Chapter Text
While the origin of dragons is lost to myth,
much insight has been gained about their diet through observation.
They will hunt anything: cows out to pasture, sheep, fish from the sea and
- in times of scarcity - other predators as well.
I watched them once with my own eyes as they devoured a pack of wolves…
"The habits and mating rites of dragons" - Everan Maller,
Maester to House Blackfyre
Watching the Queen’s host approach from the King’s Road, Sansa can’t help but feel they’re being invaded.
Again .
It feels like they removed the standards with the flayed man - symbol of House Bolton - just so that the direwolf could bow to someone else. The thought does nothing to improve her mood, and she stares ahead tight-lipped, trying to count.
“How many did you say there are?” she asks, as the snake of steel and creaking leather draws near.
At her side, Samwell Tarly opens his mouth.
“Too many,” Joslyn Forrester cuts in before the Maester can say anything. Her new equerry frowns down the rampants, his upper lip tugged into a permanent sneer by the scar that runs the length of his cheek. “Too many mouths to feed, and little in the way of grain to feed them. But we need every last one of them and then some, gods help us all.”
The army is close enough now that she can make out details. The Dothraki she was told about come first, bearing curved swords that can behead a man in one fell swoop. Behind them come orderly ranks of soldiers with armor as grey as the snow-laden sky, the likes of which Sansa has never seen before.
“Unsullied,” Sam supplies upon seeing her blank look. “I’ve read of them when I was in the Citadel.”
Finally, after the two foreign armies, come standards and colors she can recognize. Invaders all the same, but familiar ones. There’s the blue and white of House Arryn, sharp against the maudlin sky, and the roses of Highgarden. Bringing up the rear is Dorne, its sun and spear blazing proudly from two dozen banners. As surprised as she is to see some of the rest, Sansa expected them - even after the rebellion Dorne, remained fiercely loyal to the dragon.
“The ones she brought from across the sea seem to be ill-equipped for this weather.” Some of the Dothraki have entered the keep, and Sansa walks the battlements, following their progress. “Can we provide them warmer clothes?” Without waiting for the rest, the first group of Dothraki warriors has crossed the courtyard in a hurry, and is huddling next to the smithy for warmth. As Sansa watches, one of them shivers and hawks yellow phlegm onto the snow.
“Not in such a great number, and with so little notice. But I will send hunting parties out while there is still time. We need more food anyhow, and-” Joslyn pauses, and shoots her a look. He hasn’t been castellan long, but Sansa has quickly learned he’s always measuring, always observing. Very little escapes the man’s keen gaze - he’s weighing her words now, his dark eyes unreadable.
“Forgive me, Lady Sansa, but I was under the impression you didn’t care much for the Queen or her army.” She hadn’t, not when Jon had first suggested going to Dragonstone. In fact, she’d argued and fought and screamed at him until her voice was raw.
“You’d bend the knee to another southron ruler, Jon? After everything we’ve been through?”
He’d looked at her with infinite sadness in his eyes, and when he replied, his voice was barely above a whisper.
“If we fail up here, the Dead will march on. They hunger, and they will devour all of Westeros, and then it won’t matter who bends the knee to whom. There will be only death.”
He had been right, of course, but Sansa hadn’t been ready to admit it until after he’d left.
She doesn’t like his plan now, with the Targaryen army at their door, afraid of what Jon must have promised in return for the help. But Joslyn is right: they can’t afford to be picky.
“I care enough to keep them alive.” The wind picks up, and the Targaryen standard they hoisted up in welcome flutters madly, as if about to take flight. “Dead men will only benefit the enemy.”
A great shadow blots out the light at her words, followed closely by two smaller ones.
The entire world seems to hold its breath for a moment, and when time flows again, snow begins to fall. Sansa shivers, but not from the cold.
*************************
Nothing prepared Daenerys for the cold.
Ser Jorah had tried, but when he spoke of how the sap could freeze inside the trees and burst them from within, she’d scoffed a little and assumed he was exaggerating to underline the dangers of their task. Until Tyrion had taken her aside to tell her of the time he’d visited the Wall, before the war broke out.
“It is cold, up North, Your Grace. Colder than you can possibly imagine. It wasn’t winter when I went, and still, one of the men bound to take the Black lost four of his fingers before we reached Winterfell. The brother who’d taken him from the prisons gave him rags to wrap around his hands during the march, but the man wouldn’t listen. There was the sun up in the sky, he said, so how was it possible to freeze?” Tyrion had paused then, and had taken a sip from his cup, his mismatched eyes never leaving hers. “But freeze he did, from the inside out. By the time we noticed, his fingers were dark with gangrene, and Yoren had to cut them off.”
Dany had an easier time believing a story about a man losing parts of his body to the cold, than she could the one about exploding trees, so she’d ordered her advisors to gather as many furs and blankets as they could to outfit her armies.
The Westerosi who had renewed their allegiance to her banners had come mostly prepared, even the Dornish. But those who’d followed her from across the sea fared worse, and although the army took what equipment could be spared along the long road to the North, it was not possible to provide for such large numbers. She could only hope that the Northerners could help with the rest. They owed her that much, for bringing her swords to Winterfell at all.
Her fierce bloodriders were the slowest to adapt, the hardest to convince they had to – refusing to don the furs and woolens the money of Highgarden had procured even as the snow began to fall. They’d changed their tune when a few had fallen sick, and after Daenerys threatened to leave behind the ones who wouldn’t listen. Still, without enough warm clothes to go around, sickness had been inevitable.
Daenerys is so preoccupied with thoughts of food and cloaks, she realizes Drogon had climbed further than intended only when a violent gust of wind threatens to rip her from her perch astride his back.
A wall of roiling grey surrounds her on all sides, and the ground she’s flying over is hidden by the clouds as well. A tail – forest green tipped in bronze – surfaces from the boiling mass for a fleeting moment, but it’s enough for her to regain her bearings.
Daenerys nudges gently with her knees, and Drogon folds his wings, dropping through the clouds like a stone. He bursts through them with a roar, so close to the tops of the trees the army is marching through that the entire forest seems to waken from its seasonal slumber.
Below her, the men of Dorne cheer and lift their spears as one in welcome. Each weapon is tipped by a foot of gleaming steel, and ribbons have been tied where wood and metal meet – of a red so vivid that, from her point of view, it looks like the forest has caught fire.
Drogon tries to climb again, but she scratches at his neck with gloved fingers and leans forward to whisper soothing nothings in his ear. She doesn’t know if the dragon hears her – the wind howls, relentless like a pack of wolves – but he seems to settle for flying right over the column.
Daenerys is grateful. Despite the thick gloves and the hood of her cloak pulled over her head, she cannot feel her body anymore.
It shouldn’t be surprising, really. Before coming to Westeros, Daenerys has known only warmth.
Pentos had been a city caught on the edge of perennial summer. It was always warm there, the sea breezes sharp with brine, yet sweetened by the fragrance of the lemon tree that cast its shadow across her bedroom window. Even at the heart of Pentos’s summer, when the maids Magister Illyrio had assigned her would sweat buckets, Dany would bathe in water so hot its surface almost bubbled. That had the servants gossip in hushed tones of her Valyrian blood, but Dany paid them no heed. She would stay in the water until the skin of her fingers wrinkled, enthralled by the curls of steam lifting from the bath.
In those moments, she could almost believe Viserys’s stories about the dragons her ancestors had ridden into battle, and see herself atop one. But then, the true heat of her brother’s anger would flare up, and the reality of their predicament struck her from her daydreams – as bitter as the winter she’s led her armies into.
At Drogo’s side, Dany had discovered a different kind of warmth. Where Viserys had burned with no regard for those his fires may hurt, the Khal’s flames were kept tightly in hand. He’d burned, too, but quietly and self-assured. Banked coals blazed deep within the darkness of his eyes, and when he allowed his inner fires to spread, the whole world wailed in terror. Viserys certainly had screamed, his blood too weak to bear the brazen heat of the molten crown her alpha husband smelted for him
Dany had been scared of the heat trapped beneath Drogo’s ribcage, until she’d learned to burn with him and match him in ambition. After, under the starry, endless-looking skies of the Dothraki Sea, they’d blazed a trail of fire together.
But he’d burned out too soon, consumed by the fever and the fires of his pyre had been like ice on Dany’s skin. Nothing, she had thought then, would ever burn as hot or bright as the love she’d felt for him.
Later, having emerged from the cleansing flames a mother, she had reconsidered.
The heat of the Red Waste had been different still. So dry it wicked the moisture out of every living thing and lined the throat with dust. Dany and her people had endured that, too, and found rest in the shadow of the Harpy.
Later, with her ancestral home of Dragonstone secured, Dany had confessed she’d rather have returned to the deadly sands at the edge of the world than set foot among the pyramids again.
After Astapor and Yunkai acclaimed her as their savior, Dany had anticipated the Meereenese would do the same.
She had been wrong, and what she witnessed in Meereen will haunt her for as long as she draws breath.
Mereen had been a mistake, its gilded pyramids a fiction of grandeur. Made pretty on the outside to entice the unwary, but akin to tombs within. The heat there had been stifling. Humid. Reeking of sickness and filth.
It had been there, alone and surrounded by treachery, that Daenerys had felt a chill for the first time. The shiver said to traverse those who stepped on unmarked burial grounds. She’d tried to chain her fears away, the way she was forced to chain her dragons, but corruption followed in her footsteps. In her dreams, too. Hounding her until she could only sleep in fitful bursts, and find no comforting warmth in Daario’s arms.
The foul odor of decay had lingered in her nose long after she’d set sail for home, the unease lifting only as she walked the halls of Dragonstone for the first time, and sat on its stone throne.
Dragonstone is colder than she’s used to, and Dany takes some time adjusting, swapping silk and linen for wool and an oiled cloak that keeps her dry when ocean spray reaches the battlements, or fog sets in. But the bone-deep chill, the winds slashing through the war room, are nothing compared to the constant noise of the ocean.
Waves crash against the rocky shores, lap at the keep’s walls. The sea around the island is always dark and choppy - topped with foam - and Daenerys can’t escape the sound of rushing water, nor its incessant dripping.
For a time, her own fires burn low and miserly and damp , and breath hisses from her chest like the smoke drifting up from the water-clogged wood her warriors burn in every courtyard to keep warm. Then, Jon Snow comes, leading her deep into the bedrock of the island to show her lustrous caves of dragonglass. Liquid fire used to flow through the tunnels, he explains, and when Daenerys puts her hands against the smooth stones he wants her leave to mine, she feels it – a memory of heat trapped in the shimmery material.
Jon Snow is a soft-spoken alpha with sad eyes and a solemn face. A good man, Dany believes, if a bit misguided for claiming to be King. A man who – despite the many titles on his shoulders – asks where others would demand . In the end, a man of reason, when he kneels and pledges the North to her in exchange for help against a foe that sounds even more extravagant than Jorah’s tales about the northern winters.
There are times, during their journey along the King’s Road, when it looks as if Jon Snow would like to kiss her. She sees it in the way he never meets her eyes for long, in how he makes sure to never be alone with her again as they had been beneath the island.
She toys with the idea of letting him, but the thought doesn’t spark new fires within her chest, and her body doesn’t quicken.
The first snowfall, however, has her heart alighting with curiosity and wonder. She welcomes the quiet, and laughs when Rakharo sticks his tongue out to catch the swirling flakes. Her delight dies as they make camp a week’s ride from Winterfell, the evening air filled with the screams of those under the surgeon’s scalpel. Some lose fingers, others a foot, and as the healers burn the parts they have cut away, she throws up her meal of mutton stew.
The journey has been hard and rife with death, but they’re almost at the end of it. Daenerys can’t decide whether that is good or bad.
Drogon’s wings beat faster, sensing her mood, and he swiftly takes her to the head of the trail in time to see scouts in the Arryn colors returning. One of them raises his eyes to her and points a finger north. His face is obscured by a hood, but Dany can read tiredness in the way his shoulders sag.
Yet, a ripple of excitement is spreading through the men, and they pick up the pace – exhausted as they are by the long march.
Looking to where the scout has pointed, Dany can see why.
The forest is thinning out and, mere miles from where they are, it gives way to rolling hills and snow-blanketed fields. Gripped by winter, the land appears empty and desolate, but in the summer, it must be a sea of bronze-gold wheat, rivaling with the Dothraki Sea in beauty.
And above it all, looms Winterfell.
The castle is vast; far bigger than she had imagined. Her interest piqued, Daenerys urges Drogon forward, and he leaps ahead so fast that stinging tears well in her eyes from the rushing winds. Rhaegal and Viserion follow their brother, streaks of color against the white glare of the snow, and as they approach at speed, the castle rapidly grows in scale – from big to enormous. A granite giant breaking the horizon.
Atop each of its mighty watchtowers flies the banner of the Starks – snarling direwolves in a field of white, that seemingly spring out of the fabric to attack her sons when they fly closer.
Among them – and above, she is pleased to note – a swarm of cloth-spun dragons spread their wings to meet her. Targaryen banners in black and fulgid red grace the top of every wall, declaring the castle’s allegiance.
It brings a smile to Dany’s lips; perhaps she will find welcome here, and warmth.
A sizeable town huddles against the keep, but its roads, as her vanguard makes its way through them and to the open gates, remain empty.
Tyrion told her about the Boltons in broad terms, but when she’d asked Jon to elaborate, a pained expression had touched upon his face and he’d said little else. Winterfell was sacked and most of the garrison put to the sword. As for the people who had lived in the castle’s shadow… Dany only has to close her eyes to see the dead children the Great Masters had crucified as warning, and left for her to find.
The fate of the townsfolk must have been similar – worse if the rumors about the Bastard of Bolton are to be believed.
Too impatient to wait for all of her men to reach the keep, Daenerys circles the caste a few times, searching for a place where she can safely land.
Rhaegal and Viserion, fearsome dragons in their own right, but smaller than Drogon, have an easy time of it. There’s a tower behind the castle’s inner wall that has caved inward, the debris glassy-looking as though the stone had been exposed to a great heat. Drogon’s smaller brothers settle there, displacing a great cloud of ravens in the process.
Eventually, feeling her own mount grow frustrated with the search, Dany commands the black dragon to hover above the ramparts that run atop the main gate and hops down his back, much to the consternation of the Stark guards gathered there.
They bow to her as one, but their eyes remain fixed on the black dragon at her back, varying degrees of terror written on their faces. A few of them make to grab their swords, but the one woman among them shakes her head, and immediately, they pull their hands away.
Daenerys scarcely notices, nor does she watch Drogon leave. The dragon huffs once in her direction, mildly annoyed, then wheels away back toward the forest. Doubtlessly on the hunt for food.
Daenerys sees none of it, her eyes trained on the lone woman among the Starks’ retinue. The only one who didn’t bow.
The woman stares right back, a look of faint displeasure on her face, and if the sight of a dragon up close is bothering her, she doesn’t show it.
Her gaze is stern, as icy cold as the snow still kissing Dany’s cheeks, and her hair is the hue of fire. Like Daenerys, she is dressed from head to toe in wool, but hers looks homespun and thicker than what the southerners are shivering in. A pin in the shape of a running direwolf holds her cloak in place, but strangely enough, she goes bare-handed. Knowing it’s not polite to, Dany tries not to stare, but her eyes are inexorably pulled to the thin scarring on the back of the woman’s hands. Her fingers are scarred, too - a latticework of lines ending at each knuckle.
Somebody did this to her on purpose, but before she has the time to feel horrified, Daenerys is caught staring. The woman hides her hands behind her back, and a frown edges her eyebrows.
This, Dany extrapolates from the descriptions she’s been given, must be Sansa Stark.
Tyrion had spoken of her at length, as had Jon, yet both had failed to mention she’s an alpha.
Alpha females are as rare as omega queens, perhaps even more so. Among the Dothraki they are taught to fight as soon as they present and are sent to the Dosh Khaleen to serve as their protectors. They are held in high regard, and revered almost as much as the future-scrying crones. The stories say that Rhaenyra Targaryen had been one, too, but the stories also paint her in such a grim light that to draw such a comparison would bring ill luck.
The only other such she’s met in Westeros is Yara, who even now is sailing back from Pyke to strengthen the host with her own forces, but the two couldn’t be more different.
Yara is roguish, wild to match the sea she hails from, and with a tongue thrice as sharp as salt. Like her people, she fears nothing and makes no mystery of it.
Staring at Sansa, Daenerys is sure she, too, fears very little, yet she lacks the cockiness that is Yara’s brand. The northern alpha reminds Dany of Drogo in a way. She is one matured into the power she so clearly wields, one who has fought and bled for what she has. Her chin is tilted in what some would name as arrogance, but if that’s the case, Daenerys suspects she’s earned the right to it. The fire in her eyes burns cold, like the blue-green light at the heart of a glacier. Dangerous. Unpredictable and to be revered.
It causes Daenerys to re-evaluate: she’ll find no welcome here, and definitely not warmth.
Unbeknownst to her, and yet unfelt, embers of desire stowed deep inside her gather. They are ready to re-ignite, primed to start a fire where none have burned for a long time.