A/N: Winner, Best Fic in the 2012 Fire and Smut House Targaryen Contest at GameofShips.

Taste For Blood

Red drips from my chin where I have been eating.
Not all the blood, nowhere near all, is wiped off my mouth.
Clots of red mess my hair
And the tiger, the buffalo, know how.
I was a killer.
Yes, I am a killer.
(Carl Sandburg, "Fight")

The mead rolls hot down Jorah's throat as he leans back against the plank wall of the shed, huddled into the fur collar of his cloak, and watches the women work. Straw stained dark brown crunches beneath their lamb's wool-lined boots where the bear carcass hung all night from the rafters, draining from its open jugular, though fresh blood runs onto the boots' leathern toes, gleaming in the torchlight, as they slice through the shaggy fur to separate skin from sinew and butcher the beast.

Through the cloud of his own breath, he notes the thick sticky red coating Daenerys' arms, bared to her shoulders bronzed by the sun of those eastern lands from whence they came. His senses, assaulted by the visceral color in the midst of the drab backdrop of fur cloaks and weathered wood and straw, the heavy metallic tang that pricks his nostrils and turns his belly, the low murmured instructions of his kinswomen, transport him back there: across the Narrow Sea and the unending plains of ghost grass, to Vaes Dothrak, inside the torch-lit temple of the dosh khaleen. Where everything changed.

Everything ischanged, he amends, drawn back to the here and now by Alysane's muttered words to Maege: "His Lady Lynesse would've swooned long before now."

"She'd have keeled over at the thought of joining a bear hunt in the first place."

Jorah tries not to think how the catty exchange should have been between Aly and her elder sister Dacey instead of her mother, and focuses on how this ceremony is as much a test as the one Daenerys was put to by the sage widows of the Dothraki. He tilts his chin upward, confident that she will pass through this fire, bloodied, but unburnt, and rise a beloved queen.

They've drawn the comparison since Daenerys first passed through the gate carved with the warrior-woman wielding battleaxe and suckling babe, a sevennight past, and Jorah rues the much longer ago day he made it himself: Why, she looked a bit like you. Foolish words, which have haunted him as surely as any of the ghosts he carries. I am not your Lady Lynesse, ser, Daenerys has said. I will not be loved as any woman's replacement.How can she even think it? Yet think it she does, and Jorah is at a loss as to how to disabuse her of this notion.

Until now.

Draining the flagon, he sets it aside and pushes off the wall, the women pausing their task to look inquisitively up at him. Except for Daenerys, furrowing her brow in concentration and worrying at her lower lip as her knife catches in the bear's chest. Jorah unsheathes his own hunting blade from his belt and steps in to assist her, his height as well as his strength giving him the necessary leverage to slice between the muscles and tendons that join the two sections of the ribcage.

"Daenerys is not in the least squeamish at the sight of blood," he says; as if to prove his point, she does not flinch back as an artery spurts forth a red stream over the roughspun tunic she borrowed of one of Maege's girls. "Why, when she was afflicted with the sickness of pregnancy, she ate the entire heart of a horse as is custom for khaleesiof the Dothraki."

He pushes up his sleeve and slips his hand inside the carcass. Fibers and organs and pockets of blood squish and suck as he rummages inside, closes his long fingers around a tough system of muscles, and rips the bear's heart free.

"Raw," he adds, eyebrows quirking upward as he proffers it to Daenerys. Her nose crinkles slightly at the bridge as her gaze flickers downward to the half-frozen organ, the cold blood dripping in slow blobs over his own tanned skin.

"It's not an accomplishment I'm eager to repeat," she says, looking up at him, her expression mirroring his. "And Jorah exaggerates. I only just managed to choke the heart down. It didsicken me. I started to retch…but I swallowed."

"Why did you have to eat it?" asks Aly's girl Meg, eleven now and appearing rather green on this, her first bear hunt-though no more than her only scarcely older aunt, Lyanna, whose dark eyes reflect the same curiosity as she asks, "Why is that the custom?"

"Because the horse is, in the most apt terms," Jorah replies, turning to place the heart in a bucket reserved for the organs, "the very heart of the Dothraki culture. The Great Stallion is their god, but they are a nomadic people, dependent upon their mounts, and they are sustained by the meat and milk."

"I've eaten horse flesh when there was naught else on a long march," interrupts his namesake, Jorelle. "Tough and gamey, they are."

"Of course," Lyra adds, "the beasts were as starved as us."

"How's the milk?" Maege asks.

"Sour," Jorah answers, "but when fermented it suffices to get a man roaring drunk, in the absence of a good Dornish red."

The air clouds with puffs of gruff laughter, and by silent mutual agreement all step back from the skinned bear, wash hands in a tub of now lukewarm water, and lean back against trestle benches to partake of the spiced mead, grown cooler now, though a deal warmer than the air in the shed.

"As for the heart ceremony," Jorah returns to Lyanna's earlier question, warmed more by Daenerys seating herself close at his side than by the drink, "the Dothraki believe that if a pregnant woman consumes the entire heart, she will bear a strong son. If she does not," he adds, smirking at Maege, "she's like to have a daughter."

She harrumphsinto her cup. "I'd like to see what the horselords make of my she-bears."

"The Dothraki view of women has come rather a long way since I was wedded to Khal Drogo," Daenerys says. She grins up at Jorah. "Of course, having a few dragons at one's command helps."

He chuckles, but insists, "Before that it was the heart. When you ate the heart, that was when they loved you. When you became their queen. And mine."

"That's a change from Queen of Love and Beauty," Aly mutters, again to Maege.

"Alas that I am not so much a queen as that," says Daenerys, her smile turning suddenly sad. Because of the comparison to Lynesse? Because the talk of the Dothraki custom brought the grief for her lost child too near?

Because she knew how much he loved her, after all this time, and knew her own feelings were not, and never would be, equal?

"Excuse me," she mumbles, rising, the space she leaves at Jorah's side cold. "I need some air."

Only when the bear is cleaned, its meat butchered and sent to the kitchens for cooking, the ice and smokehouses for keeping, the pelt to the tanner to be made into a cloak for Daenerys-a gift of his kinswomen to mark her a true Bear Islander, they decided in her absence-does Jorah go in search of her. He does not look in the lord's chambers, given over for her use as befits her rank and privilege, or even in the long hall at all, but instinctively trudges out through the snow, following the lingering tiny tracks of her boots to the godswood as patches of lilac alternate with the jagged silhouettes of trees in the early winter twilight. The sight of her solitary silver figure amidst the lengthening shadows, one gloveless hand pressed to the white bark of the heart tree, as if frost bites her no more than flame burns, comes as little surprise.

Neither does her voice, acknowledging his silent approach without her turning to look. "I never asked you, Jorah, who you prayed to. Was it the old gods you beseeched to bring you home, or the new?"

"Even in my youth here," he replies, coming to stand beside her, "I was never what anyone would call a praying man." He allows his eyes to be drawn by the red pair carved thousands of years ago in the tree's trunk. "Yet for all that my heart always bowed before this weirwood, for it was the old gods I offended when I betrayed my kin."

What Daenerys' reaction to this is-if she reacts at all-Jorah does not see, for staring into the vacant yet strangely searching gaze of the heart tree. If he is honest, he still cannot be sure whether he believes that it was the gods-old or new-that returned him home, or Daenerys. He opens his mouth to tell her this-and to apologize for whatever insensitive remark by himself or the she-bears made her withdraw here in the first place-when she speaks again.

"It's a wonder that mykin embraced the Seven instead of the old gods. Given our obsession with blood…"

She swipes her fingers beneath the weeping red eyes. Gently. A comforting gesture, as Jorah has seen her dry the tears of those poor wretches who called her mysha-mother.

As she did for him, when he returned from his banishment, broken, and begged for her to forgive him, to receive him again.

And she did.

"Yet I seem to be the only blood of the dragon who has no taste for it."

Daenerys turns to him, withdrawing her hand from the tree trunk and holding it palm up to show fingers shiny and sticky with the red sap. At his side, Jorah's own fingers twitch with the impulse to close around them, but if he has learned anything in his years of service, it is not to trust his instincts with regard to touching her. He curls his fingers into a restraining fist and searches her imploring gaze, uncertain what she needs from him. Or if he was wrong to fight impulse after all, her eyes flickering down to his hand at his side, a line deepening in her delicate brow.

"I know why the Dothraki accepted me for their queen when I ate the heart," she says, lifting her gaze again to meet his. "But why did you, Jorah?"

"Because it meant you would do your duty," he answers. "Whatever it was, I knew you would chew it, and swallow it, no matter how distasteful you found it, no matter how it sickened. That's a rare quality in a ruler with the power to abdicate responsibility."

"And in the end not one I possessed." Shaking her head, blinking hard, Daenerys turns her back on the heart tree. She sighs and her cloak billows about her as she sinks down upon a root that rises up from the snowy ground, thick as the branches overhead and covered with the clinging brown lichen that grows so tenaciously in this wood even in deepest winter. "I sickened at the thought of shedding innocent blood. So I abdicated my throne."

"You melted the Iron Throne down with dragonfire. Not strictly the definition of abdicationas I've always understood it."

His attempt at humor elicits no laughter, not even a smile; Daenerys glances away, brows pulling together downward with a frown, and Jorah silently curses himself for the ill-thought joke. For a moment he stands, at a loss. Then he too sits amid the roots of the heart tree.

"Surely you do not regret your decision?" he asks, beginning to see the reason for her distress. "To restore sovereignty to the Seven Kingdoms rather than to rule over them? To break the chains that would bind the people under one master?"

Daenerys returned to Meereen astride her black dragon at the head of a khalasartwenty thousand strong-seemingly the Stallion Who Mounts the World herself-and unleashed her vengeance upon the Harpy and his Sons, and upon the Pale Mare. The fighting pits became mass graves where disease and the moral decay that ran even more rampant through the city were burned to ash, before she finally abandoned the accursed place, took her ships, and at last sailed west.

Still, it came as little surprise to Jorah that when they finally reached the shores of their homeland, she viewed the fields of failing crops, first burnt, then covered in snow, the war-weary men and the hollow-eyed widows and the children with their bloated bellies through the eyes that pitied the poor conquered Lhazareen. The people pray for rain, healthy children, and a summer that never ends, she said, and commanded her Unsullied to throw down their spears and her Dothraki to stay their arakhs. I will play no game of thrones. She evacuated the Red Keep, save for those in the dungeons judged guilty of crimes against the people of Westeros, and uttered a single word to deliver, not conquer, the Kingdoms: dracarys.

"Not regret," she replies, exhaling her breath as a long slowly swirling cloud. "I may be the heir to House Targaryen, but that doesn't make me heir to a throne taken with fire and blood by an ancestor who had no right to it in the first place."

Jorah hears his own voice in her words, uttered so long ago, and chances her wrath by putting his arm about her slight shoulders, his big hand squeezing the slender arm in an awkward gesture of comfort.

To his relief, she does not pull away, but rather leans into his embrace.

"True though that may be," he says, fingers stroking her arm, "you know I believed in you. I would have shed the last drop of my blood for you to sit upon the throne."

"It would have been too great a price." She looks up at him, and the small hand that reaches across her body covers his on her shoulder radiates warmth into his skin. "Blood of my blood. You were my one true friend in the beginning. It is fitting that you should remain so in the end."

"This is not the end, Daenerys."

It comes out gruffer than he means it to, as his chest constricts at the word friend. Always friend. Though he hoped…When she told him after all was settled with the new independent kingdoms and the time came for herto settle, that all he told her of his hall of pine logs made it sound more like home than any of the stories on which Viserys raised her of the Red Keep or the Stone Drum, and she went north with him, he hoped that perhaps more may grow in this winter…

He should not have done, the condition of her acceptance of him again being that he never speak again to her of his heart. But love does not work that way. Or at any rate, hedoes not.

"I hope not." Daenerys' words are soft, but her grip hardens on his hand. "I hope that there is something in me yet to believe in, though I am no longer a queen."

"You are alwaysa queen. Whether you wear a crown or sit on the swords of your enemies-"

"No, Jorah." She releases his hand and pushes to her feet, stepping round the tree roots and his legs to face him. "You already told me why you loved me as your liege. What I don't know is where I stand as a woman."

"What do you want me to say?" he asks, hands spread open on his knees as he hunches forward. "That I still love you? That I always will? That I could not keep the promise I made to you to put these foolish and unseemly notions behind me?"

Red blossoms high in Daenerys' cheeks as they suck inward with her sharp indrawn breath, and her eyes blaze violet flame. "When did you fall in love with me? Was it the first moment you saw me and thought I looked like your wife? Was that why you stopped spying on me?"

Heat floods Jorah's face, too, not out of guilt, but with offence. Can she still think so little of his love? He does his best to swallow his pride, his voice a little choked as he says, "If you would permit me to speak plain-"

"You never spoke me gently before, when you were sworn to serve and obey. Why begin now?"

"Then I will tell you I cannot recall one defining moment when I fell in love with you, though I know for certain it was notlove at first sight." As with Lynesse. "Love took root in my heart without my knowledge of it, and grew there, strong and certain and unstoppable. As you grew."

He pauses, to allow her to respond if she will. She does not, but while it is a little disheartening, she does not bid him to stop, as she has every other time he has dared address her. Hope rises, and he continues.

"I suppose I knew it that night I watched you walk into your husband's funeral pyre, and I thought my exile could not be greater if I watched Bear Island burn to ash and settle to the bottom of the sea. For you were my home."

"Now you are home, and I am here, too."

A shadow falls over her so that Jorah cannot make out her expression as she speaks. Her words indicate the progress he has long hoped for, but he proceeds with caution.

"Maege and the girls wonder if you are to be a she-bear. They say you have it in you."

"What is required of me? Must I first eat the heart of a bear?"

She takes a step nearer to him, into a slanting beam of dying sunlight, and he sees the white as her lips part in a teasing smile.

Jorah has never been more in earnest. "You have your teeth in mine already. You have for too long. Swallow it or spit it out, Daenerys, it makes no matter which."

Her eyebrows arch in amusement, and Jorah glances away, rubbing the hair at the back of his neck.
"Forgive my coarseness."

"I did say not to speak me gently," she says, laughter in her voice, her hand gentle upon his cheek, drawing his eyes up to hers again, the color deepened to violet, rich with her sincerity. "You have loved me, in fire and blood."

He feels the fingers of her other hand curl around his, and as she tugs him to his feet he glances down to see the sticky red sap seeping between their entwined fingers.

"Now here we stand, before this heart tree."

The expectant look on her upturned face makes him pull her in snug against his chest, his heart clenching, too, making his words come out almost as a growl. "It's about time you gave me an answer my proposal."

Daenerys laughs. "Oh good. I wasn't sure the offer still stood."

"Those arethe words of my House."

"From this day forth, they shall be mine, too."

Jorah leans in to kiss her, but as his lips meet hers, soft and warm, she draws back and asks, "Don't we need a witness?"

He glances at the eyes of the heart tree, which seem no longer to be weeping. "I think the old gods are watching."