#ash is a very patient man but perhaps one day his patience will be tested... askjdhajksd

[ashton-ryder]

moodboard meme send me one of the following symbols and i’ll make a moodboard for my character.

@hawthornpenrose asked:

"💛 (I know they have one even though they've never interacted you can't tell me otherwise)" 💛 - for a moodboard about our muses’ relationship

[chiclet-go-boom]

cullen - fragment

I am never going to finish this, apparently.  /drops into the tumblr well and dusts hands

The world explodes.

There is everything and then there is nothing and then there is everything again and the blood runs from her ears, down her neck in a lover’s caress. She staggers, undone.

Then for a long heartbeat there is only emptiness, a soundless wave crashing against a shore she cannot see, cannot hear for panic and billowing dust. There’s something gritty under her fingertips, beneath her boots as she clutches the rail, oddly clear when nothing else is. She somehow still on her feet although she knows not how. She shakes her head once and then again as if it will help.

Far away, oh, so far away something whispers. She looks up to the stone vault so high above. The powerful buttresses arc in mathematical precision, built by men, built to stand, built this time to last. Sees in this moment of stillness between strike and impact with blood sticky on her skin the fractures race, shudder, streak like dark lightning.

The slow pieces start to fall.  

The boiling, malevolent sky chases them down.

Cassandra runs.

In the weeks that follow she begins to think of it as a kind of music. An opening overture of magic and fury, calling the dancers to the floor. And the worst part is that while the sheer scale is overwhelming, the tune is oh, so very familiar. She can all but see the notes swirling across the parquet of her mind’s eye, framed by the rubble and the bodies and the screaming.

Music from an orchestra she cannot yet see, that cannot be comprehended in its horror. Yet she is who she always was, a daughter of old royalty however far she has strayed from those long ago silks and no amount of time or distance can erase the knowledge from memory of how treachery always starts.

It is as old as empires and as fresh as the mud she kicks from her boots as she ducks under the lintel with new fear and old anger coating the back of her throat like a wine gone sour. The prisoner fuels both and she drags them into the weak sunlight whether they will or no but the sky still breaks and the tune still plays.

A turn, a pirouette, a sword thrust through a demon’s body and the wide eyed fear on another’s face. They advance. The only direction she will ever permit is forward.

She hates it. Hates every chaotic step she takes even as she bows to the necessity and does her best to lead. A bone deep surety hammered home by everything that has ever happened to her in her life that that she will never be politic enough, diplomatic enough, close enough to patient enough to win where Most Holy never even had the chance to fail.

For her strength is where it has always been - in steel and in relentlessness, in the searching and the finding and the naming.

So she finds. She names. And she recruits.

Leliana does not have to be asked, of course, although she does so anyway because she will take nothing for granted now. It is a measure of bittersweet grace that the Left and the Right have moved as one through these new steps, even with the master who yoked them together so long ago no longer holding the reins. That will be a grief for later, should there be time. It is a small comfort that between them they have saved what could be saved but there needs to be more. There has to be more or the way is already lost.

They speak over candlelight in the hearts of midnight and exhaustion and then messages as black as the crows they fly on are sent out, are returned, and are sent out again.

The Inquisition rises. A shaggy beast with half closed eyes, roused from the centuries of ash and destruction that had been its bed. Leliana sings and the jewel of the Montilyets answers, a diadem of discernment and perfume lured from its nest in Val Royeaux, come to rest on its heavy brow. Cassandra prays and hears no answer save that faith will always be the question, that the Maker does as He wills and answers only to Andraste, if He answers to anyone at all. She walks out of her tent in the morning and adds another player to the dance;  the fresh-minted Herald with their virulent hand holding up the light for the path forward.

She continues with the work.

The liar lies but his rough voice echoes into shadow, under stone, around so many unseen corners that she is persuaded to tolerate him, as much as Cassandra would prefer the dwarf in irons where he can do no harm and turn no profit. She looks to those of the Chantry that can be made useful and discards or ignores what cannot. Looks to the Gray Wardens, scattered as they are, even as she sends urgent missives to her own far flung sect. She looks to the mages even as they are gathered up and repurposed. She looks to the templars and finds Cullen.

She has watched this all before, and always there is an element of risk in the pieces, in the players. Can she do better for the Inquisition? Perhaps. But not soon and not easily. If the Champion yet lives they will not to be found conveniently lounging in a nearby tavern, ready to be pressed into service. The thief holds still the secret locked behind a wide smile, buried under the heavy pulse in his throat. Absolutely nothing she says or does has dislodged it which is infuriating.

She would drink if it help but it will not, so she makes her decisions based on what is and not what she would have it be. Cullen himself is not as she remembers but in the choking pall of the husked out Conclave there was no questioning his competence. Men fell into line without question, desperate for order, any order at all and he gathered them all as if born to it. His voice and his authority that bound them and sent them out to face the demonspawn that had all but overrun the staggering, shattered survivors. His was the path carved to safety, lined in bones and blood and fear.

In the evenings when she places her candles on the altar, one of them is always for the Knight-Captain.

Her sword is meant for a single thrust, her voice a single question, but his brought a victory to a battlefield that was lost before any of them knew it had even began. And his faith in her, at least, is steel. She raises him up with Leliana’s blessing and she watches. She waits. She speaks of many things to the wind-chapped Herald, tries to teach what she knows as fast as it can be absorbed, defers to others when she knows she is beyond her depth. There are not enough hours in the day, the nights lit a sickly green as the barrier between waking and dreaming, alive and dead shreds itself apart in streamers of color. She searches for both truth and Truth as she has done all her life, desperate to find answers faster than the questions can unravel in her hands. The how is important and she leaves that to Leliana to tease out the threads of it, but it is the who and the why that occupies most of her thoughts.  

She prays. People arrive in trickles, then in small streams. She shunts the mages to one side, the warriors and templars to the other and sets the rest between like a field of healing laurel. Whatever good can come from the wreckage of Most Holy’s dream, she hopes she can somehow make a space for it to grow.

The divide is deep though and tension simmers in Haven. There are fights; fast and some few of them vicious. The Chantry’s locked basement doors, meant to hold grains and leathers and barrels of fine oil, are grimly repurposed.

The Commander does not falter under the burden she has given him, the hardest of all save perhaps the glittering webs that Josephine begins to spin from raw hemp. She needs a force that will give others pause, needs it as fast as he can raise it and she has only the desperate and the trapped to give him.

She sees then what she supposes Meredith must have seen and Greagoir before her.

Was he always this way? She truthfully cannot remember. She hears the younger man he must have been once in the quiet of his voice, rarely raised even in close quarters; hears it again in the thoughtful advice he offers before he waits on the decisions made by others. Hers first and then tentatively the Herald’s with Leliana near silent as she lets the Right continue to carry their decisions forward, the public face. She sees it sometimes too in the wry smile he gives her, acknowledgement that they are only human and their tasks only greater with each day they continue. There is oddly little ego and in her spiteful moments she feels that he must have gifted the lion’s share of his to the Chancellor who seems to have brought more than enough for everyone at the table.

But those glimpses of another man are fleeting and brief. Cullen breathes the same biting air that she does, suffers the same complaints of inadequate shelter, walks through the same half frozen muck that claws at everyone’s boots and patience but that is all. If he eats, it is alone. He must sleep but when she could not say. If his body requires ease there are no rumors of it, salacious or otherwise.

Never unarmored. Never without a sword or knife to hand. That what she gives him he purifies ruthlessly and that the cold light of it does not seem to end.

She listens and does not know what she listens for. He does not speak of the Circle Tower although she knows something of what must have happened there, as much as anyone can know who did not live it. She tells herself if that no one would choose to revisit a place so corrupted, even in memory. He speaks only slightly more of Kirkwall and never of the rebellion itself, save a regret echoing in his voice that does not always reach his eyes.

Can she fault him for that? Could anyone?

Yet if he is quiet, if he is good at accepting orders, it detracts nothing from the fact that his dominion becomes firm, becomes absolute. The markers start to move on the table and the victories begin to pile like furs; small yes, but decisive. Their influence expands, testing its cage on the backs of restless horses. He trains with his men, rides with them, raises his seconds and then his thirds.

Fair of hair, fair enough of face and judgement but cold, cold as the winter winds that bite at everyone impartially. Even though she tells herself she knows his past it catches her by surprise when she starts to see his scars reflected on others.

A courier drops to a knee in the winter slush to give report and she watches as the Commander does not correct the behaviour. It is not wrong, to kneel before a superior officer, but it is still obedience, blind and unthinking. She opens her eyes and sees then as she had not before the clenched fists to chests as he passes, the voices a murmur like a fluttering breeze behind him. Lion of Ferelden. Hammer of the Gallows. Cassandra watches as a legion swirls and begins to coalesce like the rough cloak he wears pinned to his shoulders. Sees the eyes that follow with both fear and unnerving worship.

Meredith’s Fist.

She told him she needed an army so that the Inquisition will be unopposed as it does its work. Can she permit herself concern over how it is accomplished?

She cannot answer this. The Inquisition walks, eating as it goes, growing larger but still so fragile, so newly born. The sky boils day and unceasing night.

She looks to Leliana but the shadow has nothing to say. There is only approval of any method that advances them. That Cullen succeeds where so many others might fail? It is a blessing from the Maker Himself. Rough chaff, winnowed and cleaned and polished, blades that are bright and then red and then bright again with so few losses, considering all. She nods her head and withdraws. The Nightingale is not wrong. Still, if she has made a mistake, there may yet be time to correct it. She tries again to speak to the thief, to the liar, cornering him where he cannot evade but his secrets remain prisoners, starved and dying. The Champion is but a myth that he speaks of as if the stories happened a thousand years ago to someone else, a legend of fog and rumor with no strength in the now.

She pushes, pushes hard but there is no forward here, nothing for her to sink a blade into this time. It rouses her temper and her blood, both of those things dangerous.

Because his voice is as rough as it always is but there is a thread of sweetness now that runs through it, a shimmer of milk-dark honey. She distrusts it and him for it nibbles at her, a mouse pilfering in the dark where it cannot be seen and caught.

She spends longer with him than she intends, the words moving from accusation to argument and back again in convoluted spirals that spike both heartbeat and hair and she is more than unsettled when she finally, finally abandons the task, long stride once again carving distance between them.

Gold against his throat and the rhythm of his breath, the curling lick of his voice with oh, so many words that say absolutely nothing at all. She would throttle him if only to make herself feel better, but she has tried that before, her fingers twitching with the memory of warm skin under fingertips and she is no further ahead than when she started.

The secrets rattle their bones and laugh.

The word begins to spread that all is not, perhaps, lost. The streams of people become small rivers. If Cullen slept before, she is sure that he does not now. There are too many, those with skills and those without, uses that must be assigned, absorbed, made somehow to work. Idle hands belong to the Maker and she fills them all as best she can. Rough buildings begin to spring up like scattered flowers, stones brought up from the river to be smoothed and set into the ground for better roads, voices yell and grunt and spread.

Through it all Josephine is a whirlwind of dark hair and gleaming pins, organizing, sorting, soothing. Haven settles down restlessly under her touch even as Cullen tightens his grip beneath it and draws out the worst of the poisons that leech in with the tide. The companies ride out in waves to assure safety in wider and wider circles and some carefully carried away within them do not return.

Cassandra does not ask. She travels with the Herald and assesses the land for herself.

She seeks and seeks and she finds more yet more questions but also answers and finally, finally a name. Corypheus.

The liar swears in a voice she has never heard from him before and she tentatively names it fear. It throws her, a little. Never has she heard him afraid. But what cannot die? Apparently something that walked the Golden City an age ago and gloats that the streets of it are black, abandoned, dead. Something that has now found a way to tear open the very sky above their heads because there was nothing and no one to stop him. And now it comes for them, comes for them all, but most of all it comes for the Herald.

Can there be any mortal answer to that?

Yet she will not be driven from the field before it is truly lost. She asks then for time and is answered. They walk out alone, shoulder to shoulder like comrades, like the friends she would prefer to believe they are.

They don’t go far for it would be foolish beyond all words to pass out of sight with so much uncertain in the world. Only as far as the frozen lake, blue and ice and snow spreading before them in an afternoon much like all the others before it. The red of his cloak is the only color that she can see with the world sleeping in its winter, a winter that does not yet know what is happening, possibly would not care if it did and she takes deep, rigid breath.

What she seeks she always finds but she already knows this question will be poison. His will be the hand that must pin their enemy to the ground, should the Maker’s grace be with them that far. Should a thousand other things not defeat them first, the largest of them named Despair.

It’s quiet. The tip of her nose tingles, then numbs as they talk of, Maker bless, inconsequential things. How fast can he do this? How fast can she? What are they equipped to take on now, how much further can they go if pressed to the wall, how much more do they need? Plans upon plans upon contingencies written in plumes of frost.

This should be the War Table. The others should be here. But forward is what she knows and if she has failed with the trickster, she cannot risk failing here.

She has to know and know absolutely.

She speaks the words finally because she must. Kinloch, she says. Tell me of Kirkwall. Did he know what was coming when she asked him to walk with her so far beyond the walls? She strikes for where the worst of it must lie within him, aims for the center of the abscess that she knows must be there if only because he never speaks it.

When he breaks the silence, he tells her things colder than the world around them, when she’d thought his pain and anger would be hot as fire. His voice does not waver even if her breath does. The words are spare and unadorned, leeching away to fall onto the snow. That nothing stains around them seems an affront.

He does not lose control so neither does she. Yet when she thinks him done, a silence of heartbeats where the world thinks longingly of spring, it is then that he tells her of leash broken and a collar snapped. Some things become clearer, others much less so. He asks, in that quiet voice that she no longer believes holds calm, has ever held calm, what she would have him do. He trusts her. He will do as she bids in this but he will not put it on again. He will never put it on again. He will have control of himself in all things or he will have nothing.

His face is clean as she studies it, his eyes gold and remote. His hand rests on the pommel of a sword he is never without. A single, outward scar to stand for all the rest.

The trees sway on the other shore, their tops dusted in white and she listens to the remembered voice of the Nightingale in her ear. Her matched twin, asking who else could do all that he has done, in the bloody then and in the paralyzed now.

Meredith must have laughed at the end, she thinks, out of nowhere. She could not have seen it coming.

Will she see it coming? If he will not be held captive to anything again, if the shape he has been forced into is a man kneeling in the snow at his feet, can she accept that?

She has certainly seen worse in the world. May even have done worse herself.

Cassandra closes her eyes and chooses because faith is never the answer, only the question.

If the world will fall, it will not be because she could not trust. He has not faltered, never where it mattered, survived what would have broken any other. Has yet to fail her, with all she has given him. Does he not do only as they have asked him to, as she has asked him to and yet more besides, beyond expectation?

If he is the Commander, it is for a reason. And that reason has not changed.

A hand to his arm, gloved against the frost and the single, slow blink of his eyes. No more than that. She falls back from that edge and they speak then of all the ways they could fail, but she makes sure that they plan in the expectation of hope.

Cassandra does not second guess herself. There is little point in gnawing at decisions already made, sinking teeth into well chewed bones as if they will yield any more meat. The days are cascades of choices, each one of them just as likely to send them over into the abyss. She consoles herself that should it all end in cataclysm, she will no doubt have the opportunity to review every one of her errors before the final blow and no doubt the dwarf will be the one to read her the list. She will worry about it then.

The mages work themselves into daylight, the warriors ride and return and ride again. The Herald develops dark circles under their eyes that no longer fade but it is no less than anyone else and Cassandra can do nothing about any of it so she says nothing but does what little she can. A mug of mulled cider, spicy with autumn, a flight of new arrows left on a desk, fresh fletched. Cullen is there and then he is not for some weeks, two cohorts at his back. Leliana says nothing of import but acknowledges the Commander acts with her knowledge and that must suffice. Cassandra asks herself if she wants to know and concedes that she does, but the real question is need and that she does not have. The Left pursues her own purposes, as always.

The Commander returns with less than half his men but Leliana is serene so Cassandra leaves it to disappear under the papers that weigh down the War Table. One stack is held by a knife sunk deep and she imagines that’s probably where her answer is. They move on, always forward.

Then, somehow, the Breach closes. Is closed. The Herald smiles in the midst of exhaustion and no one could ask for more than that. Haven rejoices. No. Haven raises its voice and screams like a falcon at the end of a kill.

The kegs are split, the fires are raised. Revelry rings off the paving stones. She is persuaded to a drink herself. She listens to music that contains only voices and stamping feet as someone, several someones thump rough time on the wooden tables. Rough skirts swirl with dance and joy and knife-edge relief.

A voice at the gates ends all.

A man collapsed on his knee and struggling to rise. An army on the ridge. A warning too late, too late by far, barely enough time to turn and see the truth of it. The alcohol she has consumed burns fierce and bright in her gut.

Cullen is at her shoulder then, out of nowhere, red and blonde and focused as she has only seen him some handfuls of time in the past and she will never know how because in the moment she would ask, there is no time to care.

She is not as he is. Her gifts are a cousin only to his, born of a different, solitary faith. But she is close enough, aware enough to know when the waters of the world recede between one step and the next, stripped, sucked back into the sea and rising.  

Black. Malevolent. Templar. Her mouth is a desert, her shoulder shocked into rigidity. She stares as if she is he, locked on the single bared shoulder, the brown hand clenched around a mage staff. The weave and shine of expensive cloth meant to impress. At Tevinter’s snake unerringly picked out in metal and thread.

She does not, can not know what he feels, not truly, but she knows what he wants in that one moment as if they were twins, as if they had been raised from a single cradle. There’s a thunderhead in her throat, an earthquake under her heart. His hand is tight on his sword hilt, brushing against her hip, he stands so close. As if the occlusion of her body between him and the mage is the only thing holding him back.

The Herald is oblivious. They are all oblivious and she marvels at it, as one might marvel at a fever dream even as it passes. Words are exchanged, the danger sketched out in hoarse words as if eyes could not read the story now amassing on the mountain flank above.

She dares not look over her shoulder to see if Cullen’s eyes have turned black with strain. It is contained, he contains it. She wills it so. Each second bleeds away the likelihood that he will strike the man in front of them. It is potential only. It is only old training, old fears startled out of sleep. Maker, so deep.

Her fingers twitch and touch his hand so close to hers.

Time resumes.

Cullen strides away, his voice ringing out, mustering whatever defense they can, as useless as it will be.

She can feel the fury soaking in the ground where he shed it like a snake.

[runawayjay]

Of Words and Swordplay

Chapter Summary: Jon thinks about what spurred him to fight for Daenerys's instruction and prepares for the competition.

Chapter 2: The Wolf’s Sword on a03!

Jon wasn’t entirely sure what possessed him to offer his sword for the queen’s instruction. He had his reasons, yes. He couldn’t have the one possible ally the North had left against the Night King going off to battle unprepared to fight for her life if need be. Daenerys Targaryen was important, with or without a dragon or three. The North needed her alive. The people of Westeros needed her alive. Jon should do what needed to be done to ensure she stayed that way for the benefit of his people.

Even so, she had her own swords to train her: an Unsullied soldier and a Dothraki warrior he’d never seen fight before. Whatever reasons he had, they hadn’t bound him to make his offer. Jon did that on his own, and bound himself to a blind fight.

He’d faced worse odds with greater risks, however, and he’d come out of every fight he’d had before alive—every fight except the one he hadn’t known he’d been losing until he lost his life. None of those had been fought with tourney weapons, either, and the Dragon Queen didn’t want him dead. Not yet, at least.

Jon donned leathers better suited to fighting than what he’d been wearing earlier. The only good mail or plate would serve in this competition would be slowing him down. Fastening a sword belt, he knew the most damage the blunted weapons could do were bruises—perhaps broken bones, if the other two men were determined enough. Jon trusted himself to be quicker if that were indeed the case.

“Have you ever seen the Unsullied or Dothraki fight?” Davos asked, handing Jon a tourney sword. He’d used no sword but Longclaw in so long, the blunted sword felt strange and clumsy. Jon flourished and swung it once or twice, knowing the feeling would disappear soon enough—hoping it would disappear sooner still.

“No,” Jon answered. He’d wished the queen had left time before this competition for him to watch her soldiers and warriors fight, but wishes were nothing but wasted thoughts. “Have you?”

Davos nodded his head in way that didn’t make Jon feel very confident in his advisor’s words. “I’ve heard tales.”

“Any advice?”

“Don’t lose.”

Jon shared a halfhearted smile with Davos. The old smuggler had given better counsel.

“My apologies that you don’t have more time to prepare, Jon Snow,” Tyrion said, causing them both to turn towards the door. “I’m afraid the queen is quite insistent the competition take place today so she can begin training on the morrow.”

 Jon stuck the tourney sword through his sword belt and followed Tyrion, Davos close behind. “She’s impatient, your Dragon Queen.”

“More patient then some,” Tyrion said, adding over his shoulder, “more patient than you.”

“And how’s that?”

“Daenerys had many opportunities to come to Westeros and reclaim her birthright, yet she waited her whole life to do so and accomplished many great things in Essos while she did. Can you say you’d do the same?”

Jon had never been in exile, but he’d been at the Wall. There were times where it had felt like the same thing: when his father was killed; when Robb took up arms; when Robb was killed and betrayed. He might as well have been worlds away when those things happened. Jon had been tested, like old Maester Aemon had said. He’d had his opportunities to leave like Daenerys had. He almost had left once, and his years in the Watch were not the same as a life of exile.

Jon shook his head in answer. He couldn’t say he’d do the same.

As they came upon the closed doors of the great hall where Daenerys had received him when he arrived on Dragonstone, Tyrion braced his fingers against them and looked at Jon.

“If you happen to win this competition, Jon Snow,” he said, “perhaps you could convince the queen during her training to remember her patience and not fly out to meet her enemies.”

Jon looked at the doors, towards the room where he knew Daenerys Targaryen and the other two competitors were waiting—gathered again after only a few hours wait. He thought of the fight that was ahead of him and his blood prickled with anticipation. Jon had seen more fights than he’d ever wanted to, but he still felt a nervous before each one—a nervousness that kept him alive. He flexed the fingers of the hand he’d once burned grabbing that lantern to protect Old Bear Mormont from the wight. The memory and the scars were enough to remind him why he was here and why he was fighting a competition to teach an ally the North desperately needed.

Jon was determined to win; he needed to. Training with his brothers in the Watch was how he’d made allies with Grenn and Pyp and Sam—how he’d made friends. He was taking Tyrion’s advice and trying to learn who the queen was. Perhaps teaching her would yield the same outcome it did in the Watch.

As determined as he was, he’d heard in Daenerys’s voice she was more determined still to fly her dragon and meet her enemies. Jon could not be dissuaded in his own plans. Daenerys would not be dissuaded in hers, either. What Tyrion asked wouldn’t be possible.

Jon looked back at the Hand of the Queen and finally said, “You’d have better luck stalling her. It would give her more time to learn to fight. That’s the best you could hope for now.”

“And how do you propose I do that?”

Jon thought. “She said she’d train until her armor was ready. That won’t take long to make. It’s not long enough to teach her. How long would it take a saddler to make something for a full grown dragon?”

Slowly, Tyrion removed his hand from the door and nodded. “You may prove yourself something other than a Northern fool yet.”

Dothraki guards opened the doors before them and Jon entered the hall where the queen and his competitors were waiting as expected. The Unsullied and Dothraki men were standing in the center of the hall, and Jon joined them while Ser Davos and Tyrion took to the sides. The first thing Jon noticed were the light leathers his competitors wore. The second thing he noticed were their weapons: the Unsullied carried his spear, and the Dothraki his curved blade. This much Jon had expected. It was how they used the weapons he didn’t know.

Finally, Jon looked up at where the Dragon Queen sat her throne of stone. Daenerys sat much as she had that first day, wearing Targaryen blacks with her silver hair braided back and her hands clasped in her lap. She didn’t appear eager for the fighting, Jon thought. She only seemed eager to have her champion instructor found.

The Unsullied soldier and Dothraki warrior knelt, bells jingling in the Dothraki’s braid as he did. Jon remained standing. Daenerys favored her men with smiles and bid them to rise, but her smile turned firm once she looked upon Jon. When she’d given him leave to mine the dragonglass, she’d made clear who and what she considered a part of her kingdom. So had Jon, and he was not about to bend.

When Jon had first seen her, he’d been more surprised than anything. He hadn’t expected Daenerys Targaryen to be so beautiful and close to his own age. In truth, he hadn’t known what to expect. He’d thought only of the alliance he needed, and of how he could never bend his knee and subject the North that trusted and crowned him to a southern ruler.

As beautiful as she was, Jon had quickly remembered his purpose. He was glad he had. If he hadn’t, he would likely have missed the most beautiful, terrifying part of the Dragon Queen. She had a fire in her eyes, in her heart—dragonfire, if Jon had to name it. The queen kept it just beneath her skin: enough for the world to see; enough to keep the world from ashes. She controlled it with her composure and her fierceness, but Jon saw it for what it was. Every man had a beast beneath his skin. Women were no different. They were just better at keeping it in.

Jon wondered not for the first time if perhaps women were the stronger ones. He’d felt the fire he’d seen in Daenerys’s eyes underneath his own skin more than once: any time anyone had called him a bastard when he was young; every time Ser Alliser Thorne decided to remind him what a fool he was; when he looked at Ramsay Bolton’s face after he’d abused Sansa and murdered Rickon, before Jon beat his face bloody; when Littlefinger dared say he loved Sansa in the crypts beneath Winterfell and Jon choked him against the wall. Jon knew the number of times he had not kept the rage back. He could never know the number of times women like the queen had.

Restraint such as that took strength, and Daenerys Targaryen was as strong as she was beautiful.

“Thank you,” Daenerys finally said, her voice ringing throughout the hall as regal and sweet as the first time he’d heard it, “for offering your skills to your queen. As court was held just this morning, you are all aware of what you must do. Whoever the man left standing at the end of combat, I will take him as my instructor.”

The queen nodded, and the Unsullied readied his spear while the Dothraki drew his arakh. Jon took a deep breathe to ease the nerves that had always served him well and kept him alive. He and his competitors stepped away from each other, filling the empty space of the hall.

Over the pulse of his heart in his ears, Daenerys said, “Begin.”

Jon drew his blunted sword, as clumsy and strange as it felt, and did what he did best.