Chapter Text
You could stay here forever
& be tired of how tired you are
for a very long time
Talk about it over coffee with someone you call your friend
hug them with lips so close
to the hair that skirts their shoulder
you can taste how the sun
has bleached them
It’s a violent thing to be alive
devin kelly, look at what i'm looking at
The boy with the wolf eyes finds them at the end of the world.
She is the first one to see him in the violet darkness of the manse, the air heavy with the scent of overripe fruit and the tangy brine of the sea. He stands silently in the foyer, the hood of his dark cloak, travel-stained and crusted with sea salt, still raised to obscure his features. Beyond the open foyer, the sun casts molten bronze shadows onto broken and cracked columns, and the cries of the black-eyed gulls carve sorrowful songs into the shores here at world’s end. Still too, there is the thunder of the sea.
Her bare feet are silent on the stone floor as she pauses, uncertain.
Strangers are plenty here in the cities of the Jade Sea, but visitors are more rare in this quiet house along the shore with its doors made of seashells and tin. When the sun melts into the green sea and the moon ushers along its cutthroats and spies, the door closes, and the night belongs to books and wine and quiet conversation amongst dragons long since forgotten. It does not make sense for a strange boy to be here now.
After a moment of tense silence, he half-turns to her, long-fingered hands moving to lower his hood. The setting sun rains gold into the young man’s long dark hair and into strange grey eyes that peer at her from beneath the tiled eaves. He is tall and handsome in a way that seems familiar—if she passed him on the cobbled streets of the city, she might find herself staring for a second—a moment, a heartbeat—too long. But there is something predatory about his graceful movements too. Even though he only stares at her quietly, her fingers twitch toward the dragonsteel dagger at her hip, hidden beneath a sandsilk robe of seafoam and gold.
Here in the manse, she has rarely been afraid. Perhaps there is something like a prison about the city at the end of the world, but it is safer than the life she once knew—a girl-child hunkered down in dark alleys, a brother protecting her until he too was gone. Then, a miracle. Then, a journey and safety and a reunion she never thought to have. It is safer to be surrounded by her gaolers. It is safer to not exist.
Yet even dynasties must rise again. Debts, after all, must be paid.
The young man holds up his hands, as though in surrender. He speaks, but the language is strange and not one she hears often in the manse or the city by the sea. She understands it, but she wonders why someone else from the Sunset Kingdoms is here. She studies his face again—the long features, the serious brow, a flash of bright color in his brown hair. Is he a friend of Ser Jorah’s or Ser Barristan’s or Lord Jon's? It seems unlikely—he looks to be far too young to be a peer with those older men, perhaps of an age with herself and her niece and her nephew.
When she doesn’t respond, the strange boy frowns. Then, carefully, slowly, and in the tongue she has spoken for as long as she can remember, he asks, “Is this the house of the dragons?”
Does she answer this? Who is this boy?
But before she can reply, it is her niece’s voice that rings out from behind her.
“Wolves are not welcome here, ser.”
Then Princess Rhaenys Targaryen sweeps into the foyer, as lovely and delicate and dark-eyed as her mother had been, gold at her throat and in her hair and along her fingers, radiant sunshine itself. An old black tom trots after her, green eyes affixed to the stranger as it hisses a warning, a behemoth in miniature. Her niece lays a gentle hand on her arm and draws her back, firm, resolute. It is not in Rhaenys to be a warrior, but her heart shields her brother and her aunt with a fierceness that belies her size.
As she steps back, it is only then that she sees some of the truth in her niece’s words. At the boy’s hip, there is a longsword with a wolf-headed pommel, its red eyes turned fiery in the quickly falling dusk. But the boy’s moves themselves are lupine, and she finds herself both unsettled and intrigued.
The young man sighs. He looks sad.
“I came looking for you.” He pauses, that peculiar grey gaze falling from Rhaenys to her. She takes in a breath, unsteadied by the intensity in those stormy depths. “Lyanna Stark was my mother.”
And then Daenerys Targaryen knows exactly who this boy is.
In the years after the Rebellion, the dragons scattered.
It is no wonder, with madness looming in the golden city. Only a mother’s intuition, driven by her fear, had found a way to send her children to a lonely obsidian island when news came from the Trident. The young woman had borne the brunt of the king’s rage through her tears and pleas, too, but in the end, they were safe.
In the end, it made no difference. Death came to the prince and the princess, to the king and the queen, and countless more who dared stand for the crown. Once the gates had been opened and blood filled the halls of the great red castle, only then did the dark, vengeful shadows of the new rulers of the realm fall onto the island. Only then did the word dragonspawn splinter the air, crashing against the black cliffs like the waves of the sea, a dynasty brought to its knees in a violent moment.
And then, in the night, in the darkness, the children vanished too. Princes and princesses, swallowed up by the war, gone before anyone knew to even look toward the sea. The loyal followed after them, names already sullied with disrepute, but their oaths meant more than their reputations.
But that was all a very long time ago.
And some stories do not end.
The moon rises.
Silver cascades into the room in a waterfall of star-kissed light, bringing with it the distant rumble of the sea. The low fire in the hearth does little to dissuade the shadows whispering over the rug-strewn floors, and it is by moonlight that nimble hands dance through Daenerys’s pale hair.
She sits on her niece’s bed while the older girl gently plaits her hair with tiny silver cuffs, the old black tom a void of rumbling fur amongst the sleeping silks. The sea breeze drifting in from the open doors is warm and damp against her skin, and carries the bracing scent of driftwood and sulphur, the blue world at its crashing end. She tries not to think of fire and she tries not to think of the boy, but his name sits between the two young women like an ill omen—that, and all of the destruction his presence promises to bring. Her heart should be stone after all of these years in exile, and yet…
“What will we tell Aegon?” Daenerys finally asks. In her hair, her niece’s fingers go still.
“The truth, I suppose.”
It is rare to hear the other young woman sound so uncertain. At three-and-twenty, Rhaenys is a woman grown, quiet and seemingly world-weary despite their confinement, the unattainable object of desire of so many men here in the city by the sea. While they have all come from far-flung lands to cling to each other here at the edge of the world, it is Rhaenys who acts as their protector, perhaps more so than the knights who have followed them to the edge. She is the eldest of the remaining dragons, and Daenerys knows that it is a responsibility she does not take lightly.
But Daenerys is younger than even her nephew, and her heart, despite its caution, cannot quell its curiosity. The boy with the wolf eyes seemed lost and oddly lonely, and when the old knight took away his sword and his knives, the young man had not put up a fight. It is Ser Barristan, though, who had taken one look at the boy named Jon and seen the dead dragon prince in his features.
“A ghost,” the old knight had said, and his voice carried with it the memory of the dynasty that lies broken at the feet of children too young to remember it.
There is a part of Daenerys that knows that there are players in the great game who would love nothing more than to use the Targaryen children as pawns for a power grab. She knows the weight of her name, can feel it burning through her blood some days. It is what they are destined to do, after all. With fire and blood, they will take back what is theirs.
“I don’t think he is here to hurt us,” Daenerys finally says, and she can hear her niece sigh.
“We cannot trust him, Dany. He is a wolf.”
Her brother once told her about the viciousness of the wolves. Those are nightmares that had been recounted in the foreign rooms and alleys, before the world had shifted and she’d escaped to the ends of it. But her brother is dead, and the son of Lyanna Stark is here. She does not think he is untrustworthy, and she says so. Why would Rhaegar’s other son have risked the journey if he meant to do them harm?
Rhaenys only smiles.
“I’m sure Father once thought the same.”
The princes and princesses had been spirited across Essos, divided and, as their guardians hoped, safer because of it. A sharp burst of anger had arisen between those loyal men when it came to who would protect the dragon heir, but eventually, time forced their separation nonetheless.
Ser Barristan Selmy, once recovered from his wounds on the Trident, fled south with the princess Rhaenys and the tiny black kitten she refused to be parted from, the rage of the new stag king following after him. Lord Jon Connington vanished into the Free Cities with the heir to the throne at his side, already weaving a story of lies around his fate and his name. In Braavos, the prince’s brother and sister were taken under the wing of merchants and the bear knight, shielded from the crown’s watchful eyes by the walls of wealth.
The last of the dragons were gone and forgotten, their names the only remaining legacy of a once great dynasty.
And to the north, a young wolf had brought home a grey-eyed babe, the last remaining vestige of the war. His heart had been swollen with sorrow and loss and with a devastating secret. He had given the boy the name of a bastard, and he had hoped and prayed it would be enough to keep the prince’s son—his sister’s child—safe.
But that was all a very long time ago.
And some secrets are not meant to be kept.
Daenerys watches the boy with the wolf eyes from the hall outside his room.
She knows that she should have one of the many guardians who have followed them into exile with her. At seven-and-ten, she is not some foolish little girl who thinks that she is ever safe in the presence of unknown men, even one related to her by blood. Parts of her have been sharpened through the years, from loss and disappointment and the knowledge that home is a place beyond her grasp and understanding. Yet there is something about this young man with his strange grey eyes that causes her to hold caution at bay, if only for a moment.
He is looking out the window at the iron-shattered sea and the foaming crash of the deep, the grey evening casting long dark shadows across the limestone floor. Despite the dagger that still hangs at her hip, she doubts it would be of much use if her curiosity proved to be ill-placed—the young man is a head and a half taller than she is.
She studies him for a long time as he watches the sea. It is he who is the first one to break the silence, shattering it the same way the waves themselves shatter the night.
“Are you here to kill me, princess?”
His voice is not mocking. He only sounds tired. She balks.
“No,” she replies. “I would like answers. You arrive like a ghost to our manse, name yourself a lost son of my brother’s, and refuse to tell more of your story.”
He half turns to her, as he did all those days ago in the foyer beneath the star-splattered sky and the pearl tiles. Shadows play across his face, but those grey eyes watch her from the darkness as she studies him. There is that wink of bright color from within his hair that is immediately swallowed by the dark locks. His black clothes are worn, but finely made and still crusted with salt and travel along the thickly-woven hems. At his side, his right hand, discolored with burn scars, flexes, almost as though he is nervous—but that can’t be. Why would he be nervous of her?
She steps a little closer to the door of his room. He does not move away from the window; in fact, he only seems to sink further against the sill, the cool sea breeze tangling in his hair. She can taste the salt and the brine on her lips, the floor cold and steady against her bare feet.
“It doesn’t matter,” the boy finally says quietly.
“Of course it matters.”
“My story is without relevance, princess.” He shakes his head. “It is best that it remains that way, for your safety and mine.”
Then, those almond-shaped eyes flit away from her, his attention returned once again to the roar of the distant breakers. She wants to step into the room, to grab him by the arm and turn him to face her. But she remains still, with only the lone cry of a black-eyed gull piercing the silence between them. He says nothing more, and she finds that she can pull no words from within her to demand what he is unwilling to give—this boy, this stranger, this enigma.
When she finally slips away back into the salt-crusted shadows of the manse, she wonders what might cause a wolf to flee so far from his den.
The dragon princess is gifted the three stone eggs as payment for something she cannot even begin to conceive. The merchants tell her that it is only right that a child of Valyria, a descendant of the famed dragonriders of ancient times, has the decorative emblems of her House, though the centuries have turned them into little more than ornamental rocks.
The merchants speak of debts, and though the dragon princess is but a girl when she receives the gift, she cannot help but wonder what price might ever be so high. At night, in the blazing heat of her room, she stares at the three eggs in their brazier and thinks that these are gifts best suited to others who might have worn crowns.
When the princess finds the other dragons though, she wraps the stones in crimson silk and memory and lets them rest in the depths of the hearth at the end of the world. The only dragons she will know are those made of cloth and sticks, the last flicker of flame in her blood and the blood of her family. It does little good to imagine a world where beasts awaken from the fires themselves and consume the world with blood and ancient rage.
After all, that was a very long time ago.
And some monsters must remain sleeping.
When the boy-dragon returns from the green city in the mountains, his usual bright humor is tempered by the story of the young man with the wolf eyes.
His guardian, a man with sad eyes and hair the color of the sunrise over the salt-speckled cliffs along the shore, meets with their guest briefly. It is the spasm of pain in his eyes a few moments later that confirms what they have already suspected—this boy must share their blood. The griffin lord says as much, quietly noting that though his coloring belongs to the wolves, it is the long-dead dragon prince who stares out at him from those grey eyes.
The boy-dragon is thoughtful as they meet amongst the pillows strewn across the stone floor of his room, and Daenerys watches as curiosity and laughter and all the joyful things of the world dance across his face. Her own lips burn with salt and smoke and garlic, fingers slick with lemon and sage-flecked butter as they slip against the blue-speckled shells of the miniature oysters littering the shared platter of food between them. She curls against her niece, who feeds tiny silver fish to the black cat sitting like a lord amongst commoners.
“If the she-wolf’s son has found us, it won’t be long before the war does too,” Prince Aegon Targaryen finally admits, a corner of his mouth flicking upward in amusement at the promise of destiny. His fingers are marked with calluses in a way his heart and his spirit are not. “It must be soon.”
“Do not dream of war,” Rhaenys warns with a frown. With Viserys no longer anything but ash on the westward wind, it is she who best remembers the decadent city and the golden world before it had been lost to war and death. Her stories are broken, cobwebbed things, told through the eyes of a child who has forgotten so much. The decades are not kind to memory, to horror, to grief. “It has brought our family nothing but sorrow.”
“It has brought our family glory. When we had dragons…”
“The dragons are dead. Let them rest for once.”
Her brother pauses.
“In my dreams…” He trails off, uncharacteristically sober, as both his sister and his aunt fall quiet, both knowing the sorts of dreams the young man has. He speaks of them rarely, the quiet knowing of the impossible enough to shutter this curse in his blood. The dragon prince, they know, once had these dreams, too. “In my dreams, I see snow. And fire, too. There is a great lake surrounded by the armies of men, but there are corpses standing in their midst. The waters hold a thousand dead things.”
“That might mean anything.”
“It means nothing good if we don’t act.”
Daenerys is silent, as she always is when they discuss a place that might have been home. She had been born on Dragonstone, months and months after her brother fell on the Trident—there is no home for her to remember. Her first memories are of lemon trees and red doors in the great city of Braavos, before even that shine too had dulled. These lands beyond the sea are a mystery to her, framed only by the scaffolding of her niece’s memories. Even Aegon can only recall faint impressions of the young Dornish princess—kind dark eyes, the smell of summer lilies, the whisper of a lullaby.
As her niece and her nephew argue about the illusion of war, Daenerys thinks of the young man with the wolf eyes. He knows more of the Sunset Kingdoms than any of them. Mayhaps he might be able to tell them of the shadow that the stag king has cast on the realm, and whether or not the people cry for the dragons they have exiled. She does not think it is likely—people, she has long discovered, have terribly short memories—but she would like to hear of it.
She says as much, and the children of the dragon prince trade looks. It is Rhaenys who looks at her pityingly.
“Do you not think,” she asks quietly, “that this Jon Snow is part of the Spider’s web?”
“We’re all part of the web,” Daenerys points out, ignoring the sharp twinge of something in her belly at the boy’s name. “If he is here, he could only have found us thanks to Varys. For whatever reason, they want us together.”
“The others said the same, but they’re cautious.” Aegon reaches for another oyster. He peers at it as though it holds all the answers to the world. “We’ve known this was coming since we were children. Why should we balk now? He is Father’s son, too. We are stronger if we show that dragons are not easily conquered. If the stag king is the monster they say he is…”
“We can ask him,” Daenerys suggests. “Jon Snow. We can ask what he knows of the Sunset Kingdoms.”
Neither Rhaenys nor Aegon can argue that. Aegon looks pleased, as though he is the one to have suggested it, though even Daenerys sees that his dreams scar his expression. But in the princess’s dark eyes, there is only a sharp warning.
Be careful, little Dany.
Be careful.
The city by the sea is ruled by a god-emperor who seems unaware that there are dragons living along the emerald shores. Foreigners come and go here, as foreigners brought by trade and travel and adventure tend to do, but the name Targaryen means nothing to him. Stories have been told of the Doom, even to the farthest reaches of the world, yet when it comes to civil wars burning in the present, past horror is of little consequence.
Anyone can lose their name in the city. The sloping tiled roofs and the red columned courtyards create a labyrinth of an old city, an ancient civilization. From the backs of wagons filled with woven baskets of rice and garlic, merchants hock their wares in a melodic tongue. Black-eyed children chase gold-eyed cats through alleys draped with lanterns. Sun-bronzed young men pull paler young men in rickshaws both ornate and rusted. Old women sit on stone porches, barefoot and wrinkled beneath their wide straw hats, judging with fathomless eyes every passerby.
Everywhere, there is the smell of the sea.
No one pays any mind to the dragons who live by the coast. They have names that do not fit comfortably on the tongues of the people whose bones are shale and whose blood is saltwater. Perhaps the moonstone hair of the boy and the younger girl is peculiar in a city with black and brown and russet. Perhaps the eldest girl’s dusty skin is not the same bronze as those who toil in the fields. It is no matter. Dragons mean nothing to them.
After all, that story ended a long time ago.
And the western dragons vanished into flame and ash.
“Tell me your story.”
The young man looks up from the book he is reading as she enters his room uninvited. She holds a plate near to overflowing with blue-veined cheeses, honeyed figs, colorful jellies in painted dishes, and glossy pastries stuffed with red bean paste. Her dagger is a cold presence at her side, and out of the corner of her eye, she can see light catch on its curved grip. She knows the boy sees it too, especially as she lowers herself down onto the floor next to him, legs tucked beneath her.
“You’re bold, princess.”
“And I want to hear your story,” she says, reaching forward to lift his book from his hands, replacing it with a pastry (their fingers brush, and she tries to pretend there isn’t a thrill within her at the danger). He seems uncertain, though his confusion is tempered by the slight crinkle of amusement at the corner of his grey eyes. “Our guardians are wary of your intentions. My niece and my nephew do not trust you, even if you are their brother. I want to hear why you would risk such suspicion.”
This is the nearest she’s ever been to him. This close, she can see the faded scars across his face, as though some great bird of prey raked snow from his brow to his cheek. His dark hair falls loosely to his shoulders, half pulled back into a single plait.
It is only then that she can see the source of curiosity that she has had since his arrival, that wink of bright color in his hair. There is another thin braid just behind his ear, woven with a leather string and a handful of beads, the colors of ice and snow. It is customary, she recalls from stories the bear knight told her of families descended from the First Men, for them to wear their hair in such a way. It reminds her of bells and sorrow beneath a hot blue sky, the wind sharp with blood as it weaves through fields of high yellow grass.
She almost reaches out to touch the beads, to see if she can graze her fingers across winter itself, but stops, curling her fingers into her fist. Instead, she says with some levity in her voice, “You really are a northerner, through and through.”
“I am too much a northerner, then?” He is still turning the pastry over in his hands. When he looks up though, his eyes seem to catch on her face, and she thinks she sees his jaw clench against a thought, against a word, against an exhale. There is heat in her cheeks, and she curses her foolishness.
It is not as though she has never heard the whispers in the city by the sea. Though the outright stares have long since passed, worn down by the incessant pressure of years before, there is no mistaking the crimson flush of lust that still swims in the undercurrent of people’s gazes when they see the children of the dragons. Her niece and her nephew are like the night and the day in their coloring, though they share a ghost’s features. Daenerys herself has been called even more beautiful than her niece, though she has always been unsure what to make of the compliments.
The unspoken appreciation in the young man’s eyes, however, is enough to burn. She looks away.
“You have a northern bastard’s name, not a dragon’s.”
“Ah.” He frowns. “My fath— my uncle likely assumed that giving me a Targaryen name was not wise. It was better no one knew whose son I was.”
Daenerys narrows her eyes.
“And he knows you’re here? This uncle who gave you a bastard’s name?”
The smile she receives in return is small and sad.
“He was killed many years ago.”
Oh.
“I’m sorry.” The words fall past her lips before she can think to stop them. Despite the boy’s surprised look, she realizes that she means the words. “I think it’s a terrible thing to lose someone you love. Eddard Stark might be one of the reasons we live in exile, but I do not celebrate his death. He was a father to you, after all. He kept you safe. That is a good thing, is it not?”
“You don’t know me, princess.”
I’d like to.
But Daenerys does not say that.
She thinks Rhaenys may have been right to worry.
It has always been expected that they will return for their family’s throne one day. It is the story that their guardians tell them when they recall the days of the great Targaryen dynasty. Theirs, they have been told, is a terrible destiny, yes, but one that might be better for the realm than the rule of stags and lions. It is, sometimes, a horrible thing to tell children who cannot remember what was, but it is in their thoughts all the same. The city at the end of the world holds many secrets, but it is also a shield—from the past, from truth, from all the great things that lurk just beyond the horizon, swallowing the setting sun.
There are other stories, too, of things darker and more terrible in the far north. Of giants and dead things in the water and silent fae-like creatures whose star-bright eyes promise death and winter.
Those stories might have once been true to some children, but they were told a long time ago.
And what was dead cannot live again.
She and Rhaenys watch as the boys spar with Ser Barristan.
“Do you believe in the tales of the Night’s Watch?” Daenerys asks, her finger looping around a delicate chain of silver at her neck. Sometimes, the gaze of the young man with the wolf’s eyes flickers over to her, his gaze drawn to the pale skin at her throat, and she pretends not to notice, though she can taste her heartbeat on her tongue. “Do you think what he says is true?”
“You shouldn’t let yourself be so taken with him,” Rhaenys chides. Her own fingers dance over the steel of an ornate knife, the whetstone a shadow in her elegant but steady grip. “He is still more wolf than dragon.”
“Aegon likes him.”
“Aegon is eager to have another boy his age as a drinking companion.” Her niece’s tone is dismissive. “He has always liked shiny things to collect.”
This is true. The boy who would have been and still might yet be heir to the throne is a laughing sort, given to bright smiles and easy forgiveness. He is carefree with his heart, and perhaps that is why it longs for war and bloodshed—a heart that so easily bleeds for others must crave the violence of others’ hearts being torn open. She sees it now in the way his twilight-bright eyes darken as his sword clashes with his brother’s. It is already such a violent thing to be alive; it makes sense that he’d crave an illicit affair with death.
“You do not like him, then.”
“He is Father’s son. I suppose I must have some love for him.” Still, those dark serpent eyes narrow. “But you must be wary, Dany. We do not have many weaknesses, but the wolves are one of them.”
Daenerys looks back over at the boy with the grey eyes. He moves like a ghost. Across the way, she sees the way the griffin lord watches him. There is hunger and longing in the man’s eyes.
“I only wish to know more about this throne we are to conquer soon.”
Rhaenys’s hands still.
“Make sure that is all it is.”
Some days, she brings a cyvasse board to his room (he is a poor player, but a fast learner). Other days, she brings a platter of sweetmeats and a pitcher of wine (he cares for thick northern ales, pursing his lips at the plum-rich reds she pours). On rare occasions, she brings nothing but her curiosity, bare feet tucked beneath her as she sits on the edge of his bed, and asks him to tell her of a faraway kingdom.
He obliges with that quiet smile of his, but when she tries to find out more about him, he shies away. His answers, curt and vague, are reluctantly given. It makes her fear that perhaps Rhaenys was right, that he truly is here to do them harm. He twists her questions, his head tilting to the side as she finds herself answering stories about herself instead, before she realizes the trick.
Eventually, they both stop asking about each other’s past. Those stories died long ago.
And it is safer to let those ghosts haunt and lie.
“Isn’t it true that deserters of the Night’s Watch are executed?”
Daenerys wishes that Aegon had not asked that, as the knight, the bear, and the griffin lord trade looks. Aegon is balancing the weight of the wolf sword in his hands—after all these weeks, it still has not been returned to their guest—and he looks thoughtful and defiant. Daenerys knows enough about Valyrian steel to realize how valuable this sword is. She hopes that her nephew does not mean to claim it as his own—she feels oddly defensive of it on the grey-eyed young man’s behalf.
“That’s true,” Ser Barristan allows. “But this is your brother. He is the prince’s son, just as you are.”
“So he is,” Aegon agrees, though there is a peculiar light in his violet eyes. Daenerys does not like it.
“When you’re king, you’ll acknowledge him,” she reminds him. “He is one of us. He’s a Targaryen.”
Rhaenys purses her lips.
“His blood is that of the dragon, but I think he will always be a wolf.” She watches Daenerys carefully. “Your heart is too soft on him.”
“I think we’re stronger together than we are apart.”
To her surprise, Aegon nods.
“I would have him by our side when we take back the throne.”
Yet for some reason, this does not make Daenerys feel any better.
Once, many years ago, the bear knight kissed her. He professed his love and desire for her, and she could see desperation in his eyes, and hope.
She rebuked him.
She loves him, too, but not in the way a woman loves a man. She will always be thankful to him, considers him one of her dearest friends. But there is no desire in her for the man. She might have expected it instead for her long-dead brother or for Aegon, whose moon-silver hair shines as bright as hers. That is the way of their family, after all.
But at night, when her mind drifts in the darkness in that lull between wakefulness and dreams, and her hand wanders to the sweet, warm spot between her legs—touching, touching, touching—it is not their ghostly kisses she imagines on her pin-prickled skin. It is not their hands she fantasizes slipping down her curves. It is not their lips or their teeth scraping the sensitive peaks of her breasts, ravishing her until she is weeping from pleasure.
When she unravels beneath her own touch, she wonders if she is a foolish girl after all.
“Mercenaries are loyal to gold, not to a cause.”
While their guardians speak of the inevitable come true, of finally acting to take back the throne of the dragons through fire and blood (plans and strategies entangled in the webs of Spiders and cheesemongers), Daenerys speaks with caution. She sits at the table, listening to men older than her speak of the wars to come.
She is loath to condone any part of the plan. She has become used to this city at the end of the world. She is familiar with the cold spray of saltwater on her face and the cool sand between her toes. She speaks the language at world’s end nearly as fluently as the tongue of the dragonriders. Despite all of their stories, despite all of their longing, there is no part of her heart that wishes for a home she has never known.
“Princess…”
“Numbers mean nothing if we do not have allies,” her niece agrees, giving Daenerys a nod. “If we arrive in the Sunset Kingdoms, will the people who once supported our father support us?”
“There are other schemes in motion to ensure that they will.”
Schemes. Daenerys hates the word. But it causes all eyes to turn toward the grey-eyed young man. He has been silent throughout this entire conversation, a ghost on the edge, a memory, a shadow. News from the Sunset Kingdoms comes rarely to them here in the city by the sea, and he must know it better than any of them who have been gone for decades now.
They still do not entirely trust him, Daenerys knows. Even if Rhaenys has warmed to him, even if Aegon’s rapport with him burns hot and sudden as all of his loves and friendships do, no one quite knows what to make of this wolf amongst dragons. He is still too much of a Stark for their liking.
But he says, “The realm is at war after King Robert’s death. If you wish to strike, there would be no better time.”
He neither argues for nor against moving against the realm, moving against the shattered remnants of his family.
When the conversation continues to roll over them like a storm, she glances his way again. His attention is on the sea just beyond the black-draped windows, a troubled light in his grey eyes that she suspects has nothing to do with the looming war. She wants to ask him about it, but she suspects he will only entertain her with unsatisfactory answers. It is a touch, a breath, a whisper of the chasm that settles between them.
Yet, when she lays her head down that night, watching shadows skitter across the stone dragon eggs in her room, she thinks that anyone can build a bridge.
And a brave person can cross any abyss.
She is sitting along the shore when he joins her.
The easterly wind has sprayed her hair with sea salt and the foaming wash of the tide, her toes buried deep in the cooling sand. The sun is little more than a sliver of molten gold melting along her spine, gilding her pale hair. She has drawn her knees to her chest, letting the pale blue silks of her summer robe ward off the cold breath of twilight. Her fingers tangle in the silver chain at her neck.
“You don’t want to leave the city,” the young man with the wolf eyes says as he settles into the sand next to her. Out of the corner of her eye, she can see the breeze gently tossing his dark hair away from his handsome face. She does not turn to look.
“It is not all I’ve ever known,” she admits, “but there is peace here. There promises to be no peace once we travel west.”
“So you want peace.”
“I want…” She stops, her words caught up in a net. She can taste the green foam of the sea on her lips, the hoarfrost of the storm lacing across her skin. “It does not matter.”
“It should.”
“I am Rhaegar’s sister.” The words are silt on her tongue. “The crown will never pass to me. Why should I decide the destiny of my family?”
“Not theirs,” Jon reminds her. “Yours.”
“You are kind to say that, but Aegon was right. We are stronger together than we are apart.”
“‘When the snows fall, and the white winds blow, the lone wolf dies, but the pack survives.’” Daenerys looks askance at him, surprised. There is a faint ghostly smile on his lips. “It is something my father reminded us of often. I think Aegon isn’t wrong to say it. Once we all left Winterfell…”
He trails off then, the past strangling his words into submission. She stares at him for some time before she asks, “You’ve lost them.”
His answer is silence. The silence carries the weight of grief.
This she can understand, though perhaps not in a way she can tell him. He might think that she only grieves for the power and influence her family once had, a dynasty lying in ruins across a black sea. But she thinks of a place called home, a brother she might have loved more if loss hadn’t turned him cruel, of the soft-spoken mother whose final breath caught in Daenerys’s first. It is a loss of ghosts, of things she never knew, a longing for the unknown and the unspoken. And what are ghosts to wolves?
Still, she finds herself entangling her fingers with his in the sand.
“Perhaps what I want…”
She cannot speak it aloud. She shouldn’t.
But her mouth is on his before she can commit a punctuation to a clause.
It is not surprising that in the months he has been here, she would taste the brine of the sea on his tongue. But there is a sharpness there, too, something that reminds her of night-cloaked winters and the wild places of ancient hunts. Here, there is danger and cold and death—but it is an intoxicating hunger rather than fear, that whisper of want driven by weeks of longing, of curiosity, of need. There is no warning in the abyss, no hesitation in his touch, and she is glad of it.
His hands are steady but gentle against her arm, her shoulder, fingers grazing the slope of her neck and her jaw. She shivers, the sandsilk of her robe suddenly too thin, chafing against her skin. Every breath tastes of urgency, of knowing that this world must end. She wants to rage against it, and she wants to draw herself down into the green deep with him.
Daenerys thinks she would drown if she could drown with him.
She draws him down against the cresting dunes, letting the roar of her heartbeat drown out the crash of the sea. His body is warm and solid against hers, a reassuring weight, and she thinks she might curse herself for all of her caution. Perhaps she is nothing more than a foolish girl, but it is lonely here at the edge of the world. Soon her world will become nothing but darkness and bloodshed, and she does not think it is wrong to indulge in something she wants before it does.
A soft sigh escapes her lips at the thought, and it seems enough to silence the world.
He draws away first, the movement jerky, those grey wolf eyes wide. He suddenly seems unsure, unmoored, a ship cast out to sea. His dark hair falls around his face like a sheet, brushing her skin, hiding the world around them away.
“I—”
But the words are lost to the easterly wind. He retreats, his expression a mask, and then he stands and is gone.
Regret.
She takes in a breath, staring up at the sky. The stars have winked out.
There is a storm coming.
At the end of the world, it is not strange to find a lover to soothe away the storm of the sea or the algae-slick obsidian cliffs around a heart.
Rhaenys has taken a few lovers in the years that have resided in the city by the sea, coal-eyed young men enraptured with her cinnamon skin and her long dark hair split by a blaze of silver. Aegon has taken more than a few to warm his bed, men and women and everyone in between, speaking tongues against the prince’s skin as though they might engrave secrets onto his bones with their teeth. The guardians say nothing, though their expressions advise caution.
Daenerys is not as open as her niece and her nephew. She is no maid, but the nightly pleasures that Rhaenys sometimes and Aegon often seek are not something that Daenerys herself is interested in. The two men she has taken to bed have both been adequate, though she remembers not being able to understand the need to bring warmth—salt-slick skin and strangely tangled limbs and moist breath against her ear—into the secret places of her heart.
But then the boy with the wolf eyes arrives beneath a bevy of stars.
And suddenly desire no longer seems such a foreign thing.
They will leave in three moons’ turns.
Daenerys grieves a life already lost to her.
And the boy avoids her.
Rhaenys is concerned by the silence lingering between her aunt and her half-brother.
“What has happened between you two?” the young woman asks, dark eyes silver bright in the green darkness of the night. Daenerys’s fingers trip in her own pale braid, memory of ship knots and cords falling away as the question leeches away rote confidence.
“Wolves fall silent sometimes,” she answers, hoping that her niece will not pry any further. She cannot think of the way the young man pulled away from her, an indecipherable mask clouding his expression as he fled. “It is their nature.”
Rhaenys does not look convinced. But the old black tom in her lap begins nipping at her fingers, sniffing for food, and the conversation peels away like the sinking tide.
Aegon is confused by the silence lingering between his aunt and his half-brother.
“You can’t possibly be angry with him,” the young man muses, twilight eyes flitting between Daenerys and the shadow of his brother across the backshore. Daenerys tries not to let her fingers tense along her nephew’s arm, picking her way across the cluster of pebbles and discarded shells of a myriad of tidal crabs.
“He keeps his secrets,” she answers, hoping that her nephew will understand the truth in the unspoken, that she has pried more answers from the boy than anyone. “When he wants to trust us more, he will.”
Aegon only frowns. But his eyes catch on the crashing breakers and the fishing skiffs just beyond the sandbar, sun-weathered faces turned toward the city, and the conversation skitters away like the silver minnows that have escaped the fishermen’s nets.
The sudden storm that rages from down the mountains turns the sea white with fury, its foaming maw crashing against the barnacle-peppered ships heaving their way towards the safety of the city’s docks. In a tumultuous roar, the storm swallows the day in a grey haze. The city at the end of the world falls silent, hushed by the sheets of rain that turn the winding streets into rivers and drain color from the painted columns. Even the gold-eyed cats vanish into warm, dry hovels, waiting in displeasure until the rain with its violent, stentorian howling passes.
Daenerys watches from her bedchamber in the manse, the staccato beat of rain against sea-glass windows a familiar song she knows she must soon leave behind. Her room pulses with heat, wax pooling beneath the iron plates of dozens of candles, the braziers glowing softly with red embers and flame. In the shifting shadow of the room, she sees all that she knows, all that she loves, and wonders if she will ever find anything like it across another sea, in the middle of the world instead of at the end of it.
She wonders if it will ever feel like a place she might call home.
“Princess.”
The young man’s voice takes her off guard, and she looks up from her book in surprise to see him standing in the hall just beyond her door, all grey shadow and winter darkness. She still cannot read his expression, but she can see the way hesitation grips his body, taut as the mooring lines on the ships facing the storm. Those strange grey eyes find hers before they drift to the stone dragon eggs settled in the embers of a large brazier.
“Are you here to apologize?” she immediately questions, cursing her tongue for its sharpness. Her hurt from his rejection still stings even now, a fortnight later. “You were cruel.”
The young man frowns.
“I…did not mean to be,” he admits. “You’re just…”
He falls silent, and she places her book down on the glass-tiled table next to her chair, the wicker creaking as she rises.
“I am your blood. That is what bothers you.”
“Yes. No.” His frown deepens. “You’re a storm, princess.”
“And have you not weathered storms before?” He is perplexing, this young man. A Stark and a Targaryen. An honorable brother of the Night’s Watch and a deserter. Someone who has traveled to the ends of the earth for the truth, and someone who so seldom reveals truths of his own. “The Spider says we are to trust you. Rhaenys has warmed to you. Aegon likes you. Even Ser Jorah and Lord Connington have allowed for you. Ser Barristan—”
“And you?” The question shutters her words, as does that intense grey gaze. “Have you allowed for me?”
She stares at him. Then she scowls, feeling the thunder in her heart.
“I don’t allow for intransigent men who barge into my chambers uninvited.”
“If only your doors were as firm as your words,” comes the shrugged reply.
And suddenly Daenerys wishes that he had not come here at all, that he had stayed in that cold, dismal place a whole world away—unknown and unknowable. It is clear that Rhaenys was right, that the winter storm that he brings is dangerous, that it will coat her heart in hoarfrost if she even thinks to want a glancing touch of it. The storm drives her forward, into the spray, into the tempest, and her hands are cupping his face, pulling him down, down, down into the dark and fathomless deep that has swallowed her heart whole.
When she kisses him this time, he doesn’t pull away.
Be careful, little Dany.
Be careful.
It is different. Of course it is, now that her heart has been flayed open. She wants nothing more than to drown in the sensation of him—the taste of his kiss, the thrill of his touch. Her own hair is full of salt and smoke, the fire raging at the end of the world where cities vanish into the great green sea. Yet when her tongue flicks across his, she thinks she might understand the wild lure of winter,
She wants to close her eyes, settled peacefully from where she and the young man have fallen back onto her bed, to let the storm sweep her away amongst the already tangled sheets. Instead, she peers up at the dancing shadows on the ceiling—silver and gold and green—and lets out a pleased hum that carries with it the song of the drowning deep. The sound clatters and clinks against her teeth, as sandsilks melt away from her skin, baring her to the heat of a thousand flames. Her hands never leave him, too enthralled by the corded muscle beneath her fingertips, and dark tresses as smooth as a tidal pool. His lips are on her jaw, on the curve of her neck, the slope of her shoulder, and lower, lower, lower still.
When his mouth latches onto a rosy peak of her small breasts, she is no longer sure if the roar she hears is of the tempestuous sea or the blood pounding in her head, the please please please of her heartbeat. It is too much, and it is not nearly enough, the world too small and too big all at the same time. He is a strange and familiar weight between her legs, and she wants to come undone with him.
She reaches down to pull his tunic up, to bare his skin to the fire and the sea as much as hers is—but he stops her, catching one of her hands in his. She gives him a quizzical look, but his grey gaze drifts away, distracted, and he is kissing her again, the rush and the tide. She allows it, even as his hand slips between her legs, to the gathering heat there, to the place where she has sought pleasure so many times since he’s arrived, and…oh, oh, oh.
“Yes,” she sighs, the molten cacophony in her head reaching a crescendo. She hears the soft wet noises as his fingers make quick work of her, his lips and tongue and teeth still ravishing one nipple and then the other. It is too much. It is sublime. She needs more.
Yet when he sits up, kneeling between her legs, she almost sobs. He looks disheveled, undone, the smoking grey of his eyes no more than a thin ring of silver against the black. That storm-furious gaze follows her hand as she reaches between her own legs, rubbing and circling and chasing something new she can’t define. Something sharpens in those eyes, and his hands move to the front of his trousers, pulling, fumbling, the thunder turning deft fingers clumsy.
Daenerys has a moment to see the shadow of his cock, thick and hard against a pale thigh, before his mouth is against hers again, and there is the pinch of something large and warm pressing against her, into her, and this is too much, and her panting becomes peppered with sharp little cries of discomfort, but it feels right, deeper and deeper and deeper, and she claws at anything within reach, whispering please and wait and yes yes yes.
They are a tumultuous thing, but not violent. She gasps prayers to the suffocated heavens, friction and skin and sweat turning her delirious. With each pulse of his hips against hers, she hears the strangled gasp of Daenerys and princess and sweet girl and filthier curses in her ear, a wet and devastating heat.
Lightning dazzles the room in silver. She never wants this to end.
When it does, it is quick. He pulls away from her, slipping out of her with clenched teeth and torn curses, a jerk or two of his hand, and she feels a rope of something wet and warm on her belly. Her heart twists with something she cannot name as he collapses next to her, her head hollow with a heartbeat.
Neither of them speaks.
Then, hesitantly, her fingers ghost over her belly. Soft. Warm. And when she brings those same fingers to her lips, to taste the sea and brine and storm within him, she thinks she might not leave the end of the world after all.
And when his eyes turn fiery, when he falls away like the low tide to settle his head between her legs, when he feasts on the desire still hot and storming within her…
"Jon..."
She wonders if the sea will follow her regardless.
When the silver princess sleeps, cradled by his side, a river of moonlight across her back, he lies awake to peer up at the storm shadows. This place seems timeless, caught in the years like an insect caught in a web. But he knows that winter is coming. He has always known that. It is why he ran to find them. It is why he is a coward, here at the end of the world. The wolves will call him home. They always will.
He closes his eyes. The scars on his chest burn. He does not sleep anymore. Not truly.
But what happened to him happened a very long time ago.
And even the dead must rise again.