A Dream of Snow [ON HOLD]

10 | The Last Targaryen

When his face turns serious I know he is about to offer me some learned wisdom. 'For what it is worth, I do think it is a good match.'

'Well, I trust you would not have advised it had you thought otherwise?'

'I advised it for the good of the realm,' he explains.  'But I do believe it is a good match for you. I believe he is a good match for you. He will be kind, honourable, and loyal. I am sure of it.'

I nod, glancing from him lest he see the depth of my own hope and feeling in my eyes.

'And you are permitted to love him, you know,' Tyrion adds a moment later.

'I am? I gape, feigning shock. My hand frowns, unamused. 'It is a marriage of alliance Tyrion, nothing more.' The words feel like a lie upon my tongue. The words are a lie upon my tongue.

'It is not unheard of for a marriage of alliance to also be one of love. Did not you come to love Drogo?'

A strange lick of guilt prickles over me.  So consumed by Jon had I been this day and the last that I had given little thought to Drogo. To the man I had first been given to as a wife. As a prize. I had not wanted to be his queen it was true but that choice was not mine to make.

Had I mourned him when he was taken from me? Yes. But not as I had mourned for my child or my home, not as I had grieved for Jorah when I sent him from me.

Had I come to love him?

The truth of this is less clear. I often wonder whether it was only that I yearned so much to love and be loved that I had taken it in whatever form it was given to me. 

Drogo had taught me a great many things, and I wonder too what I would be now had he lived.  For was it not his death which had shown me that strength and power lived within me? Was it not his death which had awoken the dragon?

'I had not known love before him,' I say, gazing at some point beyond Tyrion, to someplace in the past. Someplace where love had been as mysterious to me as the place I knew as home. Viserys had been incapable of love. His rage and fear and helplessness had prevented it. It had moulded and twisted him into something dark and cruel. 'Yet on some days — brighter, warmer, hopeful days — Viserys would cling to me so hard and whisper to me so fervently of how I was all he had left in the world that I truly believed he loved me.' 

It was on these days too he would talk of our marriage, of our glorious return home on the backs of our dragons to claim what was rightfully ours. He had been half-mad by then, of course.  The dragon has three heads, do you see? Who is the other, Viserys? Who is the other? Rhaeghar was, but he is dead, Dany.  We are all that is left. We are all that is left...

'You are loved, your grace,' Tyrion says, his smile tainted with sadness. 'You are loved.'

I blink myself back to the present and refocus my gaze on him. 'Not here, Tyrion. Not in Westeros.  They do not love me here — they fear me still.' I hate how small my voice sounds then, how weak.

'But they will come to love you. When they see what you are - who you are - they will love you.' There is conviction in his words.  'As will he. If he does not already...'

***

Turning my head upward I send a silent greeting to the sky and call Drogon to me.  Tonight they would see who and what I truly was.  Tonight, for good or for ill, they would see Daenerys Targaryen wed their northern son.  For some, their fear and mistrust would only grow, of that, I was sure, but tonight I would leave no one in any doubt of who and what I was.