Feed the fish
The Red Cove | Westeros
(150 leagues from the site of King's Landing)
The sea slashes against the knife-like rocks at the mouth of the harbor, riding a fast westward wind. The Greyjoy fleet has left, save for Yara's pride and joy, the Queen's Axe. That beast of a thing she took from Euron with its great iron boarding claw and black sails wide as a dragon's wingspan. Gods but the Dornish women she keeps abord seem strange on deck amid the gray, worn faces of Iron Islanders. Proof of Yara's supremacy and her pledge to treat rapers as harshly as the other kingdoms is in every half-naked woman walking the high deck or the shoreline for some fresh air. Much to the dismay of the whoremongers, the Ironborn are never eager to be in harbor too long especially if weather might pin them there. So the great chains are up now, lacquer freshened to a shiny black to keep from rusting before the cooler months. They hold the harbor shut as sure as a bolt shuts a dungeon door. Should anyone wish to assail her home or the common homes that scatter the shores of the Red Cove like foam inside a seashell they must be willing to sail their first rows of ships straight into three bands of iron and have their men climb the wreckage, the cliffs and the hail of Unsullied spears and Wildling arrows to follow. before they have any hope of reaching the guard towers.
It's cold. Gods but it's cold. She gathers the outer layers of her coat -- her wife's influence, Dany rarely wore more than draped silk -- close in and taking it as a signal, her bloodriders tense. Their horses knacker and toss, sense their riders discomfort.
"Just the cold," Dany assures Ornela.
Ornela doesn't even turn her head and her voice is a viper's hiss when she orders her men to take a pace back. The girl is khaleesi in all but name. The girl never left her side after Dany put the Khals to the torch. It wasn't until Sansa climbed on top of her in the marriage bed that Dany truly knew why.
Whether Sansa heard the scrape of knife on sharkskin or had been playing the girl the entire time, she never said. Sansa had been taken against her will, as Dany had. Never again. They both had learned how to fight, to kill or at least make it come to blood. So that either a living, victorious woman or a dead body would be in the bed in the morning. A woman's only victory, in dark times.
Her wolf dodged the thrust, took Onrela's knife hand under and held on until the lack of blood flow convinced her. Presented her captive face-down in the furs like a cat presents a mouse at the doorstep. Dany only nodded and then Sansa took her like a bitch, over and over, returning each snarl and slap Ornela made with one of her own, digging puple bruises with her grip whilst her long fingers made Ornela yelp and moan into Dany's cunt. Dany never crested, Ornela's focus was gone too soon and Sansa was deep in some animal place, only able to fuck herself and her prize into exhaustion. Whatever blood-burning jealousy filled her friend Ornela that night, it was purged by morning, wrung out along with her sweat, her juices and her screams.
Waking to see a grinning Sansa and a quiet, pacified Ornela were a worthwhile trade for a wedding night without her dear Sansa's fingers actually landing on Dany's skin. Dany got very little done that day, having finally seen what Sansa could do to a woman but not felt it.
Once their little lamb masters common, Westeros may have a third queen unless she learns of the pet name first and strangles the both of them.
"The cold not bother you. Is your home," Ornela reminds her. "Is known."
The Khal who had owned her seemed to have little use for her words, only her mouth and holes.
She had forgotten the Lamb Men's tongue, she was stolen so young. Dothraki was uneven and alien in the poor woman's mouth and when they met. There really was no language in Ornela, just pieces and halves. Dany has taught her that, alone, a handful of words at a time. Missandei has taught her common, strange magical child she is, even with no place to hook it on. No point of reference.
Dany had never really believed Magister Ilyrio in Pentos. How could Westeros be home? Pentos was comfortable if if that is only a child's overly-polished memory. The plains and camps on Great Grass Sea felt at the least like she belonged with them and with her new people. That grand old city of Meereen itched and bothered but whether the treachery or the place and climate she never decided.
Here, Dany decides. This is home.
This strange land where half the year, no shutters or blankets keep her from waking covered in gooseflesh? Where the salt spray from the sea stings from the cold and the force alike? Where she wakes with fingers blue in the cold months if Sansa goes early for business and where in the warm months, she cannot shed enough blankets fast enough and it feels like the skin of the red-maned woman in her bed might set her on fire? Where a day never is simply comfortable?
This is home. Because her queen was born here. Because the cold doesn't bother Sansa in the least and amuses Ornela and because all the roads and tears led them here.
"Festival day," Ornela decides after a quick sniff of the wind.
"It is, Orry, yes. Or has been."
Ginger. Great bales of it, brought in at royal expense from the spoils of the broken Lannister and Baratheon houses. Woven in bundles around sticks and placed in the ashes of Kings Landing. Set aflame among the graves of a quarter-million who lived there and a full million buried there afterwards, a graveyard of known and unknown and marked and unmarked graves. Small and great folk alike.
It is all burned on one day, so that a nose-prickling smell of heat and spice wafts over the Kingdoms.
The septons call it the Wind of Grief. Grief for the war dead, the loved ones who died and then had to be killed again in the eighth Hell that the north became. Grief for the ones Cersei burned the moment Drogon's wings shadowed the Red Keep. She no doubt thought the fires would behave, stay only in Flea Bottom. Obey her, like everything else always had.
Grief for her son, sweet Viserion. Mother of Dragons indeed, she learned the moment the knife crossed the neck scales. Only mothers cry so and only a mother would dare such pain in order to ease another's.
Jon could capture a dragon and restrain it, brilliant and also half-witted and unwise man he is. Dany could free Viserion.
Red Cove and Black Keep are far enough south that she need not look at her failure each morning but not so far that she cannot smell it on the anniversary, carried over the mountains. Humility. Her map-makers say it had been a mason's camp once, fed and clothed by traders on two paths in the mountains barely wide enough for a large cart. The iron for the gates of the wall came from the range here, and the stone for the Red Keep from a strange and now gutted mountain at the south end. The peak had been sliced off in haste to appease Maekor the Cruel's need for a palace and no one cared much that it had been a volcano. Her maesters took three weeks to decide the mount was dead and done.
While hangers on and whore-mongers and wine merchants flocked to what would become her capital, Drogon burrowed in to the red mountain with flame and claw, melting a nest into the rock for herself.
The single, great tower of Black Keep that Dany ordered built sinks into the mountain it sits on -- easier to carve down than raise up, the masons said -- and was then hardened and shined by a momentary puff of dragon breath. It stands shiny and smooth as a polished obsidian knife and a buried river keep keeps it watered and cooler below in the servants and guest quarters. Smoke from the kitchens no doubt gives away the hidden part but it matters little. No stone in the world has that dark shine unless burned.
To look on that castle is to wonder how close the beast that made it prowls and how long the siege might last before she returns. The city benefits from mountains so shattered and jagged that most can not be walked two mean abreast for even the most skilled climbers and a pair of massive gates to rival what the Wall had once had. The mouth of the cove is narrow and the guard towers there can lift the chains in minutes either to keep ice floes from intruding in the more wicked winters or to keep unwanted ships out.
The Unsullied settled here and though they will father no sons, she suspects that the Dornish taking a liking to them means that bits will live on. Her descendants can reap the benefits of all this planning and hardening and scheming. She hopes that the reign of Daenerys I and Sansa the Red will be long and boring and known in the North and in the Kingdoms for their current aim of rebuilding farms and hamlets. She prays that an emboldened North swelled by wilding settlers who seem to make black and red-haired babies faster than rabbits and the kingdoms it left behind remain friends. Whether from her marriage or children or good judgment, she does not care. She wants to go down in the lineages as the last Targaryen to need to think of such bloody matters for longer than an afternoon inspection or changing of the gaurd.
The wind changes again and a dragon's roar splits the air, bouncing like thunder off of the cliffs. Drogon plunges into the sea past the mouth of the cove and comes back up with a fish close to the size of a whale in her jaws. Greyjoys call it a whale shark and Dany is never one to question their knowledge of the sea.
It struggles, gills so tall that a man could step into twitching helplessly before the teeth sink and it stills.
Drogon lands on the beach ahead, shaking every grain of sand, and begins to cook lunch. Hopefully another clutch of eggs is hardening inside her daughter, ready to nestle into the corners of the red mountain. She felt like a poor excuse for a Targaryen when a trembling, pudgy man explained to her how to tell a draka and a draga apart. Sam Tarley always has a place in her court for never repeating the story of such embarrassment.
Home. Because the cold bothers her but not Sansa and because Ornela finds it curious to live so far from where she was born, taken, and nearly broken with mistreatment. Because her dragons like it.
"Go home?" Ornela suggests.
"Home," Dany agrees.