"A hedge knight," Jorah said, "has no lord. He wanders. He sells his sword to whoever needs it for whatever they'll pay, and when the job ends he moves on." He turned the pale stone over. "The name comes from the fact that they often sleep in the open — under hedges, in ditches, wherever there's shelter. No keep, no hall, no roof. Just the horse and the armour and whatever skill at arms they have."
"And a sworn sword?"
"A sworn sword has pledged himself to a lord. Permanent service, in exchange for food and lodgings and a modest wage. Less freedom than a hedge knight, more security." He paused. "I was your brother's sworn sword. Then yours. Until you gave me the higher office."
She nodded. She did not correct his version of how the queensguard appointment had come about — that he had, in fact, proposed it himself, that she had been in the middle of a different problem entirely. It didn't matter.
"The Lannisters," she said, "have gold mines."
He looked at her.
"In the Westerlands," she said. "That's why Robert could borrow from them without worrying. The debt would never be called in."
"How do you know—" He stopped. "Yes. The mountains there are full of gold. And silver. It helps to have a floor under your finances." He looked rueful. "Bear Island has fish."
She almost smiled. "Continue."
He told the rest of it plainly, without self-pity or particular drama, which made it land harder than either would have.
Lynesse had grown quieter as each month on Bear Island passed. Not cruel about it — he was careful to say this, twice. She didn't complain. She became somewhere else, the part of her that was warm and present retreating somewhere Jorah couldn't follow. He watched it happen and couldn't find the mechanism to stop it.
"So I tried to solve the problem I could see," he said. "Which was the life she had been taken from."
The cook from Oldtown. The singer, eventually. The gowns, the jewellery, whatever she saw in the merchants' catalogs. Tournament prize money running down like water through sand. Then the tournament money gone, and borrowing, and the borrowing compounding.
"Braavosi banks," he said, "are very efficient."
"I know," Daenerys said.
He looked at her. She had grown up in Braavos for four years, she and Viserys counting coins and watching the Iron Bank's towers from across the canal. She did know.
"At some point I ran out of things to sell and things to borrow against," he said. "My men — I still had a few riders, hedge knights who patrolled the island's forests — brought me three poachers. Common men, caught taking game that was technically mine." He was quiet for a moment. "Under First Men tradition, they had two options: lose a hand, or take the black."
"What did you do?"
"I sold them," he said. "To Tyroshi slavers. For enough gold to pay the singer's wages for another month and buy Lynesse a necklace she had wanted." He stopped. "I knew it was wrong. I knew it while I was doing it."
She said nothing. This was not a moment for commentary.
"Word reached Winterfell," he said. "Eddard Stark summoned me. I rode to answer the summons because I was still, at that point, capable of the self-deception that there might be another outcome." He paused. "There wasn't. He heard the charges, heard me confirm them, and sentenced me to death. To be carried out by his own hand, under First Men law."
She looked at the rough map he'd scratched in the mortar dust. "Bear Island to Winterfell is—"
"A long ride," he said. "Long enough, if you didn't stop, to reach the coast and a ship before anyone could follow."
"You ran."
"I took Lynesse and everything portable of value and I ran." He exhaled. "I told myself it was love. That the life I was building for her was worth every other thing I had destroyed to build it — my honour, my lord's trust, the lives of three men I sold into slavery." He turned the stone over and over. "We reached Lys. The ship was worth something. We lived well for half a year."
"And then?"
"And then I needed to work." He set the stone down. "I had skills exactly one kind of employer wanted. I found a contract — a Braavosi dispute upriver on the Rhoyne, two months away. I gave Lynesse the advance payment. I arranged lodgings." He looked at the horizon. "I left at dawn. By the following evening, she had taken the money and her jewellery and moved into the house of a trade prince named Tregar Ormollen."
The name sat in the air.
"She is still there," he said, after a moment. "As far as I know."
Daenerys was quiet for some time.
Above them, Drogon had given up his vigil and glided back to land somewhere in the courtyard below. She could hear the distant sounds of the khalasar settling into the evening — fires being built, the smell of food, someone laughing at something.
She thought about Jorah's arc: Bear Island to Lys in the space of a decade, everything lost at every stage, the losses accelerating, the final betrayal not violence but simple indifference. She thought about the quality of that particular wound — not hatred, which at least contains heat, but a woman who packed her jewels and simply moved to a better arrangement. She thought about what he had given up and what he had received for it.
She thought: He is not the most unfortunate person in this conversation.
There was a person she knew who had been sold at fourteen to a man in a foreign land, whose only protector was a brother who regularly threatened to sell her again if she stepped wrong, who had been a political tool her entire remembered life and an orphan for all of it, who had watched her husband deteriorate and her world collapse and had walked into a fire because the alternative was worse.
She thought: That person is me.
The thought arrived without drama. She sat with it for a moment.
"I'm sorry," she said, and meant it — not the comfortable sympathy of someone watching suffering from a distance, but the recognition of one person who knows something about loss acknowledging another.
Jorah looked at her. Something in his face shifted.
"You understand this better than most," he said quietly.
"Better than most," she agreed.
She looked south, where the last light was going out of the sky behind the waste's flat horizon and the first stars were appearing, and the comet was rising again, red and constant and indifferent.
"Tomorrow," she said, "I want to start training them to hunt."
He nodded. They sat in the cooling air and watched the comet rise, and neither of them said anything else for a long time.