Chapter 2
They stay at Riverrun only one night. Visenya knows Aegon and Rhaenys would have wanted to stay longer, to regroup and march with Rhaegar’s army, but Daenerys joins Visenya in her determination to fly North as soon as possible.
“Dany cannot come,” Rhaegar tells Visenya, catching her arm on her way to her chambers to settle in for the night. “I will not allow her to go.”
Visenya stares disbelievingly at her father. “Pardon me?” she says. “Whyever not?”
Rhaegar looks grim, his face drawn and pale. Her father has grown old, it seems, without Visenya’s noticing. When she’d dropped down off of Ghost earlier, the relief on his face had been evident, marred only by worry, and he had been only apologetic when Visenya had snapped at him for leaving the Starks and the rest of the North in peril for so long.
“If we all march North,” Rhaegar says, “House Targaryen dies with us.”
Visenya opens her mouth, but nothing comes out. It’s true, she supposes. With Viserys dead, and his wife Margaery childless, all the Targaryens who can continue the line are under this very roof.
“You cannot expect her to go back to King’s Landing, Father,” Visenya finally retorts. “She is in a better position to help than you are, you know. She’s got a dragon. I think it should perhaps be you that retreats to the capital.” When the words come out, Visenya is surprised only with how sensible the idea is. Her father would not exactly be welcome in the North. The North remembers, they say. They remember Lyanna Stark.
Rhaegar drops Visenya’s arm, and tells her curtly, “I command these armies.”
“Aegon can do that. He’s commanded troops before, during that little revolt in the Stormlands a few years ago. And we’ll have Lord Connington and Ser Barristan with us. And Ser Jaime, when he reaches Eastwatch. Seasoned commanders, all of them.” Visenya is warming to the idea already. “You are not needed here, Father. You want to be, because the glory of it all compels you, but this battle is better left in the hands of your Prince that was Promised and his sisters.”
“Dany is my sister,” Rhaegar reminds his daughter. He looks angry. Visenya shakes her head.
“You’re like a father to her. If you did not want this, Father, then you should not have pushed this bloody prophesy at us all our lives. You will not be able to keep Daenerys from the battlefield.”
Rhaegar frowns at his daughter, his lilac eyes glinting dangerously in the firelight. Visenya cannot recall the last time she has been so close to her father. “And you,” he says, softly, “shall not keep me from it either.”
Visenya turns on her heel without another word, stalks to her chambers fuming mad. The idiot. She lets Dany know that they shall leave at first light, lest Rhaegar think of taking her back to King’s Landing by bloody force.
Rhaenys awaits Visenya in her chambers, but Visenya barely looks her in the eyes, and fumbles with her sword belt instead. Her fingers are unsteady with nerves and anger and a cool dread that has started to form in her chest. Visenya wrenches the leather through the buckle, only to tangle the small metal bit in another loop. Finally, she tosses the sword at the dresser.
“Bah!” she shouts in frustration. “I always forget how angry he makes me.”
Rhaenys keeps quiet. She knows how Visenya enjoys silence, especially when Rhaegar is involved.
“Come here, my love,” she tells her finally. “I’ve just the thing to make you forget.”
Despite herself, Visenya smiles. “I’ll bet you do,” she teases. “Will Aegon be joining us?”
Rhaenys pulls Visenya in close, and kisses her deeply. Her kisses are biting and desperate, unlike Aegon’s soft lips and touches, but Visenya does not mind as much as she once did. “Not until later,” Rhaenys breathes against Visenya’s mouth, and her lips moving against Visenya’s tingle. “For now, it’s just the two of us.”
So Visenya closes her eyes, and steps into her sister’s care.
When the Wall is in sight, Visenya loses her breath.
From the sky, all the land underneath her seems white, tinted with meters of snow, but she knows the Wall immediately by it’s ice-blue sheen. She’s left Daenerys flying behind miles ago, and they’d passed Winterfell from the sky only two days past, so she is alone when the Wall shocks her into silence. Visenya feels a sense of rightness, like she was supposed to be here, and that perhaps in another life she’d have been here long ago, visiting with her Uncle Ned. The fact that man built such a thing…
Well, Visenya could never have imagined it would look like this.
She spurs on Ghost, and although the wind bites at her cheeks, Visenya does not care. Her goal is so close—
From miles above, she can start to see the army camped on the southern side of the wall. Northmen, who, once she gets low enough, start to look up and point. She can see the banners of the Manderlys, the Karstark’s white sunburst, the bear of Bear Island. Up ahead, the Stark direwolf whips in the wind. There is an excitement in Visenya’s chest, a feeling of inevitability, a finally finally finally coursing through her veins.
When she lands in the courtyard at Castle Black, her breath has come back to her, and she no longer feels the cold, perhaps because she can no longer feel her fingers either, but still—she’s here.
She looks down at the men in the yard from the back of her white dragon. Some are dressed in black. Many more are dressed in wools and leathers with surcoats announcing their heraldry. Visenya does not believe there has been such a silence since she’d won the tourney, all those years ago.
Visenya climbs off Ghost’s back as regally as she can, even though it is an awkward process with such a heavy coat and so many furs. By the time she’s dropped to the ground, the whispers have started, and the men gape at her openly. Visenya yanks down her hood, and pulls the scarf from her mouth. There’s a roar of whispers when they see she is a woman.
“I am Princess Visenya Targaryen,” she tells them in her strongest voice, even though her knees are shaking from being seated in one position for so long, and she’s tired and hungry. “Tell Lord Stark that I’ve arrived.”
The yard explodes into movement again. Noticeably, a fat boy gaping at Visenya is nearly barreled over by his own black brothers in their haste to tell their Lord Commander of her coming. Visenya feels a nervousness as she scans the yard. Perhaps she should not have made such a…loud entrance. But suddenly, she can’t bring herself to care anymore.
There he is.
One time, when Visenya was little, she’d worried aloud to Ser Jaime that even if she were allowed to meet her uncle Ned Stark, she would not know it was him, and he would be offended. Ser Jaime had laughed and assured her that would not be the case.
How do you know? she’d demanded, and Ser Jaime had brought her a mirror.
Look into that glass, Princess. That’s Eddard Stark’s face, all right. You shall know him at first sight, and I daresay he shall know you as well.
He looks exactly how she’d pictured. Well, she hadn’t pictured his mouth open in shock, or the lines on his face, or that his hair was straighter and longer than hers, but his face was the one she’d pictured for years.
He is still across the yard from her, but Visenya sees him mouthing her name.
She is in his arms in a heartbeat.
He is shaking or she is shaking, or maybe they both are, but Visenya takes care not to cry. It would not do, for these Northerners to see her cry, and she does not want her uncle to think she is a blubbering girl at their first meeting. He seemed to have no qualms, though, and when they pull apart, his eyes are wet.
“Visenya,” he says again, loud enough that she can hear it this time. “Gods, how you’ve grown. I can’t believe this. You look exactly like Lyanna.”
Visenya is grinning so hard it hurts, but she can’t speak. She is too overwhelmed.
Suddenly, snow crunches under someone’s feet behind her, and Robb is there as well. “Visenya!” he calls, his face red and smiling. His arms warm and comforting. “You got my letter?” he whispers in her ear, and she nods.
“I can’t—” Visenya clears her throat and meets her uncle’s eyes. “I can’t believe I’m finally here,” she says finally. “I’ve dreamt of coming North. I’ve dreamt of this.”
Her uncle cuffs a hand on her shoulder, and he is laughing and telling her, “As have I. More than I can tell you.”
“Your mother was the wildest girl I’ve ever known,” Uncle Ned tells her later that night, when she and Daenerys are trying to warm up by the fire. “We loved her all the more for it, Brandon and Benjen and I. She had the wolf’s blood, and my Arya has it as well. Robb tells me you’ve a touch of it yourself.”
Dany laughs, “What, our Visenya? She’s not wild at all!”
“Entering in tourneys and riding dragons into battle?” Uncle Ned says wryly, lifting a brow. “I’d disagree, Princess.”
Maester Aemon chuckled from besides Daenerys. He’d held both their faces in his old, weathered hands earlier, and kissed their cheeks through his tears.
“Ser Jaime has arrived in Eastwatch with near three thousand soldiers from the Eyrie,” Lord Commander Mormont says, convening the meeting. “He writes that his father is sending men as well.”
“We don’t just need men,” her uncle says, “we need dragonglass and valerian steel. We fight them with fire.”
“We have fire,” Visenya reminds him. “Point me in the direction you wish and I will breathe it all over the Others.”
“That poses dangers as well,” Maester Aemon cuts in. “You must fly low to aim your dragons at them, do you not? If you go too low, you are vulnerable. And your dragons are not battle-tested yet.”
Visenya can see the sense in that. She sits back in her chair. “So we wait?” she asks. “We wait till my father makes his way with all the obsidian in Dragonstone? That shall be another moon, at the least.”
“The Others are not going anywhere as of yet,” Robb Stark says from the table. “They cannot cross the wall until they break the wards that protect it. They are looking for ways to bring the wall down, but we may have some time.”
“And until then?” Daenerys asks, raising a slim brow at him. “What shall we do, twiddle our thumbs? Play with broomsticks?”
Robb flushes to the tips of his hair, “No, Princess,” he says. “I suggest that we ready the men for battle and build the walls defenses. We’ve already started manning some of the other towers on the wall, but many of the men are untested, and we should get them ready in formations.”
“Very good, Robb,” Lord Stark praises. “And I believe we should start readying catapults, Lord Commander. With fireballs.”
Lord Mormont nods. “The king shall be bringing his royal engineers along, as well as the ones from Riverrun. Our builders will do, for now, but I’d like to get them started as soon as we can. They need to be sturdy enough and built well into the Wall, so they don’t come down with it when the Wall starts weeping.”
“Weeping?” Daenerys echoes. “Isn’t it a bit cold for that?”
“It’s only autumn, Princess. The Wall will weep until winter comes.”
The Lord Commander begs his leave after that. Maester Aemon goes with his steward, the fat boy from earlier who introduces himself as “Samwell Tarly, Your Grace.”
“There’ve been no women at the Wall in centuries, Visenya,” her uncle says before he takes his leave. “It’s dangerous. I’m glad you’re here, however.”
“So am I,” she says, and embraces him tightly again. She cannot believe today has happened at all. “We will defeat them, Uncle. We must.”
He looks at her, his grey eyes matching hers. “We must,” he echoes. And then he is gone.