[He follows her despite everything — despite his newness in the city, despite the games he thinks she’s playing, despite his discomfort in being alone with a young lady in her bedchamber. The last makes him keep some distance once they arrive, leaning against the wall opposite her seat.

Is this how she holds court, so far to the east? Is this what awaits him on Dragonstone, a girl who dresses like a boy and doesn’t take much trouble to put on an air of ignorance that matches with her protestations of it?

She talks too long, but she’s right in one thing: she can set terms for any alliance between them. She’d be a fool to do it, but she can do it. So he listens to her as she speaks, without addressing any of her points until she seems to have come to an end. He keeps his eyes on her, though he is conscious of the dragon.

Finally, it comes back to him.]

In ordinary times, it might be that the Riverlands are more important to the Iron Throne than the North. But these are not ordinary times.

What we face in the North is not an isolated war, a war that is of no matter to anyone else if we lose. It’s only the first front of a war that will affect everyone. It won’t matter if your smallfolk are starving, yours or mine, if the Dead come and kill them and raise them. The army grows and grows; the people it kills are added to its numbers.

[This is only a patient explanation: he has not yet grown impassioned.]

Winterfell is defensible. We have perhaps five thousand men — more, counting any women and children who are willing to fight, though any who wish can stay in the castle. We are training them either way; they need to know how to defend themselves. But we need dragonglass, and the only place there’s much of it is Dragonstone.

It’s near worthless for anything else. It’s life and death to us.