Andromeda's spirit gradually lifted throughout the duration of the next day. She sat on her throne and worked on things, she talked things out with her guests.
"So, the Baratheon and Vela feud is finally over?" Gendry asked her hopefully. "At least, between you and I."
She took his hand gently and sincerely, shocking him with her genuineness. "Gendry, if someone ever touched a hair on your head, I would have theirs. You are one of the sweetest men I've ever met, Baratheon or not. I am a friend that you can call upon." She looked to Davos. "And same to you, Ser Davos Seaworth."
"And I am honored to call you a friend." Gendry said, his grin brighter than anything she had seen on someone in years.
"Lady Andromeda," Tyrion spoke. "Do you have an estimate on how long it will take for us to be on our way back home? Westeros needs its king."
Andromeda had somehow grown more patient within the days they had been in her home. She couldn't decide if it was a good thing or not. "And Ilta needs their queen." She looked at him pointedly. "Do you understand what I'm saying?"
"You are denying our wish to go home." He said stubbornly, and she shook her head.
"I would like to request an audience with Lord Tyrion and King Jon Targaryen of Westeros, if someone would be so kind to retrieve him." She hadn't seen the attractive man since the night of the Honoring, and she had hoped that she would see more of him. He was a handsome man, and he was nothing short of kindhearted, even though he insists that Ilta remained his territory. She felt something strange towards him, unlike anything she had felt before. It wasn't necessarily sexual, it was more like she had known him long before he arrived. "And my own Hand." Her people went to fetch each name she gave, forgetting Tyrion was already in front of her.
When Jon entered the room, the door shut and there she was, sitting like a dream. His Hand was siting across from hers, as fierce and Dornish as she was the night before. "There is something troubling you, My Lady?"
"Quite." She responded. "I want to ask you why you feel that Ilta should remain attached to Westeros."
"Ilta is our territory, it has been for three hundred years." Jon answered slowly, sitting down across from the intimidating woman. "Ilta being our territory has never been a problem until a decade ago."
"What do you gain from having Ilta as a territory, besides hatred from the people on it?" She asked boldly, picking up her slender chalice of Dornish wine.
"The loyalty of another large kingdom." Tyrion explained, almost as if she were incompetent.
"Sometimes I can't tell with you, Tyrion." Andromeda said, wagging her finger mockingly in his direction. "You look at me like a queen, but talk to me as if I'm a child. My naivety died with my family, I'm afraid that I know what I talk about."
"What are you saying?"
"I'm saying that I'm not someone who wants to take part in Westerosi politics. I'm not someone who particularly matters to Westeros. I'm just a far off woman who plays with the sky." She said, rolling her eyes. "I never asked you to bend the knee, like others have. I only ask that you allow me to be a queen to the people I have been serving for years. I am their queen, and I want all to address me as one."
"You're asking for your independence?"
"I'm asking to restore the glory to my family name." She said, desperation cutting through her voice. "These people all call me wonderful names and titles, but I know what I truly am."
"And what is that?" Jon asked, intrigued by her line of thought.
"I was the only one of us left." She said, and she needn't evaluate on who 'us' was. "I should have never ran. I should have died with honor with the rest of my family, I should have picked up a sword, I should have died with Hyperion." She scoffed. "I should have at least came back within the year."
"You did what was right to you."
"I should have came back to my people much earlier than I did. It took me four years to come back to Ilta and claim my family's throne. My mother would have came back within a fortnight. These people call me praising names, but really, I am just a coward."
"You are not your mother's daughter. You are your father's, and you said that yourself." Jon fought the urge to take her hand. "It seems to me like your father was a good man, a smart man."
"He certainly was. But it doesn't change the fact that I should have died that night. They should have taken me instead of Elara. Elara was too sweet for this world, too sweet for a crown." She shook her head and sipped from her drink. "But she deserved it more than I ever will."
"Elara was your other sister," Jon said, grimacing. "My family died in a similar way."
She looked at him and blinked. "Your family was decimated by Baratheons?"
Jon's eyes got hard. "No, they were killed by Boltons, the traitors of the North, and the Freys. It was all orchestrated by Tywin Lannister."
"At a wedding, right?" She asked, her voice slow and meticulous. "That's diabolical."
"They are all dead now, everyone who had something to do with it." He said, his jaw clenched. "My brother and his wife along with Lady Catlyn were avenged."
She stared at him for a moment with her thick brows furrowed, a scowl coming onto her face. He waited for her outburst, but the only burst she had was laughter. She laughed in his face, laughed at everything that had happened. He couldn't see anything that was funny with the situation, his family had been killed at a wedding. But she looked back at him with tears of laughter in her eyes and shook her head. "Westeros is a terrible place. And you all wonder why I want to get away from you guys? You wonder why Northmen and Dornishmen and people from Kings Landing and the Reach come here. It's terrible in Westeros, and I am a sanctuary. Ilta is a sanctuary."
Jon immediately took offense. "Are you insulting the Queen Sansa?"
She stopped laughing. "No, not ever." She said. "Actually, since her reign began, I've been getting less and less migrant people of the North. I assume she's doing a great job, as she should be. I knew she would."
"Oh," Jon said, the tension leaving him. "I was worried that you were insulting Queen Sansa."
"I would never insult a woman such as Queen Sansa Stark of the North. I have heard a great deal of Sansa, and I have immense respect for her. I can only hope that when we finally meet, she will be able to say the same for me. Any woman who wins the game of thrones in Westeros, a man's world, has my respect."
Jon smiled. "I assume you respect Cersei Lannister." Tyrion shifted uncomfortably in his seat. He may not have liked his sister, as all, but he still had no joy in seeing her smashed, and not Jaime. God, not Jaime.
"I did." She said, and his eyes dropped from hers. "She was a strong woman. She did it all for her family and house. I did not agree with the way she did things, but the woman clawed her way to power. She was the first Queen of Westeros, the first without a king. No one can ever take that from the late Cersei Lannister, no matter how murderous she was."
"I see," he said. "I thought you said that you tried not to be too involved with Westeros."
"I was in Dorne. Dorne hated the Lannisters, so of course I knew everything there was to hate about them." She said. "I never wanted to rule my kingdom like her, but I wanted to be as strong as her."
Before the king could stop anything too flattering or embarrassing to come from his mouth, he opened it anyways to say something just along those lines. "I think you're every bit as strong as any Lannister."
She looked at him for a moment in her trademark silence. He noticed that her silence was getting more and more bearable by the day, and less intimidating. He respected the woman to Winterfell and back, but the more he was around her, the less scared he was. "Hm." She smiled a bit. "I thank you, King Jon. That's very kind of you." He tried to think of anything that would hide his blush.
"No problem at all," He said, purposely not adding any titles to her name, or her name at all. He would confuse himself.
"May I ask you a question?" She had a simple look on her face, one that bordered curiosity. "You don't have to answer if you don't want to, I'm said to pry." He nodded his head, too entranced by her voice to verbally respond. "In all honesty and in all due respect, did you feel stupid for coming here?"
"What do you mean?"
"I can't help but look at the parallels between this scene and your scenes with Daenerys Targaryen." She said, either ignoring or not noticing the slight tick in the extremely handsome man's jaw.
Now that she thought of it, it was her first time to truly study him alone, or as alone as Tyrion would allow them to be with his presence. He had curly, black hair, and a true face of the North. His eyes were deep enough to fill a hundred pools and his lashes were long enough for her to be jealous of them. He always had a natural blush. It had been hard for Andromeda to tell herself that the Westerosi King wasn't attractive, that she wasn't attracted to him. She had been attracted to him since the moment he was in her castle and before her own unworthy eyes. She tried to ignore it for her sake, for Ramona's sake, for the kingdom's sake. But while he sat before her in all his glory, she had to acknowledge it.
"Daenerys Targaryen?" He repeated, his hand coming over his face, blocking his otherworldly features from her momentarily. "Are you comparing sailing on a small boat with a few men to meet a far off woman who calls herself a queen to..." He stopped himself. "I see."
She tried not to laugh. "Did you think that you were making a mistake?" Before he could speak, she spoke again. "You were meeting another queen that had more than just soldiers up her sleeve. She was dragons, and I am the sky. Tyrion must have advised you against it."
"I did," Tyrion said quietly, looking at his fingers instead of being fully engaged in the conversation. Something told him the the conversation wasn't exactly for him.
Her tinkling voice got closer as she leaned a little forward, her fresh and natural scent wafting off of her and into his area, and he breathed in deeply before realizing he looked incredibly daft. "May I ask another?"
"Mhm." He muttered, and then cleared his throat. "Yes, you may. You don't have to ask."
"Thank you, Your Grace." He was tempted to ask her not to call him that, not alone. "Do you miss your home?"
He shook his head rather rigorously, his curly had bouncing. "Not at all. That shit hole." He quickly pursed his lips together at remembering the status of the woman sitting so closely to him. He blushed then, and she could tell that the pink was far more than his natural glow.
"I mean, the North. Where you grew up."
"Yes, every day." He said, looking at her, looking into her. "But I suppose Ilta is an extremely close second. It truly is beautiful here."
"It is," she agreed. "Would you like to hear of how the gods carved the island?"
"Isn't that a wive's tale?" Jon's smile was crinkling the corners of his eyes.
"Ramona told me when I was young, and she is a maiden." She retorted, her tone serious yet words extremely sarcastic. "Would you?"
He nodded once, his hand involuntarily coming to rest atop of hers. He cheered for himself internally once the beautiful woman did not cringe away. "Of course I would, so long as it's you speaking." He thought he had gone too far, but she only laughed. They hadn't noticed that Tyrion excused himself.
"The first to find this island was a man named Aadi." She started, her voice already sending him to a happy place that he wasn't aware of. "Aadi was a great traveler and army captain, but he was a barbarian. He raped many women, and even took three for his wife. The first wife became bitter, sad and angry at the other wives. She had learned to love her chains, and when he seemed to be more... infatuated, with his other wives more, she took her own life. The second grew sick with grief after her son, the product of rape, died within her. She was hanged by him for losing a son."
"Dear lord." Jon muttered to himself, rubbing his hand over hers as she recited the tale.
"That only left the third wife, who was religious and prayed day and night, between every meal, after every violation of herself and each of her sister wives. She too lost the baby, and by the way she was carrying, also a boy. She prayed to the gods that she wouldn't have the same fate as the other wives, and the gods answered her prayers. Two, to be exact. Neoma, the Goddess of the Night and her younger sister who is the Goddess of the Day, Idalia."
The last wife was visited in her dreams that night, and the goddesses told her that she would be the human bearer of light, and that the more powerful darkness would stay dormant for some time and come long after her. She awoke having no idea what the dream meant, only that she was going to be put to death for losing a child. As she was about to be hanged, a bolt of lightning came crashing from the sky and struck her, but she did not burn. She lived, and she had the power of Idalia inside of her along with the power of Neoma, however dormant it was. So, she struck down every man who had ever violated her, who had she had ever seen violate another. It left all the good men and women and children, and she was a new and liberated woman."
"Tyrion would have loved to read this." Jon said, and she shook her head at him fondly before continuing again.
"She created a new name for herself, a new last name. She created a chair for herself, and a name for this island with the help of Idalia and Neoma. She is my ancestor." It was to be expected, but Jon still looked shocked. "Lyra Vela, the First of Her Name, and the First Queen of Ilta. The first Day Queen. Idalia's powers rest in all queens of Ilta, yet Neoma's lie dormant for one hundred and fifty years at a time, until the sister's powers of night and day combine into one person. A Night Queen."
"You're the Night Queen." Jon said, his deep voice sounding every bit confused, but he still sounded confident.
"I am a Night Queen." She corrected. "The fourth, after Queen Calypso, Queen Cordelia, and Queen Nuray."
"And you are special because you can do both?" He inquired.
"Exactly." She beamed at him. "My mother was obviously a Day Queen, considering she didn't come one hundred and fifty years before me. A Queen of Ilta can handle both the skies if she absolutely had to, but Day Queens are much better at sticking towards Idalia's time of day. Day Queens are not capable of creating stars, but the extremely powerful ones can shift them. Night Queens, on the other hand, are exceptional in both. We can create lightning and storms, and we can create constellations and stars, as you have witnessed. We are supercharged Day Queens, charged with the power of Neoma, who is strong because of how dormant she was in my ancestors. After me, Neoma's powers will rest another hundred and fifty years."
"And what's your middle name?" The question had her mind switch gears, from a history lesson to something as different as her middle name. He had this smile on her face that told her that he was being playful, and she decided that she liked it when he smiled, very much so.
"Jenara."
"Jenny," he corrected automatically, as if it was something engrained deeply inside of him. "That could be a nickname."
She smiled. "No one has ever called me Jenny, I doubt anyone would."
"Maybe I will."
"Maybe," she responded back somewhat cheekily, still a little shy and blinded by his physical and internal beauty. The man was beautiful and he was smart, and he knew how to rule a kingdom. There was nothing more she could ask for in a suitor, something that was undoubtedly coming. It was a shame that he was not in Ilta to be a suitor.
"You know," he started after giving his hard headed mind a little break. He was never good at history, or geography at that. "When you wrote back to me and said that you would move the stars for no one, I didn't know you could actually do it."
She smirked at him. "I can," She sipped from her cup. "But I will not."