➰Jon ➰

I could not remember a time when I felt as rested or as unburdened as I did in the weeks after arriving on Dragonstone.  Busy, worthwhile days - council meetings were as tiresome as I expected they would be - but overseeing the drills of the Dothraki and Unsullied, reports from Theon and Ed, and the mining of our newly discovered hoard of Dragonglass kept me occupied.

Sam had written back to Daenerys's request for a maester, accepting her offer gratefully, while informing us that he couldn't come before the moon's turn. The library at The Citadel was too valuable to leave behind just yet, and he was involved in a most grave assignment that he could not entrust to any other.

His letter had also advised he'd made some startling discoveries - one of which being the answer to our, as yet mainly fruitless, search for Dragonglass. The Citadel texts had revealed that while we'd been scouring the realm for that which Dany called Zīrtys perzys, Dragonstone itself had been concealing the greatest quantities of it anywhere on earth. For deep beneath the grey rock was a wealth of it, Sam had written.

And sure enough, on the third day of searching the slick and briny caves by the shoreline, we found it. Obsidian infused rock as far as the light carried, enough for thousands upon thousands of weapons. I'd given the command immediately for it to be removed, mined, and forged into every bladed weapon possible: battleaxes, halberds, pikes, hatchets and daggers.  I'd written back to Sam to tell him his direction had been right, and to advise him the Sea Dragon Tower was readied for him, Gilly, and little Sam urging him to hurry at his grave assignment for I missed our chats.   

Nights on the isle were as satisfying as the days. The overwhelming need I felt for Dany that I'd thought was in some part due to the novelty of a new marriage, did not seem to lessen any as the nights continued. Instead, it grew.

I could not sleep without her beside me, and so if she was awake late into the night at her letters or with Tyrion, I would lie awake and wait for her. I'd stare at the intricate markings carved into the wooden canopy of our bed, or rise from it and drink her favourite wine - my tongue slowly learning to appreciate its ripe sweetness - while I waited up by the fire.

On one such night, around three weeks after our arrival on the isle, when the first suggestion of sunlight had begun to spill over the horizon and still she had not come to bed, I made the decision to go and insist she leave whatever she was still doing until morning. Tyrion would also hear from me on the matter of keeping her up so late into the night. We all knew he slept little, but it did not mean everyone else must do the same.

Leaving the chamber by the eastern door, I took the north tower stairwell directly upwards towards the chamber of the painted table. Darkly lit, only the waning light of the dying sconces offering a snatched glimpse of the stone steps, I vowed then to have more torches added and a rail fixed to the stone wall for the idea of her navigating them in the dark in her dainty scant slippers unsettled me.

Though Dany had ordered the large open bays enclosed shortly after her arrival here, the room was cold, too cold, the wind battering loudly against the wooden shutters like an angry mob and the fire having long seen its peak.

On the chair in front of the great fireplace she slept, her small body covered partially with a thick blanket of white fur that reminded me of Ghost's coat. Next to the half filled wine glass by the chair lay a thick parchment of some report or command.  Reaching down so I could set it back on the small table from where it had fallen, I'd glanced absently at it, my eyes catching upon the bottom corner of what was quite clearly a letter.

Inscribed with the sort of flourish that did not belong to a brutal sellsword was a name I'd almost forgotten.

Daario Naharis

The language had not been in the common tongue and I was grateful for it, for I was not certain the my value for her privacy would have prevented me from reading his words to her then. Words I held clutched in a tightened fist.

My fingers burning and my breath quick from rancour, I'd laid down the letter and turned back to her with a half expectation that she may have been awakened by my discovery. She'd slept on soundly. Thick velvet eyelashes resting on her pale cheeks, rosebud lips slightly parted, hair of glossy silver draped over one shoulder.

Were his words better than my own? Did he enclose poems about her beauty? Did he write about how his heart ached to be parted from her and how it longed for her still? Had he loved her as deeply as I was beginning to suspect I did? I had not admitted it to myself until the moment his name had been brandished in front of me, until the very notion that he might take her from me.

Of course he had been unable to forget her. For how did one begin to forget one such as her? How would he find in any other even a glimmer of her magnificence?

Why hadn't he followed her here? Why hadn't he fought by her side to take back the throne stolen from her? Surely had he loved her then he would not have been able to leave her side? For I was certain now that there was nothing which could move me from her side.

Sliding my hands beneath her legs and around her shoulders, I'd lifted her from the chair into my arms and carried her to our bed. Sleep did not find me easily that night, visions of Dany and her sellsword lover in each others arms brash and unwelcome in my head. 

***

Aegon's garden is always where I come to think. It reminds me vaguely of the Wolfswood where Robb and I would hunt as boys. Where for years I'd beat him to the first kill even though I knew him to be far more skilled with a bow than I ever was.

The day I realised why that was I knew that it was possible to both hate and love a person at the same time.

He had let me beat him.

For years he'd let me claim the first kill, let me laud over him my skill at the hunt, his poor luck, his lame shot. There in the forest where it was only us, he'd allowed me to be his superior. He had given me this thing because he'd pitied me my low birth and Gods had it burned to know it. That he, my brother, pitied me. It had set a fire tearing through my blood; flames of shame and envy and rage and foolishness all at once. A terrible violent furnace.

I'd been jealous of Robb my whole life. The way my father looked at him, the way his mother looked at him, the way our brothers and sisters didn't look at him. He was better than me at everything; fighting, and hunting, and riding, and girls. Gods, the girls loved him. I wanted to hate him, but I never could.

But that day I hated him.

The memory of it is as though it was but yesterday. Laden with spoils we'd walked in silence through the wood toward home, the grass as thick as straw beneath our feet, the rich scent of the north heavy in our noses, our young bodies giddy and trembling from exhaustion.

'This is the last time we hunt together, Stark,' I say as we exit the cover of the trees into the open stretch of bronze field which would lead us home.  I feel Robb's frown settle on me. I only ever called him Stark when I was angry with him. He knew this. He pretended then that he did not.

'And how am I to beat you if this is the last time we hunt? Anyway, what else is there to do around here since you've no interest in girls?' He scoffed.

I stop walking, Robb a few steps later when he realises I'm not beside him. Turning to me he sees something on my face which causes a shadow to pass over his. Sparks of doubt inside the light blue of his eyes.

'What's the matter?' he asks, confusion colouring his eyes now.

'You missed that shot on purpose. You let me beat you.'

'Pah, I'd never let you beat me at anything, Snow.'  He turns from me.

'Liar!' I spit. 'You think I want your pity? You think I need it? Because I don't. Not from you, not from anyone!'

There's a second's pause before he turns back, smiling. 'The only thing I pity you for, Jon, is that you're so bloody ugly. But since there's nothing that can be done about that I don't see the point in holding it over you...'

I drop my kills on the grass and charge him, tackling him to the ground in a rough tumble. Robb grunts and flails while he tries to force me off, before hooking his legs about mine and flipping us over so that I'm beneath him.

'Alright, fine! I s'pose you're not that ugly, I mean, not if you squint,' he grins, squinting down at me. I roar with anger and copy his earlier move, curling my legs around him and pushing us both over so that I'm over him once more. He's strong and tries to topple me once more but my rage makes me stronger. When I have a clear shot I rear back my hand and punch him squarely on the face, causing him to cry out from a mixture of shock and pain. When he looks at me again the playfulness has been replaced with pure indignant fury.

'Don't do it again!' I snarl.

His face scrunches up, perplexed. 'I didn't do anything! You punched me!'

'You let me get the first kill! You've always let me get the first kill! I don't need you to let me beat you, Robb! I don't need it!'

He opens his mouth to protest, to disagree, but I raise my fist again in warning and he closes it.

'And don't lie to me either!" I growl. 'Not you! Anyone but you! I thought you were my... brother...' before I realise it the tears are squeezed from my eyes and Robb's bleeding face has smoothed from anger into something else. Shame. Apology. 

Breathing hard, I fall back off him onto the grass and turn my face to brush away the tears with my fist, shame engulfing me. I hit him. I hit my brother.

Some moments of us both breathing hard and laboured pass between us before Robb speaks.

'You are my brother, Jon,' he says quietly. When I turn he's sitting up, his knees pulled up and his hands between them pulling at clumps of grass absently. There's no tension in his body at all now. He looks only sad. 'I'm sorry,' he adds. 

With each breath the rage leaves my body, the anger smoothing away, softening the hardness inside.  Robb moves to stand first and comes toward me and reaches out his hand, his eyes easy and soft.  He did not even have it in him to hate me for hitting him. As the last of my anger fades it's replaced by a swell of love so great that it threatens to suffocate me, just as the hatred had done only a short time before.

I put my hand in his and let him pull me up from the grass, our eyes focussed intensely on the other. I reach down to lift my rabbit from the grass and sling my bow back across one shoulder, before moving to lift his, ashamed to see it split in two seperate parts where it had been crushed beneath him.

'You'll make me a new one,' he says, watching me inspect the snapped bow. I reach for my own and offer it out to him, guiltily. He takes it from me and smiles. 'That's the only free swing you get.' He says, rubbing his fingers lightly over his jaw, wincing slightly.

I straighten my stance and look him straight in the eye, lifting my chin up. 'Hit me back,' I say. 'I deserve it.'

He stares at me a moment, surprised, before nodding once.

'You do deserve it, aye. But so did I.'  He lets his words hang in the air a moment before flashing me one of his easy grins. 'Come on, last one back to the gates has to clean Old Nan's feet!' Then he turns and bolts off across the field.

Gods, I missed Robb.  I miss Arya and Bran and Rickon and my father too but sometimes I think I miss Robb more than anyone else.

Daenerys had never followed me out here into Aegon's Garden. It was as though some unspoken pact had been made between us that this was my place as much as the sky above the castle was hers.

Thoughts filled with home, I arrive at the wooden door which opens out onto the windy hillside atop the caves on the northern face of the island. I like to walk the length of it, to where a deep gash in the rock had created a great chasm all the way down to the sand, before turning back. It clears my head the way standing on top of The Wall often did.

Standing still by the lip of the chasm I turn east to see The Narrow Sea stretching towards the Free Cities, Slavers Bay and beyond. Turning to the south and then west where the green outline of the mainland could be seen today, the sky a muted grey but otherwise cloudless and clear. Turning last to the north where everything I know and fear lies in wait, I feel the slow creep of dread settle over me as it always does, it's heavy shadow like a death shroud. The first time I'd walked this route and looked around at the miles of water stretching out on all sides of me the idea had come to me, sudden and biting.

Dragonstone could remain entirely untouched by the horror of the dead. They could march past the Wall, all the way to the Neck and we would be safe from them.  This meant we could remove as many people as possible to the island; women, children, livestock, supplies, enough that we could repopulate the land again once we'd defeated them. We could use the island as a docking port to take more to the cities on the other side of The Narrow Sea. 

Or, if everything failed and we were unable to defeat them, then they could have the seven kingdoms and we could start again here. It was not an outcome I liked to consider but it would be possible. Dany would be safe. Sansa would be safe. The people I cared about could be safe.

I'd taken the idea to the council and the plans had been drawn up. Preparations made. Vague, exploratory letters sent across the sea to Slavers Bay and the Free Cities in the guise of creating opportunity and integration. Daenerys wrote that she wanted to bring all of her people together. We could save as many as we could simply by offering them new lives and land in the east. We needed only to decide on the right way to convince them of it without terrifying them with stories of the dead.

As the wind batters against my skin, slicing across my cheeks with icy fingers, a screech tears through the sky from high above, followed by a second, lifting my attention upwards to the sight of the dragons tearing across the grey sky. They had become a fixed feature in the air around Dragonstone, but they never failed to stun me into a stupor upon first sight of them.

Leaping and dancing through the clouds, their shadows rushing beneath them across the water like great underwater beasts, the way they seemed to sing to each other as they called out across the miles. Their magnificence and power was undeniable, and I could not help but view them as the great winged saviours of the realm for they had the potential to save many lives when the time came.

I watch, awed, as Drogon and Viserion race overhead and out across the sea, shattering the sound of the wind around me. Dany had taught me their names before we left Winterfell. The black beast she'd ridden to our wedding, her favourite I'd guessed, named Drogon for her first husband. The butter-scaled Viserion named (surprisingly) for her cruel brother Viserys, and Rhaegal, the shade of a forest doused in sunlight, for Rhaegar; the Targaryen prince who'd stolen away my father's sister and brought the realm to its knees.

Where was Rhaegal now? Why didn't he fly with his brothers?

I have my answer a moment later as a dark shadow falls upon me and the sound of slow beating wings rises up from the cliff at my back. Slow they may be, but the force of them still whips my cloak up and wraps it around my body. The dragon's shimmering golden eyes are trained on me and for a moment my blood turns to ice with fear.

Did he recognise me as the male who walked with Daenerys to greet them most mornings? I had to believe he did. Though did it matter, truly? He could still turn me to ash where I stand, no thought or conscience to the act at all. Dany swore they were intelligent beasts, that they could feel, could sense her sadness or happiness as well as any human could, but I was not convinced.

His wings slow to a stop as he settles his great feet onto the grass and lowers his head toward me, eyes blinking and nose twitching, curious.

Fear has no effect on them for everyone is afraid of them...

Everyone but you.

Everyone but me.

He shifts closer and then closer still so that the heat of his breath warms my wind-bitten skin. Curling his wings back against his body, he stretches his maw out toward me, his nostrils inhaling deeply.

I have known fear, have felt it slither and slide through my blood like a slow dark poison, but strangely, fear is not what I feel now. It's warmer than fear, it's more like a low murmur of anticipation and exhilaration. I'd always considered my death would be delivered by the dark king who controlled the dead, had always believed that our fates were entwined somehow, that perhaps he was the purpose the Red Witch had spoken of when she'd returned me. Perhaps I'd been wrong. Perhaps I would die here, now, by dragonfire.

As Rhaegal's breathing begins to slow, I feel my own do the same, my heart slowing along with it.  When he raises his head to full height I'm certain he's about to open his mouth and release the full fury of his fire upon me. I think briefly of my father - the moment he smiled at me and promised to tell me of my mother - and then of Dany, of how her eyes had looked like starlight and her skin had smelled of jasmine the night I first claimed her body. 

But Rheagal does not open his mouth and does not breath his fire, instead he lowers his head, this time all the way so that it rests on the grass before me. Then he makes a low keening noise —a soft rumble from somewhere deep inside his mammoth body—and gently nudges his great snout towards me. 

Without thinking, I move to slip off my glove and slowly reach out my hand to him, allowing him to scent me as I would a horse or dog. Transfixed, I watch the black slits of his eyes widen so that the ring of gold is almost entirely eclipsed with deepest onyx, and then carefully move to place my hand flat on the rough scaled flesh.

It is not unlike steel to the touch, but a living breathing kind of steel which feels alive beneath my fingers. Second, I notice the heat; the fire itself which lives and breathes beneath the surface. More curious than both however is the sound which comes from him as I smooth my fingers across his flesh; a dull rumble which at first sounds like the low warning growl of a wolf or dog.

It's only when I meet Rhaegal's eye again, and see the almost subservient look in them, that I realise what the noise is. Purring.

I'm not certain how long the encounter lasts before I catch a sliver of movement from the side of my eye. Davos stands some distance away, his mouth open in astonishment, his eyes too, as he drinks in the sight.

I take a final look at Rhaegal and step back slowly out of his reach, the dragon too shuffling backwards, his head still bowed low to the ground. He stretches out his wings and kicks up off the grass and back into the air above.  I watch in awe, smiling a little, as he uses his whole body to push higher into the sky and off into the direction of his brothers.

When I turn back to Davos he's moving toward me, cautious, as though I'm a stranger he does not recognise. 

'What in the name of The Seven was that?' He shakes his head and gazes off in the direction of Rheagal.

'I...have no idea.'

He nods, bringing his focus back to me. 'A ship from Slavers Bay docked at port this morning. Visitors for the Queen. They've just arrived in the Great Hall.'

Slavers Bay. It had to be in response to our resettlement requests.

Davos and I walk quickly back to the castle via the same route, through Aegon's Garden toward the wooden gate which led back through the eastern section of the castle and the central atrium toward The Great Hall. The two guards by the doors move to open them as we approach, bowing to me as I pass.

A group of four men stand with Dany and Tyrion at the foot of the stairs beneath The Great Chair, Missandei and Grey Worm a short distance away.  Tyrion sees us first and turns his body toward us, a strange look in his eyes which speaks of some great discomfort. Perhaps it was not going well?

Dany is deep in conversation with one of the men, her back turned fully to me and so it takes Tyrion's soft nudge of her arm to distract her.  A similarly uncomfortable look crosses her face as she turns to greet me, before she offers me a smile which does not reach all the way to her lavender eyes. 

'Jon, there you are,' she says. There's a stiffness in her body as she moves to create space between herself and the visitor to allow me to step into the gap.

I offer her guests a warm smile, drawing my gaze over the one who'd commanded her attention before my arrival. He's tall, taller than me, with a lithe frame and bright blue eyes which assess me keenly. He's wearing a Dothraki arakh on his left hip - which I don't like in such close proximity to Daenerys and so I narrow my gaze a little - and a smile on his mouth which is partially hidden by a nut-brown beard.

'Sorry, I didn't know we had visitors,' I explain. 'I came as soon as Davos informed me.'

'I too was not expecting them so soon,' says Dany, still smiling that same stiff smile at me. She flicks her eyes to the male on my right, then to Missandei, and then finally to me. 'Jon, these men were among my most loyal supporters. They sailed from Mereen to congratulate me on my victories.'

Mereen. Mereen. The realisation is immediate, a slice of understanding across my chest. I turn to him slowly as it draws over me like a veil being lifted.

'And on your marriage, Khaleesi, and on your marriage —of which we have just this moment become aware.' He smiles at her leisurely and slow, his gaze almost greedy with longing. When his attention finally slides to me, it does so without care that I've observed his clear and unbridled desire for my wife. 'Daario Naharis,' he offers, inclining his head no more than a fraction. 'We have heard.. well... nothing about you across the Narrow Sea,' he admits with a smirk. 'but still, let me congratulate on claiming the greatest beauty on earth as your wife. Tell me, what is it we are to call you? Father of Dragons?' He chuckles, glancing at his men.

I feel my fists curl and my jaw clench tight.

'Your Grace,' I tell him, a note of warning in my voice. 'You will call me Your Grace.'