The Dothraki sea,” Ser Jorah Mormont said
as he reined to a halt beside her on the top of the ridge. beneath
them, the plain stretched out immense and empty, a vast flat
expanse that reached to the distant horizon and beyond. It was a
sea, Dany thought. Past here, there were no hills, no mountains, no
trees nor cities nor roads, only the endless grasses, the tall
blades rippling like waves when the winds blew. “It’s
so green,” she said.
“Here and now,” Ser Jorah agreed. “You ought
to see it when it blooms, all dark red flowers from horizon to
horizon, like a sea of blood. Come the dry season, and the world
turns the color of old bronze. And this is only hranna, child.
There are a hundred kinds of grass out there, grasses as yellow as
lemon and as dark as indigo, blue grasses and orange grasses and
grasses like rainbows. Down in the Shadow Lands beyond Asshai, they
say there are oceans of ghost grass, taller than a man on horseback
with stalks as pale as milkglass. It murders all other grass and
glows in the dark with the spirits of the damned. The Dothraki
claim that someday ghost grass will cover the entire world, and
then all life will end.”
That thought gave Dany the shivers. “I don’t want to
talk about that now,” she said. “It’s so
beautiful here, I don’t want to think about everything
dying.”
“As you will, Khaleesi,” Ser Jorah said
respectfully.
She heard the sound of voices and turned to look behind her. She
and Mormont had outdistanced the rest of their party, and now the
others were climbing the ridge below them. Her handmaid Irri and
the young archers of her khas were fluid as centaurs, but Viserys
still struggled with the short stirrups and the flat saddle. Her
brother was miserable out here. He ought never have come. Magister
Illyrio had urged him to wait in Pentos, had offered him the
hospitality of his manse, but Viserys would have none of it. He
would stay with Drogo until the debt had been paid, until he had
the crown he had been promised. “And if he tries to cheat me,
he will learn to his sorrow what it means to wake the
dragon,” Viserys had vowed, laying a hand on his borrowed
sword. Illyrio had blinked at that and wished him good fortune.
Dany realized that she did not want to listen to any of her
brother’s complaints right now. The day was too perfect. The
sky was a deep blue, and high above them a hunting hawk circled.
The grass sea swayed and sighed with each breath of wind, the air
was warm on her face, and Dany felt at peace. She would not let
Viserys spoil it.
“Wait here,” Dany told Ser Jorah. “Tell them
all to stay. Tell them I command it.”
The knight smiled. Ser Jorah was not a handsome man. He had a
neck and shoulders like a bull, and coarse black hair covered his
arms and chest so thickly that there was none left for his head.
Yet his smiles gave Dany comfort. “You are learning to talk
like a queen, Daenerys.”
“Not a queen,” said Dany. “A khaleesi.”
She wheeled her horse about and galloped down the ridge alone.
The descent was steep and rocky, but Dany rode fearlessly, and
the joy and the danger of it were a song in her heart. All her life
Viserys had told her she was a princess, but not until she rode her
silver had Daenerys Targaryen ever felt like one.
At first it had not come easy. The khalasar had broken camp the
morning after her wedding, moving east toward Vaes Dothrak, and by
the third day Dany thought she was going to die. Saddle sores
opened on her bottom, hideous and bloody. Her thighs were chafed
raw, her hands blistered from the reins, the muscles of her legs
and back so wracked with pain that she could scarcely sit. By the
time dusk fell, her handmaids would need to help her down from her
mount.
Even the nights brought no relief. Khal Drogo ignored her when
they rode, even as he had ignored her during their wedding, and
spent his evenings drinking with his warriors and bloodriders,
racing his prize horses, watching women dance and men die. Dany had
no place in these parts of his life. She was left to sup alone, or
with Ser Jorah and her brother, and afterward to cry herself to
sleep. Yet every night, some time before the dawn, Drogo would come
to her tent and wake her in the dark, to ride her as relentlessly
as he rode his stallion. He always took her from behind, Dothraki
fashion, for which Dany was grateful; that way her lord husband
could not see the tears that wet her face, and she could use her
pillow to muffle her cries of pain. When he was done, he would
close his eyes and begin to snore softly and Dany would lie beside
him, her body bruised and sore, hurting too much for sleep.
Day followed day, and night followed night, until Dany knew she
could not endure a moment longer. She would kill herself rather
than go on, she decided one night . . .
Yet when she slept that night, she dreamt the dragon dream
again. Viserys was not in it this time. There was only her and the
dragon. Its scales were black as night, wet and slick with blood.
Her blood, Dany sensed. Its eyes were pools of molten magma, and
when it opened its mouth, the flame came roaring out in a hot jet.
She could hear it singing to her, She opened her arms to the fire,
embraced it, let it swallow her whole, let it cleanse her and
temper her and scour her clean. She could feel her flesh sear and
blacken and slough away, could feel her blood boil and turn to
steam, and yet there was no pain. She felt strong and new and
fierce.
And the next day, strangely, she did not seem to hurt quite so
much. It was as if the gods had heard her and taken pity. Even her
handmaids noticed the change. “Khaleesi,” Jhiqui said,
“what is wrong? Are you sick?”
“I was,” she answered, standing over the
dragon’s eggs that Illyrio had given her when she wed. She
touched one, the largest of the three, running her hand lightly
over the shelf. Black-and-scarlet, she thought, like the dragon in
my dream. The stone felt strangely warm beneath her fingers . . . or was she still dreaming? She pulled her hand back nervously.
From that hour onward, each day was easier than the one before
it. Her legs grew stronger; her blisters burst and her hands grew
callused; her soft thighs toughened, supple as leather.
The khal had commanded the handmaid Irri to teach Dany to ride
in the Dothraki fashion, but it was the filly who was her real
teacher. The horse seemed to know her moods, as if they shared a
single mind. With every passing day, Dany felt surer in her seat.
The Dothraki were a hard and unsentimental people, and it was not
their custom to name their animals, so Dany thought of her only as
the silver. She had never loved anything so much.
As the riding became less an ordeal, Dany began to notice the
beauties of the land around her. She rode at the head of the
khalasar with Drogo and his bloodriders, so she came to each
country fresh and unspoiled. Behind them the great horde might tear
the earth and muddy the rivers and send up clouds of choking dust,
but the fields ahead of them were always green and verdant.
They crossed the rolling hills of Norvos, past terraced farms
and small villages where the townsfolk watched anxiously from atop
white stucco walls. They forded three wide placid rivers and a
fourth that was swift and narrow and treacherous, camped beside a
high blue waterfall, skirted the tumbled ruins of a vast dead city
where ghosts were said to moan among blackened marble columns. They
raced down Valyrian roads a thousand years old and straight as a
Dothraki arrow. For half a moon, they rode through the Forest of
Qohor, where the leaves made a golden canopy high above them, and
the trunks of the trees were as wide as city gates. There were
great elk in that wood, and spotted tigers, and lemurs with silver
fur and huge purple eyes, but all fled before the approach of the
khalasar and Dany got no glimpse of them.
By then her agony was a fading memory. She still ached after a
long day’s riding, yet somehow the pain had a sweetness to it
now, and each morning she came willingly to her saddle, eager to
know what wonders waited for her in the lands ahead. She began to
find pleasure even in her nights, and if she still cried out when
Drogo took her, it was not always in pain.
At the bottom of the ridge, the grasses rose around her, tall
and supple. Dany slowed to a trot and rode out onto the plain,
losing herself in the green, blessedly alone. In the khalasar she
was never alone. Khal Drogo came to her only after the sun went
down, but her handmaids fed her and bathed her and slept by the
door of her tent, Drogo’s bloodriders and the men of her khas
were never far, and her brother was an unwelcome shadow, day and
night. Dany could hear him on the top of the ridge, his voice
shrill with anger as he shouted at Ser Jorah. She rode on,
submerging herself deeper in the Dothraki sea.
The green swallowed her up. The air was rich with the scents of
earth and grass, mixed with the smell of horseflesh and
Dany’s sweat and the oil in her hair. Dothraki smells. They
seemed to belong here. Dany breathed it all in, laughing. She had a
sudden urge to feel the ground beneath her, to curl her toes in
that thick black soil. Swinging down from her saddle, she let the
silver graze while she pulled off her high boots.
Viserys came upon her as sudden as a summer storm, his horse
rearing beneath him as he reined up too hard. “You
dare!” he screamed at her. “You give commands to me? To
me?” He vaulted off the horse, stumbling as he landed. His
face was flushed as he struggled back to his feet. He grabbed her,
shook her. “Have you forgotten who you are? Look at you. Look
at you!”
Dany did not need to look. She was barefoot, with oiled hair,
wearing Dothraki riding leathers and a painted vest given her as a
bride gift. She looked as though she belonged here. Viserys was
soiled and stained in city silks and ringmail.
He was still screaming. “You do not command the dragon. Do
you understand? I am the Lord of the Seven Kingdoms, I will not
hear orders from some horselord’s slut, do you hear
me?” His hand went under her vest, his fingers digging
painfully into her breast. “Do you hear me?”
Dany shoved him away, hard.
Viserys stared at her, his lilac eyes incredulous. She had never
defied him. Never fought back. Rage twisted his features. He would
hurt her now, and badly, she knew that. Crack.
The whip made a sound like thunder. The coil took Viserys around
the throat and yanked him backward. He went sprawling in the grass,
stunned and choking. The Dothraki riders hooted at him as he
struggled to free himself. The one with the whip, young Jhogo,
rasped a question. Dany did not understand his words, but by then
Irri was there, and Ser Jorah, and the rest of her khas.
“Jhogo asks if you would have him dead, Khaleesi, “
Irri said.
“No,” Dany replied. “No.”
Jhogo understood that. One of the others barked out a comment,
and the Dothraki laughed. Irri told her, “Quaro thinks you
should take an ear to teach him respect.”
Her brother was on his knees, his fingers digging under the
leather coils, crying incoherently, struggling for breath. The whip
was tight around his windpipe.
“Tell them I do not wish him harmed,” Dany said.
Irri repeated her words in Dothraki. Jhogo gave a pull on the
whip, yanking Viserys around like a puppet on a string. He went
sprawling again, freed from the leather embrace, a thin line of
blood under his chin where the whip had cut deep.
“I warned him what would happen, my lady,” Ser Jorah
Mormont said. “I told him to stay on the ridge, as you
commanded.”
“I know you did,” Dany replied, watching Viserys. He
lay on the ground, sucking in air noisily, red-faced and sobbing.
He was a pitiful thing. He had always been a pitiful thing. Why had
she never seen that before? There was a hollow place inside her
where her fear had been.
“Take his horse,” Dany commanded Ser Jorah. Viserys
gaped at her. He could not believe what he was hearing; nor could
Dany quite believe what she was saying. Yet the words came.
“Let my brother walk behind us back to the khalasar.”
Among the Dothraki, the man who does not ride was no man at all,
the lowest of the low, without honor or pride. “Let everyone
see him as he is.”
“No!” Viserys screamed. He turned to Ser Jorah,
pleading in the Common Tongue with words the horsemen would not
understand. “Hit her, Mormont. Hurt her. Your king commands
it. Kill these Dothraki dogs and teach her.”
The exile knight looked from Dany to her brother; she barefoot,
with dirt between her toes and oil in her hair, he with his silks
and steel. Dany could see the decision on his face. “He shall
walk, Khaleesi,” he said. He took her brother’s horse
in hand while Dany remounted her silver.
Viserys gaped at him, and sat down in the dirt. He kept his
silence, but he would not move, and his eyes were full of poison as
they rode away. Soon he was lost in the tall grass. When they could
not see him anymore, Dany grew afraid. “Will he find his way
back?” she asked Ser Jorah as they rode.
“Even a man as blind as your brother should be able to
follow our trail,” he replied.
“He is proud. He may be too shamed to come
back.”
Jorah laughed. “Where else should he go? If he cannot find
the khalasar, the khalasar will most surely find him. It is hard to
drown in the Dothraki sea, child.”
Dany saw the truth of that. The khalasar was like a city on the
march, but it did not march blindly. Always scouts ranged far ahead
of the main column, alert for any sign of game or prey or enemies,
while outriders guarded their flanks. They missed nothing, not
here, in this land, the place where they had come from. These
plains were a part of them . . . and of her, now.
“I hit him,” she said, wonder in her voice. Now that
it was over, it seemed like some strange dream that she had
dreamed. “Ser Jorah, do you think . . . he’ll be so
angry when he gets back . . . She shivered. “I woke the dragon,
didn’t I?”
Ser Jorah snorted. “Can you wake the dead, girl? Your
brother Rhaegar was the last dragon, and he died on the Trident.
Viserys is less than the shadow of a snake.”
His blunt words startled her. It seemed as though all the things
she had always believed were suddenly called into question.
“You . . . you swore him your sword . . . ”
“That I did, girl,” Ser Jorah said. “And if
your brother is the shadow of a snake, what does that make his
servants?” His voice was bitter.
“He is still the true king. He is . . . ”
Jorah pulled up his horse and looked at her. “Truth now.
Would you want to see Viserys sit a throne?”
Dany thought about that. “He would not be a very good
king, would he?”
“There have been worse . . . but not many.” The
knight gave his heels to his mount and started off again.
Dany rode close beside him. “Still,” she said,
“the common people are waiting for him. Magister Illyrio says
they are sewing dragon banners and praying for Viserys to return
from across the narrow sea to free them.”
“The common people pray for rain, healthy children, and a
summer that never ends,” Ser Jorah told her. “It is no
matter to them if the high lords play their game of thrones, so
long as they are left in peace.” He gave a shrug. “They
never are.”
Dany rode along quietly for a time, working his words like a
puzzle box. It went against everything that Viserys had ever told
her to think that the people could care so little whether a true
king or a usurper reigned over them. Yet the more she thought on
Jorah’s words, the more they rang of truth.
“What do you pray for, Ser Jorah?” she asked
him.
“Home,” he said. His voice was thick with
longing.
“I pray for home too,” she told him, believing
it.
Ser Jorah laughed. “Look around you then,
Khaleesi.”
But it was not the plains Dany saw then. It was King’s
Landing and the great Red Keep that Aegon the Conqueror had built.
It was Dragonstone where she had been born. In her mind’s eye
they burned with a thousand lights, a fire blazing in every window.
In her mind’s eye, all the doors were red.
“My brother will never take back the Seven
Kingdoms,” Dany said. She had known that for a long time, she
realized. She had known it all her life. Only she had never let
herself say the words, even in a whisper, but now she said them for
Jorah Mormont and all the world to hear.
Ser Jorah gave her a measuring look. “You think
not.”
“He could not lead an army even if my lord husband gave
him one,” Dany said. “He has no coin and the only
knight who follows him reviles him as less than a snake. The
Dothraki make mock of his weakness. He will never take us
home.”
“Wise child.” The knight smiled.
“I am no child,” she told him fiercely. Her heels
pressed into the sides of her mount, rousing the silver to a
gallop. Faster and faster she raced, leaving Jorah and Irri and the
others far behind, the warm wind in her hair and the setting sun
red on her face. By the time she reached the khalasar, it was
dusk.
The slaves had erected her tent by the shore of a spring-fed
pool. She could hear rough voices from the woven grass palace on
the hill. Soon there would be laughter, when the men of her khas
told the story of what had happened in the grasses today. By the
time Viserys came limping back among them, every man, woman, and
child in the camp would know him for a walker. There were no
secrets in the khalasar.
Dany gave the silver over to the slaves for grooming and entered
her tent. It was cool and dim beneath the silk. As she let the door
flap close behind her, Dany saw a finger of dusty red light reach
out to touch her dragon’s eggs across the tent. For an
instant a thousand droplets of scarlet flame swam before her eyes.
She blinked, and they were gone. Stone, she told herself. They are only stone, even Illyrio said
so, the dragons are all dead. She put her palm against the black
egg, fingers spread gently across the curve of the shell. The stone
was warm. Almost hot. “The sun,” Dany whispered.
“The sun warmed them as they rode.”
She commanded her handmaids to prepare her a bath. Doreah built
a fire outside the tent, while Irri and Jhiqui fetched the big
copper tub—another bride gift—from the packhorses and carried water
from the pool. When the bath was steaming, Irri helped her into it
and climbed in after her.
“Have you ever seen a dragon?” she asked as Irri
scrubbed her back and Jhiqui sluiced sand from her hair. She had
heard that the first dragons had come from the east, from the
Shadow Lands beyond Asshai and the islands of the Jade Sea. Perhaps
some were still living there, in realms strange and wild.
“Dragons are gone, Khaleesi,” Irri said.
“Dead,” agreed Jhiqui. “Long and long
ago.”
Viserys had told her that the last Targaryen dragons had died no
more than a century and a half ago, during the reign of Aegon III,
who was called the Dragonbane. That did not seem so long ago to
Dany. “Everywhere?” she said, disappointed. “Even
in the east?” Magic had died in the west when the Doom fell
on Valyria and the Lands of the Long Summer, and neither
spell-forged steel nor stormsingers nor dragons could hold it back,
but Dany had always heard that the east was different. It was said
that manticores prowled the islands of the Jade Sea, that basilisks
infested the jungles of Yi Ti, that spellsingers, warlocks, and
aeromancers practiced their arts openly in Asshai, while
shadowbinders and bloodmages worked terrible sorceries in the black
of night. Why shouldn’t there be dragons too?
“No dragon,” Irri said. “Brave men kill them,
for dragon terrible evil beasts. It is known.”
“It is known,” agreed Jhiqui.
“A trader from Qarth once told me that dragons came from
the moon,” blond Doreah said as she warmed a towel over the
fire. Jhiqui and Irri were of an age with Dany, Dothraki girls
taken as slaves when Drogo destroyed their father’s khalasar.
Doreah was older, almost twenty. Magister Illyrio had found her in
a pleasure house in Lys.
Silvery-wet hair tumbled across her eyes as Dany turned her
head, curious. “The moon?”
“He told me the moon was an egg, Khaleesi,” the
Lysene girl said. “Once there were two moons in the sky, but
one wandered too close to the sun and cracked from the heat. A
thousand thousand dragons poured forth, and drank the fire of the
sun. That is why dragons breathe flame. One day the other moon will
kiss the sun too, and then it will crack and the dragons will
return.”
The two Dothraki girls giggled and laughed. “You are
foolish strawhead slave,” Irri said. “Moon is no egg.
Moon is god, woman wife of sun. It is known.”
“It is known,” Jhiqui agreed.
Dany’s skin was flushed and pink when she climbed from the
tub. Jhiqui laid her down to oil her body and scrape the dirt from
her pores. Afterward Irri sprinkled her with spiceflower and
cinnamon. While Doreah brushed her hair until it shone like spun
silver, she thought about the moon, and eggs, and dragons.
Her supper was a simple meal of fruit and cheese and fry bread,
with a jug of honeyed wine to wash it down. “Doreah, stay and
eat with me,” Dany commanded when she sent her other
handmaids away. The Lysene girl had hair the color of honey, and
eyes like the summer sky.
She lowered those eyes when they were alone. “You honor
me, Khaleesi,” she said, but it was no honor, only service.
Long after the moon had risen, they sat together, talking.
That night, when Khal Drogo came, Dany was waiting for him. He
stood in the door of her tent and looked at her with surprise. She
rose slowly and opened her sleeping silks and let them fall to the
ground. “This night we must go outside, my lord,” she
told him, for the Dothraki believed that all things of importance
in a man’s life must be done beneath the open sky.
Khal Drogo followed her out into the moonlight, the bells in his
hair tinkling softly. A few yards from her tent was a bed of soft
grass, and it was there that Dany drew him down. When he tried to
turn her over, she put a hand on his chest. “No,” she
said. “This night I would look on your face.”
There is no privacy in the heart of the khalasar. Dany felt the
eyes on her as she undressed him, heard the soft voices as she did
the things that Doreah had told her to do. It was nothing to her.
Was she not khaleesi? His were the only eyes that mattered, and
when she mounted him she saw something there that she had never
seen before. She rode him as fiercely as ever she had ridden her
silver, and when the moment of his pleasure came, Khal Drogo called
out her name.
They were on the far side of the Dothraki sea when Jhiqui
brushed the soft swell of Dany’s stomach with her fingers and
said, “Khaleesi, you are with child.”
“I know,” Dany told her.
It was her fourteenth name day.
The Dothraki sea,” Ser Jorah Mormont said
as he reined to a halt beside her on the top of the ridge. beneath
them, the plain stretched out immense and empty, a vast flat
expanse that reached to the distant horizon and beyond. It was a
sea, Dany thought. Past here, there were no hills, no mountains, no
trees nor cities nor roads, only the endless grasses, the tall
blades rippling like waves when the winds blew. “It’s
so green,” she said.
“Here and now,” Ser Jorah agreed. “You ought
to see it when it blooms, all dark red flowers from horizon to
horizon, like a sea of blood. Come the dry season, and the world
turns the color of old bronze. And this is only hranna, child.
There are a hundred kinds of grass out there, grasses as yellow as
lemon and as dark as indigo, blue grasses and orange grasses and
grasses like rainbows. Down in the Shadow Lands beyond Asshai, they
say there are oceans of ghost grass, taller than a man on horseback
with stalks as pale as milkglass. It murders all other grass and
glows in the dark with the spirits of the damned. The Dothraki
claim that someday ghost grass will cover the entire world, and
then all life will end.”
That thought gave Dany the shivers. “I don’t want to
talk about that now,” she said. “It’s so
beautiful here, I don’t want to think about everything
dying.”
“As you will, Khaleesi,” Ser Jorah said
respectfully.
She heard the sound of voices and turned to look behind her. She
and Mormont had outdistanced the rest of their party, and now the
others were climbing the ridge below them. Her handmaid Irri and
the young archers of her khas were fluid as centaurs, but Viserys
still struggled with the short stirrups and the flat saddle. Her
brother was miserable out here. He ought never have come. Magister
Illyrio had urged him to wait in Pentos, had offered him the
hospitality of his manse, but Viserys would have none of it. He
would stay with Drogo until the debt had been paid, until he had
the crown he had been promised. “And if he tries to cheat me,
he will learn to his sorrow what it means to wake the
dragon,” Viserys had vowed, laying a hand on his borrowed
sword. Illyrio had blinked at that and wished him good fortune.
Dany realized that she did not want to listen to any of her
brother’s complaints right now. The day was too perfect. The
sky was a deep blue, and high above them a hunting hawk circled.
The grass sea swayed and sighed with each breath of wind, the air
was warm on her face, and Dany felt at peace. She would not let
Viserys spoil it.
“Wait here,” Dany told Ser Jorah. “Tell them
all to stay. Tell them I command it.”
The knight smiled. Ser Jorah was not a handsome man. He had a
neck and shoulders like a bull, and coarse black hair covered his
arms and chest so thickly that there was none left for his head.
Yet his smiles gave Dany comfort. “You are learning to talk
like a queen, Daenerys.”
“Not a queen,” said Dany. “A khaleesi.”
She wheeled her horse about and galloped down the ridge alone.
The descent was steep and rocky, but Dany rode fearlessly, and
the joy and the danger of it were a song in her heart. All her life
Viserys had told her she was a princess, but not until she rode her
silver had Daenerys Targaryen ever felt like one.
At first it had not come easy. The khalasar had broken camp the
morning after her wedding, moving east toward Vaes Dothrak, and by
the third day Dany thought she was going to die. Saddle sores
opened on her bottom, hideous and bloody. Her thighs were chafed
raw, her hands blistered from the reins, the muscles of her legs
and back so wracked with pain that she could scarcely sit. By the
time dusk fell, her handmaids would need to help her down from her
mount.
Even the nights brought no relief. Khal Drogo ignored her when
they rode, even as he had ignored her during their wedding, and
spent his evenings drinking with his warriors and bloodriders,
racing his prize horses, watching women dance and men die. Dany had
no place in these parts of his life. She was left to sup alone, or
with Ser Jorah and her brother, and afterward to cry herself to
sleep. Yet every night, some time before the dawn, Drogo would come
to her tent and wake her in the dark, to ride her as relentlessly
as he rode his stallion. He always took her from behind, Dothraki
fashion, for which Dany was grateful; that way her lord husband
could not see the tears that wet her face, and she could use her
pillow to muffle her cries of pain. When he was done, he would
close his eyes and begin to snore softly and Dany would lie beside
him, her body bruised and sore, hurting too much for sleep.
Day followed day, and night followed night, until Dany knew she
could not endure a moment longer. She would kill herself rather
than go on, she decided one night . . .
Yet when she slept that night, she dreamt the dragon dream
again. Viserys was not in it this time. There was only her and the
dragon. Its scales were black as night, wet and slick with blood.
Her blood, Dany sensed. Its eyes were pools of molten magma, and
when it opened its mouth, the flame came roaring out in a hot jet.
She could hear it singing to her, She opened her arms to the fire,
embraced it, let it swallow her whole, let it cleanse her and
temper her and scour her clean. She could feel her flesh sear and
blacken and slough away, could feel her blood boil and turn to
steam, and yet there was no pain. She felt strong and new and
fierce.
And the next day, strangely, she did not seem to hurt quite so
much. It was as if the gods had heard her and taken pity. Even her
handmaids noticed the change. “Khaleesi,” Jhiqui said,
“what is wrong? Are you sick?”
“I was,” she answered, standing over the
dragon’s eggs that Illyrio had given her when she wed. She
touched one, the largest of the three, running her hand lightly
over the shelf. Black-and-scarlet, she thought, like the dragon in
my dream. The stone felt strangely warm beneath her fingers . . . or was she still dreaming? She pulled her hand back nervously.
From that hour onward, each day was easier than the one before
it. Her legs grew stronger; her blisters burst and her hands grew
callused; her soft thighs toughened, supple as leather.
The khal had commanded the handmaid Irri to teach Dany to ride
in the Dothraki fashion, but it was the filly who was her real
teacher. The horse seemed to know her moods, as if they shared a
single mind. With every passing day, Dany felt surer in her seat.
The Dothraki were a hard and unsentimental people, and it was not
their custom to name their animals, so Dany thought of her only as
the silver. She had never loved anything so much.
As the riding became less an ordeal, Dany began to notice the
beauties of the land around her. She rode at the head of the
khalasar with Drogo and his bloodriders, so she came to each
country fresh and unspoiled. Behind them the great horde might tear
the earth and muddy the rivers and send up clouds of choking dust,
but the fields ahead of them were always green and verdant.
They crossed the rolling hills of Norvos, past terraced farms
and small villages where the townsfolk watched anxiously from atop
white stucco walls. They forded three wide placid rivers and a
fourth that was swift and narrow and treacherous, camped beside a
high blue waterfall, skirted the tumbled ruins of a vast dead city
where ghosts were said to moan among blackened marble columns. They
raced down Valyrian roads a thousand years old and straight as a
Dothraki arrow. For half a moon, they rode through the Forest of
Qohor, where the leaves made a golden canopy high above them, and
the trunks of the trees were as wide as city gates. There were
great elk in that wood, and spotted tigers, and lemurs with silver
fur and huge purple eyes, but all fled before the approach of the
khalasar and Dany got no glimpse of them.
By then her agony was a fading memory. She still ached after a
long day’s riding, yet somehow the pain had a sweetness to it
now, and each morning she came willingly to her saddle, eager to
know what wonders waited for her in the lands ahead. She began to
find pleasure even in her nights, and if she still cried out when
Drogo took her, it was not always in pain.
At the bottom of the ridge, the grasses rose around her, tall
and supple. Dany slowed to a trot and rode out onto the plain,
losing herself in the green, blessedly alone. In the khalasar she
was never alone. Khal Drogo came to her only after the sun went
down, but her handmaids fed her and bathed her and slept by the
door of her tent, Drogo’s bloodriders and the men of her khas
were never far, and her brother was an unwelcome shadow, day and
night. Dany could hear him on the top of the ridge, his voice
shrill with anger as he shouted at Ser Jorah. She rode on,
submerging herself deeper in the Dothraki sea.
The green swallowed her up. The air was rich with the scents of
earth and grass, mixed with the smell of horseflesh and
Dany’s sweat and the oil in her hair. Dothraki smells. They
seemed to belong here. Dany breathed it all in, laughing. She had a
sudden urge to feel the ground beneath her, to curl her toes in
that thick black soil. Swinging down from her saddle, she let the
silver graze while she pulled off her high boots.
Viserys came upon her as sudden as a summer storm, his horse
rearing beneath him as he reined up too hard. “You
dare!” he screamed at her. “You give commands to me? To
me?” He vaulted off the horse, stumbling as he landed. His
face was flushed as he struggled back to his feet. He grabbed her,
shook her. “Have you forgotten who you are? Look at you. Look
at you!”
Dany did not need to look. She was barefoot, with oiled hair,
wearing Dothraki riding leathers and a painted vest given her as a
bride gift. She looked as though she belonged here. Viserys was
soiled and stained in city silks and ringmail.
He was still screaming. “You do not command the dragon. Do
you understand? I am the Lord of the Seven Kingdoms, I will not
hear orders from some horselord’s slut, do you hear
me?” His hand went under her vest, his fingers digging
painfully into her breast. “Do you hear me?”
Dany shoved him away, hard.
Viserys stared at her, his lilac eyes incredulous. She had never
defied him. Never fought back. Rage twisted his features. He would
hurt her now, and badly, she knew that. Crack.
The whip made a sound like thunder. The coil took Viserys around
the throat and yanked him backward. He went sprawling in the grass,
stunned and choking. The Dothraki riders hooted at him as he
struggled to free himself. The one with the whip, young Jhogo,
rasped a question. Dany did not understand his words, but by then
Irri was there, and Ser Jorah, and the rest of her khas.
“Jhogo asks if you would have him dead, Khaleesi, “
Irri said.
“No,” Dany replied. “No.”
Jhogo understood that. One of the others barked out a comment,
and the Dothraki laughed. Irri told her, “Quaro thinks you
should take an ear to teach him respect.”
Her brother was on his knees, his fingers digging under the
leather coils, crying incoherently, struggling for breath. The whip
was tight around his windpipe.
“Tell them I do not wish him harmed,” Dany said.
Irri repeated her words in Dothraki. Jhogo gave a pull on the
whip, yanking Viserys around like a puppet on a string. He went
sprawling again, freed from the leather embrace, a thin line of
blood under his chin where the whip had cut deep.
“I warned him what would happen, my lady,” Ser Jorah
Mormont said. “I told him to stay on the ridge, as you
commanded.”
“I know you did,” Dany replied, watching Viserys. He
lay on the ground, sucking in air noisily, red-faced and sobbing.
He was a pitiful thing. He had always been a pitiful thing. Why had
she never seen that before? There was a hollow place inside her
where her fear had been.
“Take his horse,” Dany commanded Ser Jorah. Viserys
gaped at her. He could not believe what he was hearing; nor could
Dany quite believe what she was saying. Yet the words came.
“Let my brother walk behind us back to the khalasar.”
Among the Dothraki, the man who does not ride was no man at all,
the lowest of the low, without honor or pride. “Let everyone
see him as he is.”
“No!” Viserys screamed. He turned to Ser Jorah,
pleading in the Common Tongue with words the horsemen would not
understand. “Hit her, Mormont. Hurt her. Your king commands
it. Kill these Dothraki dogs and teach her.”
The exile knight looked from Dany to her brother; she barefoot,
with dirt between her toes and oil in her hair, he with his silks
and steel. Dany could see the decision on his face. “He shall
walk, Khaleesi,” he said. He took her brother’s horse
in hand while Dany remounted her silver.
Viserys gaped at him, and sat down in the dirt. He kept his
silence, but he would not move, and his eyes were full of poison as
they rode away. Soon he was lost in the tall grass. When they could
not see him anymore, Dany grew afraid. “Will he find his way
back?” she asked Ser Jorah as they rode.
“Even a man as blind as your brother should be able to
follow our trail,” he replied.
“He is proud. He may be too shamed to come
back.”
Jorah laughed. “Where else should he go? If he cannot find
the khalasar, the khalasar will most surely find him. It is hard to
drown in the Dothraki sea, child.”
Dany saw the truth of that. The khalasar was like a city on the
march, but it did not march blindly. Always scouts ranged far ahead
of the main column, alert for any sign of game or prey or enemies,
while outriders guarded their flanks. They missed nothing, not
here, in this land, the place where they had come from. These
plains were a part of them . . . and of her, now.
“I hit him,” she said, wonder in her voice. Now that
it was over, it seemed like some strange dream that she had
dreamed. “Ser Jorah, do you think . . . he’ll be so
angry when he gets back . . . She shivered. “I woke the dragon,
didn’t I?”
Ser Jorah snorted. “Can you wake the dead, girl? Your
brother Rhaegar was the last dragon, and he died on the Trident.
Viserys is less than the shadow of a snake.”
His blunt words startled her. It seemed as though all the things
she had always believed were suddenly called into question.
“You . . . you swore him your sword . . . ”
“That I did, girl,” Ser Jorah said. “And if
your brother is the shadow of a snake, what does that make his
servants?” His voice was bitter.
“He is still the true king. He is . . . ”
Jorah pulled up his horse and looked at her. “Truth now.
Would you want to see Viserys sit a throne?”
Dany thought about that. “He would not be a very good
king, would he?”
“There have been worse . . . but not many.” The
knight gave his heels to his mount and started off again.
Dany rode close beside him. “Still,” she said,
“the common people are waiting for him. Magister Illyrio says
they are sewing dragon banners and praying for Viserys to return
from across the narrow sea to free them.”
“The common people pray for rain, healthy children, and a
summer that never ends,” Ser Jorah told her. “It is no
matter to them if the high lords play their game of thrones, so
long as they are left in peace.” He gave a shrug. “They
never are.”
Dany rode along quietly for a time, working his words like a
puzzle box. It went against everything that Viserys had ever told
her to think that the people could care so little whether a true
king or a usurper reigned over them. Yet the more she thought on
Jorah’s words, the more they rang of truth.
“What do you pray for, Ser Jorah?” she asked
him.
“Home,” he said. His voice was thick with
longing.
“I pray for home too,” she told him, believing
it.
Ser Jorah laughed. “Look around you then,
Khaleesi.”
But it was not the plains Dany saw then. It was King’s
Landing and the great Red Keep that Aegon the Conqueror had built.
It was Dragonstone where she had been born. In her mind’s eye
they burned with a thousand lights, a fire blazing in every window.
In her mind’s eye, all the doors were red.
“My brother will never take back the Seven
Kingdoms,” Dany said. She had known that for a long time, she
realized. She had known it all her life. Only she had never let
herself say the words, even in a whisper, but now she said them for
Jorah Mormont and all the world to hear.
Ser Jorah gave her a measuring look. “You think
not.”
“He could not lead an army even if my lord husband gave
him one,” Dany said. “He has no coin and the only
knight who follows him reviles him as less than a snake. The
Dothraki make mock of his weakness. He will never take us
home.”
“Wise child.” The knight smiled.
“I am no child,” she told him fiercely. Her heels
pressed into the sides of her mount, rousing the silver to a
gallop. Faster and faster she raced, leaving Jorah and Irri and the
others far behind, the warm wind in her hair and the setting sun
red on her face. By the time she reached the khalasar, it was
dusk.
The slaves had erected her tent by the shore of a spring-fed
pool. She could hear rough voices from the woven grass palace on
the hill. Soon there would be laughter, when the men of her khas
told the story of what had happened in the grasses today. By the
time Viserys came limping back among them, every man, woman, and
child in the camp would know him for a walker. There were no
secrets in the khalasar.
Dany gave the silver over to the slaves for grooming and entered
her tent. It was cool and dim beneath the silk. As she let the door
flap close behind her, Dany saw a finger of dusty red light reach
out to touch her dragon’s eggs across the tent. For an
instant a thousand droplets of scarlet flame swam before her eyes.
She blinked, and they were gone. Stone, she told herself. They are only stone, even Illyrio said
so, the dragons are all dead. She put her palm against the black
egg, fingers spread gently across the curve of the shell. The stone
was warm. Almost hot. “The sun,” Dany whispered.
“The sun warmed them as they rode.”
She commanded her handmaids to prepare her a bath. Doreah built
a fire outside the tent, while Irri and Jhiqui fetched the big
copper tub—another bride gift—from the packhorses and carried water
from the pool. When the bath was steaming, Irri helped her into it
and climbed in after her.
“Have you ever seen a dragon?” she asked as Irri
scrubbed her back and Jhiqui sluiced sand from her hair. She had
heard that the first dragons had come from the east, from the
Shadow Lands beyond Asshai and the islands of the Jade Sea. Perhaps
some were still living there, in realms strange and wild.
“Dragons are gone, Khaleesi,” Irri said.
“Dead,” agreed Jhiqui. “Long and long
ago.”
Viserys had told her that the last Targaryen dragons had died no
more than a century and a half ago, during the reign of Aegon III,
who was called the Dragonbane. That did not seem so long ago to
Dany. “Everywhere?” she said, disappointed. “Even
in the east?” Magic had died in the west when the Doom fell
on Valyria and the Lands of the Long Summer, and neither
spell-forged steel nor stormsingers nor dragons could hold it back,
but Dany had always heard that the east was different. It was said
that manticores prowled the islands of the Jade Sea, that basilisks
infested the jungles of Yi Ti, that spellsingers, warlocks, and
aeromancers practiced their arts openly in Asshai, while
shadowbinders and bloodmages worked terrible sorceries in the black
of night. Why shouldn’t there be dragons too?
“No dragon,” Irri said. “Brave men kill them,
for dragon terrible evil beasts. It is known.”
“It is known,” agreed Jhiqui.
“A trader from Qarth once told me that dragons came from
the moon,” blond Doreah said as she warmed a towel over the
fire. Jhiqui and Irri were of an age with Dany, Dothraki girls
taken as slaves when Drogo destroyed their father’s khalasar.
Doreah was older, almost twenty. Magister Illyrio had found her in
a pleasure house in Lys.
Silvery-wet hair tumbled across her eyes as Dany turned her
head, curious. “The moon?”
“He told me the moon was an egg, Khaleesi,” the
Lysene girl said. “Once there were two moons in the sky, but
one wandered too close to the sun and cracked from the heat. A
thousand thousand dragons poured forth, and drank the fire of the
sun. That is why dragons breathe flame. One day the other moon will
kiss the sun too, and then it will crack and the dragons will
return.”
The two Dothraki girls giggled and laughed. “You are
foolish strawhead slave,” Irri said. “Moon is no egg.
Moon is god, woman wife of sun. It is known.”
“It is known,” Jhiqui agreed.
Dany’s skin was flushed and pink when she climbed from the
tub. Jhiqui laid her down to oil her body and scrape the dirt from
her pores. Afterward Irri sprinkled her with spiceflower and
cinnamon. While Doreah brushed her hair until it shone like spun
silver, she thought about the moon, and eggs, and dragons.
Her supper was a simple meal of fruit and cheese and fry bread,
with a jug of honeyed wine to wash it down. “Doreah, stay and
eat with me,” Dany commanded when she sent her other
handmaids away. The Lysene girl had hair the color of honey, and
eyes like the summer sky.
She lowered those eyes when they were alone. “You honor
me, Khaleesi,” she said, but it was no honor, only service.
Long after the moon had risen, they sat together, talking.
That night, when Khal Drogo came, Dany was waiting for him. He
stood in the door of her tent and looked at her with surprise. She
rose slowly and opened her sleeping silks and let them fall to the
ground. “This night we must go outside, my lord,” she
told him, for the Dothraki believed that all things of importance
in a man’s life must be done beneath the open sky.
Khal Drogo followed her out into the moonlight, the bells in his
hair tinkling softly. A few yards from her tent was a bed of soft
grass, and it was there that Dany drew him down. When he tried to
turn her over, she put a hand on his chest. “No,” she
said. “This night I would look on your face.”
There is no privacy in the heart of the khalasar. Dany felt the
eyes on her as she undressed him, heard the soft voices as she did
the things that Doreah had told her to do. It was nothing to her.
Was she not khaleesi? His were the only eyes that mattered, and
when she mounted him she saw something there that she had never
seen before. She rode him as fiercely as ever she had ridden her
silver, and when the moment of his pleasure came, Khal Drogo called
out her name.
They were on the far side of the Dothraki sea when Jhiqui
brushed the soft swell of Dany’s stomach with her fingers and
said, “Khaleesi, you are with child.”
“I know,” Dany told her.
It was her fourteenth name day.