreams Arya had that she could remember, only a quarter of them came true, and with odds like that, what idiot would believe them? But Daenys, the dreamer, saved House Targaryen. Maybe she did, but Arya wondered as she dusted off her linen trousers and sighed in relief that the sun was well passed halfway through the sky. Women in the North began adopting the Lengii procedure of using a kind of sticky wax and paper strips or fine razors to remove hair on their legs and in their unmentionable places before the rest of the seven Kingdoms had, and Septa Mordane kept insisting that Arya learn how to do these things and it was annoying and disgusting. It's easy to figure out how to use wax and stupid paper. Easier still for blade work. Why do I have to stand around for that?

Although she enjoyed working with the new straight razors, it was another invention by the sage-smiths of Dragonstone but made famous by smiths in King's Landing, White Harbor, and Wintertown. She enjoyed the texture and the feel her mother and father had paired with ivory handles. Ygritte says you can slit a man's throat with those.

Ygritte was the daughter of a spear wife sworn to House Giantsbane. She had red skin and dark eyes but hair that was the color of fire, and she was older than her elder brothers. Arya liked Ygritt; she wore armor, fought like men, and was an arbiter and judge at the wrestling and fistfight contests during the Winter King festivals. It had been since she was her age, and she remembered life beyond the wall. She and Osha had come south with their families when Ygritte was small, arriving at Hardhome and agreeing to bend the knee to house Aetheryon's "lures" as the free folk (Ygritte didn't like being called a wildling.) those men who arrived with ships and offered safe passage below the war so long as the free folk vowed to submit to Northern law.

Most refused, others snuck down as raiders, and she knew the Night's Watch disliked what the Sea dragons did, but the ones who did agree to bend the knee were growing in number each year. Ygritte and her family weren't Wargs, so they didn't stay in Aetheryon land and found their way to the lands around Winterfell and the service of the Giantsbane and through him to Winterfell as palace guards and through that to being Arya's personal spear. "Where's Winter?" Arya muttered sleepily.

"She flew off," Ygritte said, walking into view; she'd been praying to one of the new Heart trees carved by green men when King Torrhen (The one who knelt.) had begun constructing the castle complex that she now lived in. And so, a three-acre Godswood became a ten-acre Godswood, new Weirwood trees and heart trees were grown and consecrated, and parts of the old castle had been reclaimed by vines, various exotic trees (which were sustained by the hot springs.) and sentinel pines.

Ygritte was eating a kind of plum that was found nowhere else in the world but for the glass gardens in Winterfell, Oldtown, Dragontown at Sea Dragon Point, and Dragonstone, for they were of the Valyrian peninsula and only grew in places of heat and were descendants from some of the few trees and bushes and growing things brought from the peninsular before the doom. Of course, they were eaten the world over and fetched a pretty penny, but Arya laughed because Ygritte looked like she had eaten half a dozen of them. "Another dragon is here," Ygritte answered.

"Really?" Arya asked with a look of wonder in her eyes.

"Aye, little lady." She said, tossing Arya a plum. "I'm not a lady," Arya grumbled; she was a lady. But a proper Northern lady and not the dainty southern weaklings that her mother wanted her to be. "Yer rich, ya live in a castle bigger than most free folk villages, and yer daddy's a lawd, that makes ya one…m'lady," Ygritte responded, exaggerating her provincial accent as she pulled a knife and offered it to Arya, joining her on an old stone bench that was being devoured by a flowering vine. "You're richer than most small folk and some merchants, you live in my father's castle, and Jory Cassel wants to marry you. By your reasoning, that makes you one too."

Ygritte swatted at her cheek playfully and leaned back. "Aye, he does fancy me, 'an 'he can take me or die try'n as is proper free folk custom."

"You just want to fight him." Arya teased, sinking her teeth into the plum. It was rich, sweet, and spicy all at once, and it juices the color of blood, and the juices steamed as they ran down her chin. "Aye, and you eat like a savage ya do, little wolf."

Arya shrugged. "Why is another Dragon here, and which one is it? Argella? Vaegon? Has Maelos come? Is the King visiting? Or is Winter ready to make eggs again?" the prospect of maybe gaining a dragon and riding it filled her mind with wonder and the memories of her dream. But Morgha was dead a thousand years if my dream is true.

Ygritte laughed. "I only just learned to read little wolf." She had Arya to thank for that, Jory had made a jape about her not knowing how to read, and though he meant it without malice, Arya found Ygritte attacking a straw dummy in a rage with tears in her eyes. And so, in exchange for learning knife and spear work, Arya had begun to teach her to read, and to her surprise, her mother of all people was the one to insist Ygritte become her personal spear. Mother is kind sometimes.

She was still furious about the other night, about what was said to Jon, and she still couldn't figure out why her mother allowed the rambunctious spear wife to serve as her sworn spear. "But I think," Ygritte began again, "It was one of the young dragons, all grey and big and looking like a bull with wings."

"Stormwind?" Arya asked, surprised, her violet eyes wide with surprise. "Lord Gendry's dragon?!". Gendry had been born a bastard like her brother Jon. He spent his childhood as an apprentice blacksmith in King's Landing and then later under Donal Noye, the one-armed master of Storm's End. The latter was one of the few Blacksmiths outside the Sage Smith masters on Dragonstone or the Sage Smith Tobho Mott of King's Landing that understood how to work steel almost unnaturally. He couldn't make Valyrian steel, but Sansa was given a necklace of Noye's work, a wonder to behold. From there, her aunt Lysa noticed he was a bastard of Roberts and wanted him out of the castle. Yet her lord husband refused, and then Gendry saved her from bandits, and she became his fiercest defender. Jon thinks there's no place for him here because of mother. But Gendry proves that wrong, and he's supposed to be handsome.

The thought made her cheeks redden, and she felt like a fool.

Arya boychild, Arya underfoot, Arya the wildling. They called her those things, yet her father said she looked like Lyanna and Grandmother Rhaella. Ridiculous, Lyanna was a Northern beauty, and Rhaella is the grace of the maiden personified. Arya would never be that Sansa would because she would take after their mother. But Arya could be a proper Northern lady. Hold a keep, fight beside a future husband and defend her family.

"Who's this Gendry?" Ygritte asked.

"He's the bastard son of the Lord of Storm's End," Arya answered, rummaging around for something to wipe the mess on her chin and neck. "Like Jon." She added, 'But he has a name. Greystorm because of a fight with Lyseni pirates."

"Slavers," Ygritte hissed. "Ever since you kneelers broke up their precious balance of power back home, they've been feral towards the free folk in the true north. One of the reasons we came down here." The other, Ygritte would never talk about.

"Well, he wanted to prove himself worthy of my aunt's patronage, so he set out with Stormwind escorting ships from the Stormlands east, and when pirates fell on their fleet Lord Gendry and his dragon destroyed them all during a storm. It's said they couldn't fire their scorpions at them because the dragon was as gray as the storm clouds" Arya's smile turned into a frown as Ygritte handed her a silk kerchief that she produced from Arya's own pockets with the deftness of a seasoned cutpurse.

"What is it, little wolf?" Ygritte asked, drawing her sword, a lithe broadsword designed to emulate the Braavosi water dancing styles, and began cleaning the blade with a linen cloth from her pockets.

"My brother being stupid again."

"He's not even four."

"No! Not that ." Arya frowned, biting her lip, a few strands of her dark hair fell over her right eye, and Arya huffed, blowing them out of the way. "He wants to join the Night's Watch because mother called him a Strong."

Ygritte scoffed, but it lacked any of her usual irreverence. Arya thought she detected a note of fear as the steam from her breath rose into the air. "That one knows nothing, the dragon lady and the younger lady dragon. They try and learn him. But it's like I told them, but you can't smarten a rock."

Arya rolled her eyes. "I'm serious, Ygritte! He's been sullen and set in his way about it. Saying that if she fears him to be another tyrant's bastard, he should remove himself from her castle." That was probably a falsehood, though. Arya thought it was over her mother's attempts to wed Daenerys to robb.

"It's not her castle. Doesn't her family rule a fish market or a beaver dam?" Ygritte asked with a dismissive shrug. "No…. not a beaver damn or a fish market, it's a castle like this one, though not as big and in the center of a river." She sighed. "If he joins the watch…it's noble, I guess, but he can do much more here."

"Aye, it's moot; ya shant let him join the watch," Ygritte said, her voice suddenly stern and fearful. Desperate perhaps? Arya blinked in surprise; she'd never seen Ygritte be afraid of anything. "I cannot dissuade him. It's the-"Ygritte seized her at that moment by the shoulders and squeezed with surprising strength, almost harming her. "Listen, little wolf…You can't let him join the watch."

"w..why," Arya asked, looking up at those pale bright blue eyes that were always so fierce yet now seemed to be wild with terror.

"Because if you do, he'll die…There's nothing beyond the wall but death and those about to meet it." Ygritte whispered in a voice that suddenly sounded old and tired, and her face was drawn and gaunt with the fear in her soul. "Nothing..do you understand, little wolf."

Arya nodded, trying to suppress her own fear and tears. Ygritte gripped her with such abandon and fierceness it hurt, and when her sworn spear noticed, she released Arya and took the girl's hands into hers. "I'm..sorry…Little wolf…"

"It's okay," Arya said, feeling an immense debt of gratitude towards the wildling girl.

Though she couldn't understand why.