Chapter 15
- Location
- Texas
Chapter 15
Morndas, the 1st of Evening Star, Year 201 of the 4th Era
Morndas, the 1st of Evening Star, Year 201 of the 4th Era
Daenerys woke from dreams of fire and screams to freezing darkness and the smell of a charnel house. As soon as she woke the memories came flooding back to her. She felt like breaking down and crying again, but more importantly, she was freezing to death. She was shaking from the cold. Warmth had to come first. She pushed herself to her feet. She needed to find the wood and build a fire, but she couldn't see hardly anything. Candlelight. She had already managed two spells with a Seeming. She held out her hand and tried to focus on endless possibilities, but it was no good. She couldn't make herself believe that anything was possible. All she felt was the harsh cold grip of reality. Instead, she focused on anger and that was easy to do. Anger at the three men who had planned to rape her. Anger for the coward of a jarl who had sent her here to be raped.
Flames erupted from her hand, she eased it back to a mere trickle and looked about. There was a stack of firewood up against one wall. She gathered two logs, tossed them into the firepit and lit them on fire. That provided enough light to see by. She fetched more and wood and built up the fire. She wasn't staying in this damned frozen prison any longer than she must. She didn't need to make the wood last, and she desperately needed to get warm. Once the fire got good and going, she searched the bodies for the keys and removed her manacles. Then, she stripped naked, lay her clothes in a circle around the fire, and walked into the flames. She stood over the burning logs and soaked in the heat of the fire. She had always found heat to be soothing. The hotter, the better. Bathing in the flames did more than just chase away the cold. It felt like it burned away her pain.
At least it did until the smell of smoke and the sound of the crackling logs began to remind her of the burning of King's Landing. She stepped out of the fire and quickly got dressed. She felt human again, but the memories of the recent past still threatened to overwhelm her. She'd killed those guards, and she didn't regret it one bit. They had deserved it, but it was hard to feel righteous now staring at their burnt bodies. Maybe she deserved to die for her crimes every bit as much as they did, but she wasn't going to just lay down in the cold and give up. Even if she did deserve it, she wasn't going to give up. Not now, not ever. There had to be a reason she was here in Skyrim. There had to be a reason she was given a second chance.
She found a lantern and went outside. It was pitch dark outside. The sky must have been overcast because it was black on black outside the small circle of light from the lantern's glow. She might have dropped off the world out here. Nothing but ice and darkness. North of Winterhold. She might as well have been in hell. Were the gods passing judgement upon her? If so, they had a sick sense of humor.
However, there was a boat. She inspected it and it had a sail. That was good. She doubted she could manage the oars. The wind was always the same for the past few weeks, cold and from the north. She knew little of sailing, but if she hoisted the sail, then the prevailing winds should blow the skiff south. Eventually, she would get to the mainland. Then what?
She went inside, tossed another log on the fire, and sat down to plan. She was an outlaw now, or at least she would be as soon as word got out. How long would that take? Were all three men supposed to stay and guard her? That didn't seem likely given the cages. Most likely the warden, Naudgari, would have stayed, but the other two had planned to sail back. Did it matter? She wasn't staying around. She would leave at dawn.
But where? She should be able to find her way back to civilization from here. They had been going more or less north from Winterhold when she had been conscious, but she had been knocked out part of the time. Still, if she headed south, she couldn't miss the mainland. However, the only landmark she might recognize from the sea was the College of Winterhold. Tamriel was a big continent. She could easily miss the College. More importantly, did she even want to return even if she could find it?
If she went west, eventually she'd get to Solitude. If she went south along the coast, she'd reach the White River and could follow it upstream to Windhelm. She remembered that much. However, it was also foolishness. She knew nothing of sailing. There is no way she would reach another city by boat. She could probably reach the mainland, but sailing over that long a distance on the Sea of Ghosts? She'd run aground, or flounder, or just tip over, and then she would drown. Trying to walk to one of those holds along the coast in winter would be just as suicidal. It would take weeks. She would die of starvation or exposure in the wilderness on her own, and that assumed she didn't run into wolves, trolls or worse along the way. No, Winterhold was the only sane choice.
So, Winterhold it had to be. Finding it would be the hard part. Sneaking into the College would be easy. Jarl Korir couldn't know that she had killed his men yet. He wouldn't be having the seas watched. Besides, there were dozens of fishermen and horker hunters who called that fishing village home. She could probably sail right up to Winterhold unchallenged. If she avoided the island with the fishing village and instead landed beneath the bridge to the college, then she could come up that little trail and arrive right at the bridge to the College. It could work.
Then it would be up to Archmage Savos on whether to give her sanctuary or turn her over to the jarl. That was a political question. Things were already tense between the College and the town. Would he sacrifice her for peace? Or would he be willing to face the possibility of… war? Wouldn't that be what it would basically be? She didn't know how he would jump, but she had no other real alternatives. Faralda would back her. Her friends would as well. With at least one of the faculty on her side, it would be difficult for him to just hand her over. At least she hoped so.
.oOo.
While there were a few bedrolls, Daenerys didn't feel at all tempted by the idea of sleep. What had happened at this place had dredged up all the ghosts of her past. Even if she somehow managed to sleep, she would only be tormented by nightmares. Instead she used the time to load the boat up with supplies. While she hoped to sail straight back to Winterhold, she knew that trusting the wind to take her straight back was foolish. If she drifted off course, she might need both food and firewood to survive. It was a long slow process. Holding a lantern in one hand left her one free hand for carrying needed supplies. So, she carried load after load from the prison cave, out through the cold darkness, and stowed her supplies in the boat. Sometimes she stopped to warm herself by the fire.
The tedious task of loading gave her too much time to think. She had been a fool. That much was clear. She had expected to be treated with honor, courtesy, and respect. She had believed that despite Jarl Korir's obvious antipathy for mages. She had dealt with loud and opiniated bigots before. When had they ever treated her fairly? Hadn't she learned her lesson in Meereen? Time and again she had tried to make peace with the former masters, which had only led to more deaths. She had tried to follow their customs, and they killed and killed, innocents and her Unsullied alike. It had ended in flame and death, as it always seemed to do.
That led inevitably back to her burning of King's Landing. It was so easy to sink into a cycle of guilt, recrimination, and despair over her callous murder of so many people. Why had she done it? Everything had gone so wrong once she set sail for Westeros. The easy war that everyone had promised her was anything but easy. It only got worse when she went north. She followed her heart to save Jon Snow and it cost her Viserion. Cersei betrayed them and sat out of the war. She had put her Unsullied and Dothraki on the line to fight the Night King. Her armies outnumbered all the Westerosi. She had thought that she would be the one to kill the Night King. The High Priestess of the Red Temple, Kinavara had proclaimed her as the one who was promised. Bran said that dragonfire had never been tried, and the Night King was a being of ice. Surely slaying the Night King would have earned the love of the Westerosi.
However, it had been Arya Stark, not her that killed the Night King. Everything just kept getting worse and worse instead of better. Jorah dead. The feckless Northerners and Sansa the bitch acted like it was their victory alone. Rhaegal lost for nothing. Missandei. She missed her so much still…
The closer to when she died the harder it was looking back to understand why. Jon Snow had turned from her. Varys had betrayed her, but why had it been necessary to burn a city? They hadn't submitted. She had thought it was necessary to make an example but… why? Why? WHY?! She had pledged herself to break the wheel. How had that justified slaughtering so many? Destroy the gates – yes. Send in her armies – yes. Destroy the Red Keep, that would have made sense. Cersei never surrendered, but burning the city? It had been madness.
A pale pink glow started to appear on the horizon. Dawn was here. Not enough to see yet, she still had to get the boat into the water. She pushed down her pointless recriminations. They never solved anything. Some power had seen fit to give her a second chance. She needed to live this life. If there was a reason, then maybe she could balance the bloody scales. It was a forlorn hope.
Enough! No more wallowing in the past. Put it aside. She had to get off this island, or she would die here.
.oOo.
Getting the boat into the water proved to be more difficult than she thought. Only when she tried to move it did she realize that the Stefan and Jaako had unloaded the boat before they pulled it out of the water. She couldn't even get it to budge by pushing on it. However, her Shove spell moved it forward a little bit. Instead of unloading and reloading, she instead cast and recast her Shove spell. With each casting the boat moved inch by inch toward the water. Finally, it slid into the water and started to drift away. She hastily climbed in and set sail. Hoisting the sail wasn't too difficult. Pull the rope and up the sail went. Holding the rope taut and tying it down so the sail didn't fall back down was a challenge. She didn't get it perfect. The sail was only mostly up, but that was as good as it was going to get. All that mattered to her was that it worked. The wind pushed the sail which pushed the boat, and she was moving.
She was cautious about using the rudder, but the sea wasn't empty. It was full of big chunks of ice that she had to steer around. It also wasn't flat which made avoiding those chunks of ice difficult. Mostly she tried to just point the boat in the direction the wind was blowing, but some of those icebergs were bigger than the boat. She couldn't relax for more than a moment. After a while she felt like she was getting the hang of sailing.
Maybe she didn't have to go back to the College. Sailing wasn't too difficult. She could just continue either south along the coast until she reached the White River, or head west to Solitude. She really didn't want to put her life in the archmage's hands unless she had to. He might just turn her over to Jarl Korir. She had killed three of his guards. It was only her word that they had tried to rape her. She hoped the archmage would defy the jarl to protect her, but there was no guarantee.
A hard thump against the hull of her skiff from a large chunk of ice jolted her out of her reverie. She needed to focus. There was a bit of land off to her left, or was that port since she was on a boat? It was too low to be the cliffs of the mainland. Was that the island of the fishing village? Or had she been blown off course? She turned the boat toward the land to bring her closer, but steering was getting harder. Instead of a steady breeze, the wind was gusting now. However, as she approached the bit of land, she saw other boats on the sea around it. That was probably the fishing island. She stopped trying to get closer to the island and just sailed with the wind.
As she expected, land soon appeared on the horizon before her and slowly resolved into a cliff face. This was about as good as she could have hoped. She could just keep going and she should reach the beach at the base of the cliffs west of Winterhold. Or she could turn west and follow the coast until she reached Solitude. Regardless, there was another low-lying island or maybe iceberg in her path. She turned to get around it, but her little boat started rolling in the waves. She was going sideways along them now, not with them. She leaned harder on the rudder.
One moment she was trying to turn. Then next the boat pitched wildly and suddenly she was in the ocean with the boat above her. She started swimming desperately. The ocean was as cold as it was wet. She started kicking with all her might immediately making for the island. It had been a short distance for her skiff, but it was a long swim. The freezing sea felt like it was cutting her with knives, but she kept kicking. When her body started to falter, she cast Healing in desperation. Warmth flowed into her and the numbness was pushed back and rewarded her with the pain of icy knives again. However, it helped a little, enough to keep going just a bit longer. She had to cast the spell twice more to reach the shore, and a third time after she pulled herself out of the water onto the rocky shoreline.
She wanted to lay down and rest, but she was soaking wet. She knew that if she stopped moving, she would freeze to death in minutes. She forced herself to walk. The island she'd landed on wasn't very big and it was cut off from the mainland by a narrow channel. She cursed the gods. She wasn't a gods-damn Nord. She hated the cold, but she had no choice , so she waded out into the sea. An undertow almost knocked her off her feet, but she staggered up the beach, healed herself, and kept moving.
After that it was a 'simple' matter of heading east along the beach. Her body wanted to stop, but she forced herself to keep going in a slow jog, one step after another. She didn't even notice that what looked like brown rocks were actually horkers until she was amongst them. When they bellowed and chased her, she found the energy to run until she left them behind. She walked after that. Slowly the College came into sight. She reached the beach below the bridge and took the narrow and winding path up the cliff until she finally reached the top – right by where the bridge to the College started.
Her heart leapt with joy when she saw who was standing watch on the bridge. "Faralda!" Daenerys somehow found the energy to break into a run. She embraced her reserved mentor like a child clinging to their mother.
Surprisingly, Faralda returned the embrace. "I don't know how you got here, but let's get you inside."
.oOo.
An hour or so later after a warm bath and some clean clothes, she felt alive again. Faralda escorted her to the archmage's sanctum. It was a large and lavishly decorated room taking up the entire top floor of one of the towers. Shelves full of books, alchemical ingredients, soul gems, and other wizardry paraphernalia crowded the walls, but the most interesting thing about it was a large indoor garden containing a riot of exotic plants growing under magical lighting. She got to sip warm mulled wine with a blanket wrapped around her while telling her story to Archmage Savos and Mirabelle. Faralda stood behind her the whole time with one hand resting on her shoulder.
"… and then I took the path up the cliff from the sea that ends at the bridge. That's when I saw Faralda, and the rest you know," concluded Daenerys. While she had glossed over some of the more disturbing details, she had been truthful with one exception. She claimed that she must have somehow cast a Fireball instead of admitting that she Shouted.
"Well, that's quite a story," said the archmage. He was a dour Dunmer in his middle years who had listened to Danerys tell her story without much of a reaction.
"It's intolerable, that's what it is," declared Master Wizard Mirabelle. "We've had troubles with the jarl for years, but this is not to be born. Detain her for questioning, that's one thing. There was an altercation. Asking her what she knew about this Sagyvor, fine, but what they intended to do to her! No, we cannot allow our students to be thrown in prison and be violated on such flimsy pretexts."
Archmage Savos sighed. "What world do you live in? Even if we were under Imperial law, which we aren't anymore, Jarls can have anyone who isn't nobly born arrested on the flimsiest of excuses. Nobody takes them to task if they then torture the accused into confessing. Rape is hardly unexpected." He said the words with the tone of one lecturing a particularly stupid child. "Jarls who abuse their authority used to have to answer to the High King, and indirectly the Emperor. However, Korir supports Ulfric Stormcloak. There is no Imperial law to appeal to any longer. Just Nord custom, which favors the strong over the weak. We should be glad that we have her back in one piece."
Faralda growled. "One piece? You said the jarl promised you she would be returned within a week – unharmed. You call what they planned for a her a lack of harm?"
"Oh, I'm sure Jarl Korir knew nothing about what his guards had planned," replied the archmage sarcastically. Ladies, you need to get over this. Three out of twenty of our students die in training. We had a student sacrificed in a dark ritual just a few months ago. Yes, I was aware that she might be raped. With a pretty young girl like her, it was even likely to happen. There are worse fates. By the time I got involved, I believed it likely she had already been raped. I was trying to get her back alive, and without opening active hostilities with Winterhold. If she has the spine to be a mage, she would have survived and recovered. Now there are three dead guards slain by magic. The jarl will believe that I ordered an attack on the Chill to free her. This is only going to escalate further."
Daenerys felt anger bubbling inside her. There was a part of her that understood the politics of the situation, but she couldn't stand the cavalier dismissal of her ordeal. Nor was she going to sit here idly and drink her wine while her future was decided. Politics be damned! "You're not even considering handing hand me back over to them, are you?"
"No," declared Faralda. "Daenerys Targaryen, the Unburnt I offer you an apprenticeship under me."
Daenerys turned in her seat to look up at her mentor. "I accept." She bowed her head to her newly confirmed mentor. She knew that the apprentice/master relationship gave Faralda a lot of authority over her, but this move was clearly intended to shield her.
"That was unnecessary," said the arch-mage. "I wouldn't have handed her over at this point."
"You have handed over students in the past," stated Faralda.
"Different circumstances. Our students are sometimes guilty." He leaned his head forward and pinched the bridge of his nose. Once again, he sighed.
Mirabel cleared her throat. "Archmage, I understand we are in a difficult situation, but if we don't protect our students, we won't have any students."
"I know. I know. It seems I have no choice. She may have sanctuary here," he agreed as if it cost him gold to say the words. "I won't give her to Jarl Korir, but I will only protect her for as long as she remains within the walls of the College. If she steps foot into Winterhold again, even with a faculty member escorting her, I wash my hands of her."
"It won't be forever," said Mirabelle kindly. "Once this civil war is resolved, any jarl who rose up against the Empire will be replaced. We can appeal your crimes then."
Daenerys frowned. That might take years. Surely, there had to be another way. Wait. The archmage had said something about not being nobly born… Could it be that simple? She tossed off the blanket and stood up. "I am Daenerys of the House Targaryen, the First of Her Name, the Unburnt. I am of noble birth, and I demand the right of trial by combat."
For a while everyone was silent. Mirabelle broke it with a whistle. "I didn't see that coming."
Archmage Savos shook his head. "Nice try, but I don't think it would work. If I recall Nord customs correctly, you would be able to claim trial by combat against the charge of murder. Since there are no witnesses and it only your word of honor that they tried to rape you. You could claim that right whether you were noble or not. Which is a good thing, as I have never heard of a House Targaryen. However, the trial by combat would take place under Nord custom, not Imperial law. Using magic would be considered cheating. Unless you have a champion in your pocket to fight for you?"
Faralda gave a short abrupt bark of laughter. "Daenerys, are you sure you want to do this?"
"I'm absolutely certain." This would work. Jarl Korir could hardly accuse her of cheating when Ulfric Stormcloak himself Shouted in his duel with High King Torygg. More importantly she was sick and tired of hiding. Too many people already knew she could Shout anyway. Undoubtably there would be consequences. However, trying to be a good little outlander had almost gotten her raped. She had been a queen. Kingdoms had trembled before her. She was done with hiding!
Faralda smiled. "Don't worry, Archmage. If she duels, she will win, and she will do it without breaking Nord customs."
"Humph. Well, win or lose it will certainly solve the problem. On your head be it. I'll open negotiations with Jarl Korir. It will take a least a few days, perhaps as much as two weeks. He will want to bluster and demand I hand you over first. He will also accuse us of wanting to use magic to cheat. However, I predict he'll agree to trial by combat in the end."
"Can you push to have the duel take place on the bridge?" It would be a logical middle ground between the city and the College. Also, it would be a huge advantage for her. Even if her opponent wore heavy armor, and her Shout wasn't immediately lethal, either Yol or Fus would knock the Jarl's champion off the bridge.
The archmage stroked his beard. "Yes, that could probably be arranged. I might even be able to get the Jarl to suggest it himself as 'neutral' ground."
Of course, that wasn't the end of the discussion. She was questioned about what lands House Targaryen ruled. She invoked the College custom of leaving her past behind. The Archmage also declared that he was closing the gates. No more visits to Winterhold at all until this matter was resolved without either the approval of either himself or Mirabelle. A short while after, she started to fall asleep, and she was released to get some rest.
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