A/N: This time of year, I always hanker for a little holiday fic. Alas, there is no Christmas in Westeros, but the imagery of mother and child is universal. So, I come bearing gifts of dragon nativities…

Silent Night

The song of the dragons rang in Jorah's ears, but no sound emitted from Daenerys' tent as he stood without.

Though her handmaid who answered his request to speak with the khaleesi assured him that she was not asleep, when he ducked beneath the tent flap to enter, he stopped short in the doorway, the words he had intended to speak about departing at once with her people before a khalasar came along to finish them off or enslave them dying on his tongue. Not because the queen did, in fact, appear to be drowsing, raising her head only slightly from its cushion to peer at him with heavy-lidded eyes, but because he found the scene before him so calm and peaceful and holy that it seemed nothing short of irreverent to break the silence. Jorah did not now go to his knees, as he had done when the smoke had cleared in the grey predawn to reveal Daenerys curled much like a newborn babe herself around her hatchlings, but he did stand in worship of her.

Her handmaids had scrubbed her clean of the dirt and soot that had earlier streaked her body, and she lay upon her sleeping silks, her skin fair as the pelt of the hrakkar that cloaked her. The green and black dragons suckled at her breasts, bright as emerald and onyx against the full, pale mounts; the cream beast coiled asleep on her bare shoulder where the lionskin had slipped off.

Jorah committed the image to memory. When he returned home-for there was no longer any if, not now that he served the Dragon Queen-he would tear down the gate of his holdfast with the carving of the warrior mother and rebuild it in her likeness.

"Ser Jorah."

At the sound of her soft, sleepy voice, and the movement of her hand as she stretched it out to him, the dragon on her shoulder lifted its head and the two at her breasts stopped suckling to turn their heads peer at him through the reptilian slits of their eyes.

"Come," she said, more alert now as she pushed up on one elbow and tugged the hrakkar cloak more modestly around herself, "meet my children."

"It would seem the maegi was wrong," Jorah said as he trod softly toward her across the floor of woven rugs, "when she said you would never bear a living child."

If his reference to her dead babe caused Daenerys grief, Jorah caught no glimpse of it in her bright violet eyes nor felt it in the warm, firm grasp of her hand around his as she drew him down beside her onto the cushions. She did not blame him, for carrying her into that death tent. She had been given back threefold what had been taken from her, and now, strange though it should have seemed to him, had the peaceful time to bond with her dragon young that she should have had with Khal Drogo's son.

And perhaps a husband might, one day, be restored to her, too. Perhaps Jorah might-

"Do they have names?" he interrupted his own dangeours line of thought as the cream dragon lay his head once again upon its own coils and his brothers resumed suckling.

"I have tested a few, but not chosen any yet. I should like to know them better, before I settle upon the names that shall be written in the histories of my reign. Would you like to hold one?"

Jorah laughed.

The three dragons looked at him again, askance, as did Daenerys.

"Forgive me,my queen," he said. "Only-it was such an ordinary question, asked under such extraordinary circumstances...I recall my aunt Maege offering to let me hold her babes, and I shrank from them, though they lacked tooth and claw like these."

"I see," said Daenerys, smiling as she plucked the green from her breast. "Then you do not wish to be the only living man to have held a dragon? The first in three hundred years?"

Though he thought he saw small puffs of smoke from the dragon's nostrils, Jorah reached out his hands to take the creature from her. The instant his hands made contact with the smooth scales, however, he hissed.

"Seven gods, but he's hot!"

This appeared to please the queen as much as any compliment he could have paid her child. "Dragons are fire made flesh-or so say your books."

Jorah, in turn, was pleased that Daenerys had made good use of the wedding gift he had made her-and that she remembered him as the giver. Gingerly handling the creature, his eyes went to the milky white skin of her breasts as she gave the cream dragon a turn alongside the black, who seemed to be a gluttonous little bugger.

"Does fire-made-flesh not burn your fleshwhen they suckle?"

"Is your memory so short, my bear? Have you forgotten already that I passed last night in the fire, and no harm came to me?"

Jorah opened his mouth to tell her that so long as he lived, he would never forget the grief he'd felt to watch her walk into the flames. That his throat still burned from the smoke and the curses he'd screamed into the roar of the fire: at her, at her father for passing on his fire-madness, at the Lhazareen witch for repaying Daenerys' mercy with murder, at the gods for allowing all of it to happen, for leading him to her, to love her, and to lose her. That the feeling of invincibility given her by her youth had been compounded by the miracle of last night. That fire might not kill a dragon, but a dragon could still bleed; the flesh of her shoulder was crisscrossed with scratches where the cream beast had perched.

But he could not pronounce one syllable of it.

His speech was stolen away by a yawn, which lasted so long that he could neither apologize for it nor protest when Daenerys pushed against his shoulder until he was lying back with her on his cushions, the cream dragon curled up on his chest like a warm cat, and the queen wrapped up in her lionskin cloak against his side.

"I came to discuss plans for your departure, my queen," he murmured, remembering the errand that had brought him to Daenerys' tent in the first place.

But she silenced him with a gentle kiss.

"Be at peace, sweet ser," she whispered against his mouth, "and sleep."

And, having sworn to obey her, Jorah did.