POV- Daenerys Targaryen
It had been five days since Harrenhal, and Aegon had not once talked with a straight face. Daenerys had counted them the way she used to count the days between one water source and the next during her travel from the Dothraki Sea to the Slaver Cities, an old habit she had thought she had left behind her in the Red Waste, and yet here it was again. Five mornings of bread and meat eaten in a cold silence. Five nights of watching her husband stare blankly at the sky as though it might change something the hall at Harrenhal had decided.
She could not blame him for it, not truly. A man did not walk out of a room as calm as he had walked in, not after his own father's oldest friend and father figure had called him a lie in front of a thousand witnesses, and simply carry on as though nothing had happened. She had seen his face in that hall, had felt his hand go rigid in hers before he tore it away to stride for the doors, and she had understood, in that one unbearable moment, that whatever else Jon Connington had taken from him, he had broken his heart and their relationship, all at once and past any mending.
She had tried, that first night, to go to him. Had found him sitting outside their tent long after the camp had gone quiet, wrapped in a cloak against a chill that did not seem to touch him at all, and she had sat beside him without a word, because words had failed her every time she reached for them since the hall. "You do not have to speak of it," she said finally, when the silence had stretched past what she could bear. "I only want you to know that I believe you."
"I know you do." He had not looked at her when he said it, only at the fire, and something in his voice had made her feel, for one cold instant, as far from him as Asshai was from the Trident. "But I am not certain that it helps as much as you think it does."
She had not tried again after that, not directly. She told herself to act with patience. She was a queen, and she deserved respect of her own. She was not a nanny who had to console a grown man for something stolen from him by the man of his age. Some nights, lying awake beside her husband who slept like a man keeping watch even in sleep, she missed Euron, his confidence and mystery, more than any other, and her flame of hate rose with each breath against Aemon.
The camp smelled of horse and crushed grass and the dry ash of a hundred cookfires banked too close together, and beside it, faint but growing each day they marched, was the smell of salt. They were close now. She could taste King's Landing on the wind before she could see it, and some nights that taste alone kept her from sleep more surely than her husband's silence did.
The column itself stretched a couple of miles behind them when Daenerys let herself look back on it, Westerland crimson and Reach green and gold woven through with the black and gold of the Golden Company, the legion of sellswords who had marched under one man's word for a decade of years and now, five days past Harrenhal, seemed unable to decide whose word they marched under at all. She had watched their captains drift toward Tywin's fires more often than toward Aegon's since Connington's deceit, small and wordless a thing as it was, and she did not think Aegon had noticed it yet, or, if he had, that he had no strength left in mind and body to bring them back to him.
Margaery Tyrell came to their tent most evenings, uninvited and entirely unbothered by that fact, trailing the scent of some Highgarden perfume that had no business surviving a war camp and a bright, easy laugh that Daenerys had come to both resent and depend on in the same breath. She never asked permission. She simply appeared, settled herself on whatever camp stool stood nearest Aegon, and talked, about nothing and everything. And Aegon, who had given Daenerys nothing but grunts and one-word answers for five days, would talk to her. Would almost smile.
"You are entirely too serious for a man with three dragons and an aunt who would burn the world down before she let anyone take away what belongs to you," Margaery told him, dropping onto the stool at his side as though she had been invited, which she had not. "Smile, your grace. It costs you nothing, and it frightens the smallfolk and your allies far more than scowling ever does. I have watched my grandmother do it my whole life, and it is the most unpleasant memory of my life. I'm sure Queen Daenerys wishes to see your smile too." She said, turning to Daenerys, and Daenerys nodded despite herself.
"I am not in a mood for smiling, my lady," Aegon said, and, contrary to his words, smiled.
"No one is, when it matters most." She had reached over and straightened the collar of his doublet with two fingers, an easy, familiar gesture that made something in Daenerys's chest go tight and watchful. Then she turned to Daenerys and smiled apologetically, despite knowing the meaning behind her own actions.
He had smiled then, for her, the way he had not managed once for his own wife in five days, and Margaery had looked pleased with herself, for she knew exactly what she had just accomplished, and exactly who had watched her accomplish it.
Daenerys watched it happen from across the tent more nights than she wanted to admit, and told herself it was only relief she felt, watching some of the weight go out of her husband's shoulders. Mostly she believed it. There was always, underneath that, a colder thought she did not examine too closely: that she had crossed the Red Waste and the Narrow Sea and half the known world to stand beside this boy, and it was a rose of Highgarden who could make him forget his worries, not her.
She noticed the Tyrells too, more of them drifting near Aegon's fire each night than strict courtesy required. Ser Garlan Tyrell, the second son of Lord Mace Tyrell and Lady Alerie Hightower, tall and more broadly built than any, seemed, too, to fall into deep conversation whenever she was too far off to hear.
Two of Olenna's household knights found reasons to linger by the horse lines whenever Aegon walked them. It was not disloyalty, not yet, not anything she could have named to another soul without sounding a fool or a jealous queen, and yet she marked it the way she had once marked her enemies in the Slaver Cities.
Tywin Lannister's eyes were a different kind entirely. He did not linger near anyone. He watched from wherever he happened to be sitting, pale green flecked with gold, and it was the most unsettling thing she had ever known. His son and daughter kept their distance from her and Aegon, but not more than once had she heard screaming from Cersei for her brother, the same brother who had killed her father. A brother who was now captive of Aemon. She prayed the pretender would give that man the death he deserved.
It was Ser Jorah and Irri and Jhiqui who kept the days bearable. Irri braided her hair each morning with the same quick, calm, soothing hands she had used since the old days on the Dothraki Sea, while Jhiqui murmured in Dothraki about nothing of consequence, the color of a horse she'd seen on the road, a joke half her own people would have laughed at, and for the length of that braiding Daenerys thought of Doreah, who had died in the Red Waste, and other women too. Jorah never softened anything for her, not once in all the time she had known him, but he stood where he always stood, close enough that she need not look for him.
Once, braiding, Irri had asked her, quiet enough that it barely carried past the two of them, whether she still dreamed of the boy who would have been Khal, the Stallion who would have mounted the world, the son the maegi had taken from her before he ever drew breath.
Today they would reach the capital.
She had known it since the scouts rode in the evening before, dust-white and grinning, swearing they had seen the smoke of King's Landing's chimneys from a rise not three hours' ride distant, and she had lain awake a long while after hearing it, turning the thought over. Home, some small foolish part of her kept calling it, though she had been born on Dragonstone and had set foot inside the Red Keep only once, when she arrived in Westeros and allied herself with the Lannisters and the Tyrells. It was not home. The home she meant was the one with the red door and the lemon tree outside her window.
The council tent had been raised before dawn, its canvas sides rolled up to let the grey morning light in, and a map of the crownlands lay pinned flat across the trestle table with a chalice and a flask of wine at its corners to keep the wind from lifting it. Tywin stood at its head already, as he always did, as though the tent had been built around him rather than the other way about. Garlan Tyrell sat near the map's eastern edge, his fingers tracing some line of road only he seemed to find interesting. Mace Tyrell had claimed the chair nearest the exit, his wife Alerie beside him with her hands folded in her lap in the stillness Daenerys had come to recognize as fear dressed up as composure, and Olenna sat by the side of them both and across from Lord Tywin, sharp-eyed and silent, watching the tent fill.
Aegon came last, and took the seat at Daenerys's side without a word of greeting to any of them, which told her more about the state of him.
They had barely settled before the tent flap was thrown back and Ser Jorah ducked through it, Lord Varys a half step behind him, both men rushing with haste. They had not even stopped to brush the road dust from their cloaks before finding her.
"My queen." Jorah's voice carried the same rough urgency it always did when he brought her word that mattered. "The Dothraki have landed. At Rosby."
Something in her chest loosened, the fear of losing the war vanished when she heard his words. Drogo's khalasar had broken when he died, but it had not scattered as far as she had believed, and ten thousand riders were no small host to bring here. She had sent riders across the Narrow Sea days past with instructions and little enough hope that they would come to her, though she had held little hope of it, for most of them still feared salt water more than any battle. "How many, Ser Jorah?"
"More than ten thousand, by the scouts' count." He said it plainly, but she caught the weight beneath the plainness, the old bear choosing his words with care in front of this company.
She smiled, and did not try very hard to hide it. Ten thousand Dothraki screamers loosed on a kingdom that still told its children stories about them to frighten them into their beds. Whatever else came of this war, that alone was worth the crossing.
Tywin's face did not change at all. "Then it is time we begin dealing with the rebels, your grace."
Aegon's head came up. "You mean clearing the rebels from the crownlands."
"Among other matters." It was Garlan who answered, mild as ever. "Yes, your grace."
Garlan had not yet finished when Varys cut in with the soft, unhurried voice he used for the news he judged worst. "Not only the rebels of the crownlands, your grace. Lord Stannis and Lord Velaryon left Harrenhal together three days past. They sailed together from Maidenpool, Lord Stannis bound for Storm's End, and Lord Velaryon to Dragonstone. My birds tell me they will make landfall within a day."
The tent went very quiet. Daenerys felt every eye in it drift toward her, the want plain in them for her to loose her dragons upon their enemies, enemies who carried the blood of Valyria too. She looked at her husband instead.
Aegon's jaw had gone tight, the same hardness she had learned to read in the days since Harrenhal, grief curdling fast into something with sharper edges. "We deal with that usurper's allies now, all of them," he said, and there was real heat under the words, the first heat she had heard from him in five days. "Whatever it costs."
"Where is Aemon now?" The question left her before she had quite decided to ask it.
"He lies at Harrenhal still, your grace." Varys inclined his head. "My birds have confirmed it within the day. He has not stirred from the castle since the council closed."
She nodded, and let the small silence that followed sit a moment before she trusted her own face not to show what moved beneath it. She had dreamed, moons past, of standing on some ship she did not recognize, near a stone-dragon-shaped castle, looking up to find four dragons circling above her instead of three, the fourth larger than any of her own, red as blood, its eyes finding her children across all that empty sky as though they were nothing more than meat it had not yet troubled itself to eat.
She had told no one of the dream. Not Jorah, nor Aegon, who had enough weight on him already without carrying hers too. But she understood now, when Varys said Dragonstone, that her own island lay directly beneath the water where that dream had found her, and some cold, ugly part of her, the part that still remembered a khalasar's respect for omens, did not care to send any of her children anywhere near it while Aemon's dragon yet lived.
She said none of that aloud. She couldn't appear to look weak in front of any of them.
"And the lords of the crownlands," she asked instead. "How do we mean to deal with them?"
Tywin turned to Garlan without hesitation, as though the answer had been waiting behind his tongue the whole time. "Lannister men and the Westerland levies will march on Crackclaw Point and into the Stormlands, to bring those houses to heel. The remaining strength of the Reach will sack and burn the houses of the lords who have sided with the usurper."
Olenna's eyes went wide, the first unguarded thing Daenerys had seen on that carved old face since Harrenhal, and Mace sputtered before he had fully found his voice to do it with. "You ask me to march against my own leal houses."
"Tarly, Rowan, Ashford, Hightower, and others." Olenna named them herself, flat and quick, before her son could stammer his way any further into a sentence he plainly wished he had not begun. "Half the great houses of the Reach stood in that hall at Harrenhal not five days past, my lord Hand, swearing fealty to the boy who calls himself Aemon. You would have us sack our own for it? Surely their surrender in the field would suffice."
"I would have you remember which king you marched south to crown," Tywin said, and did not raise his voice at all to say it.
Aegon turned on him so fast that Daenerys felt the air of it move against her own arm. "Was it your leal houses who rejected my claim, then?" His voice had climbed past heat now into something closer to a shout, color rising up his throat and into his face until it went past red and toward something almost purple, five days of swallowed grief finding, at last, somewhere it could go. "Send your men, Lord Tyrell. I want their heads. And bring me the head of every septon and every Hightower who still draws breath in Oldtown."
Alerie made a small, wounded sound at that and pressed her folded hands tighter against her lap, and Daenerys watched Mace's face go through several shades of color before deciding to obey. "Yes, your grace," he said, and bowed his head, and said nothing more.
Daenerys felt the smile try to rise in her again and this time worked harder to keep it from her mouth. Whatever else had come of that outburst, it had driven a wedge between Aegon and the Tyrells wider than anything five nights of Margaery's easy laughter had closed, and a wedge between Aegon and the Tyrells was, whatever the cost to Tyrell's pride, no bad thing at all for a woman who had noticed how many roses had taken to sitting near her husband's fire uninvited.
Tywin let the moment settle before he spoke again, unhurried, as a man who had all the time in the realm before giving his next order. "The attack on Velaryon and Baratheon and his other allies will force Aemon to leave Harrenhal to answer it. The Dothraki will march on Harrenhal then."
"What?" The word came out of Jorah before anyone else in the tent had finished understanding what he meant, loud enough that even Aegon's temper seemed to pause for it. "My lord, there are lords still gathered there. Guests under that roof, however uneasy a peace we keep with one another. Such an action would be breaking the guest right."
Tywin looked at him the way a man looks at a hound that has barked at something it does not understand. "Which is why we would not be the ones breaking it, Ser Jorah." He let that sit a moment, long enough for every face at the table to catch up to what he had just said. "The Dothraki would."
Daenerys felt the cold of it settle into her stomach before her mind had finished understanding the whole plan, the way it always did with Tywin Lannister's schemes, comprehension arriving a full breath behind the dread. Guest right meant nothing to men who had never sat at a Westerosi table, who had never sworn by bread and salt in their lives. No septon would curse them for it. No singer would write of Lannister treachery when it had been Dothraki hands that did the killing, and if word ever did travel that a Targaryen queen's own riders had been loosed against a hall full of lords, it would be her name the smallfolk spat when they told the tale, not Tywin Lannister's, whose hands would stay clean enough to hold a cup at the wedding feast that followed.
"And if word slips free regardless?" she pressed, low enough that it was meant for Aegon alone, though she doubted anything spoken within arm's reach of Tywin Lannister ever truly stayed private. "If some lord survives to tell the realm it was my riders who broke bread and salt at Harrenhal?"
"Then we will have burned those survivors too, and Aemon will have failed to protect his own guests both." There was nothing of the boy she had crossed the Narrow Sea for left in his voice just then, only something colder that Harrenhal had put there in his place. "I find I can live with being blamed for that, wife, so long as it works."
She said nothing further. There seemed, just then, nothing further worth saying.
"They are my people," she said, and heard, even as she said it, how thin the objection sounded set against the plan that Tywin had just laid on the table. "Not swords to be spent without my word."
"No one asks you to spend them without your word, your grace." Tywin's voice did not change at all, and she knew the argument was already lost before she had finished making it. "But the throne needs sacrifice, and the Dothraki would kill and steal and rape as is their culture, nothing different from what I have proposed."
She looked to Aegon. He was still flushed from the Tyrells, still breathing a little too fast for a man who had merely raised his voice once, and when he met her eyes there was nothing in his face that told her he had heard the true meaning behind the words of what Tywin had just proposed, only the greed of what he wanted accomplished and an enemy's allies broken before they could reach them. "It solves the matter cleanly," he said. "Dragonstone will fall to us with the burning of House Velaryon. Storm's End too, when we finish them, in time. And no Westerosi would live to tell the tale of horror at Harrenhal that would come by the hands of the Dothraki, and even if they did, our hands would stay clean of it."
Clean, she thought, and did not say aloud, was a strange word for ten thousand riders loosed on a hall full of men and women, but in the end she said nothing.
The throne was hers, and she would have it, no matter if it meant killing old allies of her House or bringing horror to Harrenhal.
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