WTTV - Chapter 33 - Dany POV - The Ribbon (Patreon)

She woke to silver light and did not know where she was.

The room was small and pale. Sunlight came through a high narrow window and fell across the foot of the bed in a thin band, white on white. Linen sheets soft against her arms. A wool blanket folded at her feet. Somewhere outside, water lapping at stone — not the open sea of Pentos's wide harbor, not the slow swell of the Gull's Reach beneath her, but something smaller and closer. A canal. Canals. Braavos has canals. The memory arrived half a breath behind the question.

She kept her eyes on the ceiling and her eyes tell her what it was. Plaster. White. A water-mark in one corner where the rain had come in some past winter. Not the gilded ceiling of Illyrio's guest-quarters with its gold leaf between the beams, not the painted wood of the cabin on the Gull's Reach with its lamps swinging in their gimbals — nothing like any room she had slept in for as long as she could remember.

A weight on her chest, small and warm.

She looked down without moving her head.

Rhaenyra. Curled there, breathing slow, the silver-white fur rising and falling. The lemur's small paws were tucked beneath her chin, and her purple eyes were closed, and the tail-tip flicked once as if dreaming. Dany held very still. She did not want to wake her. Mine, she thought, and the word was strange and warm in her mouth, the way home had been strange when Ser Willem said it. She is mine. Jon said she was mine.

Her brother's son had said so. Her nephew, who looked like Rhaegar from the few paintings they have, who was older than her by months and also older than her by something else she did not have a word for, and who had drugged a manse and killed six men and crossed a sea and never raised his voice at her once.

She breathed in, and out, and waited for the rest of the room to come clear.

The window was open a hand's-width. Cool air came through it, salt and stone and bread-smoke from somewhere not far off. Curtains the color of old parchment hung loose. There was a chair by the bed with a folded dress laid across it — the green one, the plain one, the one Wylla had picked because "it's good for not being looked at, which is what we want" — and beside it a small basin of water and a towel. The chair was new. Someone had brought it in while she slept.

She did not know who.

A servant. Of course a servant. The manse had servants — she had seen them yesterday, or the day before, the days running together since the Gull's Reach had brought her up the lagoon and the Titan had passed overhead and the city had spread out below her like a thing she had read about in books. A woman with iron-grey hair had brought her food. A man with a limp had carried up the washing-water. They had not looked at her. They had not asked her questions. They had set things down and gone away, and one of them had said signora once, which meant lady, and the rest had said nothing.

Five servants, Jon had said. None of them theirs. All of them paid by an agent who did not know their names.

She turned the words over in her head. None of them theirs. None of them mine. A servant who was not hers could not be hers to disappoint. Could not be hers to lose. Could not be hers to fail.

Greedy girl, the voice said, the tone of it is always familiar, always sinister. You take and you take and you—

She closed her eyes.

The voice was not in the room. She knew that. The voice was half a continent away, in a manse in Pentos. The voice was not in the room.

The voice was still in the room.

Rhaenyra shifted on her chest, opened one purple eye, closed it again. Settled deeper into the wool of Dany's sleeping shift.

She trusts me, Dany thought, and the thought arrived strange and slow, the way most thoughts had had felt since the night Jon had crouched beside her bed in Pentos and asked her if she wanted to marry the horselord. She trusts me. She did not ask my permission to trust me.

Outside, a bell rang. Two notes, low. She did not know what they meant. In Pentos the bells had meant time for prayers, or time for trading, or time for the magisters' midday meal — Illyrio had told her once, by way of explaining why he was leaving the manse and she was not. In Braavos the bells must mean something. She did not know what. She did not need to know.

She let herself feel it for a moment — the not-needing-to-know.

It felt like the floor was missing.

She got up carefully. Lifted Rhaenyra onto the pillow without waking her. Washed her face from the basin, slowly, because there was no one waiting for her to be done. Dressed in the green dress, slowly. Brushed her hair, slowly, and braided it into the loose Braavosi braid Wylla had shown her how to do, the one that hung over the shoulder. Her hands knew the motion. She did not need to think about it.

When she was done she stood in the middle of the small room and waited.

She did not know what for.

That was the thing she had been doing for two days, or three, or however many. She did not quite remember. The Gull's Reach had docked, and Jon had walked them through the morning streets to this manse, and the woman with the iron-grey hair had shown her this room, and Dany had stood in the middle of the room and waited. Waited for someone to tell her what was next. To say now you do this. To set her in motion. Someone had always set her in motion. Viserys, his hand at the back of her neck. Illyrio, his three rings on her arm. Doreah, who told her which dress to wear and which paint to put on her face and how to stand.

No one had told her anything since she had arrived.

She had been given a bed and a meal and a quiet voice saying take whatever time you need.

She did not know what take whatever time you need meant. She had never been given time before. Only orders, and the time between orders, and that was not the same thing.

She went to the window.

Below, the canal was the color of beaten pewter. A gondola passed, slow, the gondolier's pole pushing off the stone. A woman on a balcony across the water was hanging out washing. Beyond the canal, the roofs of Braavos rose pale and crowded — temples and bell-towers and the great mossy hump of the Sealord's Palace, half a mile off, copper-domed and bristling with banners. Gulls turned overhead. The air smelled of brine and bread and pitch and lavender, and Dany breathed it in and stood there a long time, looking out, while the bell rang again somewhere and Rhaenyra stirred on the pillow behind her.

Free, she thought.

The word did not fit.

She tried it again. I am free.

It still did not fit. It was a dress someone had handed her that was a size too large. She did not know how to wear it.

She turned from the window and went down to find her breakfast.

The household was as it had been the day before, and the day before that. The servants moved through the rooms. Jon was already gone — she had heard the door, just after dawn, before the bells, his quiet step and Ghost's quieter one. Wylla was at the table by the courtyard windows, writing in her journal, her yellow-dyed braid coming loose. Arya was on the floor in the next room with her spear and her buckler doing the slow practice-shapes Jon had taught her, her bare feet silent on the stone. Nymeria watched from a doorway, head on her paws.

Dany came in. They both looked up.

"Good morning," Wylla said, and smiled. "There's bread. The cook makes a kind with olives. It's strange but it's good."

Arya nodded at her, but did not stop the practice-shape. The spear-tip drew a slow circle in the air, came down, then came back. The buckler turned on her arm like she was opening a door.

Dany sat at the table. The bread was on a wooden board. Beside it a small jar of honey, a knife, and a cup of watered wine. She broke a piece of the bread, slowly, and put it in her mouth. The olive-tang was strange. It was good.

She ate and no one watched her eating.

—DT—

It was the third morning, or the fourth, when Jon stopped her at the gate.

He had his cloak on. His sword and his bow. Ghost at his heel, all black fur and red eyes in the courtyard light. The dyed wolf, Wylla had called him on the Gull's Reach — we had to dye him so he doesn't draw the eye, as if that were the most normal thing in the world, to dye a wolf the color of pitch. Dany had not yet brought herself to touch him. He had not yet come to her. They watched each other across rooms.

She had come down with a question she had been working on since the previous afternoon. What time will you be back? It was a small question. She had practiced it. She wanted to know if the manse was hers to move about during the day or hers to wait inside.

She came out into the courtyard, and Jon turned to leave, and at the gate he stopped.

"Daenerys."

She froze. I have done something. I have not done something. Which—

"Here." He came back across the courtyard, unbuckling something from his belt. "I keep forgetting. Here."

He held out a leather purse.

It was small, no more than the size of a peach. It was heavy when she took it — heavy enough that her wrist sagged before her mind caught up to the weight.

She looked at him.

"What is this?"

"Coin. For if you want anything from the market."

She held the purse in her two hands. The leather was old and oiled and the cinch was tight. She could feel the small hard shapes of the coins inside. Many coins. More than the three coppers Viserys had given her once, years ago, to buy a hairpin in Lys — the only money she had ever held that had not belonged immediately to someone else.

"How much—"

"Doesn't matter. Don't count. It's yours."

She did not understand him.

"For—"

"For whatever you want. Ribbons. Bread. A book. There are good booksellers near the temple-quarter. Wylla can take you. Or Arya. Or you can go alone if you want — the manse is in a safe quarter, no one will trouble you in the daytime."

She was holding the purse against her stomach. Her hands had folded over it without her realizing it.

"And — if I—"

She did not know how to ask. She did not even know what the question was supposed to have even been.

He looked at her a moment longer. His grey eyes, so unlike hers but she liked to think there was something of her side of his family hidden in his gaze, went a little softer.

"You don't have to account for it. To me. To anyone. It's yours. Spend it the way you want. Don't spend it. Buy something stupid. Buy something useful. Throw it in the canal." He half-smiled. It did not reach the rest of his face. "I'll give you more next week."

Then he was through the gate, and Ghost was through the gate too, and they were gone.

She stood in the courtyard with the purse against her stomach and did not move.

A long time. Long enough that one of the servants — the iron-haired woman — came by with a basket of laundry and saw her and went past without speaking, then disappeared into the kitchen courtyard. It was long enough that the sun moved across the flagstones, and long enough that Rhaenyra came down the stair, leaped onto her shoulder, and chirped into her ear.

Mine, Dany thought. The word sound almost as if from someone else.

She took the purse to her room.

She put it under her pillow, where no one would see it.

She did not open it.

She did not count it.

For two days she did not touch it. She knew it was there. She knew because she went to her bed at night and lay down on the pillow and could feel the small hard shape of it beneath the linen — coins under fabric under her cheek. She slept with her hand resting against it, the way she had slept as a small child with her hand on Ser Willem's wrist after he had read her to sleep, the year she had been five and the world had been a house with a red door and a man who had loved her.

On the third day she took it out and opened it.

She poured the coins onto the blanket. They were stags — silver stags, dozens of them, more silver than she had ever seen at once outside of a magister's hand. She counted them. Sixty-three. Sixty-three silver stags. Viserys would have hidden a sum like that. Sold to a fence two streets later, drunk by midnight, gone by morning — and he would have come back wanting to know why she had not stretched the money further.

She put them back into the purse.

She thought.

Then she took one stag out. Held it in her palm. A young silver stag, the king's face on one side — Robert's face, the man whose name had been a curse since she was old enough to hear curses — and the antlered stag of his house on the other. She turned the coin over in her hand for a long time.

Greedy girl, the voice said.

Buying things you do not need.

Wanting things you have not earned.

She closed her fist around the coin.

The next morning she went to the market with Wylla.

The market was near the third bridge — a long covered building with cloth awnings in saffron and blood and colors she had no name for, and merchants' voices, and the smell of fish and lemon and old fish and a kind of spiced bread she did not recognize. Wylla walked beside her with her journal under her arm and her yellow braid loose on her shoulder and a small purse of her own.

Dany found a stall with hair-ribbons. The ribbons were silk. They were not expensive. She picked one, a green one, and she did not pick it because she wanted green — she did not know if she wanted green, she had not chosen the color of anything she wore in three years — but because the merchant was looking at her and she could not stand for the merchant to be looking at her any longer, and the green one was the closest to her hand.

"How much?" she said in her careful voice, keeping to Low Valyrian.

"Two pennies."

She gave him a stag.

He looked at her like she had asked him a question.

"That's silver," he said. "That's a stag. The ribbon is five irons."

She did not know what to do.

Wylla was at her elbow then, gentle, the journal tucked away. "She would like change please."

The merchant gave her a fistful of small dark coins — square shaped, more than she could hold in one hand, so many that some of them rolled off her palm onto the stones and Wylla bent to gather them up — and the ribbon too, folded into a small twist of paper.

Dany held it all in her hands and did not move.

Wait, she thought. Wait for him to ask.

She did not know what he would ask. She knew only that he would ask.

He did not ask.

He turned to his next customer — a Braavosi woman with a basket of fish — and Dany was no longer in his world. The transaction was done. He had not wanted to know who she was. He had not asked if she had earned the coin, or whether she had a brother who would come back later and demand the difference. He had given her the ribbon, and her change, and forgotten her.

Wylla was looking at her with worried eyes. "Are you well?"

"Yes," Dany said.

"Do you want to walk a little? The temple of the Moonsingers is just—"

"Yes."

They walked. Dany kept her fist closed on the change.

At the foot of the temple of the Moonsingers, where the white stone steps came down to the canal, Dany stopped and opened her hand and looked at the coins again. Irons they were called, dull and worn, the face of a bearded man wearing a helmet on it.

Mine, she thought.

She put them away.

Later, in her room, alone, she took the ribbon out of its paper twist and held it. Green silk. The cheapest grade. Two coppers' worth of nothing.

She tied it into her hair.

She did not cry, but she thought she was going to for a moment. But, her eyes did not water.

Something inside her had shifted, like a key in a lock, and that was all.