The Dothraki named the comet shierak qiya, the Bleeding Star.
The old men muttered that it omened ill, but Daenerys Targaryen had
seen it first on the night she had burned Khal Drogo, the night her
dragons had awakened. It is the herald of my coming, she told
herself as she gazed up into the night sky with wonder in her
heart. The gods have sent it to show me the way.
Yet when she put the thought into words, her handmaid Doreah
quailed. “That way lies the red lands, Khaleesi. A grim place
and terrible, the riders say.”
“The way the comet points is the way we must go,”
Dany insisted . . . though in truth, it was the
only way open to her.
She dare not turn north onto the vast ocean of grass they called
the Dothraki sea. The first khalasar they met would swallow up her
ragged band, slaying the warriors and slaving the rest. The lands
of the Lamb Men south of the river were likewise closed to them.
They were too few to defend themselves even against that unwarlike
folk, and the Lhazareen had small reason to love them. She might
have struck downriver for the ports at Meereen and Yunkai and
Astapor, but Rakharo warned her that Pono’s khalasar had
ridden that way, driving thousands of captives before them to sell
in the flesh marts that festered like open sores on the shores of
Slaver’s Bay. “Why should I fear Pono?” Dany
objected. “He was Drogo’s ko, and always spoke me
gently.”
“Ko Pono spoke you gently,” Ser Jorah Mormont said.
“Khal Pono will kill you. He was the first to abandon Drogo.
Ten thousand warriors went with him. You have a hundred.” No, Dany thought. I have four. The rest are women, old sick
men and boys whose hair has never been braided. “I
have the dragons,” she pointed out.
“Hatchlings,” Ser Jorah said. “One swipe from
an arakh would put an end to them, though Porto is more like to
seize them for himself. Your dragon eggs were more precious than
rubies. A living dragon is beyond price. In all the world, there
are only three. Every man who sees them will want them, my
queen.”
“They are mine,” she said fiercely. They had been
born from her faith and her need, given life by the deaths of her
husband and unborn son and the maegi Mirri Maz Duur. Dany had
walked into the flames as they came forth, and they had drunk milk
from her swollen breasts. “No man will take them from me
while I live.”
“You will not live long should you meet Khal Pono. Nor
Khal Jhaqo, nor any of the others. You must go where they do
not.”
Dany had named him the first of her
Queensguard . . . and when Mormont’s
gruff counsel and the omens agreed, her course was clear. She
called her people together and mounted her silver mare. Her hair
had burned away in Drogo’s pyre, so her handmaids garbed her
in the skin of the hrakkar Drogo had slain, the white lion of the
Dothraki sea. Its fearsome head made a hood to cover her naked
scalp, its pelt a cloak that flowed across her shoulders and down
her back. The cream-colored dragon sunk sharp black claws into the
lion’s mane and coiled its tail around her arm, while Ser
Jorah took his accustomed place by her side.
“We follow the comet,” Dany told her khalasar. Once
it was said, no word was raised against it. They had been
Drogo’s people, but they were hers now. The Unburnt, they
called her, and Mother of Dragons. Her word was their law.
They rode by night, and by day took refuge from the sun beneath
their tents. Soon enough Dany learned the truth of Doreah’s
words. This was no kindly country. They left a trail of dead and
dying horses behind them as they went, for Pono, Jhaqo, and the
others had seized the best of Drogo’s herds, leaving to Dany
the old and the scrawny, the sickly and the lame, the broken
animals and the ill-tempered. It was the same with the people. They
are not strong, she told herself, so I must be their strength. I
must show no fear, no weakness, no doubt. However frightened my
heart, when they look upon my face they must see only Drogo’s
queen. She felt older than her fourteen years. If ever she had
truly been a girl, that time was done.
Three days into the march, the first man died. A toothless
oldster with cloudy blue eyes, he fell exhausted from his saddle
and could not rise again. An hour later he was done. Blood flies
swarmed about his corpse and carried his ill luck to the living.
“His time was past,” her handmaid Irri declared.
“No man should live longer than his teeth.” The others
agreed. Dany bid them kill the weakest of their dying horses, so
the dead man might go mounted into the night lands.
Two nights later, it was an infant girl who perished. Her
mother’s anguished wailing lasted all day, but there was
nothing to be done. The child had been too young to ride, poor
thing. Not for her the endless black grasses of the night lands;
she must be born again.
There was little forage in the red waste, and less water. It was
a sere and desolate land of low hills and barren windswept plains.
The rivers they crossed were dry as dead men’s bones. Their
mounts subsisted on the tough brown devilgrass that grew in clumps
at the base of rocks and dead trees. Dany sent outriders ranging
ahead of the column, but they found neither wells nor springs, only
bitter pools, shallow and stagnant, shrinking in the hot sun. The
deeper they rode into the waste, the smaller the pools became,
while the distance between them grew. If there were gods in this
trackless wilderness of stone and sand and red clay, they were hard
dry gods, deaf to prayers for rain.
Wine gave out first, and soon thereafter the clotted
mare’s milk the horselords loved better than mead. Then their
stores of flatbread and dried meat were exhausted as well. Their
hunters found no game, and only the flesh of their dead horses
filled their bellies. Death followed death. Weak children, wrinkled
old women, the sick and the stupid and the heedless, the cruel land
claimed them all. Doreah grew gaunt and hollow-eyed, and her soft
golden hair turned brittle as straw.
Dany hungered and thirsted with the rest of them. The milk in
her breasts dried up, her nipples cracked and bled, and the flesh
fell away from her day by day until she was lean and hard as a
stick, yet it was her dragons she feared for. Her father had been
slain before she was born, and her splendid brother Rhaegar as
well. Her mother had died bringing her into the world while the
storm screamed outside. Gentle Ser Willem Darry, who must have
loved her after a fashion, had been taken by a wasting sickness
when she was very young. Her brother Viserys, Khal Drogo who was
her sun-and-stars, even her unborn son, the gods had claimed them
all. They will not have my dragons, Dany vowed. They will not.
The dragons were no larger than the scrawny cats she had once
seen skulking along the walls of Magister Illyrio’s estate in
Pentos . . . until they unfolded their wings.
Their span was three times their length, each wing a delicate fan
of translucent skin, gorgeously colored, stretched taut between
long thin bones. When you looked hard, you could see that most of
their body was neck, tail, and wing. Such little things, she
thought as she fed them by hand. or rather, tried to feed them, for
the dragons would not eat. They would hiss and spit at each bloody
morsel of horsemeat, steam rising from their nostrils, yet they
would not take the food . . . until Dany
recalled something Viserys had told her when they were
children. Only dragons and men eat cooked meat, he had said.
When she had her handmaids char the horsemeat black, the dragons
ripped at it eagerly, their heads striking like snakes. So long as
the meat was seared, they gulped down several times their own
weight every day, and at last began to grow larger and stronger.
Dany marveled at the smoothness of their scales, and the heat that
poured off them, so palpable that on cold nights their whole bodies
seemed to steam.
Each evenfall as the khalasar set out, she would choose a dragon
to ride upon her shoulder. Irri and Jhiqui carried the others in a
cage of woven wood slung between their mounts, and rode close
behind her, so Dany was never out of their sight. It was the only
way to keep them quiescent.
“Aegon’s dragons were named for the gods of Old
Valyria,” she told her bloodriders one morning after a long
night’s journey. “Visenya’s dragon was Vhagar,
Rhaenys had Meraxes, and Aegon rode Balerion, the Black Dread. It
was said that Vhagar’s breath was so hot that it could melt a
knight’s armor and cook the man inside, that Meraxes
swallowed horses whole, and Balerion . . . his
fire was as black as his scales, his wings so vast that whole towns
were swallowed up in their shadow when he passed
overhead.”
The Dothraki looked at her hatchlings uneasily. The largest of
her three was shiny black, his scales slashed with streaks of vivid
scarlet to match his wings and horns. “Khaleesi,” Aggo
murmured, “there sits Balerion, come again.”
“It may be as you say, blood of my blood,” Dany
replied gravely, “but he shall have a new name for this new
life. I would name them all for those the gods have taken. The
green one shall be Rhaegal, for my valiant brother who died on the
green banks of the Trident. The cream-and-gold I call Viserion.
Viserys was cruel and weak and frightened, yet he was my brother
still. His dragon will do what he could not.”
“And the black beast?” asked Ser Jorah Mormont.
“The black,” she said, “is Drogon.”
Yet even as her dragons prospered, her khalasar withered and
died. Around them the land turned ever more desolate. Even
devilgrass grew scant; horses dropped in their tracks, leaving so
few that some of her people must trudge along on foot. Doreah took
a fever and grew worse with every league they crossed. Her lips and
hands broke with blood blisters, her hair came out in clumps, and
one evenfall she lacked the strength to mount her horse. Jhogo said
they must leave her or bind her to her saddle, but Dany remembered
a night on the Dothraki sea, when the Lysene girl had taught her
secrets so that Drogo might love her more. She gave Doreah water
from her own skin, cooled her brow with a damp cloth, and held her
hand until she died, shivering. Only then would she permit the
khalasar to press on.
They saw no sign of other travelers. The Dothraki began to
mutter fearfully that the comet had led them to some hell. Dany
went to Ser Jorah one morning as they made camp amidst a jumble of
black windscoured stones. “Are we lost?” she asked him.
“Does this waste have no end to it?”
“It has an end,” he answered wearily. “I have
seen the maps the traders draw, my queen. Few caravans come this
way, that is so, yet there are great kingdoms to the east, and
cities full of wonders. Yi Ti, Qarth, Asshai by the
Shadow . . . ”
“Will we live to see them?”
“I will not lie to you. The way is harder than I dared
think.” The knight’s face was grey and exhausted. The
wound he had taken to his hip the night he fought Khal
Drogo’s bloodriders had never fully healed; she could see how
he grimaced when he mounted his horse, and he seemed to slump in
his saddle as they rode. “Perhaps we are doomed if we press
on . . . but I know for a certainty that we are
doomed if we turn back.”
Dany kissed him lightly on the cheek. It heartened her to see
him smile. I must be strong for him as well, she thought grimly. A
knight he may be, but I am the blood of the dragon.
The next pool they found was scalding hot and stinking of
brimstone, but their skins were almost empty. The Dothraki cooled
the water in jars and pots and drank it tepid. The taste was no
less foul, but water was water, and all of them thirsted. Dany
looked at the horizon with despair. They had lost a third of their
number, and still the waste stretched before them, bleak and red
and endless. The comet mocks my hopes, she thought, lifting her
eyes to where it scored the sky. Have I crossed half the world and
seen the birth of dragons only to die with them in this hard hot
desert? She would not believe it.
The next day, dawn broke as they were crossing a cracked and
fissured plain of hard red earth. Dany was about to command them to
make camp when her outriders came racing back at a gallop. “A
city, Khaleesi,” they cried. “A city pale as the moon
and lovely as a maid. An hour’s ride, no more.”
“Show me,” she said.
When the city appeared before her, its walls and towers
shimmering white behind a veil of heat, it looked so beautiful that
Dany was certain it must be a mirage. “Do you know what place
this might be? Ser Jorah.”
The exile knight gave a weary shake of the head. “No, my
queen. I have never traveled this far east.”
The distant white walls promised rest and safety, a chance to
heal and grow strong, and Dany wanted nothing so much as to rush
toward them. Instead she turned to her bloodriders. “Blood of
my blood, go ahead of us and learn the name of this city, and what
manner of welcome we should expect.”
“Ai, Khaleesi, “ said Aggo.
Her riders were not long in returning. Rakharo swung down from
his saddle. From his medallion belt hung the great curving arakh
that Dany had bestowed on him when she named him bloodrider.
“This city is dead, Khaleesi. Nameless and godless we found
it, the gates broken, only wind and flies moving through the
streets.”
Jhiqui shuddered. “When the gods are gone, the evil ghosts
feast by night. Such places are best shunned. It is
known.”
“It is known,” Irri agreed.
“Not to me.” Dany put her heels into her horse and
showed them the way, trotting beneath the shattered arch of an
ancient gate and down a silent street. Ser Jorah and her
bloodriders followed, and then, more slowly, the rest of the
Dothraki.
How long the city had been deserted she could not know, but the
white walls, so beautiful from afar, were cracked and crumbling
when seen up close. Inside was a maze of narrow crooked alleys. The
buildings pressed close, their facades blank, chalky, windowless.
Everything was white, as if the people who lived here had known
nothing of color. They rode past heaps of sun-washed rubble where
houses had fallen in, and elsewhere saw the faded scars of fire. At
a place where six alleys came together, Dany passed an empty marble
plinth. Dothraki had visited this place before, it would seem.
Perhaps even now the missing statue stood among the other stolen
gods in Vaes Dothrak. She might have ridden past it a hundred
times, never knowing. On her shoulder, Viserion hissed.
They made camp before the remnants of a gutted palace, on a
windswept plaza where devilgrass grew between the paving stones.
Dany sent out men to search the ruins. Some went reluctantly, yet
they went . . . and one scarred old man
returned a brief time later, hopping and grinning, his hands
overflowing with figs. They were small, withered things, yet her
people grabbed for them greedily, jostling and pushing at each
other, stuffing the fruit into their cheeks and chewing
blissfully.
Other searchers returned with tales of other fruit trees, hidden
behind closed doors in secret gardens. Aggo showed her a courtyard
overgrown with twisting vines and tiny green grapes, and Jhogo
discovered a well where the water was pure and cold. Yet they found
bones too, the skulls of the unburied dead, bleached and broken.
“Ghosts,” Irri muttered. “Terrible ghosts. We
must not stay here, Khaleesi, this is their place.”
“I fear no ghosts. Dragons are more powerful than
ghosts.” And figs are more important. “Go with Jhiqui
and find me some clean sand for a bath, and trouble me no more with
silly talk.”
In the coolness of her tent, Dany blackened horsemeat over a
brazier and reflected on her choices. There was food and water here
to sustain them, and enough grass for the horses to regain their
strength. How pleasant it would be to wake every day in the same
place, to linger among shady gardens, eat figs, and drink cool
water, as much as she might desire.
When Irri and Jhiqui returned with pots of white sand, Dany
stripped and let them scrub her clean. “Your hair is coming
back, Khaleesi,” Jhiqui said as she scraped sand off her
back. Dany ran a hand over the top of her head, feeling the new
growth. Dothraki men wore their hair in long oiled braids, and cut
them only when defeated. Perhaps I should do the same, she thought,
to remind them that Drogo’s strength lives within me now. Khal
Drogo had died with his hair uncut, a boast few men could make.
Across the tent, Rhaegal unfolded green wings to flap and
flutter a half foot before thumping to the carpet. When he landed,
his tail lashed back and forth in fury, and he raised his head and
screamed. If I had wings, I would want to fly too, Dany thought.
The Targaryens of old had ridden upon dragonback when they went to
war. She tried to imagine what it would feel like, to straddle a
dragon’s neck and soar high into the air. It would be like
standing on a mountaintop, only better. The whole world would be
spread out below If I flew high enough, I could even see the Seven
Kingdoms, and reach up and touch the comet.
Irri broke her reverie to tell her that Ser Jorah Mormont was
outside, awaiting her pleasure. “Send him in,” Dany
commanded, sand-scrubbed skin tingling. She wrapped herself in the
lionskin. The hrakkar had been much bigger than Dany, so the pelt
covered everything that wanted covering.
“I’ve brought you a peach,” Ser Jorah said,
kneeling. It was so small she could almost hide it in her palm, and
overripe too, but when she took the first bite, the flesh was so
sweet she almost cried. She ate it slowly, savoring every mouthful,
while Ser Jorah told her of the tree it had been plucked from, in a
garden near the western wall.
“Fruit and water and shade,” Dany said, her cheeks
sticky with peach juice. “The gods were good to bring us to
this place.”
“We should rest here until we are stronger,” the
knight urged. “The red lands are not kind to the
weak.”
“My handmaids say there are ghosts here.”
“There are ghosts everywhere,” Ser Jorah said
softly. “We carry them with us wherever we go.” Yes, she thought. Viserys, Khal Drogo, my son Rhaego, they are
with me always. “Tell me the name of your ghost, Jorah. You
know all of mine.”
His face grew very still. “Her name was
Lynesse.”
“Your wife?”
“My second wife.” It pains him to speak of her, Dany saw, but she wanted to know
the truth. “Is that all you would say of her?” The lion
pelt slid off one shoulder and she tugged it back into place.
“Was she beautiful?”
“Very beautiful.” Ser Jorah lifted his eyes from her
shoulder to her face. “The first time I beheld her, I thought
she was a goddess come to earth, the Maid herself made flesh. Her
birth was far above my own. She was the youngest daughter of Lord
Leyton Hightower of Oldtown. The White Bull who commanded your
father’s Kingsguard was her great-uncle. The Hightowers are an
ancient family, very rich and very proud.”
“And loyal,” Dany said. “I remember, Viserys
said the Hightowers were among those who stayed true to my
father.”
“That’s so,” he admitted.
“Did your fathers make the match?”
“No,” he said. “Our
marriage . . . that makes a long tale and a
dull one, Your Grace. I would not trouble you with it.”
“I have nowhere to go,” she said.
“Please.”
“As my queen commands.” Ser Jorah frowned. “My
home . . . you must understand that to
understand the rest. Bear Island is beautiful, but remote. Imagine
old gnarled oaks and tall pines, flowering thornbushes, grey stones
bearded with moss, little creeks running icy down steep hillsides.
The hall of the Mormonts is built of huge logs and surrounded by an
earthen palisade. Aside from a few crofters, my people live along
the coasts and fish the seas. The island lies far to the north, and
our winters are more terrible than you can imagine, Khaleesi.
“Still, the island suited me well enough, and I never
lacked for women. I had my share of fishwives and crofter’s
daughters, before and after I was wed. I married young, to a bride
of my father’s choosing, a Glover of Deepwood Motte. Ten
years we were wed, or near enough as makes no matter. She was a
plain-faced woman, but not unkind. I suppose I came to love her
after a fashion, though our relations were dutiful rather than
passionate. Three times she miscarried while trying to give me an
heir. The last time she never recovered. She died not long
after.”
Dany put her hand on his and gave his fingers a squeeze.
“I am sorry for you, truly.”
Ser Jorah nodded. “By then my father had taken the black,
so I was Lord of Bear Island in my own right. I had no lack of
marriage offers, but before I could reach a decision Lord Balon
Greyjoy rose in rebellion against the Usurper, and Ned Stark called
his banners to help his friend Robert. The final battle was on
Pyke. When Robert’s stonethrowers opened a breach in King
Balon’s wall, a priest from Myr was the first man through,
but I was not far behind. For that I won my knighthood.
“To celebrate his victory, Robert ordained that a tourney
should be held outside Lannisport. It was there I saw Lynesse, a
maid half my age. She had come up from Oldtown with her father to
see her brothers joust. I could not take my eyes off her. In a fit
of madness, I begged her favor to wear in the tourney, never
dreaming she would grant my request, yet she did.
“I fight as well as any man, Khaleesi, but I have never
been a tourney knight. Yet with Lynesse’s favor knotted round
my arm, I was a different man. I won joust after joust. Lord Jason
Mallister fell before me, and Bronze Yohn Royce. Ser Ryman Frey,
his brother Ser Hosteen, Lord Whent, Strongboar, even Ser Boros
Blount of the Kingsguard, I unhorsed them all. In the last match, I
broke nine lances against Jaime Lannister to no result, and King
Robert gave me the champion’s laurel. I crowned Lynesse queen
of love and beauty, and that very night went to her father and
asked for her hand. I was drunk, as much on glory as on wine. By
rights I should have gotten a contemptuous refusal, but Lord Leyton
accepted my offer. We were married there in Lannisport, and for a
fortnight I was the happiest man in the wide world.”
“Only a fortnight?” asked Dany. Even I was given
more happiness than that, with Drogo who was my sun-and-stars.
“A fortnight was how long it took us to sail from
Lannisport back to Bear Island. My home was a great disappointment
to Lynesse. It was too cold, too damp, too far away, my castle no
more than a wooden longhall. We had no masques, no mummer shows, no
balls or fairs. Seasons might pass without a singer ever coming to
play for us, and there’s not a goldsmith on the island. Even
meals became a trial. My cook knew little beyond his roasts and
stews, and Lynesse soon lost her taste for fish and venison.
“I lived for her smiles, so I sent all the way to Oldtown
for a new cook, and brought a harper from Lannisport. Goldsmiths,
jewelers, dressmakers, whatever she wanted I found for her, but it
was never enough. Bear Island is rich in bears and trees, and poor
in aught else. I built a fine ship for her and we sailed to
Lannisport and Oldtown for festivals and fairs, and once even to
Braavos, where I borrowed heavily from the money-lenders. It was as
a tourney champion that I had won her hand and heart, so I entered
other tourneys for her sake, but the magic was gone. I never
distinguished myself again, and each defeat meant the loss of
another charger and another suit of jousting armor, which must
needs be ransomed or replaced. The cost could not be borne. Finally
I insisted we return home, but there matters soon grew even worse
than before. I could no longer pay the cook and the harper, and
Lynesse grew wild when I spoke of pawning her jewels.
“The rest . . . I did things it shames
me to speak of. For gold. So Lynesse might keep her jewels, her
harper, and her cook. In the end it cost me all. When I heard that
Eddard Stark was coming to Bear Island, I was so lost to honor that
rather than stay and face his judgment, I took her with me into
exile. Nothing mattered but our love, I told myself. We fled to
Lys, where I sold my ship for gold to keep us.”
His voice was thick with grief, and Dany was reluctant to press
him any further, yet she had to know how it ended. “Did she
die there?” she asked him gently.
“Only to me,” he said. “In half a year my gold
was gone, and I was obliged to take service as a sellsword. While I
was fighting Braavosi on the Rhoyne, Lynesse moved into the manse
of a merchant prince named Tregar Ormollen. They say she is his
chief concubine now, and even his wife goes in fear of
her.”
Dany was horrified. “Do you hate her?”
“Almost as much as I love her,” Ser Jorah answered.
“Pray excuse me, my queen. I find I am very tired.”
She gave him leave to go, but as he was lifting the flap of her
tent, she could not stop herself calling after him with one last
question. “What did she look like, your Lady
Lynesse?”
Ser Jorah smiled sadly. “Why, she looked a bit like you,
Daenerys.” He bowed low. “Sleep well, my
queen.”
Dany shivered, and pulled the lionskin tight about her. She
looked like me. It explained much that she had not truly
understood. He wants me, she realized. He loves me as he loved her,
not as a knight loves his queen but as a man loves a woman. She
tried to imagine herself in Ser Jorah’s arms, kissing him,
pleasuring him, letting him enter her. It was no good. When she
closed her eyes, his face kept changing into Drogo’s.
Khal Drogo had been her sun-and-stars, her first, and perhaps he
must be her last. The maegi Mirri Maz Duur had sworn she should
never bear a living child, and what man would want a barren wife?
And what man could hope to rival Drogo, who had died with his hair
uncut and rode now through the night lands, the stars his
khalasar?
She had heard the longing in Ser Jorah’s voice when he
spoke of his Bear Island. He can never have me, but one day I can
give him back his home and honor. That much I can do for him.
No ghosts troubled her sleep that night. She dreamed of Drogo
and the first ride they had taken together on the night they were
wed. In the dream it was not horses they rode, but dragons.
The next morn, she summoned her bloodriders. “Blood of my
blood,” she told the three of them, “I have need of
you. Each of you is to choose three horses, the hardiest and
healthiest that remain to us. Load as much water and food as your
mounts can bear, and ride forth for me. Aggo shall strike
southwest, Rakharo due south. Jhogo, you are to follow shierak qiya
on southeast.”
“What shall we seek, Khaleesi?” asked Jhogo.
“Whatever there is,” Dany answered. “Seek for
other cities, living and dead. Seek for caravans and people. Seek
for rivers and lakes and the great salt sea. Find how far this
waste extends before us, and what lies on the other side. When I
leave this place, I do not mean to strike out blind again. I will
know where I am bound, and how best to get there.”
And so they went, the bells in their hair ringing softly, while
Dany settled down with her small band of survivors in the place
they named Vaes Tolorro, the city of bones. Day followed night
followed day. Women harvested fruit from the gardens of the dead.
Men groomed their mounts and mended saddles, stirrups, and shoes.
Children wandered the twisty alleys and found old bronze coins and
bits of purple glass and stone flagons with handles carved like
snakes. One woman was stung by a red scorpion, but hers was the
only death. The horses began to put on some flesh. Dany tended Ser
Jorah’s wound herself, and it began to heal.
Rakharo was the first to return. Due south the red waste
stretched on and on, he reported, until it ended on a bleak shore
beside the poison water. Between here and there lay only swirling
sand, wind-scoured rocks, and plants bristly with sharp thorns. He
had passed the bones of a dragon, he swore, so immense that he had
ridden his horse through its great black jaws. Other than that, he
had seen nothing.
Dany gave him charge of a dozen of her strongest men, and set
them to pulling up the plaza to get to the earth beneath. If
devilgrass could grow between the paving stones, other grasses
would grow when the stones were gone. They had wells enough, no
lack of water. Given seed, they could make the plaza bloom.
Aggo was back next. The southwest was barren and burnt, he
swore. He had found the ruins of two more cities, smaller than Vaes
Tolorro but otherwise the same. One was warded by a ring of skulls
mounted on rusted iron spears, so he dared not enter, but he had
explored the second for as long as he could. He showed Dany an iron
bracelet he had found, set with a uncut fire opal the size of her
thumb. There were scrolls as well, but they were dry and crumbling
and Aggo had left them where they lay.
Dany thanked him and told him to see to the repair of the gates.
If enemies had crossed the waste to destroy these cities in ancient
days, they might well come again. “If so, we must be
ready,” she declared.
Jhogo was gone so long that Dany feared him lost, but finally
when they had all but ceased to look for him, he came riding up
from the southeast. One of the guards that Aggo had posted saw him
first and gave a shout, and Dany rushed to the walls to see for
herself. It was true. Jhogo came, yet not alone. Behind him rode
three queerly garbed strangers atop ugly humped creatures that
dwarfed any horse.
They drew rein before the city gates, and looked up to see Dany
on the wall above them. “Blood of my blood,” Jhogo
called, “I have been to the great city Qarth, and returned
with three who would look on you with their own eyes.”
Dany stared down at the strangers. “Here I stand. Look, if
that is your pleasure . . . but first tell me
your names.”
The pale man with the blue lips replied in guttural Dothraki,
“I am Pyat Pree, the great warlock.”
The bald man with the jewels in his nose answered in the
Valyrian of the Free Cities, “I am Xaro Xhoan Daxos of the
Thirteen, a merchant prince of Qarth.”
The woman in the lacquered wooden mask said in the Common Tongue
of the Seven Kingdoms, “I am Quaithe of the Shadow. We come
seeking dragons.”
“Seek no more,” Daenerys Targaryen told them.
“You have found them.”
The Dothraki named the comet shierak qiya, the Bleeding Star.
The old men muttered that it omened ill, but Daenerys Targaryen had
seen it first on the night she had burned Khal Drogo, the night her
dragons had awakened. It is the herald of my coming, she told
herself as she gazed up into the night sky with wonder in her
heart. The gods have sent it to show me the way.
Yet when she put the thought into words, her handmaid Doreah
quailed. “That way lies the red lands, Khaleesi. A grim place
and terrible, the riders say.”
“The way the comet points is the way we must go,”
Dany insisted . . . though in truth, it was the
only way open to her.
She dare not turn north onto the vast ocean of grass they called
the Dothraki sea. The first khalasar they met would swallow up her
ragged band, slaying the warriors and slaving the rest. The lands
of the Lamb Men south of the river were likewise closed to them.
They were too few to defend themselves even against that unwarlike
folk, and the Lhazareen had small reason to love them. She might
have struck downriver for the ports at Meereen and Yunkai and
Astapor, but Rakharo warned her that Pono’s khalasar had
ridden that way, driving thousands of captives before them to sell
in the flesh marts that festered like open sores on the shores of
Slaver’s Bay. “Why should I fear Pono?” Dany
objected. “He was Drogo’s ko, and always spoke me
gently.”
“Ko Pono spoke you gently,” Ser Jorah Mormont said.
“Khal Pono will kill you. He was the first to abandon Drogo.
Ten thousand warriors went with him. You have a hundred.” No, Dany thought. I have four. The rest are women, old sick
men and boys whose hair has never been braided. “I
have the dragons,” she pointed out.
“Hatchlings,” Ser Jorah said. “One swipe from
an arakh would put an end to them, though Porto is more like to
seize them for himself. Your dragon eggs were more precious than
rubies. A living dragon is beyond price. In all the world, there
are only three. Every man who sees them will want them, my
queen.”
“They are mine,” she said fiercely. They had been
born from her faith and her need, given life by the deaths of her
husband and unborn son and the maegi Mirri Maz Duur. Dany had
walked into the flames as they came forth, and they had drunk milk
from her swollen breasts. “No man will take them from me
while I live.”
“You will not live long should you meet Khal Pono. Nor
Khal Jhaqo, nor any of the others. You must go where they do
not.”
Dany had named him the first of her
Queensguard . . . and when Mormont’s
gruff counsel and the omens agreed, her course was clear. She
called her people together and mounted her silver mare. Her hair
had burned away in Drogo’s pyre, so her handmaids garbed her
in the skin of the hrakkar Drogo had slain, the white lion of the
Dothraki sea. Its fearsome head made a hood to cover her naked
scalp, its pelt a cloak that flowed across her shoulders and down
her back. The cream-colored dragon sunk sharp black claws into the
lion’s mane and coiled its tail around her arm, while Ser
Jorah took his accustomed place by her side.
“We follow the comet,” Dany told her khalasar. Once
it was said, no word was raised against it. They had been
Drogo’s people, but they were hers now. The Unburnt, they
called her, and Mother of Dragons. Her word was their law.
They rode by night, and by day took refuge from the sun beneath
their tents. Soon enough Dany learned the truth of Doreah’s
words. This was no kindly country. They left a trail of dead and
dying horses behind them as they went, for Pono, Jhaqo, and the
others had seized the best of Drogo’s herds, leaving to Dany
the old and the scrawny, the sickly and the lame, the broken
animals and the ill-tempered. It was the same with the people. They
are not strong, she told herself, so I must be their strength. I
must show no fear, no weakness, no doubt. However frightened my
heart, when they look upon my face they must see only Drogo’s
queen. She felt older than her fourteen years. If ever she had
truly been a girl, that time was done.
Three days into the march, the first man died. A toothless
oldster with cloudy blue eyes, he fell exhausted from his saddle
and could not rise again. An hour later he was done. Blood flies
swarmed about his corpse and carried his ill luck to the living.
“His time was past,” her handmaid Irri declared.
“No man should live longer than his teeth.” The others
agreed. Dany bid them kill the weakest of their dying horses, so
the dead man might go mounted into the night lands.
Two nights later, it was an infant girl who perished. Her
mother’s anguished wailing lasted all day, but there was
nothing to be done. The child had been too young to ride, poor
thing. Not for her the endless black grasses of the night lands;
she must be born again.
There was little forage in the red waste, and less water. It was
a sere and desolate land of low hills and barren windswept plains.
The rivers they crossed were dry as dead men’s bones. Their
mounts subsisted on the tough brown devilgrass that grew in clumps
at the base of rocks and dead trees. Dany sent outriders ranging
ahead of the column, but they found neither wells nor springs, only
bitter pools, shallow and stagnant, shrinking in the hot sun. The
deeper they rode into the waste, the smaller the pools became,
while the distance between them grew. If there were gods in this
trackless wilderness of stone and sand and red clay, they were hard
dry gods, deaf to prayers for rain.
Wine gave out first, and soon thereafter the clotted
mare’s milk the horselords loved better than mead. Then their
stores of flatbread and dried meat were exhausted as well. Their
hunters found no game, and only the flesh of their dead horses
filled their bellies. Death followed death. Weak children, wrinkled
old women, the sick and the stupid and the heedless, the cruel land
claimed them all. Doreah grew gaunt and hollow-eyed, and her soft
golden hair turned brittle as straw.
Dany hungered and thirsted with the rest of them. The milk in
her breasts dried up, her nipples cracked and bled, and the flesh
fell away from her day by day until she was lean and hard as a
stick, yet it was her dragons she feared for. Her father had been
slain before she was born, and her splendid brother Rhaegar as
well. Her mother had died bringing her into the world while the
storm screamed outside. Gentle Ser Willem Darry, who must have
loved her after a fashion, had been taken by a wasting sickness
when she was very young. Her brother Viserys, Khal Drogo who was
her sun-and-stars, even her unborn son, the gods had claimed them
all. They will not have my dragons, Dany vowed. They will not.
The dragons were no larger than the scrawny cats she had once
seen skulking along the walls of Magister Illyrio’s estate in
Pentos . . . until they unfolded their wings.
Their span was three times their length, each wing a delicate fan
of translucent skin, gorgeously colored, stretched taut between
long thin bones. When you looked hard, you could see that most of
their body was neck, tail, and wing. Such little things, she
thought as she fed them by hand. or rather, tried to feed them, for
the dragons would not eat. They would hiss and spit at each bloody
morsel of horsemeat, steam rising from their nostrils, yet they
would not take the food . . . until Dany
recalled something Viserys had told her when they were
children. Only dragons and men eat cooked meat, he had said.
When she had her handmaids char the horsemeat black, the dragons
ripped at it eagerly, their heads striking like snakes. So long as
the meat was seared, they gulped down several times their own
weight every day, and at last began to grow larger and stronger.
Dany marveled at the smoothness of their scales, and the heat that
poured off them, so palpable that on cold nights their whole bodies
seemed to steam.
Each evenfall as the khalasar set out, she would choose a dragon
to ride upon her shoulder. Irri and Jhiqui carried the others in a
cage of woven wood slung between their mounts, and rode close
behind her, so Dany was never out of their sight. It was the only
way to keep them quiescent.
“Aegon’s dragons were named for the gods of Old
Valyria,” she told her bloodriders one morning after a long
night’s journey. “Visenya’s dragon was Vhagar,
Rhaenys had Meraxes, and Aegon rode Balerion, the Black Dread. It
was said that Vhagar’s breath was so hot that it could melt a
knight’s armor and cook the man inside, that Meraxes
swallowed horses whole, and Balerion . . . his
fire was as black as his scales, his wings so vast that whole towns
were swallowed up in their shadow when he passed
overhead.”
The Dothraki looked at her hatchlings uneasily. The largest of
her three was shiny black, his scales slashed with streaks of vivid
scarlet to match his wings and horns. “Khaleesi,” Aggo
murmured, “there sits Balerion, come again.”
“It may be as you say, blood of my blood,” Dany
replied gravely, “but he shall have a new name for this new
life. I would name them all for those the gods have taken. The
green one shall be Rhaegal, for my valiant brother who died on the
green banks of the Trident. The cream-and-gold I call Viserion.
Viserys was cruel and weak and frightened, yet he was my brother
still. His dragon will do what he could not.”
“And the black beast?” asked Ser Jorah Mormont.
“The black,” she said, “is Drogon.”
Yet even as her dragons prospered, her khalasar withered and
died. Around them the land turned ever more desolate. Even
devilgrass grew scant; horses dropped in their tracks, leaving so
few that some of her people must trudge along on foot. Doreah took
a fever and grew worse with every league they crossed. Her lips and
hands broke with blood blisters, her hair came out in clumps, and
one evenfall she lacked the strength to mount her horse. Jhogo said
they must leave her or bind her to her saddle, but Dany remembered
a night on the Dothraki sea, when the Lysene girl had taught her
secrets so that Drogo might love her more. She gave Doreah water
from her own skin, cooled her brow with a damp cloth, and held her
hand until she died, shivering. Only then would she permit the
khalasar to press on.
They saw no sign of other travelers. The Dothraki began to
mutter fearfully that the comet had led them to some hell. Dany
went to Ser Jorah one morning as they made camp amidst a jumble of
black windscoured stones. “Are we lost?” she asked him.
“Does this waste have no end to it?”
“It has an end,” he answered wearily. “I have
seen the maps the traders draw, my queen. Few caravans come this
way, that is so, yet there are great kingdoms to the east, and
cities full of wonders. Yi Ti, Qarth, Asshai by the
Shadow . . . ”
“Will we live to see them?”
“I will not lie to you. The way is harder than I dared
think.” The knight’s face was grey and exhausted. The
wound he had taken to his hip the night he fought Khal
Drogo’s bloodriders had never fully healed; she could see how
he grimaced when he mounted his horse, and he seemed to slump in
his saddle as they rode. “Perhaps we are doomed if we press
on . . . but I know for a certainty that we are
doomed if we turn back.”
Dany kissed him lightly on the cheek. It heartened her to see
him smile. I must be strong for him as well, she thought grimly. A
knight he may be, but I am the blood of the dragon.
The next pool they found was scalding hot and stinking of
brimstone, but their skins were almost empty. The Dothraki cooled
the water in jars and pots and drank it tepid. The taste was no
less foul, but water was water, and all of them thirsted. Dany
looked at the horizon with despair. They had lost a third of their
number, and still the waste stretched before them, bleak and red
and endless. The comet mocks my hopes, she thought, lifting her
eyes to where it scored the sky. Have I crossed half the world and
seen the birth of dragons only to die with them in this hard hot
desert? She would not believe it.
The next day, dawn broke as they were crossing a cracked and
fissured plain of hard red earth. Dany was about to command them to
make camp when her outriders came racing back at a gallop. “A
city, Khaleesi,” they cried. “A city pale as the moon
and lovely as a maid. An hour’s ride, no more.”
“Show me,” she said.
When the city appeared before her, its walls and towers
shimmering white behind a veil of heat, it looked so beautiful that
Dany was certain it must be a mirage. “Do you know what place
this might be? Ser Jorah.”
The exile knight gave a weary shake of the head. “No, my
queen. I have never traveled this far east.”
The distant white walls promised rest and safety, a chance to
heal and grow strong, and Dany wanted nothing so much as to rush
toward them. Instead she turned to her bloodriders. “Blood of
my blood, go ahead of us and learn the name of this city, and what
manner of welcome we should expect.”
“Ai, Khaleesi, “ said Aggo.
Her riders were not long in returning. Rakharo swung down from
his saddle. From his medallion belt hung the great curving arakh
that Dany had bestowed on him when she named him bloodrider.
“This city is dead, Khaleesi. Nameless and godless we found
it, the gates broken, only wind and flies moving through the
streets.”
Jhiqui shuddered. “When the gods are gone, the evil ghosts
feast by night. Such places are best shunned. It is
known.”
“It is known,” Irri agreed.
“Not to me.” Dany put her heels into her horse and
showed them the way, trotting beneath the shattered arch of an
ancient gate and down a silent street. Ser Jorah and her
bloodriders followed, and then, more slowly, the rest of the
Dothraki.
How long the city had been deserted she could not know, but the
white walls, so beautiful from afar, were cracked and crumbling
when seen up close. Inside was a maze of narrow crooked alleys. The
buildings pressed close, their facades blank, chalky, windowless.
Everything was white, as if the people who lived here had known
nothing of color. They rode past heaps of sun-washed rubble where
houses had fallen in, and elsewhere saw the faded scars of fire. At
a place where six alleys came together, Dany passed an empty marble
plinth. Dothraki had visited this place before, it would seem.
Perhaps even now the missing statue stood among the other stolen
gods in Vaes Dothrak. She might have ridden past it a hundred
times, never knowing. On her shoulder, Viserion hissed.
They made camp before the remnants of a gutted palace, on a
windswept plaza where devilgrass grew between the paving stones.
Dany sent out men to search the ruins. Some went reluctantly, yet
they went . . . and one scarred old man
returned a brief time later, hopping and grinning, his hands
overflowing with figs. They were small, withered things, yet her
people grabbed for them greedily, jostling and pushing at each
other, stuffing the fruit into their cheeks and chewing
blissfully.
Other searchers returned with tales of other fruit trees, hidden
behind closed doors in secret gardens. Aggo showed her a courtyard
overgrown with twisting vines and tiny green grapes, and Jhogo
discovered a well where the water was pure and cold. Yet they found
bones too, the skulls of the unburied dead, bleached and broken.
“Ghosts,” Irri muttered. “Terrible ghosts. We
must not stay here, Khaleesi, this is their place.”
“I fear no ghosts. Dragons are more powerful than
ghosts.” And figs are more important. “Go with Jhiqui
and find me some clean sand for a bath, and trouble me no more with
silly talk.”
In the coolness of her tent, Dany blackened horsemeat over a
brazier and reflected on her choices. There was food and water here
to sustain them, and enough grass for the horses to regain their
strength. How pleasant it would be to wake every day in the same
place, to linger among shady gardens, eat figs, and drink cool
water, as much as she might desire.
When Irri and Jhiqui returned with pots of white sand, Dany
stripped and let them scrub her clean. “Your hair is coming
back, Khaleesi,” Jhiqui said as she scraped sand off her
back. Dany ran a hand over the top of her head, feeling the new
growth. Dothraki men wore their hair in long oiled braids, and cut
them only when defeated. Perhaps I should do the same, she thought,
to remind them that Drogo’s strength lives within me now. Khal
Drogo had died with his hair uncut, a boast few men could make.
Across the tent, Rhaegal unfolded green wings to flap and
flutter a half foot before thumping to the carpet. When he landed,
his tail lashed back and forth in fury, and he raised his head and
screamed. If I had wings, I would want to fly too, Dany thought.
The Targaryens of old had ridden upon dragonback when they went to
war. She tried to imagine what it would feel like, to straddle a
dragon’s neck and soar high into the air. It would be like
standing on a mountaintop, only better. The whole world would be
spread out below If I flew high enough, I could even see the Seven
Kingdoms, and reach up and touch the comet.
Irri broke her reverie to tell her that Ser Jorah Mormont was
outside, awaiting her pleasure. “Send him in,” Dany
commanded, sand-scrubbed skin tingling. She wrapped herself in the
lionskin. The hrakkar had been much bigger than Dany, so the pelt
covered everything that wanted covering.
“I’ve brought you a peach,” Ser Jorah said,
kneeling. It was so small she could almost hide it in her palm, and
overripe too, but when she took the first bite, the flesh was so
sweet she almost cried. She ate it slowly, savoring every mouthful,
while Ser Jorah told her of the tree it had been plucked from, in a
garden near the western wall.
“Fruit and water and shade,” Dany said, her cheeks
sticky with peach juice. “The gods were good to bring us to
this place.”
“We should rest here until we are stronger,” the
knight urged. “The red lands are not kind to the
weak.”
“My handmaids say there are ghosts here.”
“There are ghosts everywhere,” Ser Jorah said
softly. “We carry them with us wherever we go.” Yes, she thought. Viserys, Khal Drogo, my son Rhaego, they are
with me always. “Tell me the name of your ghost, Jorah. You
know all of mine.”
His face grew very still. “Her name was
Lynesse.”
“Your wife?”
“My second wife.” It pains him to speak of her, Dany saw, but she wanted to know
the truth. “Is that all you would say of her?” The lion
pelt slid off one shoulder and she tugged it back into place.
“Was she beautiful?”
“Very beautiful.” Ser Jorah lifted his eyes from her
shoulder to her face. “The first time I beheld her, I thought
she was a goddess come to earth, the Maid herself made flesh. Her
birth was far above my own. She was the youngest daughter of Lord
Leyton Hightower of Oldtown. The White Bull who commanded your
father’s Kingsguard was her great-uncle. The Hightowers are an
ancient family, very rich and very proud.”
“And loyal,” Dany said. “I remember, Viserys
said the Hightowers were among those who stayed true to my
father.”
“That’s so,” he admitted.
“Did your fathers make the match?”
“No,” he said. “Our
marriage . . . that makes a long tale and a
dull one, Your Grace. I would not trouble you with it.”
“I have nowhere to go,” she said.
“Please.”
“As my queen commands.” Ser Jorah frowned. “My
home . . . you must understand that to
understand the rest. Bear Island is beautiful, but remote. Imagine
old gnarled oaks and tall pines, flowering thornbushes, grey stones
bearded with moss, little creeks running icy down steep hillsides.
The hall of the Mormonts is built of huge logs and surrounded by an
earthen palisade. Aside from a few crofters, my people live along
the coasts and fish the seas. The island lies far to the north, and
our winters are more terrible than you can imagine, Khaleesi.
“Still, the island suited me well enough, and I never
lacked for women. I had my share of fishwives and crofter’s
daughters, before and after I was wed. I married young, to a bride
of my father’s choosing, a Glover of Deepwood Motte. Ten
years we were wed, or near enough as makes no matter. She was a
plain-faced woman, but not unkind. I suppose I came to love her
after a fashion, though our relations were dutiful rather than
passionate. Three times she miscarried while trying to give me an
heir. The last time she never recovered. She died not long
after.”
Dany put her hand on his and gave his fingers a squeeze.
“I am sorry for you, truly.”
Ser Jorah nodded. “By then my father had taken the black,
so I was Lord of Bear Island in my own right. I had no lack of
marriage offers, but before I could reach a decision Lord Balon
Greyjoy rose in rebellion against the Usurper, and Ned Stark called
his banners to help his friend Robert. The final battle was on
Pyke. When Robert’s stonethrowers opened a breach in King
Balon’s wall, a priest from Myr was the first man through,
but I was not far behind. For that I won my knighthood.
“To celebrate his victory, Robert ordained that a tourney
should be held outside Lannisport. It was there I saw Lynesse, a
maid half my age. She had come up from Oldtown with her father to
see her brothers joust. I could not take my eyes off her. In a fit
of madness, I begged her favor to wear in the tourney, never
dreaming she would grant my request, yet she did.
“I fight as well as any man, Khaleesi, but I have never
been a tourney knight. Yet with Lynesse’s favor knotted round
my arm, I was a different man. I won joust after joust. Lord Jason
Mallister fell before me, and Bronze Yohn Royce. Ser Ryman Frey,
his brother Ser Hosteen, Lord Whent, Strongboar, even Ser Boros
Blount of the Kingsguard, I unhorsed them all. In the last match, I
broke nine lances against Jaime Lannister to no result, and King
Robert gave me the champion’s laurel. I crowned Lynesse queen
of love and beauty, and that very night went to her father and
asked for her hand. I was drunk, as much on glory as on wine. By
rights I should have gotten a contemptuous refusal, but Lord Leyton
accepted my offer. We were married there in Lannisport, and for a
fortnight I was the happiest man in the wide world.”
“Only a fortnight?” asked Dany. Even I was given
more happiness than that, with Drogo who was my sun-and-stars.
“A fortnight was how long it took us to sail from
Lannisport back to Bear Island. My home was a great disappointment
to Lynesse. It was too cold, too damp, too far away, my castle no
more than a wooden longhall. We had no masques, no mummer shows, no
balls or fairs. Seasons might pass without a singer ever coming to
play for us, and there’s not a goldsmith on the island. Even
meals became a trial. My cook knew little beyond his roasts and
stews, and Lynesse soon lost her taste for fish and venison.
“I lived for her smiles, so I sent all the way to Oldtown
for a new cook, and brought a harper from Lannisport. Goldsmiths,
jewelers, dressmakers, whatever she wanted I found for her, but it
was never enough. Bear Island is rich in bears and trees, and poor
in aught else. I built a fine ship for her and we sailed to
Lannisport and Oldtown for festivals and fairs, and once even to
Braavos, where I borrowed heavily from the money-lenders. It was as
a tourney champion that I had won her hand and heart, so I entered
other tourneys for her sake, but the magic was gone. I never
distinguished myself again, and each defeat meant the loss of
another charger and another suit of jousting armor, which must
needs be ransomed or replaced. The cost could not be borne. Finally
I insisted we return home, but there matters soon grew even worse
than before. I could no longer pay the cook and the harper, and
Lynesse grew wild when I spoke of pawning her jewels.
“The rest . . . I did things it shames
me to speak of. For gold. So Lynesse might keep her jewels, her
harper, and her cook. In the end it cost me all. When I heard that
Eddard Stark was coming to Bear Island, I was so lost to honor that
rather than stay and face his judgment, I took her with me into
exile. Nothing mattered but our love, I told myself. We fled to
Lys, where I sold my ship for gold to keep us.”
His voice was thick with grief, and Dany was reluctant to press
him any further, yet she had to know how it ended. “Did she
die there?” she asked him gently.
“Only to me,” he said. “In half a year my gold
was gone, and I was obliged to take service as a sellsword. While I
was fighting Braavosi on the Rhoyne, Lynesse moved into the manse
of a merchant prince named Tregar Ormollen. They say she is his
chief concubine now, and even his wife goes in fear of
her.”
Dany was horrified. “Do you hate her?”
“Almost as much as I love her,” Ser Jorah answered.
“Pray excuse me, my queen. I find I am very tired.”
She gave him leave to go, but as he was lifting the flap of her
tent, she could not stop herself calling after him with one last
question. “What did she look like, your Lady
Lynesse?”
Ser Jorah smiled sadly. “Why, she looked a bit like you,
Daenerys.” He bowed low. “Sleep well, my
queen.”
Dany shivered, and pulled the lionskin tight about her. She
looked like me. It explained much that she had not truly
understood. He wants me, she realized. He loves me as he loved her,
not as a knight loves his queen but as a man loves a woman. She
tried to imagine herself in Ser Jorah’s arms, kissing him,
pleasuring him, letting him enter her. It was no good. When she
closed her eyes, his face kept changing into Drogo’s.
Khal Drogo had been her sun-and-stars, her first, and perhaps he
must be her last. The maegi Mirri Maz Duur had sworn she should
never bear a living child, and what man would want a barren wife?
And what man could hope to rival Drogo, who had died with his hair
uncut and rode now through the night lands, the stars his
khalasar?
She had heard the longing in Ser Jorah’s voice when he
spoke of his Bear Island. He can never have me, but one day I can
give him back his home and honor. That much I can do for him.
No ghosts troubled her sleep that night. She dreamed of Drogo
and the first ride they had taken together on the night they were
wed. In the dream it was not horses they rode, but dragons.
The next morn, she summoned her bloodriders. “Blood of my
blood,” she told the three of them, “I have need of
you. Each of you is to choose three horses, the hardiest and
healthiest that remain to us. Load as much water and food as your
mounts can bear, and ride forth for me. Aggo shall strike
southwest, Rakharo due south. Jhogo, you are to follow shierak qiya
on southeast.”
“What shall we seek, Khaleesi?” asked Jhogo.
“Whatever there is,” Dany answered. “Seek for
other cities, living and dead. Seek for caravans and people. Seek
for rivers and lakes and the great salt sea. Find how far this
waste extends before us, and what lies on the other side. When I
leave this place, I do not mean to strike out blind again. I will
know where I am bound, and how best to get there.”
And so they went, the bells in their hair ringing softly, while
Dany settled down with her small band of survivors in the place
they named Vaes Tolorro, the city of bones. Day followed night
followed day. Women harvested fruit from the gardens of the dead.
Men groomed their mounts and mended saddles, stirrups, and shoes.
Children wandered the twisty alleys and found old bronze coins and
bits of purple glass and stone flagons with handles carved like
snakes. One woman was stung by a red scorpion, but hers was the
only death. The horses began to put on some flesh. Dany tended Ser
Jorah’s wound herself, and it began to heal.
Rakharo was the first to return. Due south the red waste
stretched on and on, he reported, until it ended on a bleak shore
beside the poison water. Between here and there lay only swirling
sand, wind-scoured rocks, and plants bristly with sharp thorns. He
had passed the bones of a dragon, he swore, so immense that he had
ridden his horse through its great black jaws. Other than that, he
had seen nothing.
Dany gave him charge of a dozen of her strongest men, and set
them to pulling up the plaza to get to the earth beneath. If
devilgrass could grow between the paving stones, other grasses
would grow when the stones were gone. They had wells enough, no
lack of water. Given seed, they could make the plaza bloom.
Aggo was back next. The southwest was barren and burnt, he
swore. He had found the ruins of two more cities, smaller than Vaes
Tolorro but otherwise the same. One was warded by a ring of skulls
mounted on rusted iron spears, so he dared not enter, but he had
explored the second for as long as he could. He showed Dany an iron
bracelet he had found, set with a uncut fire opal the size of her
thumb. There were scrolls as well, but they were dry and crumbling
and Aggo had left them where they lay.
Dany thanked him and told him to see to the repair of the gates.
If enemies had crossed the waste to destroy these cities in ancient
days, they might well come again. “If so, we must be
ready,” she declared.
Jhogo was gone so long that Dany feared him lost, but finally
when they had all but ceased to look for him, he came riding up
from the southeast. One of the guards that Aggo had posted saw him
first and gave a shout, and Dany rushed to the walls to see for
herself. It was true. Jhogo came, yet not alone. Behind him rode
three queerly garbed strangers atop ugly humped creatures that
dwarfed any horse.
They drew rein before the city gates, and looked up to see Dany
on the wall above them. “Blood of my blood,” Jhogo
called, “I have been to the great city Qarth, and returned
with three who would look on you with their own eyes.”
Dany stared down at the strangers. “Here I stand. Look, if
that is your pleasure . . . but first tell me
your names.”
The pale man with the blue lips replied in guttural Dothraki,
“I am Pyat Pree, the great warlock.”
The bald man with the jewels in his nose answered in the
Valyrian of the Free Cities, “I am Xaro Xhoan Daxos of the
Thirteen, a merchant prince of Qarth.”
The woman in the lacquered wooden mask said in the Common Tongue
of the Seven Kingdoms, “I am Quaithe of the Shadow. We come
seeking dragons.”
“Seek no more,” Daenerys Targaryen told them.
“You have found them.”