# Silver and Steel and the Falcon's Burden
---
The Eyrie received them on a grey morning.
The clouds had come down overnight — not unusual in the mountains, not unusual in the Vale, the clouds being the most democratic of the Eyrie's regular visitors, arriving without invitation and staying as long as they pleased and paying no attention to the inconvenience they caused to anyone below them. They sat in the passes and wrapped the lower towers in white and made the approach road something that required trust rather than sight, the path known well enough by Michel's men that seeing it was secondary.
They came through the mist.
And the gate opened.
And the Eyrie received them the way it always received arrivals — with the patient, slightly indifferent grandeur of something that has been here longer than anyone approaching it and expects to be here considerably longer still.
---
**Sansa** was in the courtyard.
She had been told — Michel's rider had gone ahead, as his riders always went ahead, because Michel Arryn did not arrive anywhere without preparation and preparation included the people waiting for him knowing approximately when to wait — and she was there when the gate opened with Lady beside her and the morning's reading abandoned in the library and her composure arranged in the particular way it arranged itself when she was preparing for something she wasn't entirely certain how to feel about.
She watched the column come through.
She watched Michel dismount.
She watched him turn to the carriage.
She watched the door open.
And she watched the girl step down.
---
The girl was —
Small. That was the first thing. Smaller than Sansa, who was not tall, which made her the kind of small that announced itself without apology. She was wearing a traveling cloak that was good quality but not Westerosi — the cut of it slightly wrong, the wool slightly different, the clothes of someone who had been living somewhere else and wearing that somewhere's version of things.
Her hair was dark.
Very dark — the deep, specific dark of something dyed rather than grown, a colour that sat on the surface of things rather than coming from within them. But the darkness could not entirely suppress what was underneath it — the quality of the hair itself, the fineness of it, the way it moved, the specific texture of something that was used to being another colour entirely.
Her eyes were —
Sansa looked at her eyes.
Violet.
The colour that appeared in old paintings and old stories and old descriptions of the old dynasty, the colour that had no natural equivalent in the ordinary world, the colour that announced its origin before anything else could be said —
She was Targaryen.
Sansa had not been told she was Targaryen.
She had been told *a ward. A young woman who needs a safe place. Someone who requires discretion.*
She had not been told Targaryen.
She looked at Michel.
Michel met her eyes with the expression of a man who knows he has information to explain and is prepared to explain it and is simply waiting for the correct moment —
The expression of a man who is also, beneath the composure, relieved to be home.
---
The introductions were brief and slightly formal.
*"Lady Sansa Stark,"* Michel said, *"this is Dany. She will be staying with us at the Eyrie."*
Not Daenerys. Not Targaryen. *Dany.* The diminutive deliberate, the name stripped of its history and its dynasty, a small person's name rather than a princess's.
The girl looked at Sansa.
Sansa looked at the girl.
The violet eyes — cautious, assessing, carrying in them the specific quality of someone who had spent their entire life evaluating new situations for danger and was performing that evaluation now with the practiced efficiency of long habit.
Sansa understood this look.
She had worn this look.
She made her face do the thing it did when she decided to be genuine rather than diplomatic —
*"Welcome to the Eyrie,"* she said.
Simply. Without the layers of courtesy that could have been deployed. Just the words, and the intention behind them, which was real.
Something in the violet eyes shifted.
Fractionally.
The beginning of something.
---
The first week was —
Careful.
That was the word Sansa would have used if asked to describe it. Two girls circling each other with the specific wariness of people who have been told they are going to be important to each other and are not yet certain how to begin the being important. The Eyrie was large enough to provide distance when distance was wanted — the library for one, the eastern garden for the other, the castle accommodating their orbits without requiring intersection.
But the castle was also — the Eyrie.
Which meant the wind and the heights and the particular quality of life in a place above the clouds that was its own world, separate from the world below, with its own rhythms and its own rules and its own enforced intimacy. There was only so much distance that the Eyrie permitted before its walls began to argue against it.
The library argued first.
---
Sansa came in on the third morning and found the girl already there.
Sitting in the window seat — *her* window seat, the one she had claimed on her first day in the Eyrie and had occupied every morning since, the one that caught the eastern light at the precise angle that made reading possible without straining — sitting in it with a book open on her lap and the light falling across her dark hair and the concentration of someone who had found something they needed and was using it completely.
Sansa stopped in the doorway.
The girl looked up.
They looked at each other.
*"I'm sorry,"* the girl said. *"I didn't know this was —"*
*"It isn't,"* Sansa said. *"It's not mine. There's room."*
She came in.
She sat in the chair beside the window — not the window seat, which she left — and she opened her own book and they read in the same space for the rest of the morning without speaking and without needing to speak, the silence between them acquiring, over the hours, the comfortable quality of two people who have discovered that they can be quiet in the same room without it being a problem.
It was — a beginning.
---
The girl spoke first.
The afternoon of the fifth day — they had been walking in the upper garden, which was the garden with the view that made southerners go slightly pale and made Sansa's heart lift every time, the view that encompassed the Vale in its entirety and on clear days found the sea at the far edge —
*"What are the knights like?"* the girl asked.
The question arriving without preamble, the way she asked things — Sansa had noticed this already, the directness of her questions, the absence of the social scaffolding that most people built around things they wanted to know. She asked what she wanted to know. Plainly. As though she had learned early that the elaborate approach to information was a luxury that her life had not consistently provided.
Sansa looked at the Vale below them.
*"Which knights?"* she said.
*"Any of them. The ones in the stories."* A pause. *"The ones that are real. Are they the same as the stories say?"*
Sansa thought about this honestly.
*"Sometimes,"* she said. *"The good ones are better than the stories. The bad ones are worse."*
The girl looked at her.
*"How do you tell the difference?"*
*"I'm still learning,"* Sansa said. *"I used to think I knew. I thought the knights who looked like knights in the songs were the real ones." * A pause. *"I know more now."*
The girl was quiet for a moment.
*"My brother used to tell me stories,"* she said. *"About our family's knights. The Kingsguard. He made them sound —"*
She stopped.
She looked at the view.
Something moved across her face that had the quality of something complicated being set aside, stored in the place where the complicated things lived when they could not be dealt with directly.
*"Did your brother's stories turn out to be true?"* Sansa asked.
*"No,"* the girl said.
Simply. Plainly.
*"Neither did mine,"* Sansa said.
They looked at the Vale together.
*"I'm Sansa,"* Sansa said. *"I know we were introduced. But I mean —"* she paused, searching for the right words *"— I'm Sansa. Not just Lady Stark. Just Sansa."*
The girl looked at her.
*"Dany,"* she said. The same quality — the name offered as the person rather than the title. *"Just Dany."*
They looked at each other.
The wind came through the upper garden.
Cold and clean and honest, as the Eyrie wind always was, carrying nothing but itself.
Something settled between the two girls — the specific, unannounced settling of the beginning of a real thing, not yet named, not yet tested, but present.
*"Tell me about your home,"* Dany said. *"Winterfell."*
And Sansa did.
---
After that —
They were rarely apart.
The speed of it surprised Sansa — the speed at which the careful distance had collapsed into something else entirely, the way two people who have more in common than their surfaces suggest find each other with the efficiency of water finding its level. Within a fortnight they had developed the specific shorthand of girls who have been talking long enough that full sentences are optional. Within a month they had finished each other's thoughts with the alarming accuracy of people who had been thinking parallel thoughts for long enough that the parallels had become indistinguishable.
They talked about knights.
Endlessly, with the bottomless, renewable enthusiasm of two girls who had grown up on stories of them and had not yet fully made their peace with the gap between the stories and the reality. They talked about the qualities that made a true knight — not the surface qualities, not the armor and the horse and the formal courtesy, but the underneath qualities, the things that persisted when the armor came off. Honor. Commitment. The willingness to do the difficult thing because it was right and not because it was easy or rewarded.
They talked about Michel.
Not always directly. Not always with full acknowledgment of what they were talking about. But he entered the conversation the way people enter conversations when they are on the minds of the people having the conversation — through the side door, through the examples, through the *someone like that* and *a person who would* constructions that allowed the talking to proceed without requiring the naming.
They both did it.
They both noticed the other doing it.
Neither of them mentioned noticing.
---
**Michel** watched all of it.
He watched it with the attentiveness he brought to things that mattered and the specific, complicated feeling of a man who understands something that the people he is watching do not yet understand about themselves — or understand and are not yet ready to name.
He had known Sansa's feelings for months.
He had been carrying the knowledge of them with the careful, responsible awareness of someone who holds something that belongs to someone else and must be handled accordingly. He had not acted on it — would not act on it, not yet, not while she was young and the situation was what it was. He had simply held it and respected it and waited for the time to be right.
He had not anticipated Dany.
He had not anticipated that the girl he had taken from Pentos — small and frightened and brave in the specific way of people who have been frightened so long that bravery has become indistinguishable from habit — would arrive at the Eyrie and grow, over weeks of clean air and honest wind and books and the company of Sansa Stark, into something that directed itself at him with the same quality of feeling.
He had not anticipated it.
He was honest enough to acknowledge it now that it was real.
He sat in his solar in the evenings and looked at the work on his desk and thought about two girls and the stories they told each other about knights and what those stories were really about and what he was going to do about what they were really about.
He was seventeen but his mind was almost thirty years old.
Sansa was thirteen.
Dany was fifteen.
He was their guardian. Their protector. The person responsible for their safety in every sense — physical and otherwise.
*They are young,* he told himself.
*They are both young and they have both been through things that have made them feel older than young and the feeling of older than young is not the same as being older than young.*
*They are romantic,* he told himself.
*They are girls who were raised on songs and stories and who have the beautiful, dangerous quality of people who are capable of very deep feeling very quickly and who have not yet accumulated the experience to calibrate that feeling against the reality of the person it is directed at.*
*They see what they want to see,* he told himself.
*They see a knight from the songs.*
He looked at the work on his desk.
He was not a knight from the songs.
He was a lord with impossible problems and incomplete information and a gamble in progress and two dragon eggs warming in a locked chest and a girl with dyed hair who was the last of a dynasty and another girl who was the future Lady of the Eyrie and both of them —
Both of them looking at him with the eyes they looked at him with.
He breathed.
He would handle it.
He would handle it with the care it deserved and the honesty it required and the patience it needed.
He would not be a man who took advantage of being seen as something he was not.
He would not be that.
---
He was in the courtyard training when Jon found him.
Jon came with the expression he wore when he had something to say and had been holding it long enough that holding it further was no longer manageable —
*"They're going to get hurt,"* Jon said.
Without preamble. The directness that was entirely Jon Stark and had never once failed to get to the point.
Michel continued the drill he was running — the sword-work that he did every morning, the maintenance of things that required maintenance or became unavailable. He did not stop.
*"I know,"* he said.
Jon fell into step beside him.
*"Both of them,"* Jon said.
*"I know."*
*"Sansa has —"* Jon stopped. Recalibrated. *"Sansa is not good at feeling things halfway. She never has been. When she feels something she feels all of it."*
*"I know,"* Michel said.
*"And Dany —"* another stop. *"Dany has never had anyone be kind to her without wanting something for the kindness. You were kind to her. Without wanting something visible in return."* A pause. *"She doesn't know what to do with that except —"*
*"Jon."*
*"Yes, my lord."*
*"I know,"* Michel said. *"I know all of it. I've known it for weeks."*
*"Then what are you going to do?"*
Michel stopped the drill.
He stood in the courtyard with his sword in his hand and he looked at Jon Snow — this boy who was not a boy anymore, who was becoming something, who watched the people around him with the comprehensive, caring attention of someone who had always had to understand his world more thoroughly than the world required of people with simpler situations.
*"I am going to be honest,"* Michel said. *"And careful. And patient."* He met Jon's eyes. *"And I am not going to be the kind of man who mistakes being seen as something for being that thing."*
Jon looked at him.
*"They're not naive because they're stupid,"* Jon said quietly. *"They're naive because no one has ever treated them well enough for them to learn the difference between the real thing and the story."*
*"I know,"* Michel said.
*"Don't be the thing that teaches them the difference badly,"* Jon said. *"They've both had enough of that."*
Michel looked at him.
*"No,"* he said. *"I won't be."*
Jon nodded.
He started to walk away.
*"Jon."*
He stopped.
*"You see a great deal,"* Michel said.
*"I've had a lot of practice,"* Jon said.
He walked away.
Michel stood in the courtyard and looked at the Eyrie around him — the white towers, the impossible sky, the mountains that held the whole improbable structure up against the logic of gravity — and he thought about two girls talking about knights in the upper garden and what they were really talking about —
And he thought about the kind of man he intended to be.
And he went back to his training.
---
*The Riverlands.*
---
The tavern at the crossroads was the kind of place that had always existed and would always exist — the place where roads met and therefore where people met, the universal institution of the necessary stopping point, the inn that served whatever was available to whoever arrived with coin to pay for it and asked no supplementary questions.
It was full this evening.
The fire was good — the nights were cold still, the Riverlands in late season carrying the memory of winter in the air even when the days had warmed — and the food was the food of such places, plain and sufficient, prepared without art and consumed without ceremony by people who were hungry and wanted feeding rather than an experience.
The door opened.
---
**Tyrion Lannister** came in with the practiced confidence of a man who has spent his entire adult life entering rooms and evaluating them in the moment of entry — the habit of someone for whom rooms have always been potentially hostile territory and who has therefore become extremely good at reading them.
He was travel-worn. The road from King's Landing to wherever he was going had left its marks — the dust and the days and the particular quality of a man who had been thinking hard on horseback for long enough that the thinking was visible in the set of his face.
He crossed to the bar.
*"Best meal,"* he said to the owner. He placed a gold dragon on the bar. The coin caught the firelight. *"And whatever passes for your best wine."*
He sat.
He waited for the food with the patience of a man who has learned to wait for things because the alternative to patience has generally produced worse results than the waiting.
He did not look behind him.
He had not looked behind him for some time.
If he had looked behind him, he would have seen her.
He would have seen the woman who had come in thirty seconds after him through the same door, who had positioned herself in the room with the instinctive, unconscious strategy of someone who had made a decision on the road and arrived here already committed to it.
She was watching him with the blue eyes of a woman who had traveled hard and thought harder and arrived at a conclusion she did not enjoy and was going to act on regardless.
**Catelyn Stark.**
She looked at the dwarf at the bar.
She looked at the men who had ridden with her — two of them, trusted, positioned already with the quiet readiness of people who have been briefed and are waiting for the word.
She looked at the Lannister dwarf.
She thought about a dagger.
Valyrian steel. Dragonglass handle.
She thought about a man coming through her son's door.
She thought about her son lying still for weeks.
She thought about her bandaged hands.
She breathed.
She stood.
---
*"I call upon —"*
Her voice filled the tavern.
Not loudly — she did not need to be loud. Catelyn Tully Stark had learned before she could properly read that a woman's authority in a room came not from volume but from the specific quality of certainty, and she had that quality in full force in this moment, had it in a way that she had not had it since she was Tully rather than Stark, since she was her father's daughter in her father's hall with the full weight of her house behind her —
The room went still.
Every head turned.
Tyrion Lannister turned on his stool.
He looked at her.
The mismatched eyes — one black, one green — moving over her with the rapid, comprehensive assessment that was his most consistent survival mechanism.
*"I call upon —"* she continued, her voice carrying through the tavern to every corner, to the men at every table who were now, all of them, watching *"— the lords and knights of the Seven Kingdoms. By the laws of gods and men —"*
She looked at Tyr