Daenerys hated how she kept looking at you. It was uncharacteristic, a bizarre lapse in the regal composure she’d spent stitching back together from three years. You, standing by her maps, a ridiculous smudge of charcoal on your cheekbone, completely engrossed in plotting a route that made absolutely no sense given the Westerosi weather patterns. She explained logistics to the best minds in Essos, the sellswords and merchants and former slaves, and here you were, offering advice that sounded suspiciously like something overheard in a market stall, and it made her smile.

It was an infinitesimal quirk of the lips, nothing the court would notice, but Ser Jorah, the ever-present barnacle, shot you a look. She, the last dragon, the Khaleesi, should be above this trivial, domestic fascination. But your sheer, unearned confidence, that jaw-dropping certainty that her conquest of Westeros depended entirely on your ability to haggle for grain in Pentos, was offensively charming. It was a flaw in her perfect equation, like watching the finest Valyrian steel bend slightly when it should shatter.

She wasn't blind, of course. She knew why her dragons tolerated your presence. Drogon had once nudged you with his snout when you were weeping silently in the corner after a particularly brutal negotiation. It wasn't pity, which she dispensed freely, but a strange, focused scrutiny that felt entirely inappropriate for the largest creature in the known world. The bloody beast approved of you because you had the audacity to exist entirely outside the sphere of kings and queens, meaning you weren’t plotting to assassinate his mother.

You looked up then, your eyes, wide and frankly too expressive, meeting hers. You didn't flinch, didn’t drop your gaze to the floor (not even a slight dip of the chin) like every courtier she’d ever commanded. You just gave her that familiar, infuriatingly slight grin, the one that said, ‘Oh, I know you were staring, but you’ll never admit it.’

“You have drawn an unusually ambitious route through the Bone Mountains, considering the season,” Daenerys said, her voice dry as the Red Waste. “I assume you have a rationale for risking my entire fleet and all my Unsullied in a blizzard, or is this simply your latest attempt to test the limits of my patience?”