The King of Winters

Chapter-120

Dany

On the last night of her imprisonment in the Hightower, Dany had not been able to sleep. Each time she closed her eyes, her head had filled with forebodings and fantasies of what the next day might bring on. I will get out of here on the morrow, she had told herself each day that she had been held there. Tomorrow my brother would be coming to rescue me. And so will my nephew. They will take me away from this cursed dungeon made of oily stone. No one will be allowed to touch me after that.

Her rescue had come to her in the right time. And how relieved she had been when Ser Jorah had come for her, to know that her prayers had been answered after long. Only to have it all taken away from her in a single stroke. How wrong she had been to pray for her rescue from the Hightower. She had escaped from the fires of the forge only to get caught in the fires of hell.

Her new prison was much worse than the one she had in the Hightower, creepy as the oily black stone was that covered her. Here she was swallowed somewhere in the belly of the evil ship, drifting somewhere she did not know. Even that made her feel so unease, to be taken to some place that she did not know and by someone who was equally unknown to her.

Even still, the thing that made her the most afraid was the people whom she saw around the ship, cleaning the floors bringing her food and even the ones who manned the oars. All of them bore scars and marks on their skin that she had been afraid to ask how they'd even gotten them. It would not matter even if she had asked them anyhow, Dany never saw anyone muttering a word aboard the ship. Even the prisoners never made a sound, not of cry for help or a plea for mercy. She had seen some prisoners in the nearby cages who'd had their eyes gouged out and ears cut off. But none made a sound that they might have well been mute as well. She did not know. As far as she had been on this ship all that she ever heard was silence. Silence in such a sense that it unnerved her in ways that no chaotic echoes of battle had made her.

The mutes had robbed her of her of clothes and shoes and only given her a blanket to protect her with from the cold. She still counted herself fortunate however. The other captives were far worse than her, as they wore their and chains and scabs and silent cries. Saltwater sloshed about her legs whenever the tide came in, sometimes rising as high as her ankles only to ebb again when the tide receded. Her feet had been cut and it stung when the salt water got in and made her gasp. She knew that she was in some ship, but not where, or for how long.

There had been another dungeon before this one. In truth it had been far better than the ship she was in. The night they moved her, Dany had been shifting between sleeping and waking. She had vaguely seen the moon floating on a black wild sea with a leering face of a man with blue lips and a black eye, shining as the heart of night itself. When she woke she was in this place with rats moving around in the darkness. They would bite her sometimes as she slept until she woke and drove them off with shouts and curses.

The first day they had put her here, she'd searched for Ser Jorah earnestly. Dany had last seen him drown into the sea before she had been carried off and all she could do is to hope that her captors had saved the northern knight as well. Her sweet old bear, who loved her so much that he came into the dungeons of Hightower itself to save her. On the day Jorah had come for her, the day that she broke free of Hightower, she had been so overjoyed that she might have finally kissed him. Something that he so very much yearned from her. But he died before getting that from her.      

Dany walked around her cell, restless as Drogon was when they would try to chain him in the bowels of the Dragonpit even when he was the size of a large dog. Of all her children, Drogon had been the most daring and the boldest of them. He did not like the chains, no more than Dany did, when she had to be confined within any rooms. If only Drogon was with her now, she would have broken free of this ship as well and made an end to all the creatures that inhabited this dreary place.