"What would you have me do?" Daenerys asked.
She was sitting on the edge of the tower parapet with the three dragons in the air above her and the white city spread below, and Jorah was standing a few feet back with the expression of a man who had asked a question he already knew the answer to.
"The dragons are small," she said. "I have two hundred people and not enough horses. I have gold, but gold only works near a market, and the nearest market is five hundred miles south." She looked at him steadily. "What choice does leaving offer that staying doesn't?"
He was quiet for a moment. Then: "Food. For them." He nodded at the sky, where Drogon was banking north against the pale horizon. "Balerion could swallow a full-grown bull. Not all at once — multiple bites. But that's the scale we're talking about eventually. The hunting in the waste isn't sufficient."
She had thought about this.
"From tomorrow, they hunt their own food," she said. "Whatever is out there. Lizards, if that's all there is."
"There isn't much out there."
"Then they develop the skills before they need the scale." She watched Drogon turn. "I'm not trying to grow them into Balerion in a year. I'm trying to keep them alive long enough to become dangerous. Dangerous enough that killing them is no longer easy."
Jorah looked at her with the particular expression she had come to associate with him recalculating something.
"The Usurper's people," she said. "They know I have dragons now. Eventually that knowledge reaches someone who can act on it."
He was quiet for a moment before he answered. "Assassins. Yes. Though—" he paused— "not the Faceless Men, I think. The crown's treasury was empty when I left. Littlefinger was running the numbers on cheaper solutions."
She looked at him.
He met her eyes without flinching.
They both knew what he had just implicitly admitted to. She had known for some time — since shortly after Vaes Dothrak, if she was being precise about it. She had gone back through her memories of the previous year and identified the moments, the small inconsistencies, the way he sometimes knew things he should not have known. A man in Pentos with eyes on the Dothraki Sea. A wine merchant who had come to exactly the right place at the exactly the right time, and then was no longer in evidence when she needed to look at him carefully.
Jorah Mormont, Knight of Bear Island, currently attainted and landless, wanted by the crown for trading in slaves, who had turned up in the service of her brother without being asked and had remained in her service without apparent motive.
She had assessed the risk. She had concluded that the risk had passed. Whatever his original instructions had been, the calculus had shifted — possibly at Vaes Dothrak, possibly earlier, possibly the day the pyre burned and she walked out of it. Loyalty could be purchased and loyalty could be earned, and she had long since stopped worrying about which kind his was, because both kinds were real.
She said: "The Faceless Men. Someone proposed them in council. It didn't pass."
He nodded slowly.
"For which," she said mildly, "I understand Westeros's financial difficulties deserve some credit."
He had the grace to look slightly abashed. "I sent reports," he said. "I should tell you that. I sent reports from Pentos and from Vaes Dothrak." A pause. "I stopped when Drogo was dying."
"I know," she said.
He exhaled.
"You are my queensguard," she said. "You and no one else. Whatever you were before—" she looked at him directly— "you are that now. I'm not interested in the past."
"That is more than I deserve," he said, quietly.
"Possibly," she agreed. "But it's what you have. Tell me about Bear Island."
He thought for a moment, then crouched and picked up a pale stone from the tower floor. In the mortar dust of the parapet he drew a rough outline — the shape of the continent, the long arm of the north, the island off its western coast.
"Here," he said, tapping the stone. "The Bay of Ice. From the island's north coast to the Wall is roughly the same distance as from the south coast to Winterfell." He sat back. "It's beautiful. I don't know if I've ever said that to anyone, but it is. Old oaks, some of them wider than this tower. Pine forests that go on for miles. Hawthorn in the spring — the whole island turns white with it, and the smell—" he stopped. "You can smell the hawthorn from the sea approach. Before you can see the island clearly."
Daenerys said nothing. She watched him.
"We had no castle in the proper sense. The hall was timber — great timber, good construction, but timber. The outer perimeter was a palisade. My maester used to say that if any lord in the south ever saw our seat, they would refuse to believe it was the home of a noble house." He found a trace of humour in this. "He was probably right. Most of our families fished. Some trapped. We traded furs for everything else — a merchant came perhaps every three years, and what he brought was what we had until the next time."
"You were poor," Daenerys said.
"We were poor," he agreed, without embarrassment. "There was enough. I never went hungry, my people never went hungry, but there was no surplus and nothing to trade beyond what the forests gave us." He looked at the rough map. "It didn't trouble me. I knew what Bear Island was. I had never expected it to be more."
He paused.
"My father arranged the match when I was still young — a girl from Deepwood Motte, which is the seat of House Glover. A day's ride from the island, if the strait crossing was smooth. Her name was Lynesse." He stopped. Then: "No. Lynesse was later. The first one—" he paused again, and she understood that she had misread the sequence— "the first one was from Deepwood Motte. A Glover girl. Plain features, good character. We married when I was twenty-two."
"What was her name?"
He was quiet for long enough that she thought he wasn't going to answer.
"Alyssa," he said.
"Tell me about her."
He looked at the sky where the dragons were circling in the last afternoon light, three colours against the blue.
"She was patient," he said. "Very patient. Bear Island was not an easy place to live even for those born to it, and she had grown up somewhere marginally more comfortable. She never complained about it." He turned the pale stone over in his hand. "We wanted children. She—" another pause— "she was with child three times. The first miscarried early and she recovered quickly. The second later, and she didn't recover quickly. The third—"
He set the stone down.
"She didn't recover from the third," he said. "She was ill for nearly a year. Then she was gone."
The dragons called to each other overhead, the thin, clear sound of them carrying down through the warm air.
"How long were you married?" Daenerys asked.
"Ten years," he said.
She let the silence sit where it belonged.