It is easy enough for Jon to slip his white cloak. In the dawn bustle of the Red Keep a single man in a simple traveler's brown cloak goes unnoticed, just another poor knight or squire hoping for a lord's favor. Even if one of the servants recognize him Jon knows it will mean little to them, think merely that his white armor is being cleaned. It is stranger for Jon. Strange to stride the halls of the Red Keep without the weight of the armor he has worn every day for years. A cage he's thought of it as for so long, but now free of its weight he feels naked.

Though he knew he shouldn't tarry, Jon had lingered in his chamber in the pre-dawn dark looking down at where he'd laid out his white armor the night before. He'd run his fingers over the white enamel, tracing the scrollwork of the edges, rubbing his thumb over every dent and scratch he knows better than his own skin. For so long since coming south knighthood was all he'd dreamed of: a way to slip his bastard name, a way to prove false the whispers that have followed him all his life. What good was a knight who could not keep his vows? Simple the answer had always seemed to Jon, but he no longer knows, knows only that after today there will be no escaping his name, no escaping the whispers. What he does today will strip every scrap of honor from his name. Will prove right all those that sneered that the bastard could not be trusted.

Let it then. Jon clenches his jaw as he reaches the gate of the Red Keep. Only then does he pause, heart in his throat as he looks back at the high walls rising above him. He shades his eyes against the rising sun already beginning to paint the sky in splashes of orange and red, tries to seek out the tower of the queen, the window from which he's seen Sansa stare out of a hundred times as the wind lifts her red hair.

Come back. Come back to me, Jon.

I will, Jon promises silently, and as he turns to leave the Red Keep, the beat of his heart loud in his ears, he hopes that of all his vows this one he will not betray.

A Tyroshi galley takes him across the Narrow Sea, a week of rolling waves and fickle squalls that keep Jon below deck much of the time, stomach roiling as the galley tosses to and fro. A few of the other passengers empty their stomachs until all the galley smells of vomit, but Jon clenches his jaw, refusing to join them. What kind of knight of the Kingsguard loses his stomach over a few waves, he thinks grimly, teeth clenched so tight he half expects them to crack, but he knows the answer. One who's turned his cloak, one who's betrayed his vows.

"Volantis?" The Tyroshi captain had snorted days before as they stood on the quay of Kingslanding and Jon asked him which of the ships at dock could take him there. "No ship sails there. The dragon whore has set her sights on it, determined on striking the chains from their slaves and washing the black city in dragonflame."

The captain had leaned back and shouted something in low valyrian at one of his crew before turning back to Jon. "For a gold dragon you may come to Tyrosh with us, and from there find another ship to Lys. Perhaps one of their captains is foolish enough to sail for Volantis." He'd given Jon a brusque look up and down. "But if pirates find us off the stepstones you fight, yes?"

Jon had nodded silently, and though he would have prefered it to the rains that rocked their ship and sent his stomach roiling, they meet not a single pirate before reaching Tyrosh late in the day. He finds an inn off the dock and sits in the corner of the common room as the light dies, listens to the idle chatter of the other westerosi, ears straining for any mention of a turncloak knight of the kingsguard, but he hears nothing. Word travels slow, he tells himself, but draws no peace from the thought. Slow or swift, the news will come. News of a knight of the Kingsguard. News of a knight who's broken his vows and sullied his cloak.

And late that night, as sleep escapes Jon and he tosses and turns on the hard cot all a bronze groat could buy him, all the thoughts and worries he'd shoved down in the creaking hull of the Tyroshi galley seep to the surface. Will Joffrey's temper flare in a fresh set of bruises across Sansa's arms at word of Jon's escape? You left her at his mercy, a voice in him hisses. You abandoned her when she needed you most.

I had to, Jon tries to convince himself, it was the only way. But it does nothing to settle him, nothing to ease the shame in the pit of his stomach.

Hours Jon tosses and turns. Only as his thoughts drift to Sansa does he find sleep: the sweet girl in a slim blue dress she'd been in Winterfell, the way even back then she pursed her lips at her embroidery when it wasn't perfect, the deftness of her fingers with a needle, the touch of her hands in his, the quirk of her lips in a teasing smile, the feel of her warm in his arms, the tickle of her breath against his ear as she whispered come back to me.

From Tyrosh Jon sails to Lys, but no captains there is willing to set sail for Volantis, and so he is forced to travel eastward by land, the hooves of his horse clattering against the smooth black stone of a Valyrian road as he passes hills and fields and ancient crumbled stone sphinxes.

Three weeks he is on the road, and on the dawning of the fourth he catches sight of Volantis in the distance. Jon draws his horse to a stop as he reaches the top of a crest and looks down on Old Volantis, first daughter of Valyria, a city so huge it could swallow Kingslanding five times over.

It sprawls across the mouth of mother Rhoyne like a warm wet kiss, a massive bridge of fused black stone spanning the river to connect the two halves of the city like a stitch trying to draw closed a rotting wound. On the far side of the river, out of a labyrinth of alleys and temples and merchant houses rises a high a round wall of the same fused black stone as the bridge. The Black Walls, Jon had heard the Lyseni call them, the walls that enclosed those slavers of the most ancient blood. Thin tendrils of sullen smoke rise like grey fingers from within it.

And above the smoke circle three dragons.

Despite the cloying humidity a shiver runs down Jon's spine. Somehow, he realizes distantly, he'd never thought that part of the rumors true. In the bowels of the Red Keep he's glimpsed once the skulls of the Targaryen dragons of old, but it is one thing to see the bones of a beast long dead and another to see it alive and soaring, scales flashing and wings spread, fire and grace made flesh.

One of the dragons splits from its brothers as Jon watches. It coasts over the city, wings flapping lazily, it's shadow flitting across the streets and courtyards and alleys below, and Jon can only imagine what it must be to stand under it as it does, to feel such an impossibly huge shape rush overhead. Over the mouth of mother Rhoyne the dragon flies, scales catching the morning light and setting them alight with pale flame.

And suddenly, with a certainty deep in some part of all he is, Jon knows the dragon is flying towards him.

His horse whickers and rears as the dragon nears, and Jon jumps down from the saddle as it rushes overhead, wind buffeting the branches of nearby trees to and fro as though in a gale, Jon nearly losing his feet. He barely notices his horse galloping away, too caught in watching as the dragon wheels in a wide circle and alights on the grass only yards before Jon. It is the palest of the three beasts that circled the city, white and serpentine, and its yellow eyes shine like discs of beaten gold as they fix on Jon.

A strange calm fills Jon as the dragon stalks forward on its wings like an enormous pale bat. He doesn't turn away, doesn't run, doesn't flinch as the dragon circles him slowly, the heat of its breath even from feet away searing as that of a forge. He turns to follow it as it circles him, studying the dragon as it studies him: the white of its scales, the lash of its tail, the tilt of its golden eyes. Distantly, he wonders what Sansa would think of it.

The dragon comes to a stop, and Jon with it. Its lips pull back from its teeth in a silent snarl, fangs long as Jon's forearm catching the light as it hisses, the sound a physical thing that slits Jon's ears and pulls at his skin. He doesn't flinch. Slowly, carefully, eyes on its gold one, he raises hand and touches the tip of its nostrils. White scales rasp beneath his fingertips. White as snow. White as Ghost. White as the cloak he once wore.

"He likes you." A voice says from afar. "It's rare for my children to come across a man they like."

The dragon's gold eyes blink, and only then does Jon glance away and up to the voice. So intent upon the pale dragon he never noticed the two others alighting on the field beside it, one black and one green. Astride the back of the black one sits a delicately built silver haired woman, a half dozen bells braided into the shining fall of her hair, eyes dark and violet and curious. Jon lets his still outstretched hand fall to his side as the pale dragon whips away to snap and hiss at the green one. "You're Daenerys Targaryen," he says, tilting his head back to look up at her. "The one they call Stormborn. The one they call Mother of Dragons."

The woman regards him curiously. "And you are?"

"Jon." Come back to me. "Jon Snow."

"And if it is as you say, Jon Snow?" The dragon queen asks coldly hours later as Jon stands before in the long hall of a Volantene palace. Though slim and delicate she is no less regal upon her throne then she was dragonback: a barbarian kind of queen though she seems to Jon flanked as she is by jackal eyed sellswords and Dothraki screamers and bronze clad eunuchs, a white lion cloak over one shoulder and a circle of dark Valyrian steel crowning her head. "If you are who you say you are then your father betrayed mine and plotted the murder of my good sister and her children in their beds. Why would I trust you?"

"Your father gave my uncle and grandfather to the flames and laughed at their screams as they were cooked alive." Around Jon the mercenaries and Dothraki shuffle and mutter, and his fingers tingle for the hilt of the sword he gave up to the eunuchs when he entered their camp. But one sword against a hundred thousand Dothraki screamers will mean nothing, so he stills his fingers and doesn't take his eyes from Daenery, only cocks his head to the side. "But that does not mean we must need be enemies."

The dragon queen regards him flatly, violet eyes impossible to read. One of her Dothraki steps forward, hand resting on the pommel of his curved sickle sword. "Blood of my blood, let me take this one's head. It is known no traitor may be trusted."

"It is known," intones another of the Dothraki.

"A waste of flesh." One of the sellswords leaning against the wall grins, finger idly curling his blue mustachio as he does. "Give him to your dragons, my queen."

Daenerys holds up a slim hand, and both Dothraki and mercenary fall silent. Her violet eyes move over Jon coolly. "Tell me, why should I not listen to my advisors? Why should I spare a bastard and turncloak?"

Still a bastard, even here half a world away. "Because I know his plans. Aegon the Conqueror united the seven kingdoms with only three dragons, but not without roasting thousands on the battlefield. I can offer you another way. A way to unseat Joffrey quickly and bloodlessly and make you loved by all Westeros for it."

Daenerys tilts her head to the side. "And what could this king have done to make you betray him?"

"He struck my sister."

Daenerys arches a silver eyebrow as off to the side one of the sellswords barks a laugh. "That's all?"

"Every night." It cuts Jon to lay naked and bare Sansa's pain here before these barbarians and sellswords who have no right to it, but he knows this is the only way, knows that Daenerys must believe him beyond the shadow of any doubt. "Every night Joffrey graces her with the bruises of a royal temper. You ask why I would betray him? That is why. He is a vain, cruel child and unfit for the throne."

Jon sweeps his gaze at the court around him, the screamers and sellswords and eunuchs, a long, cool look that refuses to flinch an inch. All the hate and helpless anger he's pushed down deep inside him for so long he lets seep into his gaze, turns it cold and savage. Bastard. Faithless. Traitor. The words are old dull bruises, but Jon no longer feels them, no longer cares who spits them at him. I did not leave you defenseless before a monster to be cowed by sellwords and barbarians.

He turns his gaze back to the dragon queen. Call me what you will. I may be a bastard, and I may be faithless, but not in this. Not to you, Sansa. "I do not know if you are a better queen than Joffrey. I pray you are, but you cannot be worse. And if after I help you unseat him you see fit to take my head or send me to the Wall or feed me to your dragons then so be it. If that is the price I must pay to see Joffrey off the throne and my sister safe then I will gladly pay it a hundred times over."

For a long time Daenerys is silent, violet eyes studying him, the Dothraki by her side shifting their weight while the eunuchs stand still as though carved from stone in their bronze armor. "The dragon must have three heads," she says finally. "Aegon had his sister-wives to ride beside him, but I am only a young girl and have no husbands or sisters or wives. Many of my Dothraki and sellswords have tried to mount Rhaegal and Viserion and each has been met by dragonflame. Never once have my children accepted so much as the touch Viserion did yours. You wish to keep your life, son of Eddard Stark? Mount Viserion. If he does not toss you from his back then you may ride with me to unseat this king you hate."