"We should get them saddles" Kurt reflected out loud, looking up at the sky above them as they marched through the desert. Meereen's multicolored walls floated over the horizon, fuzzier and fuzzier every time he looked back at them, and the distant apexes of the pyramids shone like diamonds buried underwater.

They were leaving Slaver's Bay, and in his heart Kurt knew he would never see it again. It just seemed like a distant, blurred dream he was slowly waking up from, its grotesque forms and characters drifting at the edge of his mind only to be crushed under the unforgiving foot of reality. But it had been a nightmare, more than a dream, and reality didn't seem that terrible in comparison. Even his fixation for abolishing slavery didn't blaze that strongly in his heart anymore, sated and content with taking with them the freedmen who'd joined the Brazen Beasts and his families – a good part of the Meereenese slaves, but not all of them.

"Why?" Blaine asked from his horse, glancing up at the dragons as well. Their shadows covered most of the army as they flew, but sometimes they would disappear for a while, to go hunting or chase each other high among the clouds, their cries of victory or defeat echoing in the air for the whole world to hear.

"Because I'm tired of getting blisters on my thighs," Kurt complained, "and it would be the only way for you to ride one of them."

It came out as casual as he had intended, but Blaine frowned at him nonetheless.

"You're kidding, right?" he replied, his face a mixture of amusement and frightened shock. "No way."

"Galazza Galare once told me that dragons are easier to tame if they have a rider of their own" Kurt reasoned, keeping his tone calm and collected. "Besides, Viserion has always liked you."

It seemed to endear Blaine for a moment, but then he scoffed.

"First of all, you should stop basing yourself on what those people told you" he began, mistrust dripping from his voice as he thought about Kurt's court in Meereen. "Second, wasn't taming them the point of the whole blood affair in the first place? Third, Viserion liked me when he weighed less than my horse. Who knows what he thinks now."

Kurt rolled his eyes.

"Fourth, you're scared" he pointed out with a devilish grin. Blaine's expression clouded, his hands tightening around the reins of his horse.

"I'm not" he objected sternly, but what might have looked scary and threatening to any other person looked almost childish to Kurt by now – his narrowed eyes, the slight pout of his lips, the put-up tightness in his jaw.
Even so, Kurt didn't want to push his luck and end up angering him for real; so he stayed quiet for a minute, allowing Blaine's face to relax, before continuing in a more serious tone.

"We can do it together the first time, if you like. You can sit behind me."

Blaine chewed on that for a moment.

"I thought only the blood of the dragon could ride them" he said pensively.

"That's what my brother used to say, but apparently there are many things he didn't know. They listen to me now. I can tell them to accept as their rider anyone I deem worthy of the title. And there is no one in the world who deserves it more than you, my sun-and-stars."

That got Blaine to smile at least; however, he didn't answer the offer directly, leading the topic in another direction.

"What about Rhaegal, then? Who's going to ride him?"

It went unsaid that Kurt's favorite was Drogon, in fact; he didn't like the word favorite, because they were all equal in his heart, but he would lie to himself if he didn't admit that the time spent in the Dothraki Sea, and the subsequent discovery, had created a special bond between them.

"I was thinking about Finn" he said slowly – he hadn't put that much thought in it, if he had to be honest, but there was no one else he trusted more apart from Blaine, and no one else he would give such an honor to.

"No, thanks!" the knight's voice came from behind them, almost startling him. "I'm perfectly fine with my feet on the ground, khalees."

Kurt heaved a long frustrated sigh.

"What is it with you people? Anyone else would kill to ride a dragon."

"I will!" another voice said, joining the conversation forcefully. When Kurt looked over his shoulder, he saw Puck with his hand raised enthusiastically, Quinn rolling her eyes from behind him as she tightened her arms around his middle. Like Finn and Rachel, they shared the same horse now.

"I don't mean to offend you, Puck, but it's just... it's kind of a trust thing" Kurt told him in an apologetic tone.

He'd rather not tell him the other reason: that it just wasn't a role fit for a sellsword. It wasn't something maesters would like to put into their history books. Sellswords had a history of their own, in a way; a record of captains' names, contracts' duration, years of serving for who and at what prices. They had their battles – the same as those mentioned in the conventional books, only there, no one mentioned them – and their heroes, some of which were actually very powerful and influential men; exiled knights from Westeros, they were, just like Finn, but without a pretender to the throne to protect and counsel.

"What about me, then? Can I ride a dragon?" a female voice chirped – Brittany's, judging by the na�ve, dreamy tone to it.

"Holy Mother of Mountains" Santana sighed, looking up as if in prayer.

They all laughed, and as he looked at them, Kurt realized why exactly Meereen could never have been his real home. They were never truly happy there, as if a cloud of tragedy followed them around everywhere they went. None of them had ever felt at ease, he could see it clearly now; none of them had ever laughed or joked that way (well, maybe Puck had, but he didn't count). He had never noticed it before, too focused on his own problems. It was as if, for a time, they had disappeared from his life, mingling with a blurry background. But now their contours were neat and sharp once again, and he could see them.

Tina and Grey Worm might have been the exception – he remembered, clear as day, the tentative beauty of their first kiss. But their happiness had been shattered, too, together with Kurt and Blaine's hope of becoming fathers. And when a place does that – when it takes away something so big, maybe it can't be the same place that gives it back to you. Maybe Grey Worm, too, needed somewhere to call home, and Kurt hoped Westeros could be it. He hoped to see that shy, embarrassed smile blossom on the young Unsullied's face again.

After many days of march, the landscape began to change. Wisps of vegetation spurted from the ground where sand and dry rocks used to be, but they were never taller than Kurt's leg, so shade was still a forbidden luxury – if he didn't count the one provided by his dragons. The path under their horses' hooves became slippery and sort of muddy, as if the sun just couldn't manage to make it dry, and annoying flies and mosquitoes swarmed around their faces or the poor beasts' noses, making them nervous and fidgety.

It wasn't until they got sight of a lake that Kurt realized he had never seen that place before. His journey had been so long that sometimes he felt like he was about to forget some of the places he'd visited, and after all, the desert all looked the same. But it didn't look like they were in the desert anymore.

As they got closer and closer to the enormous expanse of water, a creepy white mist rose all around them, seemingly out of nowhere. The lake was, in truth, a greenish swamp, and its surface too was covered by a floating layer of fog. In the middle of it there was a long and wide stone bridge, whose end was impossible to see, swallowed by the mist.

"What is this place?" Kurt asked when they stopped in front of it, not talking to a particular person – but he knew Finn would be the one to answer. He always was, when it came to geography. "I don't remember ever passing from here."

As expected, Finn replied.

"That's because we never did, when we left Pentos the first time" he explained, his face grim and frighteningly serious. "We were headed to the Dothraki Sea, not Slaver's Bay, so we passed North of here, through the forest of Qohor. But now that we're coming back from the South, this is the shortest way to Pentos. These are the Sorrows, khalees, and that's the Bridge of Dream."

Kurt stared at him silently for a moment. The name rang something in his mind; it didn't sound completely unfamiliar to him. He searched through his memories, thinking back to Sebastian's history lessons, until he found the one he needed.

"The Sorrows? You mean Chroyane?"

Finn nodded, staring pensively at the bridge. Kurt saw Blaine looking at both of them in turn, frowning.

"So? What about it?" he asked curiously.

"Chroyane was once the richest and most splendid of the cities along the river Rhoyne. Its streets were said to be made of water and its houses of gold" Kurt told him, his voice even as his eyes scanned the landscape to try and look through the mist, searching for the ruins of the city sinking in the water. "The Rhoynar called the river Mother Rhoyne, and worshipped it like a God."

Blaine looked around him as well, his expression turning worried. Kurt knew he could sense it now, too – the haunting echo of a hollow, cursed, abandoned place. He shifted uncomfortably on his horse.

"What happened then?"

Kurt looked up at the sky. The fog was getting thicker and thicker as they spoke, and the sun was reduced to a round distant white halo.

"Dragons" he said, staring back at Blaine with quiet sadness.

"Can't we, like, march North some more and then turn left for Pentos? This place gives me the creeps" Puck commented before Blaine could reply.

"It would take us another couple of weeks" Finn told him readily, even though Kurt could see he was actually thinking about it. "I guess we could, if-"

"Bullshit!" Blaine cut him off with a suddenly confident expression. "My khalees needs to reach his protector as soon as possible, to cross the poisonous sea and take back his throne. It's just a pond and a bridge, after all."

"He's right, Finn" Kurt agreed, even though Blaine's description of the Sorrows was a little too reductive. "Let's not get influenced by superstition."

"What superstition?" Blaine inquired then. Finn promptly answered.

"The legend says that when the surviving Rhoynar fled the river to find refuge in Dorne, they cursed the Valyrians. That night, the water rose and drowned them all. The spirits of the drowned dragonlords haunt the Rhoyne now, and this fog is just their breath rising up from it."

"That's it, I'm not getting in there!" Santana said this time, as Brittany clutched tightly at her upper arm and looked around her, frightened.

"It's just a legend" Kurt promised her soothingly. "It happened almost a thousand years ago, anyway."

The place was admittedly scary, though. Being of Valyrian blood himself, he couldn't help but feel a little on edge, as if surrounded by a thousand pairs of accusing dead eyes.

Anyway, they rode on, marching slowly over the Bridge of Dream. It was wide enough to let five horses pass at the same time, and comfortably, without the riders' legs ever touching one another. The air was thick and buzzing with insects, and once in a while he could see big green turtles emerging from the water, lazily ignoring the noise their horses were producing against the stone floor. Tall looming figures reached for the sky, jutting up from the swamp on both sides of the bridge. If he narrowed his eyes, he could make out their contours, and distinguish crumbling columns from broken towers and lopsided stairs from rusty gates, both leading to forgotten palaces of damp stone.

At one point, on their right, an enormous structure appeared. Its roofless towers and barely standing terraces were covered in thick grey moss and tangled black vines, but underneath the unstoppable advancing of time and nature, Kurt could see the unmistakable glimmer of gold.

The Palace of Love.

That's what the Rhoynar used to call it, before switching to the current emblematic name the books remembered it by: the Palace of Sorrow. He could only glimpse a part of it amid the fog, but the part he was seeing was still bigger than what the Red Keep of King's Landing must be according to Sebastian's recounts, and a hundred times more beautiful, even in its desolated and forgotten ruin. There was something strikingly beautiful in it as well – the mysterious fascination of neglect and decay, the ability of places to endure even after the people who populated them are gone.

There was laughter here once, he thought. There were gardens bright with flowers and fountains sparkling golden in the sun. Those steps once rang to the sound of lovers' footsteps, and beneath that broken dome marriages beyond count were sealed with a kiss.

"This place is..." Blaine began, leaving the sentence unfinished.

"I know" Kurt said softly.

Tragically beautiful, he completed in his mind. It is never wise to tempt the dragons.

But it was men's fault, he realized. The proof of what dragons were able to do, when controlled by mean, ruthless humans. And his own children would be nothing but the reflection of who he was, and who he wanted to be.

He tried to look for them once again, but they were so deep into the fog now, probably at the center of the swamp and halfway across the bridge, that the sky itself was something foreign. There was no day and no night in the Sorrows; time went by without the need for someone to acknowledge it or mark its passing. An eternal glow ruled the place, halfway between darkness and light, and the air didn't move.

Suddenly, though, something moved. It was just a feeling at the beginning, almost the echo of a movement, rippling over the surface of the water and disturbing the stillness of the ruins. In fact, it seemed to came from under the bridge.

"Did you hear that?" he asked, uneasiness clinging to his skin as much as the dampness of the fog.

"What?" Blaine replied, apparently oblivious to the sound. "I didn't-"

Their horses whinnied then, suddenly standing on their hind legs to shy away from whatever had just jumped on the bridge in front of them. Kurt barely had the time to calm his horse that something forcefully dragged him down from it, making his right arm and side collide with the hard stone and sending an almost blinding jolt of pain through his body, due to the still healing wounds he had from the dungeon.

He snatched a dagger from his belt and tried to stand up, but someone kicked him in the stomach, took the weapon from his hand and flung it into the water. He heard screaming coming from his left, where Blaine was, and from behind him, where all the others were, and the deafening, ringing sound of blades against blades.

"Bl-" he tried to scream as he sat up, clutching at his belly, but that same someone – or at least he thought so – put a hand over his mouth from behind him and a cold, sharp sword against his throat.

"Shhh, blood of the dragon, be quiet" a male, gruff voice whispered in his ear, making him shiver all over. "Your Khal is busy, let's not disturb him."

He turned his head on instinct, the man's hand still tight over his lips, trying to find Blaine through the fog and the clamor. His tanned skin made it easier than it would have been with anybody else; he was surrounded by four men at least, fighting against each of them in turn, sometimes against two at the same time, but they were closing in on him, drawing him to the opposite border of the bridge from where Kurt was.

Between them there was just fog, since the horses must have fled to the end of the bridge in fear, but it seemed a mile to him. The men were all covered in grey, from head to toe, as if someone had poured a bucket of paint over them, which was crusting and cracking over their skins. When he tried to clutch at the man's hand and pry it away from his face, in fact, his palm came back grey as well.

Stone men, was his first thought.

Another common legend, in fact, said that the crumbling cities along the Rhoyne were now haunted by those severely affected by greyscale – a terrible, incurable disease that made your skin turn hard and your muscles unmoving, like stone, until a very painful, inevitable death. The disease was so contagious that men were usually driven away from villages and cities when diagnosed with it, finding themselves abandoned from their loved ones, stigmatized by society, looked at with fear and disgust. Those bandits must have been taking advantage of the legend to rob the careless voyagers that decided to cross the Bridge of Dream.

The man, however, had called him blood of the dragon. He knew who Kurt was. Struck by sudden panic, he began to squirm and claw at the man's arm with his nails, but the blade pressed stronger at his throat, and when he swallowed, he felt it against it.

"Hunter Clarington is so looking forward to see you" the man murmured almost soothingly in his ear, making his eyes widen and his attempts stop for a second. "Let's not make him wait, shall we?"

He began to drag Kurt away, ignoring his squirming and kicking furiously in the air, Kurt's hands thumping and clawing at both his arms in turn, to no use. His frantic eyes scanned the span of the bridge as the fighting figures all around him slowly became undistinguishable, until he found Blaine again, in the exact moment in which he got pushed against the border, lost his balance, and fell into the water.

Kurt screamed against the man's suffocating palm, his heart thumping wildly against his ribcage.

Because Blaine couldn't swim.

Dothraki were scared of the deep salty waters their horses couldn't drink from, and the Great Grass Sea they wandered in had just streams you could simply ride through, with no need to learn how to swim in the first place. But Blaine – he was the first Khal to leave the Dothraki Sea, for Kurt. And outside of it, waters were dark, deep and treacherous.

Somebody help him, he thought, or cried, or both – it was hard to tell. Somebody save him, please!

In a desperate, crazy gesture, he elbowed the man in the ribs, putting all the strength he had in it. It worked. The fake stone man cried in pain, his grip weakening for a couple of seconds, but long enough for Kurt to wriggle free from it and run to the opposite border of the bridge, from where Blaine had just disappeared.

He looked at the surface of the water helplessly, trying to get a glimpse of him, his head, his hand, something to know exactly where to jump. When he didn't, he planted his hands on the border anyway, to get the leverage he needed, but he felt a hand gripping his hair painfully and pulling him back, before throwing him to the floor once again.

"Let me go!" he shouted at the man, who was standing exactly where Kurt had stood a second before. "Get out of my way!"

Another bandit fell dead beside him, a sword buried in his chest. On instinct, Kurt snatched it from his flesh, blood and paint dripping from it when he lifted it. Finn had given him the basics of sword-fighting, but he knew he wasn't really good at it. He didn't care.

"Get the fuck away or I swear to the Seven, I will cut you to pieces!" he threatened, taking his first step forward.

"It's true what they say, then!" the man grinned, his white teeth glistening like pearls against his grey mask. "You really fell for him. King Hunter wants to kill you with his own hands, nice and slow, but I guess a Khal's corpse will raise my wage."

That's it.

He ran toward the man, slow and careful footsteps be damned, aiming his first blow at his head. His opponent avoided it skillfully and replied in kind, but Kurt knew his purpose was just to tire him until he stopped; he had just said he had to take him alive. He wondered how the exchange would have gone, if the restriction hadn't been in place, but he pushed the thought to the back of his mind to focus on the fact that he had to get to Blaine. He didn't know if someone had even seen him fall, let alone jumped after him to save him; he didn't know how many of the people he cared about were dead or alive in that precise moment.

His sore arm soon became a problem; the sword was too heavy, and he could feel the cuts he had inflicted on himself scream at him to stop stretching and contracting the muscle, but he couldn't. So he kept going, panting and slashing and stepping from side to side, the fog shifting with his movements only to wrap itself around him once again.

It's been too long, he realized helplessly.

Just as he was lifting the sword for a blow directed at the man's stomach that he hoped could be the last, a sudden gust of air coming from above moved the mist surrounding them, pushing it aside. A familiar flapping sound heralded the arrival of one of his children, come to the rescue just like he had done for them, risking his life and the one of the man he loved for their freedom. When he looked up, he saw Viserion's white body descending down on them, until he landed into the water with a loud splash.

The brief distraction was the perfect opportunity. His enemy was transfixed by the sight of the dragon – they were so huge now, that what once had been wonder and endearment had become a mixture of amazement and unbridled terror. Kurt buried the stolen sword deep in his stomach, staring in bewilderment as the blade disappeared into him – it looked almost magical, like a sorcerer's trick, except that it wasn't. It was the first life Kurt took with his own hands, and it felt... not as bad as he would have thought. Granted, he didn't feel like killing ten more for the sake of it, but he didn't feel disgusted, either. He knew he would do it again, if he had the chance.

"The Hummelsmythes send their regards" he murmured, as the man collapsed to the ground, clutching at his bleeding stomach.

He turned toward where Viserion had landed, and his heart skipped a beat at the sight. The pearly white dragon was just reemerging from the water, droplets of it clinging to his scales for a second too long before falling back into the swamp, and Blaine was sprawled on his neck. The temporary wetness of Viserion's usually too-hot body seemed to be enough for him to be able to endure it, but it was as if the dragon knew it wasn't going to last; slowly, he half-crawled, half-swam until he could lean his neck forward over the bridge and deposit Blaine on it with a delicateness so foreign to his size that Kurt's heart broke at the beauty of it.

Meanwhile, the battle seemed to be over; the dissipated fog showed him an expanse of grey corpses, while none of them seem to belong to his own men. Finn let himself shown as well, his sword leaving a red trail behind him as he walked toward Kurt, his face matted with sweat and pierced with worry. As soon as they got sight of each other, acknowledging that they were alive, they ran to Blaine. He was pale like a ghost, his frame unmoving.

"Blaine" Kurt called him uselessly as he crouched down beside his head, lifting it carefully over his lap. He stroked his damp curls away from his forehead, feeling how freezing cold his skin was. Terrified, he looked up at Finn.

"Oh Gods, Finn, is he-"

"No" Finn cut him off, kneeling over Blaine's body from the other side. He dropped the sword, pressed his flat palms against the middle of Blaine's chest, and began pushing steadily and rhythmically downwards. A little crowd of people formed around them – Rachel, Quinn, Puck, Santana, Brittany, Grey Worm, Blaine's anguished bloodriders – and behind him, in the water, Kurt could feel Viserion's presence, his breath keeping the air clear as he stared in a contemplative silence that was almost human.

He's waiting to know Blaine is alright.

He was just starting to lose hope, dizzy at the thought of dead, dead, he's dead, my sun-and-stars is dead, when Blaine coughed weakly and then increasingly stronger, water erupting from his mouth and nose as he struggled for breath. A heavy weight was lifted off Kurt's chest at the sight. He inclined Blaine's head a little more so he would not swallow back the water, until the fit subsided.

"Hey" Kurt murmured, stroking Blaine's wet face for the pure pleasure of knowing he was still there, "it's alright, my sun-and-stars, everything is alright."

He perfectly understood how Blaine had felt as he waited for Kurt to wake up, after the blood affair down in the pyramid's dungeons. He had already experienced it once, when Blaine had almost died from an infected wound in the Dothraki Sea. He hoped he would never have to go through it again. How many times did they have to risk losing each other?

Blaine's first attempt to speak caused him another coughing fit, but eventually he managed to croak, "Kurt? Did you save me?"

The childish, simple naivety of the question made Kurt's vision blurry. He smiled down at Blaine and shook his dead.

"Viserion did" he answered, glancing at the dragon out of the corner of his eye. Blaine turned, too, and gaped at Viserion as if he'd never seen him before. The white beast held his stare, his frighteningly blood-red eyes impossible to miss, and then, as if he'd accomplished his mission – which he had –, he spread his wings and took to the air, leaving the cemetery of his ancestors' victories as if it didn't really matter to him. His mother-of-pearl scales reflected the thin strip of sunlight cutting through the fog, shimmering like the golden ruins of the Palace of Love.

"Did- did you tell him to?" Blaine asked as he watched him disappear in the sky.

"No. I told you, he likes you."

He realized, though, that he had specifically asked for someone to save him in his mind. But out of all three, Viserion had been the one to answer his prayer. Blaine's face, which was slowly regaining its normal olive color, split in a proud grin.

"Looks like he really, really does."

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When Pentos came into view some ten days later, it felt surreal to Kurt. The last time he had been there, after all, he'd been a shy, insecure, androgynous boy completely subjected to his brother's will. A man was entering it now, and it felt like the city itself was different, too, because the eyes looking at it belonged to another person. They marched through that same stretch of land where Kurt and Blaine's marriage had been celebrated, right outside the city walls, and if something could remind him of just how different they both were, it was that.

It felt like closing a circle, like moving on from a period of his life to enter into a new, unknown one. The impressive expanse of Essos stretched on and on behind him with its wonders and shames, its cultures and beliefs, its strange and heterogeneous peoples – Dothraki, Lamb Men, Qartheens, Astapori, Yunkai'i, Meereenese, Volantenese, Rhoynar and Valyrian ghosts. Beyond Pentos, the Narrow Sea greeted him like an old friend from his childhood, its crushing waves filling the air with salt.

Once inside the city, he realized he had never really known it. During the time spent there with Sebastian in Sandy's palace, he barely went out, and when he did, every stare or move that could look or sound suspicious set him on edge, his mind filled with his brother's conspiracy theories. The funny thing was that after Sebastian's death his suspicions had actually found their confirmation, with the poisoned wine at the market and now the Clarington men in the Sorrows. But what was even funniest was that Kurt didn't feel as worried about it as he would have been when Sebastian was alive, when in truth there was nothing to be scared of to begin with back then. They were never considered a real threat to the Iron Throne, before obtaining the service of Blaine's khalasar, and it wasn't until Kurt had learned to control his dragons that the sovereign of the Seven Kingdoms had actually sent someone for him, instead of spreading rumors of a generic reward in the hope that some fool would try and kill Kurt.

And so every street looked new and exciting, every smile and stare far from threatening, because Kurt was as safe as he would ever be. He had had to leave the dragons outside the city, but after the attack on the Rhoyne, he knew: he just had to need their help for them to provide it. They were his, down to their cores, where smoke and flames swirled around each other for the first time; their bond was made of fire and blood, his family's words, whose true meaning had always been unknown to him until then. And Blaine was his, too; their bond was made of love and lust and sacrifice, but it was just as strong. In their own way, both bonds had been put to the test, and survived. And it was that, the deep conviction that somehow, someway, they would survive the horrors of the world, that made him believe in himself.

He felt Blaine's stare directed at him from time to time as they slowly rode along the city's narrow streets, as if he was studying him, but the khal never said a word until they found themselves at the base of the stairs that led to Sandy's palace.

"I remember the first time I saw you" he reflected out loud, as Finn spoke to a servant and asked him to announce their return to his master. "I remember it clear as day. There are some things, about the rest, that are fuzzy or incomplete, lacking detail; but that, the moment I first laid my eyes on you from this exact spot, is something I will never forget. You were so beautiful that you took my breath away, moon of my life."

Oh, and Kurt remembered it, too. The feeling of dread mixed with fascination, the mysterious pull of Blaine's savage appearance, the mounting fire in his almond-shaped eyes. He remembered standing at the top of that staircase, looking down at him, and thinking They don't come more beautiful than this. And the rest didn't matter anymore; how scared Kurt was of him at the start, how rough Blaine couldn't help but be.

Before he could answer, Sandy Ryerson appeared, wrapped in a yellow silk tunic that looked a little too feminine for his stout body. He put both his hands over his heart, then raised them in the air, and as he spoke he walked down the steps quickly, his cheeks flushed with the effort.

"Darling boy!" he exclaimed, as Kurt got down from the saddle to greet him. "I was waiting for you! Oh Gods, I thought I'd never see you again!"

He enveloped Kurt in a tight, almost choking hug, before cupping his face with his big hands to study him closely, as if looking for some striking change. Kurt knew his features were getting more defined as he slowly stepped into adulthood, his cheekbones and jaw sharper, but they were changes that those who stayed with him constantly couldn't notice. Sandy, though, surely did.

"You are growing up so fast!" he said indeed, his eyes shining and teeth glistening when his mouth stretched into an almost manic smile. "Scratch that – you're a man grown!"

Kurt laughed, not knowing what to say exactly. Sandy had always been a controversial figure in his life: on one hand, he had helped Sebastian with his plan and acted as an interlocutor for his transaction with Blaine to go through; on the other hand, he had always given Kurt good advice and treated him well. Kurt guessed it was time to discover, once and for all, if he really was devoted to him. He needed a fleet, in fact, and the money they had left would not be enough. The gifts of the Qartheen merchant prince Chandler Choan Dachos had run out, and they were living on the confiscated wealth of the Crawford family – one of Finn's most useful ideas so far.

"I'm glad to see you too, magistro" he ventured awkwardly.

"I'm so sorry about your brother's passing" Sandy said then, his expression turning sad. "News travel quickly in the East, but you know how they change shape according to people's tastes. I'm sure what they say is just... a mean, false rumor. How did it happen, sweet boy?"

He was looking at Blaine out of the corner of his eye as he said it. For a moment, Kurt thought to lie. Say a terrible disease had taken Sebastian's life, or a blade in a fight. But then he heard Blaine get down from his own horse to reach his side, and before he could speak, Blaine himself did.

"I killed him" he stated, with a stare that meant to say So what? "Poured a pot of boiling gold over his head. He pointed a sword at my khalees in front of me, threatening to spill his blood over the holy soil of Vaes Dothrak. Is this what they say?"

Sandy swallowed visibly, but his uneasiness was mixed with fascination at the sight of Blaine speaking the Common Tongue so fluently. He'd probably thought he couldn't, and talked freely in front of him without worrying too much about it. His eyes shifted to open wonder and surprise when Blaine circled Kurt's waist with his arm possessively and Kurt leaned into his touch on instinct.

"Y-yes" he stammered, staring at them as if transfixed. "I see many things have changed since the last time you've been here."

"You could say that" Kurt grinned. "Did you hear about my dragons, too?"

Sandy assumed an excited expression and clapped his hands together noisily, forgetting about Sebastian's tragic death altogether.

"I did! And what an incredible news it was! When I gave those eggs to you, I considered them nothing but fossils" he replied, looking around all of a sudden. "Where are they? I want to be able to say I've seen a living dragon before I die!"

"Outside of Pentos. I didn't want to scare everyone, they're... intimidating" Kurt concluded lamely. "But I can take you to see them later, if you like. First, though, there is something I need to ask you."

"Anything, darling boy, anything!" the man said, gesturing openly with his hands, but then he stopped and his face grew solemn. "But... will you allow me to introduce you to someone first?"

"I... yes, sure" Kurt said hesitantly, exchanging a dubious look with Blaine.

After Sandy had properly greeted Finn as well – "You did such a good job, ser, taking him back here safe and unharmed!" –, Kurt and Blaine followed him inside his palace. They walked along the corridor than once had hosted Kurt and Sebastian's rooms, and Kurt wondered what had become of them, but only for a moment – like many other things of that period of his life, it didn't matter. They reached the beautiful main hall of the house, decorated with expensive paintings and furnished with tall chandeliers and statues, floors entirely covered by carpets coming from every corner of the known world.

There, in the middle of the room, a man with white skin and shoulder-length blonde hair greeted them with a huge, beaming smile, his plump lips stretching to occupy a great part of his honest, trusting face. He wore an armor like Finn did, painted white with tiny golden suns framing his cloak and a sun-shaped pin holding it in place at his chest. Kurt felt as if that man knew him, but it sure wasn't the other way around as well. He was positive he had never seen him before.

"This is Sam Evans, prince of Dorne" Sandy simply said, as if that was enough to explain the way the knight - prince - was looking at Kurt expectantly, almost hopefully.

Dorne was the southernmost realm of the Seven Kingdoms, and the last to have surrendered to Aegon the Conqueror when he reunited them and conquered them on dragonback. Since it had surrendered willingly, instead of falling, Kurt's ancestor had granted the Dornishmen the possibility to still call their sovereigns princes instead of Lords, as was done in the rest of Westeros.

Had Sandy arranged an alliance with Dorne for him? Was that what it was about?

"It's... a pleasure to meet you, Your Highness" Kurt said politely, leaving Blaine's side to make a little bow.

Before he could do it properly, though, the Dornish prince took a step forward and hugged him, leaving him frozen on the spot. It lasted a couple of seconds, but Kurt was speechless.

Sam Evans beamed again, pushed a lock of golden hair away from his face, and said, "Long time no see, cousin!"