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Daenerys confused the white slice in the darkness for the moon, at first. She blinked twice—not knowing if it was a reflection on the blue and brackish water, or if the pale queen herself had come down from the clouds to deliver Dany a kiss.

There weren’t enough candles in the world to thaw through Daenerys Targaryen’s sleepless nights, so she had not brought one up to deck, knowing it would only fall quiet in the whistling winds. No, it was with a mere hand on the wall that she had guided herself up and now she was left wanting for a flame’s small solidarity. Perhaps she’d been hoping to sneak into the blanket of stars, which might comfort her in her grief…

As if answering her prayers, lightning flashed across the horizon—illuminating the entire sky in a scream of sludging white which, in such heavy air, Dany almost felt as though she could reach out and touch. There was no moonly mother peeking out from the iron sky, puzzle together by pewter clouds. There was only a girl, split into halves like a miracle. The hairs on Dany’s arm stood eagerly as if reaching out for a long-lost sibling. The half-girl disappeared. Well, half of her did; the maid in white. In her wake fluttered a black flag, the image of a corsair come quiet and sudden. It was an eclipse that lasted a mere moment: soon as the lightning passed, she returned to white.

An acolyte, Dany knew, near instantly.

Dany used to see this garb sometimes, in Pentos and Tyrosh, but Braavos most of all. I always loved the colors in Braavos. For beneath the grey titan’s grey skies were purple harbors, and ink blue octopi fried in brown butter. In Braavos there were yellow lemons hanging heavy as sagging breasts outside her bedroom window, her room in the house with the red door, oh yes, Dany had loved red most of all.

And there was black and white too, of course, which this girl who was here-then-there wore, even though they were riding for Westeros and away from her sunken temple. Did they worship this girl’s God in Westeros, too? Dany had never heard that.

She shrugged her hrakkar cloak closer—sleeplessness and heartache had turned her into this white lion shrouded in the terrible darkness of night. Wind and thunder chased one another in raucous circles behind the mysterious acolyte, as if summoned by some great grief. Perhaps I summoned them myself. She had been born in a storm, once. Dany peered to the sky hoping to make out a tail, a green tail. A mother, or a fierce child. Either would have given Dany great comfort.

Neither appeared.

The girl moved quick as any lightning, but Dany felt no fear, not even when they stood eye to eye. Not when the acolyte scrunched her nose in plain agitation and whispered, urgently, “I warn you. Do not trust the Imp.” She paused, slow cringe spreading across her face, her tilted mouth just visible in Dany’s faint glow. “Lannisters will eat the bread fresh from your oven in the morning, and the barley bread of your funeral in the evening.”

As a girl, Dany had been told that the people of Westeros cursed the Usurper and his dogs behind closed doors. That was not entirely false, then. Tyrion Lannister might be no enemy to her, but he clearly had enemies. And Daenerys Targaryen did, too. She wondered if one stood before her now.

“Is this Quaithe’s message?” she asked, her head heavy in the crackling air—Quaithe always spoke words of warning, though the woman had never come to Dany in the body of a halfling. 

“Quaithe? I know no Quaithe.”

Lightning flashed again. In place of the stars which decorated Quaithe’s mask and blinked like eyes, this acolyte girl’s eyes were steel-grey.

“How is it you came to be on this boat?”

The acolyte’s mouth moved uselessly for a moment. “I catch clams, your Grace. I catch fish and rats and whatever else needs catching.”

Daenerys thought, and perhaps you do, but she knew it was not the whole answer. “The truth, child,” she prodded.

“I came… for a kiss. A kiss for a dead man,” the acolyte said cryptically. “I want to give a dead man a gift.”

“What gift? Is it you who will kiss this dead man?”

“I would... if I knew how. I only know how to give the other gift.”

Daenerys frowned at the girl’s response. “You should not be kissing any man, I think. Dead or alive.”

“If he is alive, he wouldn’t need any gifts,” the girl said agitatedly, biting her lip—and all at once Dany knew with clarity clearer than the blue of the sky that this girl would never forgive so much as the earth’s clay which had made the bricks which built the oven which baked the barley bread of funerals, if this… man… needed either loaf or kiss. She knew, for Dany knew too well the twin fires of love and mourning. She looked to the sky, again; she found nothing, again.

“What are you called?” she asked, a bit severely.

The acolyte drew away from Daenerys—lightning overtook the sky, and the ship rocked suddenly. Clutching the sideboard, the girl’s eyes glowed, clever as a cat. “Nymeria,” she named herself, darkness dripping from her mouth.

Daenerys blinked.

The acolyte was gone.

Dany tried for quiet when she crawled back into her bed yet Missandei roused even so. She blinked and yawned, in her tiny way. 

“Shall this— shall I fetch her Grace some food? Or... sweetsleep?”

“Neither,” Dany said, sighing. She spread her hrakkar over both of their bodies. “Tell me. Do you know of an acolyte named Nymeria? She is aboard with us. Her tunic is—”

“Part black and part white,” Missandei filled in sleepily. “Yes. She is quick. She can even catch cats. Sometimes she weaves shapes from seaweed and gives them to the children.” 

“Mm. And she came with us from Braavos. She is not a bravo herself, though.”

“No. She comes from the Sunset Lands, I think? Some harsh place there. Forgive me, I have not spoken to her enough to grasp her accent. I am still learning the tongues of the Westerosi…”

“You have learned so much already,” Daenerys assured her, hugging her lovingly. Tyrion had been giving her small lessons—he was a natural teacher, as Missandei was a natural student. “And what shapes does Nymeria weave from seaweed, sweetling?”

“Many. Simple fish and squids. Some flowers too.” Missandei lowered her voice further, growing almost bashful. “This one was gifted one such flower. It was… very pretty.”

Dany was pleased to hear it. She stroked Missandei’s hair, lulling her back to sleep. “Will you show it to me?”

“It crumbled, your Grace. Forgive me.”

“You must have another, then.”

Missandei curled up tighter. “And you must not go above during the night full of gales again, my Queen. It is… too dangerous.”

“No,” Dany agreed faintly. “I should not.”

In truth she yet lingered on this Nymeria. She had wanted to interrogate the acolyte further on the matter of Quaithe, perhaps Tyrion Lannister. For why had the girl felt the need to warn Daenerys of him? Had her master had some dealings with lions, been cheated by them… or had she merely heard rumors which fueled her mistrust? She’d spoken of breaking bread with Lannisters, however. That made it seem a personal thing… and of course she’d slipped away before Daenerys could ask further. Luckily, ships were not kind to those seeking to hide. She could find Nymeria again, if she so wished, and that was reassurance enough even to one as curious as Dany.

The promise of tomorrow. Daenerys kissed Missandei’s crown and fell, finally, to sleep—to dreams.

In her dream, she did not see the woman at first— the fierce woman with the sun setting at her back, her alone standing at the prow of her ship as it approached land, while the rest huddled in a fruitless search for some sign of the land they’d left behind. They weighed the boat down so the woman rose higher, higher into the sky, until it seemed she might touch the sun.

She came with the sunset at the end of the day, the slow waking at the end of a dream.

Instead, it was the teller of the story which came to the eye of Dany’s mind, wreathed in smoke and singed on the edges. She’d heard stories of the dead from the lips of a dead man… lips she’d never kissed, though she did in her dream, kissing and kissing his lips and comforting him even while he spoke, pawing her watery robes into clumsy ribbons. In dreams a dead dornish prince spilled tales of ancestors, his and hers, of a woman and ten thousand ships. 

In Dany’s dream, her kiss comforted him as he lay dying of his burns. He was burning still—Rhaegal was bathing him in flame. Daenerys was bathing in it as well, only it did not hurt her. Her child had come to her! How could he ever hurt her? They were so close, her and Rhaegal, he was so close she could touch him, feel his heat, comfort him and bring him back to her. He was roaring and breathing flame, trying to come back to her even now, she knew how hard he was trying, everything around her crackling and falling apart until even the sand beneath her was broken glass. Beneath it water flowed and it was life all around her, above and below, it was hope for the future.

It was then that the woman came. So majestic at her prow that she seemed a goddess of the fading light. And the ship was burning behind her, fire filling the horizon, and it was Rhaegal burning it all, burning a fleet as he had burned Dorne’s prince only the woman did not burn, no; she raised her arms as if to embrace the sun and in her hands was a spear and Rhaegal screamed as the spear flew through the sky and Daenerys woke, screaming just the same with her hands curled into fists and her nails tinged in blood—

The sun ruled the sky, yet the king did not bother to hold court.

Instead, he attended a grand feast.

For the occasion the dark winds blew voraciously. The skies had surely spared no expense on this storm. Wishing to share in their excess, these winds hastily knocked open every door they could reach with their whistling and dancing, alive and inviting as any man, violent as any man. There was no escaping it— no sail could be unfurled unless it wished to be torn to pieces— and for some reason, Daenerys nearly wished to open her arms to the gale. Be one with the lusty beast.

She did no such thing. She had promised Missandei she would not go up to the deck again. Daenerys intended to keep that promise for at least one day. 

Thus all that was left was to sit with her thoughts. Her hrakkar swallowed her up. Tyrion came and went; rare was the day when the little man did not come to her with some tale or lesson from a book which he’d ‘discovered’ with the help of Missandei’s translation, her gift for tongues which went far beyond the limited High Valyrian he could himself claim. He came to her in his splendid yellow tunic, a white lion emblazoned upon the chest, and his unruly curls tied up in a bun to keep it out from his eyes. She could see in them that he wished to entertain her, uplift her spirits; that winter when my faithless lover left me, he simpered the verse, clever as any mummer, how cold the snow seemed! Daenerys liked to look into his mismatched eyes when he related to her passages, or true tales, or poetry— Tyrion always looked away first, and she had the sense that for some reason this frustrated him. 

He is as strange as he is clever, Dany thought. Together they were as like to soar through the skies as they were to hunker into their lairs of loneliness, despair. This was one of the latter days; Tyrion Lannister did not linger with her long.

Daenerys either did not notice or did not blame him. She had not been been able to stop smearing around her mind the remaining viscera of her dream. That woman… that woman. 

Who was she?

Was it Nymeria the warrior queen, or—Daenerys herself? She’d not seen the face. The spear had flown and Rhaegal had… what? Daenerys had felt him. Daenerys was him, as all mothers left themselves in their children, but she was not only that. Perhaps she’d lose herself in looking back... though what did it matter if she was lost regardless? With her fierce greedy green child gone from her, Daenerys was, in more than one manner of saying, adrift in the sea. This Nymeria who Dorne claimed as their mother had burned her ships upon landing, someone had told Dany once, as Dany had burned much and more upon a pyre to birth her dragons… she had had to do it, had to cross the Trident. She’d paid with death, hoping for life. Why? If all she bought was this inevitable separation. Her children might be monsters, as much as she might be one, but they were hers nonetheless. Surely it had not been her, throwing the spear. Surely not. And why, Dany wondered, were mothers called upon to make so many sacrifices? 

Only death can pay for life. Daenerys found herself remembering the maegi Mirri Maaz Durr who had taught her that first cruel lesson. She did not allow herself to think of the woman often as it was too painful— but Dany was in pain already, conjuring the woman hardly mattered! How could those healer’s hands which tipped tonic so gently into Dany’s mouth, in the hazy few moments when she could still pretend that Rhaego and Drogo yet remained to her, be the same to reach inside Dany and ravage her? That tonic was bitter, bitterer than anything I had tasted before, Dany recalled. It had washed her empty, not clean.

Nymeria had burned her ships. The maegi had too, of a fashion. Rocking back and forth in the bowels of the vessel, Daenerys shivered to imagine herself holding a spear and scuttling the floorboards of the ship even as she stood on them, waves licking at her ankles before swallowing her, dragging her down to the depths of the sea where not even hope could survive.

In her wretched loneliness, all thought of tasking Missandei with seeking out the acolyte Nymeria had fled Daenerys’s mind.

She slept fitfully—only waking when the boat had steadied long enough to light a candle and pray that, like a babe cresting childhood, it would remain standing. From that small miracle came a precious warmth.

Flickering and fragile as glass.

At least I did not dream, Daenerys thought when she woke in the storm’s aftermath, vinegar lingering in her taste and sight. There was nothing to be done about her delicate mood but go on, she supposed. Still, she kept Tyrion Lannister with her as a shield of sorts, when she surfaced into the presence of her maester in whose audience she had requested she not be disturbed. The man had been with her for some moons already, after introducing himself to her on the Dothraki Sea. And if she’d found his bear arms a comfort, an omen… if she did, which she was not sure… either way, Dany had known his name long before she met him. 

The salty air pricked once again on her tongue.

She did not often have the two men in one another’s company. Tyrion Lannister hardly needed instruction in histories, mathematics, and so forth. In another life you might have made an archmaester, my lord, Marwyn had once told him, in rare praise. I’d rather be north of six feet and wed to a crofter’s daughter, Tyrion replied, oddly sour. Such was the rhythm of their interactions: spirited debate, when it was not tangled antagonisms.

(Daenerys had had her own sour interaction with the grey-robed and gruff man. He’d seemed surprised, when she cautiously told him of Mirri Maz Duur, his red mouth hanging open like a bleeding sore. Asshai, yes… he had too slowly recalled. He could not quite manage gentle. She brought me the body of… some infant, was it? Just born, though it hadn’t been strangled. An unusual thing. I cut it open and showed her what there was to see. She wept the whole while, damned woman. After that, there’d been no more questions Daenerys cared to ask.)

Before long the two men were quarreling, as they were wont to do, and Daenerys half-regretted her queries which had begun the battle. She looked out to where Drogon and Viserion were skimming the water while otherwise ignoring one another. Their wings might have blotted out the sun, if there’d been any sun to be had.

“The number was greatly exaggerated, I grant you—”

“Gods damn the bloody numbers. A dog will grow tired of chewing on ten bones the same as he will ten thousand, you know. That the question is even asked is proof that the popular accounts are little more than folk tales, penned down three hundred years late! She was one woman, or three or five.” 

“No doubt baring six or ten breasts,” Marwyn retorted. “The same could be argued of Hugor Hill, for accounts of a deity called Hukko predate mentions of Hugor by some years. Will you say he was three or five as well?”

“I would never blaspheme so brazenly, good maester! Seven would be the appropriate speculation.”

Marwyn laughed gruffly. “Certainly I would enjoy being present when you argue before the Citadel, my Lord. See how well you fare when you are not the only clever man in the room.”

“Badly, no doubt.” Tyrion grinned. “I am yet a wanted man in Westeros, you see, and just these days High Septons and archmaesters find themselves paranoid beyond sense. Yet we digress. My point was that Nymeria did not burn her ships until war was declared. Her landing preceded that by dozens of years, if not more.”

“He says dozens! Twenty-five at the upmost. The unification of Dorne was the matter of many years, messy as a dog’s dinner, but it was damned well done in her lifetime.”

“The unification of Dorne,” Tyrion scoffed. “Those brave dragonslayers, yes. How convenient that there appeared from the sky an enemy to turn all Dorne into brothers, hm? The Bloodroyal Yronwoods and the proud falcons of Fowler and Starfall, yes, the Daynes of Starfall more than any other, all turning their proud spears skyward when they’d only the day before been caressing each other’s necks with them. The Martells made off like thieves, I tell you. There was your unification of Dorne. Nymeria was dust by then.”

“Of what kingdom could this not be argued, Lord Tyrion? Lannisport’s vassals are her ancient enemies as well.”

“Enemies and enemies and more everyday,” Tyrion agreed, half of his orange slice caught in his throat. “My sweet sister sees to that. I am an enemy too, no doubt, with much to answer for. Why, some of the crimes levied against me I even did! There is a saying, would you happen to know it? Something about Lannisters and debts…”

Refusing to be distracted, Maester Marwyn crossed his arms. “The tale of Nymeria is a banner every damned Dornishman finds shade beneath. She wed Martell and Dayne and Uller to do it, and commanded armies though she wielded no weapon herself beyond the spear on her banner— but honor she did to that spear even after the man was dead himself. For it was Martell daughters and not Dayne sons who inherited her seat.”

“Nymeros Martell daughters,” Tyrion corrected. “That would be the banner. The war banner.”

“And what exile band does not wage war for rights to a home? Nine Blackfyres did just that, until Barristan the Bold slew Maelys and ended their line.”

“Their male line only,” Daenerys interjected. She’d read much of these Blackfyres, so excited by the mention of her knightly Ser Barristan that she nearly missed the lines on the heroics of Aerys Targaryen and his honor guard. She knew much of that from Viserys’s stories already, and no tome could live up to her brother’s fanciful tales; Dany preferred to read of her white knight’s victories. “Maelys Blackfyre's death ended the male line only. The female line continued for some time, did it not?”

“That it did, your Grace, as courtesans and minor priestesses,” Marwyn said. There is still so much for me to learn, she thought mournfully. 

“Ah, but you see…” Tyrion waggled his brows, leaning in conspiratorially, “they did not burn their ships, your Grace. Had Bittersteel only done that, he might have crowned a second, third, and fourth Daemon Blackfyre.”

“And if he had, I might have grown up in exile across the Narrow Sea,” Daenerys quipped.

Tyrion’s face shaded quite immediately. He never likes when I mention such things. Perhaps it reminded him of the golden father and brother whose memories were caught inside of him like fishing hooks. Daenerys looked beyond him, to Drogon and Viserion perched on the ledge. She loved how they loved the sea. Their wings flapped, sending rain droplets careening in all directions, and Dany thought she saw some darting white and black thing flit between them… but it was only their shifting wingbones shuttering to preserve their bodies’ heat.

“You would know something of burning ships to win a battle,” the maester said then, as though it had just occurred to him. “It was a red night on the Blackwater, I heard.” 

Dany winced— she was not sure the dwarf would appreciate being goaded just now. 

And she was right that he was not, for Tyrion replied testily, “I shall correct you, maester. The night was green by all accounts. Undoubtedly that is why no songs are written of the Imp, how he loved so very many maids with hair as fair as summer and sunlight—”

“That is certainly not the song,” Marwyn said dismissively.

“No, but there were songs. How did they go? I confess I remember little and less of that night. My memories are all swallowed up by some pesky drowning on my part. Why did I do that again? I remember wildfire like a garden of green grass… oh, that could be a song, could it not? Blooming red roses spilling petals wherever men died. Bards enjoy those tricks, putting crowns on corpses. Women sang that night, I am told, and their children with them— though they did not sing for me. No, It was Robert and Renly and Rhaegar they wanted.”

Dany gave a start. Rhaegar…? She knew her brother Rhaegar was still remembered, that he had loved a silver harp, songs were surely sung of him…

Tyrion caught her surprise, his face warping. “Yes, the Prince of Dragonstone, heroic and beautiful and back from the dead! Can you blame them, truly?” he said, a bit vicious now. “Why, even my own lordly father mourned losing Rhaegar for a son—” and this Daenerys could not believe, not Tywin Lannister who had murdered Rhaegar’s children so cruelly, “—certainly more than he would have done me. For compared to pretty princelings I am a brown bowl of soup. Who would ever sings songs of soup? Though if you found a friend floating in it, perhaps…”

He howled abruptly, pained laughter streaming from his mouth and eyes. Drogon and Viserion were growing agitated as well, Drogon’s nose pouring forth steam as Viserion cowered beneath a wing, clawing uselessly at her own face.

He sucked in his cheek when she made no move to speak. “One can grow a taste for anything, really. Why, my own sister grew ravenous for boar after her dearest husband was gored by one. That after so many years of Jaime promising to hunt one down for her— and really, I should have known then how pretty his lies were.”

Daenerys looked back to the sky, thinking that she could live lifetimes and never know all of Tyrion. His great gusto, Dany’s foe yesterday and friend today; wall after wall could crumble yet before her the gates would only grow taller, cast longer shadows, and Daenerys would ask herself after each one, how much more do I wish to know? How much must I see? 

The maester was sniveling in clear disapproval, muttering how it was not becoming for Lord Lannister to work himself into a state, that the oceans were not ink with which men should pen their confessions, yet all Daenerys could muster was, “do not rile yourself to exhaustion, my lord. Doubt is the mother to defeat.”

“Any mother would do well to be wary of me,” Tyrion replied. His emotional turmoil was palpable enough to drown in. Daenerys reached for the edge to balance herself against Viserion’s shrieking, blinking away the burning rain that had dripped into her eyes. Tyrion followed her, needing something from her, saying things she did not wish to hear, perhaps things he did not even wish to say— “for my mother was the first person I killed, and my father as well, though I waited many years to reunite them in my petty rage. How many an accursed kinslayer can say that, eh? Would you know, good maester? How many men have had grand luck to dispatch not one but both of their sires?”

“Three that I can recall,” Marwyn answered dryly. “Six, if I dispatch with academic rigor.”

“And me the seventh! Ha! Perhaps I am holy Hugor Hill after all, though I’ve never walked upon water, and no whore was ever cured of pox by my washing of their feet…” his face went pale, suddenly, ghostly hands savagely scraping ghostly cheeks, his eyes the only color remaining to him. “No cure at all. Only pain and pain, ingenious pain. It was the whip for Alayaya and a rope of hands for Shae and—for Tysha— for my wife, the worst of all—!”

Daenerys reached for Tyrion then, frightened that Viserion would overturn the entire vessel in his wildness, even with Drogon beating her back with his great wings, but Tyrion wrenched away and only grew louder beneath the breaking storm. His hands hooked into his hair; an anchor as he descended into Hell. “Oh, Gods almighty, my wife. My wife, I mauled her, I, I killed her for all I know! Killed her and… no mercy!” He was spiraling, dancing into despair—

It happened at such speed.

There was no sun, but the bare light and the rain somehow made it so Dany saw the glimpse of steel and no more, merely black and white blurring into invisibility… really she saw only Tyrion, raising his forearms a blink before a great SCREECH rang out. Steel on steel, Daenerys realized soon as she heard it; her legs unlocked, springing into movement without thought.

“No!” she screamed.

“Murderer!” the blur righteously accused— and it was the acolyte in black and white, Dany saw now, wedging the skinniest blade Dany had ever seen up under Tyrion’s soft neck with only his leather vambrace to protect him. “You killed her! I heard you.”

“No—no,” Tyrion managed to wheeze out.

Marwyn, too, attempted to catch Nymeria by the back but the girl was swift as an arrow, twisting around and underneath to kick him. Marwyn dropped to his knees hard, head smashing to the deck with an ominous smack, followed by a sharp groan. Terrible it was but Dany could not turn away from Tyrion just then— I need him, I must save him, I must, she knew in that moment, I cannot lose him, without knowing just why.

And then Tyrion and Nymeria were entangled again but Tyrion was holding the sword for all the good it did him, shoved up against the edge of the boat on the wet deck they were scrambling up and down. Daenerys’s heart froze to ice in her chest, dying like a shout in her mouth. No! She willed for time to stop, for Tyrion’s lifeblood to cling to its place inside of his body.

He let go first. It was something Daenerys had always secretly feared. That Tyrion in some moment of self-loathing would give in, give up, he would not hold to life with both hands… but a beat passed where no red necklace bloomed in the injury, followed by the next, and, because her legs were moving under the heavy weight of her sodden clothing, Dany knew that time had not stopped entirely. Only the two were frozen before her: Tyrion, dangling the sword over the edge, and the acolyte, with her boot raised to his chest, reaching out.

She kicked him backwards. It was all he could do to keep his balance. On they danced, calls of Lannister! and Liar! wheeling through the air. Daenerys could barely keep Viserion tamed, screaming until Drogon knew to engulf his sister, flatten her. Their claws scraped together and made terrible sounds.

Behind Daenerys, Tyrion was manic and beyond breath, but he was speaking too, and living. “If you hope— ha— for the castle my sister promised, all you’ll see of it— ha— is the dungeons!” 

Dany spun as if to throw herself between them… only to find them some ways apart already. The acolyte did nothing but bring her skinny sword to fore. She fixed an arm behind her back and took weaving steps. Backwards. Instinctually, Dany knew the girl’s growing distance was more dangerous than if she’d thrown herself on tyrion in uncoordinated rage.

“I already have a castle,” she told Tyrion; her balance was menacing. “They say a thing about Lannisters and debts. Know it?”

“Is it— ha— kill us and— ha— we’ll kill you?”

“No. Mouth,” she spat. “You’re not the first Lannister I’ll gut like a fish.” She crouched her knees. “I could’ve killed Lord Tywin in Harrenhal, you know.”

Tyrion found it in him to laugh. “You should have. It might have saved me the trouble of killing him on the privy shaft.”

Nymeria was not so amused. “Monster. I killed the Tickler with nothing but this sword.”

“Did— ha— you? I never knew the man. Was he my cousin?”

“Only your creature. I killed Raff the Sweetling, too,” she raved proudly. Daenerys could tell from the ship’s sudden stillness that this name Tyrion did know. It was the next name which froze Tyrion colder than ice, however. “I’m going to kill Cersei and Ilyn Payne as well. But you can go first.”

“Seems a shame, when we share so many guiding stars,” Tyrion said, mouth twisted grotesquely. “Save my grisly end for last, lady, and we can sneak into Cersei’s rooms together. Mayhaps in her chamber pot.”

It was only then that Marwyn rose once more, perhaps inspired by the lull in violence, or at least the lull in the ship’s violent rocking. He rushed unsteadily to Dany, seizing her arm and attempting to guide her down. Daenerys dodged him with a twist and an apologetic look, streaming past him to get closer to Tyrion, pull him away with her. He was calm where he stood, however—Tyrion angled up his elbow. Dany stopped in her path.

“Can I ask the name of the girl who will kill me?” Tyrion was saying, simpering. It was the voice he used when he knew something others did not… only it was strangled now. Taut as cat gut.

Lightning flashed without thunder. Or perhaps Dany could not hear it. In the sudden light, the girl was smiling. Her blade swished in an arcing X. Nymeria, Dany thought, she said her name was Nymeria. 

“Me? I’m the night wolf.”

“Might be someone somewhere called you that… I would not know. But I do know that sword. The boy your brother showed it to me in Winterfell.” Tyrion’s arms fell from the guarding truss they’d formed before him. “Lady Arya, I presume? The younger Stark daughter. We all thought you were dead.”

The girl did not sneer, or spit, or confess. She did not need to. “You would have liked that, wouldn’t you? One more dead wolf.”

“As much as you seem to like the idea of one more dead lion,” Tyrion said, not sounding as if he found much fault in her position. “The deaths of your family were never my work, my lady. I—the Red Wedding was Father, he never told—”

“The Red Wedding? It wasn’t fucking red,” the girl—Nymeria—Arya cut him off. Tyrion’s own words from mere minutes ago shone briefly in her mind; I shall correct you. The night was green. “It was smoke and darkness and, and…”

Dawning horror came upon Daenerys. She was there, at this funeral-wedding. She was even younger than she is now.

“You were there,” Tyrion said softly, realizing. 

She slashed an agitated X with her steel. “Monster. You forced Sansa to marry you. Then you gave her to the Hound.”

“What? Clegane? I never did. He went craven… and before that, he was Cersei’s creature.”

“Liar. He told me so. He said he stole from her and scared her, that he would’ve done more.” Abruptly, Nymeria—that was, the night wolf— Arya, drew herself tall as she could. She was skinny as her sword. “I left your Dog bleeding to death, by the way. He begged me to kill him but I didn’t. He didn’t deserve the gift of mercy.”

“The gift!” Dany said loudly, remembering. “You told me you wanted to give a gift to a dead man.”

“I don’t know about this Sandor business,” Tyrion said; it was clear he was thinking deeply. “He disappeared before Sansa and I ever… well. It might be true that you met him.”

“Did I? He only had burns up and down his face,” Nym—Arya mocked. “I knew him, Halfman. Just like I knew Polliver and the Tickler, I didn’t know their ugly squire boy, but I knew Raff’s stupid face when I saw it.” She spat three times, a queer gesture on a young girl. More worriedly, the point of the acolyte’s sword had inched forward slowly until it was dangerously close to poking Tyrion in the chest. Daenerys laid a hand upon this Arya’s arm, squeezing it to keep it still. She could not hope to catch her if she ran. Dany could only still her without spooking her.

“All the Lannisters you’ve gutted,” Tyrion repeated. “It seems there are precious few Lannisters on this list. Why, should you run me through, I suspect I’d be the first.”

“Not the last.”

“It would be an honor, to be the last.”

“Tyrion. Please,” Daenerys implored quietly—worried that he was waving a white flag, what with how he cupped the very end of the skinny sword. There are too many candles in the world for any one man to be so far from life’s light. He shook his head, his unruly hair lost from its usual bun. Behind them, Marwyn was slumped heavily against a wooden wall, muttering curses and pleas for Daenerys to return below deck where danger would not know her.

“What? Doesn’t she know?” the wolf-girl asked impatiently. “Tell her! Go on, tell her. Tell her what you did to Father, and Mother, and Robb, and Sansa, and—and Jon, too. Jon never did anything to you!”

Tyrion’s head shot up. “Jon Snow? What has been done to him? I assure you, he was alive and well when I left him upon the Wall.” 

(The Wall, Viserys’s wall, he loved to speak of it, Dany remembered, ignoring the pinch.)

“Far be it from a Lannister to do their own dirty work! You have—Ilyn Payne and the Hound, the Kingslayer, Walder Frey, they do all the killing, but it’s your dagger.” She screwed her sword to the side, turning but not pressing. “Do you deny it?”

“If Jon Snow is dead, Lady Arya, then I am saddened to hear it,” Tyrion said in lieu of an answer.

“Who is Jon Snow?” Dany asked.

“He is her bastard brother, your Grace. A young man sworn to the Night’s Watch. I knew him once. He was a friend… for what small time we shared.” Added, “Certainly I did not set to assassinate him.”

Lady Arya squinted at Tyrion, puzzling something out. After several tense moments she reared up and said: “I think you are lying. Even if your face says you’re not. You’re just a good liar.”

“No, that is my brother Jaime. I truly have not heard of Jon Snow’s death, my Lady. I heard whispers of a different rumor.”

“What rumor is this?” Daenerys demanded—these were the things which she must know, if she were to… were to… Gods, I hardly even know what I will any longer. 

“I know it,” the girl said, agitated. “But Jon wouldn’t do that. Not if he already swore a vow.”

“Who can say what men will do? We know men, we love them, we believe them, but only because we cannot bear not to.”

“Shut up. I don’t believe you. Father believed Queen Cersei, when she said he’d only go to the Watch if he lied about being a traitor. She lied and took his head off and everyone bloody cheered.”

“Gods Below. There, too?” Tyrion groaned, wiping his face with his hand. “Damn you, girl. Damn you. I will never ask your forgiveness, my lady, and let me be scourged, let me be struck by lightning and die screaming, all of it might well be too good for me, yet it was not Cersei who did for Lord Eddard. Oh she’s a monstrous bitch whose death I dream of in the best of all my dreams, but that— that was Joff’s doing. Is there anything worse than a boy King? And from that—came all that followed. All that war… it was the price of Ned Stark’s sainted head.”

“Joffrey was his father’s son,” Daenerys said quietly. Tyrion looked up sharply, eyes beseeching. 

“No. He was all of our son, Daenerys. He was all of us. Even me.”

Arya, pale as the moon again, withdrew three paces with silent steps. She was biting her lip—perhaps staving off emotion. “Joffrey. I cut him on his face. He came into my castle so I knocked him on his arse and I—”

“I know the tale. It swept my sister into madness, seeing that scar on his face,” Tyrion said. 

Arya did not hear him.

“Sansa hated me for it.”

“Sansa… suffered, for her childish follies. She suffered too much. If it comforts you to know,” (it won’t, Dany thought, before she even heard it) “Joffrey died in some pain, my lady. Cersei…”

“I don’t care about that,” the girl spat; it ruined it, Dany knew, tawdriness ruined revenge, sullied the righteousness of it. “Sansa. Is it true you hurt Sansa?”

“No. Not me,” the dwarf said. “In truth, in all the time after she gave up Lord Eddard’s plans to Cersei I am not sure she had a single—”

This time, Arya Stark did not use her skinny sword. It clattered to the deck when she lunged, quick as a calamity, to seize Tyrion and chain him to a rocky shore. They slammed against a wall. Her boot was up against his chest again, but this time it was her hand about his throat. 

Daenerys moved instinctually. She wrapped her arms about the girl from the back, seizing her at her chest… which was breathing hard. Wetly, like a newborn butterfly. Like a newborn babe. That fragility froze Dany, as much as the honesty of the shock impaled through each of Tyrion’s features did. 

She nearly felt as if she was intruding.

“You’re lying,” she said. Insisting, demanding, less hoping for his agreement, his yes you are right I was lying, as she was decreeing it come. “Sansa didn’t tell that Cersei anything. She wouldn’t do that.”

Tyrion worked his jaw, his mouth drawn in an alien colors of impotence. With his hand curled around Arya’s—the wolf, yes, she was the wolf— he managed to say. “I know—she was your sister.”

As Viserys was my brother. As the Kingslayer was Tyrion’s. Yet Arya only shook her wet head as her limp hand slipped down, wiping mud and splinters down Tyrion’s tunic. She stared into Tyrion’s mismatched eyes as if searching for the truth. 

“I don’t know what she did,” the wolf cub said, lost. “But she’s still my sister.”

By then, Marwyn had managed to bring Grey Worm and others of Dany’s personal guard to deck, and they surrounded Arya Stark, meaning to seize her, drag her away. Daenerys held up a hand—only Missandei approached Arya after that, slipping a small hand into her small elbow. It was gentle. Arya Stark shuddered.

Tyrion collected the skinny sword where it lay forgotten. He straightened his clothes, what little he could do, and held it out to her.

She stared at it as if it was a thing she had not seen before. Then, she reached out and gripped it.

“I hate you,” she told Tyrion, sharp as if she had fangs.

The dwarf showed nothing of his thoughts. “Yes. I understand.”

---

“I had forgotten,” Tyrion told Daenerys only later, when they were alone. They had not gone back down yet—the rain was stopped, the torrential feast laid bare. “How the surprise can be the worst part.”

Daenerys shivered, wishing for her hrakkar which would hold her close. The two of them were too accustomed to betrayal. Until I saw it today, on her face. It all came back to Dany then. It did not matter that the pain was Arya Stark’s, that it did not belong to Daenerys Targaryen or Tyrion Lannister—all branches recalled the tree, and so it was that watching someone else suffer brought back memories in each person until it was all one single ache.

“This brother of hers,” Daenerys said. “Can she not be returned to him somehow?”

“In any just world. In this one, I cannot help but wonder. There is a rumor that they have crowned Jon Snow the King in the North. I have only heard whispers… but they speak of him hunting Boltons and Freys and Karstarks with his white direwolf beside him, a sword pale as the blind eyes of justice in his hands. Some say he hunts in the skin of his wolf, as Starks of old did in legend. If that is true, then he now sits in the seat that some might say she has more right to than him. Would he welcome her? I confess I do not know.”

“You said he was friend to you, once.”

“Yes. He was clever and capable, and wore his heart on his sleeve. But that was before our lives truly began.” Tyrion laughed, subdued as she had ever heard him. “For all I know he has become some fierce, pitiless, wolfish man.”

Daenerys sniffed. “He is still her brother.” It was almost an auspicious word. Brother. Like a word that came close to describing something, yet was not the thing itself. 

“As you say, your Grace,” Tyrion conceded. He lingered a moment before smiling sadly. “Do you see now, Daenerys? Why a mother should not wager on me?”

And yet I want to. And you want me to, too. There was more to be said, more questions to be asked, but enough had happened already. Dany took his proffered hand; on her feet once more, she brushed the specks of dirt from his tunic so the white dragon peeked through again. She touched him and said the kindest thing she could say.

“I am not the one who chose you, Tyrion.”

Above them, Viserion’s wings shuttered—letting the heat of far away light touch their shoulders, dubbing them both in one fell stroke.