WARNING: This chapter contains the same sort of elements that chapter 6 did (visions of past sexual violence, gore, psychological shit), but they are slightly more detailed than in chapter 6.

...on a more serious note, a thousand and one thank-yous to RAV8 for her expert advice and counseling on this chapter. She is a rockstar.

Chapter Text

I.

The audience chamber is surrounded by a winding queue of uneasy people.

“Forgive my curiosity, Your Grace, but where will you go?”

The young Flea Bottom woman is not the first person that day to pose that question. Their soldiers began loading up their ship at dawn in preparation for their journey in two day’s time, and the commonfolk quickly realized all the items being towed to the ship were coming out of the Maidenvault. When Lord Gendry and Prince Quentyn arrived and the maester began choosing which midwives could (and would) journey with them, a few quickly realized what this must mean. Word spread rapidly after that, and Jon and Daenerys found themselves quelling a hundred different anxieties from an uncountable number of people while their own anxieties festered silently in their own chests.

“There is nothing to forgive; curiosity is not a transgression. We will be going to Dragonstone,” Daenerys answers. She scrounges up a warm, reassuring smile— from where, Jon has no idea. “We will return in no time at all. Things will be managed by our small council in our absence. Ser Davos will be here in this chamber daily should you need anything while we’re away.”

The young woman doesn’t seem comforted by that. She looks uneasily at the queen for a moment longer, and then looks at Jon.

“Should we worry?” she asks him. He thinks it’s an odd question, but the answer comes to him immediately anyway: yes.

“Worry about what? Everything will be taken care of while we are away. There is nothing to worry about.”

She looks between Jon and Daenerys.

“We’re fearful of another war,” she tells them. “My tutor at the scholarhouse says she heard you’re leaving for your own safety. That men with the faces of metal birds are coming over by the shipload from Essos.”

Jon exchanges a mild look with Daenerys. They turn back to her afterwards.

“There is no need to worry about rumors such as those,” Daenerys reassures her.

“We’re going to Dragonstone because it’s our ancestral seat. We want our child born there,” Jon lies.

“The comforts of home,” Dany adds. But at the word home, all Jon can think of is their cramped bedchambers in the Maidenvault. He doesn’t think of Winterfell or Dragonstone. And he knows, from the way Dany’s lips turn down at the corners once the young woman has taken her leave after being given further reassurances, that she feels the same. They will be very far from the comforts of home when their child comes into this world.

Yet these days, even home brings no true comfort. Jon feels hunted and haunted everywhere he goes, even in their bed, a place that had once been his only true respite. He’s tortured every night with a fear stronger than his sleep deprivation; all he can do is lie beside Daenerys and watch over her, pretending that he would be able to do something to help if Lord Bloodraven chose to torment her in her dreams. Pretending that he has some control, some ability to protect his wife and his baby. He knows it’s a lie he tells himself, and that knowledge creates the nausea that rots his insides from dawn ’til dusk, and then from dusk ’til dawn.

And sometimes, hatred and anger rot his insides, too. Sometimes they consume him. He thinks of what is being done to Dany— every insidious layer to it, every perverse violation— and he can do little but burn. He tries to keep it quiet, tries to press the fury down deep so that Dany might not see it; she has enough to worry about and spends too much time fretting over him as it is. But at times, it’s an ire that can’t be suppressed. He finds himself snapping at Sansa, at Lord Tyrion, at Grey Worm, at Arya, at Ser Davos— even at Dany. The latter is the worst: it’s a vile offense against his own heart, a weak abuse towards his own desires. With all his heart, all he wants is to protect Dany and comfort her, and yet, at times, he finds himself making things worse for her.

It’s then that things seem the darkest. And though he knows he’s only human, though he knows he’s sleep-deprived, though he knows the pressure he is under is insurmountable, it is difficult for him to forgive himself for even the smallest slights.

They speak with those begging audience until Jon notices how quiet Dany's become. He looks over at her at once, completely blocking out the man currently speaking to him. Her lips are twisted in a slight grimace; she shifts uncomfortably in the chair and crosses and uncrosses her ankles a few times. Jon leans towards her, his hand settling on her thigh, everybody else in the audience chamber forgotten.

“What is it?” he asks.

She opens her eyes and meets his. “I don’t think I can sit here any longer,” she admits.

The wooden chairs they use in the audience chamber are uncomfortable even for Jon, so he can’t imagine how uncomfortable she is. She said yesterday that Lyaella was favoring a position so low that it felt like she was pressing into her pubic bone. The pressure and weight of their baby was so great, Dany said, that she kept feeling pins and needles in her legs, and a deep aching in her pelvis. Jon had suggested that she remain in bed until their departure, but she’d been insistent upon coming to the audience chamber at least one more time.

Now that they have, Jon can’t see any reason why she shouldn’t go rest. And, if he’s being honest, he wants nothing more than to rest with her. Maybe, he thinks, Arya will come sit in the room so that I can sleep, too. Just for an hour…just an hour. He would have given any amount of gold for just that one hour of rest with Dany. And he almost thinks they’ll get it for a moment. Dany agrees to go back to their bedchambers, and they both head towards the staircase, but their plans are intercepted.

“Your Graces,” Ser Davos greets, stopping them at the first step. “Queen Yara has arrived. Arya and Lord Gendry are receiving them at the gates; they’ll be here to meet us in the council room shortly.”

Dany leans into Jon’s side. He wraps an arm around her waist, trying to support her enough to maybe alleviate some of the pressure on her hips.

“Thank you, Ser Davos,” Daenerys says, her voice hollow. She steps from Jon’s arm and reaches for the staircase bannister. Jon feels Ser Davos’s eyes on him as he nervously watches Dany’s painstaking ascent up the stairs. When she makes it to the top safely, he turns to face Ser Davos.

“Yes?” he asks.

There are few people in the world that he respects as much as he respects Ser Davos, but his next words frustrate Jon deeply.

“I am advising this for the hundredth time: do not go to Dragonstone, Your Grace. I’m worried for her. I’m worried for you. I’m worried for the babe. I don’t trust that priestess at all, and I think you are making a mistake. Stay here— we’ll find a way to beat this.”

“And how do you propose I change the queen’s mind?” Jon snaps. “I don’t feel any better about than you do, but she doesn’t know what else to do. Kinvara said we’ll somehow find a way to defeat Lord Bloodraven on Dragonstone, and that’s the only hope she’s got. The only hope we’ve got.”

He wants to explain to Ser Davos how dark things have gotten for them, how frightened they are, how Jon feels on the edge of crying or shouting every moment of every day. But even if he spent hours weaving a picture of that darkness, Ser Davos still wouldn’t understand the depth of it.

“Plead with her. Beg her,” Ser Davos implores. “Appeal to her heart. It’s your unique power.”

Jon shakes his head. “I can’t ask her to stay here unless I can see a way she can survive here. And I don’t.” Jon turns to go up the stairs, but he hesitates, turning back to face Ser Davos to add one more thing. “She can feel him in her head. She says it’s almost like something’s been buried in her skull— something physical she can feel that shouldn’t be there. Her head hurts terribly at least once every day. And sometimes….sometimes she says things, Ser Davos. Things that just aren’t her.” He blinks against the searing at the back of his eyes and looks down, taking a moment to rub over his eyes and breathe. He looks back up at Ser Davos afterwards. “I don’t know if Dragonstone is the answer, and she doesn’t, either. But it’s the only thing we’ve got to try.” He starts his climb up the stairs, calling his parting words down as he does. “I’ll see you in the council room. I shouldn’t leave her alone.”

He takes the steps two at a time and tries not to fear what he might see when he opens their door.

II.

The rest of the day is spent in the council room. Dusk arrives well before they’re anywhere close to departing for bed. Jon and Daenerys go over everything they want accomplished in their absence, every contingency the small council might face, and what feels like hundreds of questions. It’s not something to be rushed, no matter how uncomfortable Dany appears or how tired Jon is; they have to make sure everyone is on the same page about what their duties will be in the coming months so that their kingdom will continue to flourish unimpeded. That means outlining the precise number of rolls that should be baked daily for each specific food tent, the amount of gold that should be funneled towards the medicines used in the sickhouses, and what the proper timeline is for a trial regarding any and every possible offense someone could commit, as well as what punishments are deemed just for each crime.

By the time they all stand to go their separate ways, they’re past-due for a meal. They all journey to the front hall, but Jon is so preoccupied with monitoring his wife’s forlorn expression and her lack of appetite that he hardly tastes his food. He’s not the only one who notices it, either, but Arya and Yara’s multiple attempts to pull Daenerys into their conversation fall flat. Even Sansa is more sociable, though she mostly talks to Lord Tyrion and Prince Quentyn. It’s better than Dany, who talks to no one. Not even Jon.

He holds her hand as they walk up the stairs towards their bedchambers, but he doubts she even notices that he is. They undress for bed, and for a bit, Dany just sits on the edge of the mattress, moonlight glowing on her bare skin. She’s as still and quiet as untouched snow. Jon reaches across the mattress and grazes the small of her back with his fingertips. Gentle— imploring.

“Come here,” he requests, unable to take her sadness a moment longer.

She is slow to slide over to him, her stomach acting as an anchor on the soft surface, but when she finally lays in his arms, he feels her. She feels there— she feels like Dany. Relief flows through him. It’s so strong he can’t do anything but clutch her close for a while, no words sufficient.

“What’s happening in there?” he asks her, his lips pressing softly to her forehead. There is her mind, and nothing frightens Jon as much as the thought of her losing it.

She doesn’t answer straightaway. She drags her fingertips down his spine, notch by notch, her breath warm and gentle against his chest. Every now and then, he feels her eyelashes flutter against his skin.

“Struggle,” she whispers finally. “Fear.”

He must’ve expected that, so why does her answer make his stomach sink, his heart plummet? Why does it make his eyes burn?

“I want to help,” he breathes. Pleads. “How can I help?”

“This helps,” she assures him. She finds the scar over his heart and kisses it softly three times. From where her stomach is pressed to him, he feels Lyaella kick hard. He reaches a hand between them and touches Dany’s jaw, guiding her face up so that he can kiss her, his other hand pressing over Lyaella’s kicks. Daenerys’s hands caress up and down his back, eventually finding his bun and pulling his hair free. He shivers slightly as her fingers pull through his curls, and with his mouth still pressed to hers, he slides his hand up from her stomach, gently cupping her swollen breast. He feels what he was looking for: her heart, steady and beating beneath his hand. Her pulse, thrumming beneath the softness of her breast. It's still there. Still pumping. Because she’s still here— she’s still in his arms— she’s still her—she’s warm, and beautiful, and alive, and he loves her so much that he can’t bear it—

He deepens their kiss. He’s sliding his hand between her thighs when she suddenly reaches down, gently catching his hand in hers, stopping him. She breaks her lips from his, and for a moment, they simply breathe and look at each other. Jon’s stomach is in tight knots.

“I don’t want to,” she whispers. Her fingers tremble around his. She pulls his hand out from between her thighs and lifts it up, pressing the back of it to her lips. Her kiss feels apologetic, and when she speaks next, her words tremble as her fingers do. “It’s not that I don’t want you. I do, you know I do. I just…” she trails off, unable to finish.

Jon’s emotions are twisted and snarled around one another. There’s guilt mingled in with disappointment, fear threaded through agony. He pulls his other hand off her breast, away from the reassurance of her heartbeat.

“No,” she tells him softly. She releases the hand held to her lips and reaches for his other hand, dragging it back up, molding it back over her heart. “That’s okay. I don’t mean I don’t want you to touch me at all, I just…I don’t want…I don’t want to be…” she trails off faintly. He realizes she’s frightened, and that makes him feel sick. Frightened of him? “Do you understand?” she asks. And then: “Is that all right?”

“Of course.” His heart is impossibly heavy in his chest. In the short silence that follows, her question seems to sink further into his brain, and he repeats himself, firmer this time. He can't believe she's even asked it. “Of course that’s all right, Dany. Seven hells. Of course.” He uses his free hand to gently touch her hair. “You’re shaking. Are you…frightened of me?”

He almost can’t bear to ask it because he knows, if she says yes, it will devastate him. Of all his fears, Dany being frightened of him is one of the strongest. It’s a fear that stems from all those months he’d been forced to live in the heads of their male ancestors who were doing exactly those sorts of things to their wives— and many other terrible things, too. He couldn’t live with the knowledge that Dany thought him capable of those things. Maybe, a small, fearful voice in his head says, Lord Bloodraven has put thoughts in her head, things to make her afraid of me.

“No. Not you.”

Jon feels her heart rate increase beneath his palm. He brings his forehead to hers. He understands now. “Him.”

“Yes,” she breathes. “Of what he might do if I'm that vulnerable...in my head, or in yours. And I don’t want him to feel what I feel. Jon, I don’t him to feel you inside me. That’s mine to feel— I can’t stand the thought of it, of him being in my head, of him feeling what I do, seeing what I do…of him…” she can’t seem to finish her thought, but Jon thinks he understands anyway. And none of it is very shocking to him. They haven’t made love once since Kinvara arrived, and while he assumed it was mostly due to her physical discomfort with her progressing pregnancy and his own exhaustion, he knew that the knowledge of the bloodtie had to have something to do with it. He knows Dany is aware of the violation every moment of every day, and he finds it hard to forget about, too. Sometimes, when Dany is doing her hair in front of the looking glass, he feels the urge to wrap her dressing gown around her body, so sick at the thought of Lord Bloodraven being in her head and ogling her naked reflection. What Dany is speaking of now would just be a deeper invasion. No, he corrects himself. The deepest invasion.

Lying there, feeling her tremble in his arms, he thinks he could easily let his rage bloom within his chest. The wrongness of it makes him want to step out onto the balcony and scream endlessly into the night. What he wants more than anything else is to torture Lord Bloodraven— that’s what he’s decided over the past fortnight. He had thought, at first, that beheading him would suffice, but with every chain Lord Bloodraven adds to Dany, with every joy he takes from her life, Jon becomes more and more of the idea that he must die from pain and pain alone. How badly would you have to hurt someone for them to die of pain? Jon wonders. There must be a fine line, too— cause too much pain and hurt them too badly, and they’ll die from that injury. How could you cause immense suffering without ending life immediately?

Currently, he’s been favoring an idea that certainly wouldn’t work in practice, but brings him a sick relief to imagine anyway. He thinks of slowly freezing Lord Bloodraven nearly to death, and then stringing him up above a fire and roasting him just until his skin begins to blister, and then re-submerging him in ice, and then stringing him up again, over and over…

Of course, he can’t torture anyone who doesn’t have a body. And right now, Lord Bloodraven is frequenting the last body in the world Jon would ever bring harm to.

“It won’t be like this forever,” Jon murmurs to Dany, his lips pressing gently to her hair. “We’re going to get rid of him. I swear it.”

“I won’t live like this forever.”

At first, he thinks she’s agreeing with him. But he realizes she’s correcting him. He closes his eyes, seized at once by terror, and they’re quiet as he obsessively counts her heartbeats in his head. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten…

He doesn’t have to ask her what she means by that. He knows. With her, he always knows.

III.

The morning of their departure, Jon pays one last visit to Bran.

“He’s close to death,” the maester warns Jon as he leads him through the sickhouse towards Bran’s room. “He won’t take food. He’ll drink water and consume herbed honey, but a man can’t live on that for long.”

Jon’s mind trips and stumbles over that word. Man. Is that what his little brother is now? A man? The thought makes Jon want to cry. If it’s true that he’s a man, he’d grown into manhood chained in the corners of his own mind. Alone. Without anyone to guide him. Jon could have guided him. And now, he never will.

Jon has been here a couple times over the past two weeks. The first two times, he found it hard to look at Bran without feeling angry. He had to keep reminding himself that Bran was Bran— not Lord Bloodraven, not the Three-Eyed Raven. Gradually, Bran started to look more recognizable. As he got smaller and frailer, he began to look more and more like Bran the last time Jon had seen him. And now, when Jon steps in today, he feels no anger at all at the sight of him. He just feels sad.

He sits beside Bran on the bed, reaching out to take one of his waxy, cold hands. He could be dead if it weren’t for the slight rise of his chest every couple of seconds. Jon holds his hand between both of his, and as soon as the maester steps from the room, he speaks.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t protect you. I’m sorry I wasn’t there when you needed me most. I’m sorry for what has happened to you— for the things that were stolen from you. Most of all, I’m sorry that you’ll never get the chance to live. I’m sorry, Bran.”

He feels Longclaw dig into his hip as he leans over to press his lips to his brother’s forehead. When he pulls back, his eyes snag on the long, thin scar running across his throat. The scar he’d put there.

“I’m sorry,” he says again, hoarse. There’s a dry ache behind his eyes. “I wish…”

He trails off. Where should he even start? He wishes so many things were different. He wishes he’d known about Lord Bloodraven the first time he saw Bran again. He wishes he could have helped him then.

He knows he needs to rise. Dany’s bathing and dressing to depart, and as soon as she’s done, he’ll need to go with her to attend to a series of last-minute tasks before they board the ship. But he thinks this is probably the last time he’ll see his brother, the last time he’ll hold his hand in his. The last time he’ll get to speak with him. And he knows it’s likely that Bran is already lost to the world and can’t hear or understand a word…but how could he live with himself if he didn’t speak to him? Didn’t take this chance to tell him the things he wanted to share before he left this world?

“I’m going to be a father soon. The maester’s measurements give my wife a moonturn and a half now until her time. Perhaps a bit more, maybe a bit less— it isn’t exact. When it comes to being a father, I’m more excited than anything else. It’s funny— you’d think I’d be nervous, seeing as I never strictly imagined I’d ever father any children. But I love my daughter already, Bran. It’s shocking and wonderful how you can love somebody so much that you’ve never even met. I’m scared, too, but not about being a father. I’m scared that something will happen to Daenerys. That’s my wife— I don’t know how much you remember about what’s happened, Sansa made it sound as if you didn’t remember much. I married Daenerys Targaryen, she is— was— the last Targaryen. She’s the Mad King’s daughter…Queen Rhaella’s daughter. We met on Dragonstone; I came to forge an alliance, to seek her help with the Night King, and she saved me. And saved me again….and again…and again. She killed Cersei. The Lannisters aren’t on the Throne any longer. Dany and I are.”

Jon looks down at Bran’s hands. With a pang to his heart, he spots a familiar scar on his left index finger. He’d hooked himself by accident when they were fishing once, with Robb and Father. He’d weathered the pain with strength beyond his years, hardly flinching as Father eased the hook back out. I want to try again, he’d said afterwards, stubborn and brave. I can catch one. I just know I can.

He never managed to, but Jon caught one for him, and he rode tall and proud on his horse afterwards, that fish swinging back and forth in the burlap bag tied to the saddle. When they’d returned to Winterfell, Bran immediately took the fish to Lady Catelyn. Look, Mother, he’d said proudly, and Jon had felt the strangest tangle of happiness and sorrow as he watched Catelyn Stark crush Bran into her embrace, her pride and love as loud as the rushing river Jon had caught that fish in. He had been happy for Bran at the same time he’d been sad for himself. He wonders if Bran feels that way now, listening to Jon tell him about his life. His future.

“I’m not a bastard either. Father was never untrue to your mother. Lyanna was my mother, and Rhaegar Targaryen my father. My true name is Aegon Targaryen. All my life, all I ever wanted was a true name. But when I discovered that I had one, it was a difficult thing to come to terms with. It was quite a long while until I could consider myself a Targaryen; it felt like a lie, like I was being an imposter. I felt like my entire life was a lie, that I was a lie. I had built myself as Jon Snow…Aegon Targaryen just felt like some other child who had been born, not like me. In so many ways, my entire identity was also a lie— that was difficult to work through. I’m still not done with it. I may never be. But I understand why Father did what he did, and I respect him for it. It’s difficult to keep the secret that he kept for so long. I learned that the hard way.”

He falls quiet. As he’s about to rise, he sees Bran’s scarred index finger twitch slightly. Not much— not enough to say he meant to do it, not enough to say he was still in there somewhere. But enough to keep Jon sitting there. Enough to make the foolish part of Jon wonder if maybe Bran was asking him to stay. Enough to make him hope.

He gives into that foolish hope, and he stays.

“I never felt like a Targaryen ’til I married my wife. I’m sure there’s a lot to be said for that— quite a few sly comments Sansa would like to make— but it’s the truth. When I’m with her, I feel that sameness. That belonging. It feels, in many ways, like it’s her and me against the world. We’re the last Targaryens, and we belong together. We’re of the same blood— and I like everything about that, and everything about her. It’s what I was afraid to admit to myself for so long, but I no longer care. I have no shame about who I choose to be anymore. That feels more freeing than shedding Snow would feel, though I don’t care so much for getting rid of Snow now. Jon Snow is who I was when I came back to life, when I got my second chance to have the life I have now. When I made a family of my own.” Bran had once been such a big part of Jon’s first family, the family he grew up with. His heart aches. “I wish that you could come back to us, Bran. There will always be a place that is yours.”

He holds his brother’s hands and works up the courage to leave. It’s hard to walk away knowing it’s the last time. It’s hard to look upon his face and know he’ll never look upon it again once he walks from this room. It’s hard to know that, soon, he won’t have a brother at all anymore.

When he finally gets the nerve to look away from Bran and let go of his hands, he stands. He turns to leave without looking back at him again. Goodbye, he thinks, but he doesn’t say it. If he were to say it, he’d cry.

“I’ll see you soon,” he says instead. “Sleep well.”

He’s at the door when he hears a jagged inhalation, followed by the creaking of the bed. He stops and turns, his breaths stilling in his throat. Bran’s eyes are still closed, but his hand moves across the blanket— towards Jon.

“Jon,” he croaks. It’s pleading. Jon crosses back over to him in only three long strides, falling to sit at the edge of the bed again. He takes Bran’s outstretched hand. He can sense in his weak, desperate grip that he has been holding on for whatever he’s about to say. All Jon can do for him now is give him peace.

“I’m here. I’m right here. You can tell me now. What do you need to say to me, Bran?”

Bran tightens his hold on Jon’s hand as much as he can, which is hardly any. He is visibly struggling against something in his mind: Jon doesn’t know if it’s death, sleep, or the Three-Eyed Raven. All he can do for either of those things is wait, and so that’s what he does.

“Silver,” Bran finally insists, the word falling urgently from his lips. His brows are furrowed in pain, his skin pale. With great effort, he manages: “Daenerys.”

“Yes,” Jon affirms, his pulse picking up. “What about her, Bran?”

His head moves from side to side on the pillow— agony. Jon’s hands flounder above him, unsure how to help, knowing he can’t. Bran seems unable to get out what he needs to say; it appears he needs to speak as long as Jon did to say all he needs to, but he just can’t.

“In…her— He—” he trails off, his head lolling slowly to the side. Jon thinks he’s gone for a moment, but then he stirs again, scraping up whatever scraps of strength remain.

“We know about the bloodtie,” Jon tells him, assuming that’s what Bran means. “Is that what you mean?”

“She…you must…”

Jon waits, his breaths knotted together and strung up in his throat. He doesn’t move.

“Let her go,” Bran begs. He pulls feebly on Jon’s hands. Jon meets his eyes, denial flooding his brain. Bran doesn’t mean what he thinks. He means something different. He just has to wait…has to give him more time to explain.

“Let her go where?” Jon presses. He hears the edge of panic to his own words, feels the weight pressing on his lungs, and that frightens him. He’s not saying that, Jon tells his body. Stop panicking.

“Let her go,” Bran repeats, the words heaving from his lips.

“Go where?” Jon demands. “Dragonstone? We are. We are going. I don’t understand, Bran—”

“It’s okay. It’s okay…”

“It’s not! It’s not okay! None of this is okay! Nothing!” The words burst from Jon, sharp with panicked edges. “Bran, I don’t know what to do…I don’t know.”

Bran holds his hands tighter. “You do know,” he says, and Jon feels terror grip his insides before he fully processes the words. His thoughts spin back to Winterfell easily. “You know, Jon. You were born knowing. Targaryen men have always known what to do with Targaryen women. They’ve always found a place for them, a purpose. You know that well. You know what to do with her, with Daenerys. You’ve seen it every night.”

He slides off the bed at once, his hand falling to Longclaw. He studies Bran— he can’t tell. He doesn’t know. He can’t tell who this is. Is this his dying little brother or his enemy?

“Those are Lord Bloodraven’s words,” Jon says, his fingers clenching tighter around the pommel of his sword.

Bran’s face contorts in pain again; this time, he cries out, the wail of pain turning into whimpering. Jon doesn’t know if he’s being tricked or not, but that sound freezes him in place, fear and pain restraining his own mind.

Bran’s eyes suddenly open. They are haunted, wide, sunken.

“I can’t—I can’t—I can’t—I can’t—I can’t— Silver— you must— you must— you must— Jon, help— help— you must—help me— help me—”

Jon shakes his head, unwilling to go any closer. “I can’t help you. I don’t even know who you are.”

“Bran…Bran! Bran! I’m Bran!” The words burst from him, each a cry of their own. He reaches for Jon, but Jon doesn’t take his hand off Longclaw. He ignores the way his own eyes are burning. “Jon— you must—…” it’s as if he’s suddenly found a word he’s been looking for, a way to explain something he couldn’t before explain. His desperate eyes chase Jon’s gaze, and once Jon is looking him in the eye, he begs: “Ramsay— like Ramsay—”

Jon’s prepared to slit the Three-Eyed Raven’s throat right then. It has to be him. Bran would never say something like that.

“I must be Ramsay?!” he spits, disgusted, enraged. He thinks back to two nights ago— I don’t want to. Is that all right? He feels like he could cry at the memory of the way her hands shook. His own hand begins to shake atop Longclaw, Rhaella’s shrieks bouncing off the walls of his mind. Never, he thinks, his stomach twisted inside out. Never. I would rather die.

“No— no—!” Bran insists, frustrated. “Not that! No! Jon— listen!”

For a second, he sounds so shrill it makes Jon think of Lady Catelyn. He sounds just like her. It’s odd enough to draw Jon out of his own panicked thoughts and back to their conversation.

“Ramsay…weapon…dogs—”

Jon feels they’re engaged in the world’s stupidest guessing game, one parents would force bored children to play during long journeys. If he’s ever felt so frustrated, he can’t recall.

“What? Ghost? Is Ghost going to hurt Dany?”

“NO!” Bran screams, and Jon’s so taken aback by the intensity of his anger that he peers at his brother in surprise. Bran is trembling harder than ever now, his eyes wet with tears, his hands fisted around the sheets. “Ramsay! Ramsay! Ramsay! His weapon! His own! RAMSAY! You must— let him— she must—”

His face falls abruptly, going from a concentrated, pained look of determination to one of abject terror. He pulls at the sheets desperately almost as if he’s trying to drag himself back away from some approaching terror.

“No! No! No!” he pleads, “No…no…”

The fight leaves him all at once. His eyes close, his fingers release the sheets, his head lolls to the side. The strings around Jon’s heart are cut— it crashes to his toes. He walks over and grasps Bran’s face. “Bran. I still don’t understand. Bran!”

He shakes him over and over again. He begs. He splashes him with water from the cup at his bedside. Nothing pulls him back.

Jon tears at his own hair as he looks down at him, still as death. He’s full of regret, guilt. I should’ve asked better questions, he thinks. I should have brought someone else with me. I don’t even remember all he’s said…how can I figure out what he means?

When he leaves Bran’s room, he asks a healer for a bit of paper and ink, intending on sitting in the sickhouse and writing down everything he remembers so he can give it to Sansa and Tyrion. If anyone will know what Bran meant about Ramsay, it’ll be Sansa.

But as he’s taking the paper and ink from the healer, he sees a familiar person weaving towards him. He’s not expecting to see her here: it automatically draws him up short, concerned.

“Yes?” Jon asks his wife’s handmaiden.

Ezhi stops in front of Jon, but she doesn’t answer straightaway. Her eyes flash to the healer standing right beside them.

“Thank you, you may take your leave,” Jon tells the healer firmly.

As soon as the healer has walked to the far end of the room, Ezhi steps closer to Jon.

“Can you come with me?” she asks him quietly, her Common Tongue heavily accented but easy enough to understand.

Jon’s fingers tighten around the paper in his hands. “What’s wrong, Ezhi?”

She shakes her head, her dark hair flying around her as she does.

“I do not know,” she whispers, and the confusion in her eyes frightens Jon. He nods and sets towards the door. She follows beside him. They walk at a pace so brisk that quite a few commonfolk look at them in concern. Once they’re in the Maidenvault’s courtyard, and less likely to be overheard, Jon looks down at Ezhi.

“Did you leave her alone?” She shouldn’t be alone. That’s one of the only things he knows with any certainty.

“No, Haji is with her,” she answers. “First that was strange was she wanted very chilled water for her bath. Khaleesi doesn’t like cold water.”

“No,” Jon agrees. When she wasn’t so far along, he had often taken his baths with her, both of them curled close in the bathing tub. Even when she insisted the water was unpleasantly lukewarm, to Jon, it was scalding. “Was she hurting? Maybe she thought the cold water would help.”

“She doesn’t say,” Ezhi answers, troubled. “She won’t get out of the water— it’s so cold she shakes, but she keep telling us she’s burning up. But her head— it’s cold, she is not with fever.” She looks up at him again. “I’m sorry for stopping you, but I do not know what to do other than to get you. I looked for Arya, but I couldn’t find her.”

“You did the right thing,” Jon assures her, his pace increasing. “You should always get me if you’re worried about her. Get me first. No matter what I’m doing.”

“Yes, Your Grace,” she promises.

Sansa and Tyrion are in the front hall of the Maidenvault. Jon hears both call out to him, but he ignores them, bolting up the stairs as quickly as he can. He hears them follow after— he turns to Blue Fly, stationed outside the bathing room.

“Do not let anyone in,” he orders. He’s shocked at how quickly his mind finds the words in Valyrian. “No one follows me.”

Blue Fly nods firmly in response. It’s not just the fact that Dany’s bathing that makes Jon insistent upon no one else coming in: it’s that he doesn’t know what is happening in her mind, and he feels it isn’t right for anyone else to see her that way. She wouldn’t want that. She’s already had all her privacy stripped from her; Jon can’t let anymore be taken in any other way.

Haji meets them at the door. She’s wringing her hands and worrying her bottom lip. She murmurs to Ezhi in Dothraki. Jon steps around the women and heads towards the copper tub. He can see the back of Dany’s head, her hair wet and shining in the light. He stands beside the tub, his fingers curling around the edge of it. He can feel the coolness emitting off the water even from that distance. He looks down at Dany, and she meets his eyes; hers are dazed, tired. Her lips are more lavender than rose. She’s up to her neck in the cold water, and beneath it, Jon sees her entire body shaking. He dips his fingers into the water. It’s painfully cold, even to him; the bones in his fingers ache soon after submerging them. How long has she been sitting in it? He reaches forward and touches her cheek. She’s never felt so cold to him. He feels as if his insides have been doused in the water she’s sitting in.

“You need to get out, Dany. It’s too cold,” he says. He grips the edge of the tub again and kneels beside it. “Why would you want to sit in that? Is your back still hurting?”

The water rocks gently within the tub as she withdraws her hand. Her fingers are trembling ice against Jon’s. He turns his hand over and grips hers tightly.

“I was burning. It was so hot,” she tells him. “This feels better. It feels good.”

Her smile is sleepy, calm. Jon’s blood races fast in his veins in fear.

“You can’t stay in here. You’ve got to get out. Here— give me your hands, I’ll help you out.” He rises and holds his other hand out, seeking Dany’s other hand as well. He still holds her left.

She shakes her head. “No, I will stay. Just a bit longer.”

“No,” Jon repeats, firmer this time. His heart clenches as he looks into her eyes again. Something is disconnected there, and it renders him momentarily speechless in fear. He has to force himself through it. “It’s too cold. Come on. Give me your hand.”

“No,” she repeats, her brows drawing down, her hand pulling from his.

He sinks to his knees again. His voice is pleading. “I’m asking you to please get out of the tub.”

“And I’m telling you no, I don’t want to.”

They stare at each other. Jon doesn’t want to reach in and grab her, doesn’t want to pull her out against her will. She knows that, too.

He turns to Ezhi. “Could you go get the maester?” Maybe it’s not as cold as he thinks it is. He’s certainly swam in water icier than that and he was fine. Maybe it’s fine for her to sit there as long as she wants. He wants it to be— he doesn’t want to fight with her.

Ezhi turns at once, hurrying from the bathing room. Jon reaches into the tub and touches Dany’s shoulder gently, drawing her gaze back to his.

“You’re not cold?” he asks her gently.

“No, I feel good.”

“Then why are you shaking like that?” Jon asks. “Why do you look so cold?”

“I’m not shaking,” she tells him. She smiles again. When she reaches up with a quivering hand and touches his cheek, he nearly cringes away, her touch icy. “I feel good.”

Jon softly takes her trembling hand in his. He kisses it, and then he holds it there at his lips, so that Dany can see her own hand shaking. “Look,” he tells her. “Don’t you see it?”

Her smile falters. After staring at her hand for a moment, she pulls her eyes from his and looks down at her own body beneath the water as if she’s only just realized where she is. She lifts a trembling arm, staring at it. She looks back up at him, and this time, Jon sees confusion and horror in her eyes.

“I don’t feel cold,” she repeats, but this time it’s in a small, frightened voice.

“What if Lyaella is?” he whispers, where only they can hear.

Her hand slips over her wet skin, settling at once on the peak of her stomach. Only a second later, she holds both hands out towards Jon. He exhales in relief and stands, taking her hands in his. He holds her securely and helps her stand. As soon as she’s upright, she begins shaking harder. Her teeth are chattering as she reaches for Jon; he ignores Haji as she approaches with bath linens, taking Dany in his arms and holding her as she steps out of the tub. She clings to him, burrowing into him, and he wraps his crimson cloak around the both of them. It’s made of Southern fabric, light and cool, so it offers little in the way of warmth, but Jon doesn’t want to pull away from her. Instead, he looks at Haji and nods towards Dany, and she thankfully understands. Jon and Daenerys stand together as she drapes one towel around Dany’s shoulders, over Jon’s cloak, and begins gently toweling her wet hair with the other one.

His cloak soaks through and his jerkin and tunic grow damp, but he doesn’t step away. She shivers without cessation. It makes Jon think about being North with her, about showing her the waterfall. Keep your queen warm, she’d said, and Jon thinks about how happy she’d looked— how radiant, how beautiful. We could stay a thousand years. No one would ever find us. They should have. He wishes they had. But even a thousand years wouldn’t shield them from a thousand and one eyes.

The maester arrives then. Jon separates from Daenerys long enough for him to look over her.

“You need to warm up, Your Grace,” he tells Dany. “Go sit in front of a fire and drink something warm. Why were you taking such a cold bath?”

Dany stares at him, unable to answer. Jon’s certain she has no idea.

“Her back hurt,” Jon lies. He doesn’t want anyone knowing what’s going on inside her head. He’s afraid they’ll call her mad. “Ezhi, can you start a fire in our chambers?”

She nods and steps from the room. The maester meets Jon’s eyes. Jon can tell he doesn’t quite believe what he’d said about her reasons for the cold bath. He wonders if that’s why he addresses Jon next, rather than addressing Dany.

“Her Grace should be in bed resting as often as possible until her time,” he advises. “I fear all this stress will sour her health. Her mother—”

“Queen Daenerys is not Queen Rhaella,” Jon interrupts. He doesn’t want to hear again about Rhaella’s stillbirths, early births, miscarriages, dead children; that’s not going to help lessen their stress. “Thank you, Maester Olken.”

A hearty fire is crackling in the hearth when they return to their chambers. Dany wraps a blanket around her shoulders and sits at the end of the bed while Jon changes out of his wet clothing. Once redressed, he joins her. She’s watching the flames, but she leans against him when he sits, her wet hair warming a damp circle into his tunic sleeve. He kisses the place a crown should lay; she smells different to him, less like the rose oil she uses and more metallic, but he supposes it has something to do with the cold water.

“Are you still cold?”

“No.”

He lifts his cheek from her hair and looks down at her. Her eyes are closed, her face clear. He takes that to mean she’s feeling better than she had, that she’s her again. He can breathe easier at that thought, but the terror lingers at the edges of his mind. She’d come back to him this time, she’d won this time. But what about the next?

He’s glad when she lies back on the bed. He agrees with Maester Olken in at least one way: he thinks she should be resting far more than she is. Yesterday, she’d been particularly restless, walking anywhere and everywhere, tending to things that could wait until they returned, checking on things she’d already checked on twice before. She refolded all the baby gowns and blankets in Lyaella’s trunk three times. They’re not going to get any better folded than that, Arya had said, her voice just a touch too uneasy to be amused. I just need to do it, Dany had insisted, and so Jon and Arya had helped her shake out the folded items and refold them for the third time. Jon had noticed she'd taken to doing a lot of things in threes when she was particularly restless or uneasy, though he had little idea why. She would kiss him three times in a row mornings after a particularly bad night, say goodnight three times before going to sleep on nights she was terrified of her dreams, say I love you three times after he woke her from nightmares. He didn't ask why; he just accepted her tripled love and accepted whatever made her feel reassured. He liked to tell himself she did to remind herself of who they are -- the three heads of the dragon. To give herself strength.

There’s no sign of that restlessness right now. If anything, she appears drained. And as he lays beside her and takes her into his arms, he realizes he’s drained, too.

“What happened in the bath?” he asks her. “Did you know you asked for chilled water?”

She nods. “I felt like I was on fire. I just kept thinking I have to cool down, I have to cool down. And it didn’t feel as cold as it was, not even close. It wasn’t cold at all until you showed me how my hand was shaking. I don’t know what happened, Jon. I’m frightened.”

Jon thinks it’s not so much what actually happened as the realization that something had happened. The Three-Eyed Raven been able to influence her mind enough to get her to follow through all the steps it took to get her to the moment where she was in a cold bath for long enough to lower her body temperature, long enough to purple her lips and make her shake. He must’ve had sway over her mind for at least a half-hour to achieve that. What else could he make her do in a half-hour?

That question hangs over them like a blade.

“I don’t think I should be anywhere without you, Arya, or Grey Worm anymore,” Dany says, her voice flat. “My handmaids will listen to what I say; I’m their queen. I have to be around people who will know when I’m not myself— people who can stop me.”

Jon reaches up and cradles her face softly. His heart rises up his throat. “Stop you from doing what?”

“Whatever he tries to make me do next,” she answers. She sounds detached, but it soon gives way to pain as tears swell in her eyes. She reaches up and sets her hands over the backs of his. “The worst part is that there’s no way for us to communicate when he’s mixing things up in my head. I keep wanting to come up with something…some word or gesture that I could use to show you when I’m me, so you know that what I’m saying is truly what I feel…but he hears everything. He hears what I’m saying right now. And he could influence me to do it even when I’m not me. I’m so afraid that no one is going to listen to me when I say what I want or what I need, or what I feel. I’m so afraid he’s going to win, that people are going to listen to the things he makes me say, and I’m going to get pushed out of myself.”

He’s scared of that, too. But he remembers the way her eyes had looked in that bath— the way he’d known at once that something wasn’t right.

“I’ll know, Dany,” he swears. “I can see it in your eyes— I can tell. And he can’t do a thing about that. I’ll know. With you, I know everything.”

Is it their shared blood or their shared love that makes him so in-tune to her? Both, he thinks. All he knows is that they’ve grown so close now that he knows her better than he’s ever known himself. He can recall the taste of her with perfect clarity at a moment’s notice. He can close his eyes and smell her rose-scented hair no matter where he is. He can hear her laugh even if he’s in a noisy hall packed with boisterous soldiers. Her heart is entwined and twisted with his; she draws air into her lungs, and he exhales it. Nothing in the world feels as right as being inside of her— being close as close can get, feeling every bit of her, being caught in a shared moment that belongs to them and them only. A kingdom within a kingdom.

“And if you looked into my eyes and I wasn’t me anymore, what would you do?”

That’s easy.

“I’d get you back.” He kisses her full lips, his heart skipping a beat in his chest at the softness of her returning kiss. “I’d make you you again.”

“What if you couldn’t? What if I was like that kitchen girl.”

“I’d find a way to heal you.”

“If you couldn’t?”

“There’s no possibility that I couldn’t. Do you know why?”

She waits quietly, her fingers pulling through his curls gently as she does. It’s soothing like nothing else in the world.

“Because not a thing in this entire world would be able to stop me.”

The authority ringing in his voice surprises even himself. Dany’s smiling as she kisses him again, her fingers pressing gently into his scalp as she cups the back of his head.

“You’re sounding kingly now,” she murmurs. She rubs her nose against his after her kiss; it’s so precious to Jon that his heart fills his entire chest. “I like it.”

It was always said that Aegon the Conqueror had loved Rhaenys Targaryen so deeply that, upon her murder during the First Dornish War, his grief and rage were hellfire that rained down on the Dornish for two years straight. He and Visenya Targaryen burned Dorne to cinders, and then doubled back and burned those cinders to ash.

As a child learning about the period called the Dragon’s Wroth, he had thought two years was an absurd amount of time. To him, it was impossible to believe someone’s rage could burn so fiercely for so long. He always assumed it was an embellishment on the true history, a belief that was only bolstered by Arya’s spirited reenactments of it during courtyard games. It’s just something they say to make Aegon and Visenya sound like fearsome heroes, he’d thought. Something to inspire people like Arya. It’s nicer to think they did all that out of love. He remembers even telling Arya that during one of her frequent ‘once, Visenya Targaryen…’ spiels. They didn’t do all that for two years just because they were angry and hurt, he insisted. Anger can’t last that long. Jon remembers now how long a year had felt when he was a child, and so he understands why he thought that. Arya, though, was adamant, even then. Yes! she’d insisted, they avenged her for two years and they would’ve done more, only you can only burn something so many times. I would do the same thing for my sister. Wouldn’t you do that for me?

He can’t remember now how he’d responded. He’d probably joked and said something like you’d never get yourself killed in the first place! He can’t recall. But he can recall his skepticism, and now, lying here with his arms around Daenerys Targaryen, he is skeptical again.

But not because he doubts Aegon’s rage and grief lasted two years. But because two years doesn’t seem long enough.

His own rage and grief, he thinks, would burn on for decades on end, and it would take Westeros with it.

IV.

In her dreams, she’s not herself.

Her silver-gold hair becomes longer, reaching past her hips, and it curls in loose spirals. Her eyes, once violet, are now a mismatched pair inspired by all the loveliness of the natural world: one a blue as dark and deep as the Shivering Sea, the other green as spring grass. Her breasts are fuller and she stands taller. Like Daenerys, she speaks multiple languages. Like Daenerys, she currently has Lord Bloodraven inside of her.

I’m not me, Daenerys reminds herself, frozen inside the stranger’s body, I’m not me, so this isn’t happening, and I’m going to wake up. I’m going to wake. It’s just a matter of time.

She turns her face, hiding it into the pillow, and she tries to ignore the putrid smell of patchouli oil clinging to his white hair. It hangs heavy in the air and makes her gag. It hurts, what he's doing to this stranger— she doesn’t mean to, but she hears herself cry out, her voice not her own.

It's nothing new: she's been pushed into the minds of more female ancestors than she can recall over the past few nights. She's felt their pain with them. She has been devoured by a dragon, mauled by her own father through her mother's eyes, imprisoned, chained, choked. She's fallen to her death from atop the dragon Meraxes, died in childbirth, died from poison. She's writhed in bed, taken with fever and agony, as a child she wanted more than the world bled out of her. She's rocked more dead corpses than she cares to remember. Once, she was even pushed into the mind of her own past-self and forced to relive her first wedding night. Bloodraven had been particularly proud of himself after that last vision, but Dany had refused to show any fear. Is that supposed to frighten me? I already lived through that. I survived that. I'm supposed to be scared of the past? I carry the past with me every day. My past, and theirs. Is that the best you can do?

She had felt his fury after that. He was crueler the next couple of nights, but he still didn't get it, and he still doesn't. He still thinks the worst pain a woman could possibly experience must come from the hands of a man, but that hasn't been Daenerys's experience at all. If he truly wanted to hurt her, he would show her Irri's dead body on the floor, Missandei's head falling from her shoulders, her empty stomach after she lost Rhaego. He'd show her Viserion weaving to his watery resting place, Rhaegal crying out in pain. He'd show her Ser Jorah's body going limp in her arms. He doesn't. That's how she knows he's getting some pleasure from his particular torture.

She manages it as well as she can; it helps that Jon usually wakes her soon after it all begins. But it's different tonight. She isn't being pulled from her dreams. She's never been in this woman's head before. And she's never been in a vision with him.

“This is how she liked it, Daenerys,” Lord Bloodraven coos into her ear, and somehow, hearing him speak to her -- her, not Shiera Seastar, not the woman whose body she's been forced into inside this vision of a memory-- makes it all the more traumatizing. The sound of his voice and the brush of his lips to her ear make her push against his arms, smack her fists into his chest, struggle to push him off of her. But her fight only fuels him. He whispers: “And you do, too, don’t you?”

She doesn’t. She doesn’t. But then he’s in her head, and she does. She fights against the pleasure he forces into this stranger’s mind— feeling more violated than she’s ever felt before— and he laughs.

“Does Aegon fuck you like this? Maybe I’ll go into his head next time, and I’ll show him how.”

“No,” she begs. She tries to reach back and push at him, but suddenly, she can’t move anything— not her arms, her legs, not even her hand. She can’t even speak. She feels terror drench her insides. No, she begs.

“When I take over your mind, this is where you’ll be. Stuck in the back of your own mind living in whatever sort of world I make for you. I think this will be it. This is your own personal hell, isn't it? I know it is. I made it just for you. But don’t worry— you won’t only be a bedslave. I would never waste your superior blood. I’ll put a baby in you, a bastard of my own. I’ll do it now. How would you like that? I know how much you want to be a mother.”

Wake me up, she thinks, the words meant for Jon, for Arya, both who had been in the room with her when she fell asleep. It was their first night on the boat, their first night on their journey. Dany already wishes they’d never gone. Wake me up. You woke me every other time. Wake me now.

Suddenly, she’s herself again. She’s standing at the bedside in her chambers on the boat, her body trembling but unhurt. Untouched. Then Lord Bloodraven is in front of her— tall, his hair long and white, a mark like a splash of blood on the side of his face. His smile reminds Dany of the leer on the face of the harpy statues in Astapor.

She recoils, more terrified now than she’s ever been, and he’s put her through some terrible things in her dreams for many nights now. He’s not really here— you’re still in your head. He can’t have his body here. He’s not really here— he’s not real—

Still smiling, he reaches out, and Dany can’t go any further; the bed is pressing into the back of her legs. He looms over her and reaches out, pressing a finger to her cheek, as if to prove he can. She flinches. His laugh is booming.

“Look at them,” he says suddenly, glancing over Dany’s shoulder. “How peaceful they look. Do you think they realize I’m here?”

Dany doesn’t look behind herself. She knows who is there. Arya and Jon.

“As you’re fond of saying, the ones who love us most should protect us. So I suppose they don’t really love you. Do you think they’ll even notice when you’re no longer the owner of your body, the person in your head?”

She knows by now that the more she talks to him, the more encouraged he becomes in his sadism, but she can’t help it.

“Yes,” she says, her chin held high. She meets his red eyes. “They will.”

He takes another step closer. Dany tries to lean back, but her legs hit the bed, and she goes falling back onto it, landing on her bottom. Fear seizes her at once; she fists her hands around the blankets and drags herself backwards on the bed, trying to get away from him, but he kneels on the mattress and leans over her. He forces her shoulders back, pinning her to the bed. She turns her face: Jon is right there, two arms’ lengths away, and Arya is curled in an armchair right beside the bed. She tries to scream, but nothing comes out.

“This bed is very special to you, isn’t it?” Lord Bloodraven coos. He strokes her cheek; that intimate gesture makes her stomach convulse. The bitter, acrid taste of vomit hits the back of her tongue. He presses her shoulders down harder and then looks over at Jon. “Do you think we’ll wake him?” He smiles suddenly— it makes Dany shudder. “Do you think he’ll fight me? It would be great fun. In fact…”

In the tiny span of time it takes Dany to blink, he’s standing at the bedside again, Longclaw in his hands. Dany’s blood runs cold. She drags herself over to where Jon is and grabs his leg, shaking him. “Jon, wake up. Wake up!”

“Oh, I’m not going to hurt him with this. Or even you. It’s for you,” Lord Bloodraven says. “I fear I’ve been quite nasty to you over these past few weeks, haven’t I? You deserve your justice that you talk so much about. There you go. Take it.”

He holds Longclaw out. Dany stares at him.

“It’s not a trick. Take it. Go ahead,” he urges her. “Here’s the way I see it, Daenerys: either I’m physically here, which means I can hold you down on that bed right beside Aegon and do what I’d like to you, or I’m not really here physically, and in which case, this is all a naughty mind game I’m playing on you. Wouldn’t you like to figure out which one it is? It would be useful to know for sure, wouldn’t it?”

She still doesn’t move. His face contorts in rage.

“TAKE IT!” he screams. He unsheathes the familiar blade. “Take it, or I’ll test it on Aegon’s throat.”

She slides off the bed, coming to stand in front of him. She reaches out, her heart hammering. She expects something horrible to happen to her the moment her fingers wrap around the sword’s hilt, but nothing does. She holds the heavy sword in her hands, turning to look at Arya, fast asleep in the chair. What would Arya do now? Run him straight through with the blade? Wait and bide her time?

Lord Bloodraven holds his hands out at his sides. “Go on. You know you want to.”

She does. More than she’s ever wanted anything in her life. But she knows it can’t be that easy.

“There’s no point. It won’t hurt you.”

“No, it won’t kill me. But it will hurt me. Do you think I deserve pain?”

“You deserve nothing but pain.”

“Then use that sword. Or are you too weak to do even that?”

“I’m not weak. I’ve never been.” She refuses to let him get a rise out of her beyond that. She tightens her hands on Longclaw. “Fine. I’ll give you what you want.”

“That’s a first. Even in Shiera’s body you put up such a fuss. They're only visions...they can't hurt you. But then, Rhaella put up the same fight, I recall. And you truly are your mother's daughter." His smile consumes his face. It's bestial. "Your father gave into the visions I fed him much easier than Aegon has so far, but don't worry. He'll break, too. And then they won't only be visions. Poor dear...I think he'll suffer as much as you when it finally happens. He truly has delicate sensibilities."

She thinks he doesn’t see it coming; that gives her satisfaction of its own, but it’s only the starting course to her true gratification. She takes the sword and swings it towards his neck, and then, right before the blade touches his neck, just as Arya showed her, she abruptly stills her momentum and lowers her arms. His eyes are wide in surprise as she takes the blade and shoves it through him, right at his groin.

It’s easier to get the blade through than she’d thought it’d be. Valyrian steel, she attests it to. She watches him double over, laughter bubbling up in her chest, her hands tight around the hilt of the sword, still protruding from his body. She sees blood…could it be that he’s real? Could it be that this is over, that she’s killed him? Just like that?

She drops her hands from the sword, but suddenly, he’s not standing where he was anymore. There’s no blood on the floor, and Longclaw is back in her hands as if she’d never thrust it at Lord Bloodraven in the first place.

Then he’s in front of her, the front of his body pressed to hers, her arms around him, Longclaw’s blade pressed to the small of his back. She doesn’t know how he got there, how Longclaw got there.

“Now Daenerys,” he whispers, his lips pressing briefly to hers. She spits on his face after he pulls away; he laughs in response and reaches up, swiping her spit onto his finger and sucking his finger into his mouth. She stares at him in disgust. “You’ll have to try better than that. Why don’t you try again?”

Her arms ache from the strange angle the sword is at, but she thinks she can drive it through his back. He’s standing pressed to her, belly to belly, but she can stop the sword before it hurts her, too. What does it matter? If this is the way he wants to torment her tonight, it’s better than other ways he’s chosen. She’d rather stab him over and over again than endure whatever cruelty he can come up with next.

But something isn’t right. It nags at her, pulling at the threads of her thoughts, keeping her from stabbing him again. I’m missing something, she thinks, and she feels an emptiness fill her chest. Something isn’t right.

“Do it!” Lord Bloodraven demands. He steps closer to her. “Do it, or I’ll fuck you over his lap, and I’ll wake him and make him watch.”

She’s heard so many vile things from him that she hardly blinks at that. She's seen so many vile things. What's one more?

“Be quiet,” she tells him, her mind spinning. She’s trying to grasp those loose threads, trying to figure out what her mind is trying to tell her. It’s so hard when he’s got the reins. “I’m thinking.”

He blinks at that. Laughter follows. “You’re feeling brazen,” he appreciates. His hand fists in her hair, yanking so hard her eyes water. “If you ever tell me to be quiet again, I’ll make it so you can never speak again.”

Ignore him, her own voice says in her head. Ignore him. His threats are nothing. Think. Something is missing. What is it? What is missing?

“Do it,” he says again. He steps back, pushing the blade a tiny bit into his back. He inhales in pain. “Go on. Finish it. DO IT!”

Dany feels her own thoughts being dragged away from her— his doing. She resists, clinging harder to the sound of her own voice, refusing to relent. What is missing? Jon is here. And…

She feels her heart tremble in her chest. She looks down slowly. Instead of the swell of her stomach, she only sees Lord Bloodraven’s stomach pressed to hers. To her flat stomach. She looks back up at Lord Bloodraven, the pieces clicking into place in her mind. He is furious; Dany’s feels his rage, and from it, he sends excruciating pain into her head, pain so bad she has no choice but to clench her fists and whimper. She can’t even see— everything goes dark. And then…

“Dany!”

Jon’s voice. He’s frightened. She blinks her eyes open, and the first thing she sees is her belly, round and full. She’s relieved. But then she notices other things. She’s standing in their chambers on the boat, and in the soft, silvery light from the moon, she sees drops of blood hitting the wooden planks at her feet. Between her legs. Drip…drip…drip…she’s standing in a puddle of it.

“What are you doing?!” Jon demands, his voice shaking in horror. She sways on her feet. A second later, his hand touches her arm, and that’s when she sees Longclaw.

She’s holding it in front of her own stomach, the point pressed near her belly button. But she’s not holding the hilt: she’s holding the blade, and when she sees the blade buried so deeply inside her palms that it has nearly cut through to the backs of her hands, she feels her stomach heave.

“Gods,” Jon says, faint, horrified. Dany is too afraid to unclench her fingers, too afraid to try and pull her hands off the blade. She thinks any movement will make that blade slice her hands right in two. She stares at the point of the sword: it’s already cut a hole into her night dress, and she feels blood congealing the fabric to her skin. “Let go. Dany, let go! Let go!”

“I can’t,” she croaks. “My hands…”

His hysteria wakes Arya. Dany hears her footsteps, followed quickly by swearing.

“Her hands—” Jon says, his voice trembling.

“I’ll fetch the maester. Get something— a bedsheet or something—” Jon pulls his own nightshirt over his head, his hands shaking. “Yes, that will work. Get something else for the other hand, too— yes, that’s good.” Arya looks at Dany. When she speaks, she sounds remarkably calm. It lessens the pressure on Dany’s lungs. “Daenerys, I’m taking the hilt carefully, okay, so it doesn’t move at all. As soon as I’ve steadied it, pull your hands back, and Jon will wrap them up.”

Dany nods. The pain is starting to hit her: it’s less sharp than she would have imagined. It’s more of a deep, steady ache. She knows the shock is keeping most of it at bay.

Arya slowly wraps her fingers around Longclaw’s hilt. True to her word, it doesn’t move in Dany’s hands. She meets Dany’s eyes, hers drenched in pain. She nods once. Dany pulls her hands to the sides, away from the blade, and as soon as she does, blood begins pouring down her wrists, soaking the sleeves of her night dress. Throbbing pain follows shortly after, the kind that bounces up her bones and travels so far she can feel the pounding in her temples.

Jon grabs her right wrist first, winding his nightshirt tightly around that palm. As he’s doing that, Dany gets a look at her left. Her knees buckle. She’s no stranger to gore, but the sight of her own hand sliced nearly in two makes her head swim. Horribly, she can’t stop herself from trying to curl the fingers of her left hand; she doubles over at the sight of the tendons convulsing inside the gaping, bloody mush that used to be her own hand. She vomits all over the floor once, twice, three times. By the third time, she stumbles, falling into Jon, unable to stand.

He binds her left hand, and then he helps her to the edge of the bed. He cups her elbows and pushes her arms up so that she’s holding her hands straight above her head. Her head is spinning. Delirious with shock, or trauma, or blood loss, or pain— she’s not sure— she tries to reach between her own legs, unsure whether the blood she saw on the floor was from her hands or from her. She feels terribly confused. But the second her hand grazes her thigh, she cries out in pain, and blood surges from the wound at a faster pace.

“Don’t move your hands!” Jon says at once, his voice shaking. “Hold them above your head and keep them there!”

He gently moves her arms up again. They shake so violently that Dany is sure she won’t be able to hold that position for long.

“I have to check,” she insists.

“Check what? What’s wrong?”

“I saw blood.” Her own voice sounds wild, unhinged.

“Your hands are bleeding!” Jon reminds her. “The floor is covered in it! No telling how long you stood there and bled—” he breaks off, too upset to continue.

“I’m not bleeding?” she asks. She feels tears burn in her eyes. A second later, they’re searing down her cheeks. “I have blood on my stomach. I think I hurt her. I think I’m bleeding.”

“No,” he assures her. He touches her belly. He widens the hole in her gown, peering through it at her skin. She feels his thumb rub over a spot that’s sore. “It’s not deep at all. You barely nicked yourself. You stopped the blade in time.”

“I saw blood,” she persists, growing hysterical quickly. “Between my legs.”

“It’s okay,” he says, but how does he know that? “Do you want me to check?”

She nods. Her hands are throbbing so hard it feels as if they have a pulse of their own. Even her teeth ache from the pain. Jon sets a hand on her knees and parts them, leaning over to peer between her legs.

“It’s dark,” she says, tears choking each syllable.

His fingers brush the insides of her upper thighs. “Nothing. You’re not. The baby is fine. But you aren’t.” He straightens. He reaches up, cupping her elbows, trying to help her hold her hands high to stop the bleeding. “What happened, Dany?”

She laughs. It sounds strange, hysterical. Where do I start? she thinks, and then she laughs again. The metallic scent of blood hangs sharp in the air between them. Where do I start? she thinks again, her thoughts becoming spaced out, tired. Where?

“What happened?!” Maester Olken cries. Daenerys has never heard him sound so insolent. He rushes over to her side. By the time he’s there, Arya’s lit the fireplace, bathing the room in bright orange light. Dany stares at the fabric wrapped around her hands: Jon’s once-white sleep shirt is crimson, so soaked in blood it’s dripping steadily onto the carpet. The tunic he’d wrapped around her other hand is similarly soaked, though that cut appears to be less severe than the cut on her right hand. And when she looks to the wooden floor where she’d been standing, she’s stunned at the blood she sees. It’s the dark pool underneath the heart tree in Jon’s godswood. It’s a black pit. Dany can’t look away from it.

“We have to cauterize it,” the maester says, without even unwinding the fabric. “Stitching will take too long to stop the blood loss in time. Hold your hands up again until the metal is hot, Your Grace.”

Dany tries to follow his command, but she’s so tired. She can’t seem to lift her hands up higher than chest-height before the muscles in her shoulders give out and they fall back down. She feels very faint. Very confused. She hardly feels it when Jon lifts her hands for her.

“I don’t burn,” she says, but her tongue is heavy, and she doesn’t know if he hears her. She feels him tie something around both her wrists, so tight she feels as if all her blood has pooled in her hands. Tingling follows shortly after. She watches him go towards the fire, a thin piece of metal in hand. “Jon,” she says, dizzy, and when she tries to reach for him, it feels as if she has a weight at the end of her arm— she stumbles to the side, nearly falling over. He catches her. “It won’t,” she tells him.

“She’s the Unburnt,” she hears Jon remind the maester, and she feels relief flow through her. “You need to stitch it now.”

“An instance of old magic doesn’t mean she can’t burn. Everybody can burn.” The bit of metal glows bright in the flames.

“Not her. It’s a waste of time! She’s already lost so much blood!”

“Those wounds will take a long time to stitch shut, perhaps too long. This is the best option.”

Jon, frustrated, sits beside Dany as the maester unwinds Jon’s nightshirt from her right hand. Dany feels throbbing pressure at the site of the wound. She hears Arya inhale sharply a moment later: she guesses the maester has pressed the metal to her skin, but she doesn’t feel anything.

Silence, and then: “I told you. Get the bloody needle ready.”

“It’s already ready, I did it,” Arya says, her words close to a snap. “Listen to Jon.” Through half-closed eyelids, Dany sees her pass a threaded needle towards the maester. She sets his opened kit beside him afterwards. “Do the right first. It’s the deepest and it’s bleeding the most.”

“Have you received training from a healer?” The Maester asks Arya curiously.

“No. But I know what I’m talking about.”

“Well, since you know what you’re talking about, boil some wine so we can disinfect the wounds. It’d be better to do it before we stitch them closed, but we’ll have to do it afterwards. Your Grace, do you feel all right?”

Her head is so heavy. She leans it against Jon.

She feels his lips press to her hair and Lyaella shift inside of her. And then nothing.

V.

“Any chance we can sail around it?”

“No, Your Grace. Not unless we want to add at least a day onto our journey. We’re still two days out from Dragonstone as it stands.”

“We can’t add any time. How bad does the storm look?”

“Hard to say. Lady Arya says the storms have been severe this season, with one quickly following another. We’re raising our storm sails now. What are your orders, Your Grace?”

“Let me know if something changes, but as of right now, let’s push through it. If the weather becomes untenable, try to get us to Sharp Point. We can rest there until the weather calms.”

“Yes, Your Grace. How is Her Grace?”

“Resting. If you see Arya on the deck, will you send her down?”

“Yes, Your Grace.”

Daenerys’s hands are throbbing. It’s all she can think about for an uncertain amount of time. They feel heavy, and each throb makes her entire arm ache, especially her fingers. She’s so weak it feels as if all her blood is pooled there in her hands, leaving little to circulate the rest of her body.

And her stomach and hips ache. It’s a wringing sort of pain, like someone’s taken her womb in their hands and twisted as it as you might do to wet fabric. It echoes to her lower back, down her thighs. She tries to lift her hand to touch it, but even moving her hand across the sheets sends pain careening up her arm to her jaw.

“Yes?” Arya.

“Could you sit with her? I want to go look at the sky.”

“Don’t bloody bother. You won’t like what you see. The sky is so dark you'd think it was night. You were right, Jon. We should have stayed.”

“We’re only two days out. If we can push through this storm—”

“More will follow this one. I told you the weather was unpredictable. Gendry told you again—”

“Arya, this isn’t helping. What would you have me do? Magically turn back time?”

“We should turn back and go back to King’s Landing! We’ve got sickhouses there.”

“And we have the maester and all his medicines here. He says there’s nothing more he could do to help in King’s Landing than he could do here. And we can’t turn back now. Dany wouldn’t want that. She was adamant about this— about going to Dragonstone. That was what she wanted.”

“Then let’s sail away from the storm. Better to spend an extra day at sea than shipwreck and swim to Dragonstone.”

“No. We need to get her there as soon as we can.” Jon’s quiet for a tense moment. Then his next words burst from him, angry and thick with pain: “And none of this would be happening if you hadn’t fallen asleep.”

Arya is quiet. Even with her body overloaded with pain, Dany feels her heart lurch for her.

“That isn’t fair. You were asleep, too.”

“Because you promised me you would watch over her!”

“And you left Longclaw in the room! It should’ve been locked in that trunk or at your hip at all times!”

They both sound close to tears. Dany wants to tell them to stop, that it’s not their fault, but her tongue is too heavy to lift, and her lips feel glued together.

“We’re both at fault. We both let her down.”

“I don’t know what happened, Jon. I was wide awake one moment, and then next thing I knew, I heard you screaming. I never thought…how could she not feel her hands being cut through like that? How could she not even cry out? We would have heard it if she had. We would have.”

“We underestimated what Lord Bloodraven could do to her. He’s playing with us, Arya. I daydream about freezing him to death, and he tricks Dany into sitting in a bath so cold her lips turn purple. I come close to cutting his hands off, and he cuts Dany’s in half. He’s not just trying to hurt Lyaella because he thinks he must because of that prophecy: he’s enjoying this. Every minute of it. It’s a game, and he won’t stop. What the fuck are we going to do?”

He sounds broken. Hopeless. Dany wants to reach for him, but she couldn’t touch him even if she could get the strength to move her heavy arm. The horrible wringing in her lower half is gone, at least.

“I don’t know. Where’s the damn Lord of Light? Isn’t he supposed to be guiding us?”

“He’s abandoned us. I spent all day yesterday staring into the fire. All I saw was flames.”

“Maybe Daenerys will see something when she wakes.”

Jon’s quiet for so long Dany nearly lets herself slip back into darkness. Finally, he says: “I’m so afraid Lord Bloodraven has been tormenting her the entire time she’s been unconscious.”

He hasn’t, Dany wants to say, realizing right then the peace she’d found in that darkness she’d pulled her mind from. It had been quiet, so quiet she didn’t even know she existed. So quiet and soft and solitary. She’d been alone— no one had hurt her, no one had invaded her mind or her thoughts. She was free. She wants to go back to it.

“Me too,” Arya whispers.

But he didn’t, and when she slips back into the soft embrace of that quiet, dark place, he still doesn’t. She guesses she’s so unwell he can’t get a good footing in her thoughts. Let me stay here, she thinks the next time she rouses, the pain in her hands and her womb pulling her mind from it. Just let me stay. The peace is so comforting it could be Rhaella’s arms wrapped around her. It could be the quiet darkness of her own mother’s womb. We begin again, she thinks, half delirious. I could begin again. This time, I will sail for Westeros right after my dragons are born, and I will go to Winterfell. And when Jon and I fall in love again, we’ll leave this place forever. We’ll go far away— the furthest corners of the known world— and no one will find us. And even if Lord Bloodraven one day did, I would have Viserion, Rhaegal, and Drogon. Nobody could hurt us.

It’s the clenching ache in her womb that finally pulls her mind securely into reality. It draws an involuntary groan from her, and before she can remember not to, she reaches towards her middle with her right hand. The agony that bolts through her bones after moving her hand makes her cry out.

Jon is at her side in an instant. He smells like home: warm, spicy, like a burst of cinnamon across your tongue, or a touch of clove. It’s comforting; she feels the panic that had begun to lace through her abate. She tries to reach for him, to hold him, but she can’t— the pain in her hands is too great. When the tension in her middle passes, she is able to open her eyes and look at him. She finds him leaning over her, tears sparkling in his dark eyes.

“Dany,” he greets, relieved. His touch is gentle against her cheek. “How do you feel?”

She shakes her head. Fear has set in now. She understands what is happening, and she doesn’t think she has the strength for it. Not now.

“Here,” the maester says gently. Dany turns to look at him. Just that one movement makes her head spin. He’s holding a steaming mug of something that smells salty. “Beef bone broth with marrow. Drink it. As much as you can. It will help restock your blood.”

But the smell turns her stomach, and when Dany tries to take a sip, she twists away and retches. Jon’s hand brushes her hair until she returns to her pillow, trembling, dizzy. She wants nothing more than to go back to the darkness, but she can’t. She must be strong now. She just has no idea where she’s going to find the strength.

She nearly tears up as she forces herself to sit. She uses her fingers to press down on the mattress, to help ease herself up, but that makes the sutures in her palms stretch and pull, and that causes her to pant against another round of nausea. She has to close her eyes against the swimming in her head.

“Let me try again,” she requests, her voice cracking from disuse.

He holds the mug to her lips once more. Dany parts her lips, nausea already mounting at the salty smell, and he tips the mug so that hot broth, so thick it’s nearly gelatinous, pours into Dany’s mouth. She clenches her fists as she struggles to swallow it and keep it down, and that’s a mistake: she chokes on a cry of pain, sputtering broth all over the blanket, growing light-headed as she hacks.

Again, she pushes herself upright. Again, she tells them to let her try once more. This time, she has tears in her eyes as she swallows a sip, and she has to turn her face and press her mouth hard into her shoulder to keep from bringing it right back up. It’s the most awful thing she’s ever tasted— worse than the raw stallion heart she consumed at the dosh khaleen. Or maybe it’s just that she’s in so much pain that everything would make her want to vomit.

She forces herself to take another sip, and another, and another. She has to stop every other sip to pant through her urge to heave. It doesn’t help that the strain in lower half returns, cramping and powerful. She turns her face from the mug as it overtakes her, breathing through it, her wounded hand seeking her stomach. She presses with her fingers only, learning now to avoid pressing her palm against anything, and she’s not surprised when she feels the tautness of her womb. She has no idea how long it’s been going on. She has no idea how long she’s been unconscious, even. But she knows she’s going to be in trouble if she can’t get her strength back. She doesn’t even know if it’s possible.

Did he plan this? Dany wonders. Did he make this happen somehow?

She had wondered for days now whether the baby would come early, but she had hoped and prayed that she wouldn’t. It was too early, at least a moonturn and a half too early. But her body had felt different recently. She could feel Lyaella’s head wedged low in her pelvis, and no matter how she coaxed her with quiet requests in Valyrian or gentle nudges to her womb, she wouldn’t budge from that head-down position. The pressure in her hips and lower back had gotten unbearable, and nothing she ate sat right with her. She told herself Lyaella was just heavy, but she had known instinctively that that wasn’t it. How much was her body’s fault and how much was from Lord Bloodraven’s outside influence? Her stress, no doubt, contributed to this somehow. The stress he put her body through with his various attempts on Lyaella’s life. If Lyaella dies, she thinks, it’s just as much his fault as mine.

She chokes the rest of the broth down, growing more and more upset with every passing moment, but she can’t waste any time on tears. She must be strong now.

“I want to get up and walk,” she tells Jon.

“Right now?” Jon asks, horrified. He looks at the maester.

“You’re too weak, Your Grace. You lost so much blood. You could fall,” the maester says. “Take more broth, and then maybe.”

The last thing she wants is more of that accursed broth. She’s still not certain she’ll be able to keep what she drank down. But she nods. Jon holds the mug to her lips this time while the maester unwinds the tight bandages around her hands to check her wounds. Dany doesn’t want to look: she keeps her eyes closed, communicating to Jon when she’s ready for him to tip the mug back again by touching her toes to his leg.

The maester is silent as he works on her hands. His attentions make them throb more incessantly, and she can feel the beginnings of deep, aching soreness just underneath the pulsating. It takes a long time. Dany can tell it’s bad from the way the mug starts trembling in Jon’s hands every time he looks down. When she’s nearly done with the mug, some broth splashes out at the trembling of Jon’s hand, landing atop Dany’s stomach. When he reaches to wipe at it, he freezes, his hand flattening at once to her belly.

Dany doesn’t look at him: her eyes are already shut as the tension he feels beneath his hand washes over her. She doesn’t know if he realizes what it means that her stomach is stretched tight like a drum beneath his hand, but he certainly can tell it feels different. She breathes with it slowly, waiting for it to ebb, thinking of that soft darkness again. If Bloodraven tries to come into my mind now, she thinks, he'll leave. He couldn't handle this. It makes her hook her mind further into the pain, savoring it, leaning into it. It protects her. It protects Lyaella.

“Dany.”

His voice is urgent, distressed. Dany’s heart trembles at the sound of it. She opens her eyes once the contraction has passed and meets his gaze. He looks broken.

“I want to walk,” she tells him again, trying to maintain her composure. She can't fall apart now. “I must get up and walk.”

He looks at Maester Olken and then back at Dany. Dany doesn’t know why she doesn’t want to tell the maester. She thinks maybe it’s because she knows he’ll try to keep her in that bed, and everything inside of her is telling her she will die if she does. I must get my strength back. I must walk, she thinks on a loop. She thinks of the Dothraki women who ride their horses until the moment they push their children from them, the khals that must never fall from their horses. I must keep going. I must not stop. To stop is to die.

After she’s finished her second mug of broth, and the maester has finished tending to her hands, she hooks her calves over the edge of the bed and uses her legs to pull herself to the edge. Jon stands and holds his hand out, and she nearly places hers there. But he grasps her forearms gently instead, tugging her up that way.

At once, she’s so dizzy she stumbles. Jon’s hands, still on her forearms, tighten as he steadies her.

“Sit back down,” he pleads.

She shakes her head. That motion makes her vision rock and nausea swell.

“I just need a moment.” She doesn’t know if that’s true, but she tries it anyway. She leans into Jon and breathes, fighting against the nausea and the dizziness. He wraps his arm around her waist, holding her securely, and she’s glad for it. Her first few steps make her feel as if she’s gliding, and by the time they reach the door to their chambers — the same door Jon had once knocked on in the dead of night— she’s so exhausted her legs tremble. But she keeps going, walking on legs that feel heavy and boneless, her heart racing strangely in her chest. It feels fast and slow all at once.

“How far do you want to walk?” Jon asks. “You need to tell the maester about your stomach. It didn’t feel like it usually does.”

“He can’t do anything for it. It’s my time,” Dany tells him.

A thunderclap booms through the corridor, the sound so powerful it makes the floors vibrate beneath their feet. Seconds later, Dany hears torrential rain begin, intermingled with the roar of high winds. The floors shift beneath her feet as the boat sways; if it weren’t for Jon’s arm around her waist, she’s certain she’d be on the floor.

“It can’t be your time,” she hears Jon say. Plead, really. “It’s too early. I’m sure it’s something else…”

“It’s not,” Dany tells him firmly. “It’s my time. Perhaps I’ll make it to Dragonstone, perhaps I won’t. But she’s coming.” She stumbles into Jon as the boat rocks again. He grasps her tighter. “I’d like to see Arya and Grey Worm before—

She stops. Jon looks away from her, his throat convulsing as he swallows hard.

“Let’s walk to them,” Dany finishes. She feels like she’s clutching to some inner source of strength with all she has; it keeps her together, keeps her focused. She thinks that source must be her love for Lyaella. She knows that she isn’t going to survive to leave this boat. Not after all the blood she's already lost. But Lyaella still might.

“We’ll summon them to us. We need to go back. The weather’s only going to get worse before it gets better.”

She starts to argue, but thunder cracks through the din of the storm, so loud it makes her eardrums expand painfully. There’s a loud rushing sound, and then both she and Jon fall against the wall of the corridor, the floor turning beneath them. Even if she wasn’t weak, she couldn’t walk in this.

“All right,” she relents. Her right hand throbs worse; she’d hit it against the wall when they fell, and when she looks down at her bandage, the bright white has blood blooming over it. She’s starting to feel so dizzy she can’t tell the floor from the ceiling at times; her vision twists and inverts, her head feels as if it’s caught in waves.

They turn to walk back to their chambers. Dany’s halfway there when she feels liquid trickling slowly down her inner thighs. She and Jon stop as the boat grows unsteady again, and Dany reaches down, her fingers trembling, and touches the wetness. Her hand comes back slick, but it isn’t blood. It continues trickling from her, leaving a small puddle beneath her, but she can’t do anything to stop it.

She and Jon share a long look, both leaning against the corridor wall as the boat pitches to the side once more, standing together in fluid from her womb. She sets her hands on her stomach. She doesn’t care about the pain in her hands— soon, the sensations in her lower half are more intense. The agony in her hands disappears entirely.

“Dany…we’ve got to get back to the bed.” She feels him grab her wrists. “And you’ve pulled some of your stitches— come on.”

She lets him half-drag her towards their chambers, stumbling on legs too weak to move. The cramping ache is tighter this time and drags on longer than it had previously, but she finds herself thinking her weakness is worse. She would take that pain a thousand times over if she could just feel strong again. If she could stand, if the thumping of her heart didn’t feel so wrong (fastslow, it trembles in her chest, like wings fluttering fast and then stopping erratically). If she didn’t feel so dizzy.

“She’s laboring,” Jon tells Maester Olken, panic encasing each word. “What do we do?”

Dany drifts for a moment, the darkness beckoning. She feels the maester touch her stomach. It feels very far away, as if she’s not even in her body anymore.

“Get her to the bed,” he says, but he sounds grave. Does he know what Dany knows? Does he know there’s nothing they can do? She was dead the moment she severed her hands on that sword. She was dead the moment Lord Bloodraven took the blood from her that she’d need to get through this. Her only blessing is that she had stopped herself somehow— she had known. She had kept herself from piercing through her child. Now, she must do whatever she can to make that mean something. She must deliver Lyaella alive— she must. She must. She must. Or else what was it all for? She can’t let him win. She can’t. She must…she must…she must...

Fly, she thinks, the word searing through her thoughts, like a red comet through a pitch-dark sky. And she is. She feels the wind whipping past her, caressing her powerful, black wings, and she watches as the sun is consumed by heavy, dark clouds. She's free...but then, she isn't. It's agony. Terrible agony. She can't understand it. It makes her wings give out for a moment, and she falls...but then she catches herself, weaving unsteadily through the clouds. Somebody is chasing her through the sky, but they have no body, no wings, no scales. No fire. She flies low over the boat...she feels them grasp onto her. She's afraid...she's afraid...he's afraid...

“Dany, open your eyes,” Jon urges.

She’s on the bed. She doesn’t remember sitting. She guesses Jon put her here. How long ago? She’s uncertain. It could have been seconds. It could have been hours. She looks up at him. He’s beautiful, she thinks, her thoughts erratic as they bounce through her mind, but will he ever look happy again? His face blurs, her eyelids droop.

I must keep going. I must keep going. She forces her eyelids back up. Her eyes want to roll back into her head. She doesn’t let them.

“I need water.”

“Water,” Jon orders immediately, though Dany isn’t sure who he’s talking to.

The intensity she feels in her womb is an anchor to her thoughts. When it takes over her again, it drags her mind down to some secret place. Like the darkness, it belongs to her and her only, but it's not dark here. It’s bright as flames, and Dany thinks of anything and everything— all things that are hers. There’s no trace of Lord Bloodraven’s thoughts, no trace of his menace. It's just her and her body and her baby. Where is he, though? Where is he? She recalls flying over the boat with piercing panic, but she can't fly. She has no wings. Everything is hazy.

“Here’s some water.” It’s Arya’s voice. Dany’s heart jerks in her chest. She wanted to see her. She wanted to say…what? She can’t remember. But she lets Arya hold the cup of water to her lips, and she sips at it slowly. It feels like ice sliding down her throat. When she’s finished, she meets Arya’s dark eyes— Jon’s, Lyanna’s, maybe Lyaella’s, too. “Arya…”

“You’re doing great,” Arya tells her firmly, her jaw set. Dany understands: she wants no goodbyes, she does not accept goodbyes, and she won’t hear them.

“I’m not.” Her own voice is hardly more than a whisper. She’s afraid. Where is Lord Bloodraven? She worries he’s going to come into her mind as soon as she’s holding her baby. He’s shown her visions before of her wringing her neck, throwing her from the window, holding her under water in a tub. She can’t. She can’t. I must keep going. “Do you remember?”

Arya stands. She turns her back to Dany, setting the cup on the bedside table. Dany sees her shoulders shake for a moment, but she masters it. “Of course I remember.”

Dany turns her head to the side, looking for Jon. Just that one movement makes her so dizzy that she has to close her eyes. Thankfully, she feels his hand settle against the side of her neck. He strokes her skin gently with his thumb. He’s there. Right beside her. At least she has him here. At least they’re together.

“Don’t forget,” Dany begs Arya. I love you, she wants to tell her, but that would sound too much like a goodbye, and she doesn’t want to hurt her. “Will you sit with me, too?” To Dany, that request is the same thing as I love you. Be with me, it means. Be here with me and with Jon. You’re my family, too. Us against this— against everything. Right now, we are the three heads of the dragon. Like Aegon and his sisters— but we won’t conquer this. Not this time.

She watches Arya walk over, but her eyes drift closed soon after that. She can feel Arya and Jon on either side of her for a moment, Jon’s hand on her leg and Arya’s on her forearm, but then she can’t. It’s just her and her body again: nothing else. And she savors it. How long has it been since it’s just been her and her body— since the only thoughts she’s heard are her own? Since the only sensations consuming her are the ones coming from her, belonging to her? She lets the pain swallow her. She rides the waves of it, focusing on it and the soft darkness at the edges of her exhausted mind. I’ll go to you, she thinks on a loop. I’ll go to you, but not yet. Not yet. Not yet. I must keep going— I can’t look back. I am almost home.

The process consumes her: time doesn't pass the way it used to, the way it ought to. She can't say how many times she rides through the clenching and unclenching of her womb, her hands throbbing and gushing blood at her sides, her head so light it could be floating over her shoulders. She can't say how much time passes. She doesn't know, but she's thankful for every moment of it. I'll get to die as me, she thinks quite a few times, the thought tinged with relief. I'll get to die inside my own body, in my own mind, and Lord Bloodraven won't be here. She never imagined she'd find such respite in pain. Never imagined she'd be glad for each powerful swell of agony.

"How do you feel?" Jon's voice sounds as if he's on the other side of the room, but she can feel him right behind her, his hand on the side of her taut belly. She's on her side, her knees pulled up as far as they'll go, but she doesn't remember rolling over. She's squeezed tightly, a powerful moment in time where she hears nothing, smells nothing, sees nothing, and then the tightness gradually unfurls. It lasts much longer than it has before. She's out of breath when it releases her, her face damp with perspiration, her hair wild around her. She reaches back blindly, touching Jon with quivering fingertips. She feels him scoot closer in response.

"I'm okay," she says, focusing on the feeling of his body tucked around hers, his hand pressed to the side of her belly, the far-off sound of the wind and the rain. "It's okay. It's good."

If he doubts that assertion, he doesn't challenge her. He just holds her tight like he expects someone to come drag her away, the pressure of his hold nearly as consuming as her contractions. Like those contractions, it brings her mind to someplace safe. As he kisses the back of her neck, his breath skating across her skin unsteadily, Dany thinks he might finally understand what's already been started, what they can't undo. But she loves him too much to address it.

"Tea? Water?" he asks, clearly desperate to help.

She isn't even sure she'll be able to keep any of it down, but she nods. She can at least try.

He helps her up and Arya brings her her favorite. Cool mint tea. The kind they used to share during their daily sword lessons, and later, their dagger lessons. Dany sips at it carefully, taking it slow, letting the coolness of the mint freeze her throat slowly on the way down.

"When we get to Dragonstone," Arya says, her voice firm, "we'll find the dragon eggs, and you'll hatch them, and we'll get the Three-Eyed Raven back for what he did to your hands. What he's done to you."

That hope is nothing more than a sweet story, the kind that might be told to children to keep their spirits alive, but Daenerys isn't sure if Arya realizes that. If she ever reaches Dragonstone again, it will be as nothing more than a body.

She can't bear to respond, but soon, it doesn't matter anyway. She's swallowed alive again. Inside that wrenching stillness, she sees things flash behind her eyes, bright things that had once been in the shapes of flames. But they pass by too quickly for Daenerys to grasp onto them, too quickly for her to understand.

This time, it drags on longer than she ever imagined it could. She twists, struggling to sit up, to lean forward. She thinks it might help. She presses her palms hard into the mattress, indifferent to the sharp tearing she feels at her wounds, and doubles over as much as she can, breathing with the pressure. Jon's hand is light over her spine, rubbing her back, but she might as well be half-numb.

This time, when it passes, she falls back against the pillows, her body trembling. Sweat coats her, making her blood-stained nightdress stick to her skin. She's cold, but she's on fire. She doesn't know which one to deal with first. After lying there, her heart beating so fast it feels like one continuous throb, she forces herself back upright to sip at the glass of water the maester brings to her. She drinks as much as she can bear to, and then she turns her face away. The maester is frowning deeply as he sets the cup on the bedside table.

"Here," she hears Arya say quietly, and a moment later, she feels a tugging at her scalp as Arya combs her wild hair. It feels comforting despite the tugs and pulls at each tangle. Dany feels the tension in her shoulders loosening. She leans against Jon and closes her eyes, her heart rate becoming calmer than it has been in what must be hours and hours. Jon takes a warm, damp cloth and cleans the blood from her fingers, her palms, her wrists, her arms. She hears the maester approach and ask to restitch part of her left palm, but it's not bad yet, and Dany doesn't want anyone else with her right then but Arya and Jon. She doesn't want to be poked at. She just wants to be loved. She feels that so intently that Jon can sense it, somehow: he tells the maester to come in later to fix those stitches, that she's resting. We'll send for you, he tells the maester firmly. He kisses Dany's palm gently, his lips a light whisper above her wound. Barely enough to tickle, not enough to hurt. Her blood anoints his lips, and he hardly notices. We are taking care of her.

Yes, Dany thinks, her eyes on Jon's face, his authoritative voice circling around them, certain she's never loved him more. They are. Let them. As Arya pulls the sweaty mats from her hair and Jon wipes the sweat from her neck, she feels like she's being put back together. And for a second, it gives her hope; she imagines she can conquer this. But she knows there's no true mending to be had here.

"I'm not much good at it, but I can do a single braid," Arya offers.

Dany inches further into Jon. He's holding her up now. She has a brief, terrible thought: will they be able to burn me? Will they be able to put me to rest properly? I don't burn. What will become of me?

"A braid