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When Daenerys first told Jorah she would tend his wounded hip herself he had protested. Now when she announced herself at the door flap of his tent, he bid her enter, took down his trousers to reveal his injury, and lay back on his sleeping mat as meekly as he had done anything in his life. Which, he owned, was not very.
Most times he stared up at the gap in the ceiling, at the red comet which resembled nothing so much as a bloodstain on the pale blue sky above Vaes Tolorro. Today, however, he watched the queen’s hands at their work, unwinding the linen bindings, cleaning the wound with a clean wet rag, rubbing herbs into it. Small but capable, her hands were, and callused. How well he remembered the time when they were not. When he’d lifted her down from her silver’s saddle and she could scarcely uncurl her fingers from the position in which she’d held the reins, palms raw as a skinned carcass.
"Almost as good as new," she said, and Jorah’s eyes flicked from her fingers to her face, a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth as he noticed how the satisfied expression smoothed away the lingering haggardness of their recent starvation in the Red Waste. "Albeit with a rather impressive scar."
"As impressive as my ear?"
Daenerys’ gaze swung up to the left side of his face, where his ear had encountered Qotho’s arakh, the shadows darkening in the hollows of her eyes and cheekbones as she winced. But her hand left his hip to stroke his cheek on the maimed side.
"You sacrificed much for me, my bear."
"Only half an ear." He spoke in jest, but Daenerys looked not at all amused.
"If your hip had gone untreated, you may well have lost your whole leg."
Jorah reached up to cover her hand where it lingered against his cheek. “I’d give every part of me for you, my queen. All that I have.”
"I thank the gods they did not require it of you," she replied, her voice almost softer than the rasp of her thumb over his beard. "For you are all that I have."
In that moment, Jorah wanted nothing so much as to put his arms around Daenerys’ slender frame, pull her down onto his chest, and kiss her. Instead, he resisted the temptation, lowering his hand and pushing himself upright, pulling his breeches back over his hips as he stood.
"You’ll have your khas as well,” he said, doing up the laces. “If I’m healed, I may sit the saddle again. I’ll ride out and find them for your grace. Blood of your blood.”
Still kneeling on the tent floor, Daenerys stretched out her hand, and Jorah took it, drawing her to her feet.
"I did not say you were healed enough for that," she said, clinging to his fingers when he tried to pull it free again from her grasp. "It may yet come to that, but I would give them a little more time to return. In truth, Jorah, you are blood of my blood as much as they. I do not think I could bear to send you from my side, and be left alone in this city of bones."
"Nor could I bear to be sent from my queen."
He prayed the gods he never would be.