She had noticed that he hadn't said his first wife's name.
He had told her about Alyssa for ten years without ever arriving at the name. It might have been that the grief was still present in a way he hadn't learned to hold yet, or it might have been the other thing — that some part of him had been elsewhere for most of those ten years, and he was only now admitting that to himself.
She didn't ask. She waited.
"My father joined the Night's Watch," Jorah said, "when I was thirty-two. I became Earl of Bear Island. There were proposals — other houses, a new match. I hadn't decided on any of them when Balon Greyjoy raised his banners."
"What made him think he could win?"
"I'm not sure he thought he could win. I think he thought the Usurper's grip on the realm was still loose." Jorah considered this. "Quellon Greyjoy — his father — had stayed neutral through the Rebellion and then pledged to Robert at the end. He took the Iron Fleet south to raid the Reach while the fighting was still happening, to prove his worth to the new king. The Tyrells held the Shield Islands and they were waiting for him." A pause. "Quellon died in that fight. Balon inherited a fleet, an island, and a grudge. Four years later, he flew the kraken banner."
"And lost."
"Within a year. Both elder sons dead, the youngest given to Eddard Stark as ward." Jorah moved the stone across the map he'd drawn in the mortar dust, tracing a route south along the coast. "Robert celebrated at Lannisport. A tournament. The prize was fifty thousand gold dragons."
Daenerys was quiet for a moment.
Fifty thousand.
She had grown up counting copper coins in Pentos and Braavos, knowing the exact price of a meal of grilled sausage from a market stall. She knew how many copper coins made a silver moon and how many silver moons made a gold dragon, and she knew what fifty thousand gold dragons meant in the way you know a number that has become abstract through sheer scale.
"That's — " she started.
"Yes," he said. "Bear Island's annual income, over a century. If everything went well." He looked at his hands. "I was not a tournament knight. The North doesn't produce tournament knights — it's an Andal tradition, and we're not Andal. I could fight. I knew how to fight. But the joust is something different. It requires years of specific training and specific equipment and a particular kind of aggression that doesn't come naturally to a man who has spent his life trying to keep fishing boats seaworthy."
"But?"
"I saw her," he said simply.
He was looking at the dragons, not at her. All three of them had come back to earth and were wrestling each other near the parapet steps with the complete self-absorption of young animals for whom the world consists entirely of the immediate.
"She had come with her father to watch her brother compete. She was half my age. She was—" he stopped, reconsidered— "everything Bear Island was not. That is the honest way to put it. When she looked at me from across the pavilion, I lost whatever sense I'd had." He seemed neither proud nor ashamed of this — just accurate. "I went to her and asked for her favour. She gave it."
"And you won."
"Every day of the tournament." He said it without ego — the tone of a man reporting a fact about someone else. "I don't know how to explain what it was. Something that had never worked before started working. I unhorsed men who had been doing this for years. At the end of the final day, I put the crown of flowers on her head."
The queen of love and beauty. She knew the tradition.
"And that night," he said, "I went to find her father."
"Lord Leyton Hightower," Daenerys said. "Of Oldtown."
He looked at her. "You know of him."
"Oldtown has the Citadel. The most powerful port in the south after King's Landing. House Hightower has blood going back to Garth Greenhand." She had been doing her reading, in the quiet hours of Vaes Ledan. "He should have refused you."
"By every rational measure," Jorah agreed. "He didn't."
A pause.
"I've spent years trying to understand why," he said. "The most charitable explanation is that he saw something in that day's performance. The most honest explanation is that Lynesse asked him to say yes, and Lord Leyton loved his daughters more than his house's interests."
He picked up the pale stone again and turned it over in his hands.
"I was the happiest man alive for about three weeks," he said. "Until she saw Bear Island."
She let him tell it at his own pace.
The cold. The constant cold, even in summer, because the Bay of Ice did not care about seasons. The timber hall that was not a castle, the palisade that was not walls, the fishing villages that were not a court. The food — the same fish, the same root vegetables, the same hard bread, month after month. The absence of everything she had grown up with: musicians, masques, the endless social performance of southern nobility, friends, colour.
"She never complained," he said. "I want to say that clearly. She was not a cruel woman. She didn't tell me she was miserable — I just watched her become it, and could not find the way to stop it."
"So you tried to bring the south to her."
"I hired a cook from Oldtown. A real cook — trained, expensive. I found a singer, eventually, though he was not much to listen to. I commissioned gowns, jewellery, whatever she saw in the traders' catalogs that came with the supply ships." He paused. "That is how I learned the price of every gem in the known world. I became very educated very quickly, because I had to be."
The rueful quality of this was not quite self-pity and not quite humour — somewhere between them, the tone of a man who has earned the right to find his own past mildly ridiculous.
"The tournament prize," she said.
"Gone in three years," he said. "After that, I was borrowing."
The dragons had stopped wrestling. Drogon had climbed onto the parapet and was staring south with the fixed attention of something that can smell things at distances no human can measure. Jade and Ivory were asleep in a tangled heap on the warm stone.
"And then?" she asked.
"Then I made the worst decision of my life," he said. "But that is a story for another evening." He looked at the southern horizon, following Drogon's gaze. "You had a question, before I started all this. About knights."
She had almost forgotten. "Yes. What is the difference between a knight and a hedge knight?"