The Dothraki sea,” Ser Jorah Mormont said as he reined to a halt beside her on the top of theridge. Beneath them, the plain stretched out immense and empty, a vast flat expanse that reached tothe distant horizon and beyond. It was a sea, Dany thought. Past here, there were no hills, nomountains, no trees nor cities nor roads, only the endless grasses, the tall blades rippling like waveswhen 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 fromhorizon to horizon, like a sea of blood. Come the dry season, and the world turns the color of oldbronze. And this is only hranna, child. There are a hundred kinds of grass out there, grasses as yellowas lemon and as dark as indigo, blue grasses and orange grasses and grasses like rainbows. Down inthe Shadow Lands beyond Asshai, they say there are oceans of ghost grass, taller than a man onhorseback with stalks as pale as milkglass. It murders all other grass and glows in the dark with thespirits of the damned. The Dothraki claim that someday ghost grass will cover the entire world, andthen all life will end.”
That thought gave Dany the shivers. “I don’t want to talk about that now,” she said. “It’s sobeautiful 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 outdistancedthe rest of their party, and now the others were climbing the ridge below them. Her handmaid Irri andthe young archers of her khas were fluid as centaurs, but Viserys still struggled with the short stirrupsand the flat saddle. Her brother was miserable out here. He ought never have come. Magister Illyriohad urged him to wait in Pentos, had offered him the hospitality of his manse, but Viserys would havenone of it. He would stay with Drogo until the debt had been paid, until he had the crown he had beenpromised. “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 himgood fortune.
Dany realized that she did not want to listen to any of her brother’s complaints right now. The daywas too perfect. The sky was a deep blue, and high above them a hunting hawk circled. The grass seaswayed 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. Yethis 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 theridge alone.
The descent was steep and rocky, but Dany rode fearlessly, and the joy and the danger of it were asong in her heart. All her life Viserys had told her she was a princess, but not until she rode her silverhad 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. Saddlesores 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 ignoredher during their wedding, and spent his evenings drinking with his warriors and bloodriders, racinghis prize horses, watching women dance and men die. Dany had no place in these parts of his life. Shewas left to sup alone, or with Ser Jorah and her brother, and afterward to cry herself to sleep. Yetevery night, some time before the dawn, Drogo would come to her tent and wake her in the dark, toride her as relentlessly as he rode his stallion. He always took her from behind, Dothraki fashion, forwhich Dany was grateful; that way her lord husband could not see the tears that wet her face, and shecould use her pillow to muffle her cries of pain. When he was done, he would close his eyes andbegin to snore softly and Dany would lie beside him, her body bruised and sore, hurting too much forsleep.
Day followed day, and night followed night, until Dany knew she could not endure a momentlonger. 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. Herblood, Dany sensed. Its eyes were pools of molten magma, and when it opened its mouth, the flamecame 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 couldfeel her flesh sear and blacken and slough away, could feel her blood boil and turn to steam, and yetthere 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 heardher 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 shell. Black-and-scarlet,she thought, like the dragon in my dream. The stone felt strangely warm beneath her fingers … or wasshe 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; herblisters 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 itwas the filly who was her real teacher. The horse seemed to know her moods, as if they shared asingle mind. With every passing day, Dany felt surer in her seat. The Dothraki were a hard andunsentimental people, and it was not their custom to name their animals, so Dany thought of her onlyas 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. Sherode at the head of the khalasar with Drogo and his bloodriders, so she came to each country freshand unspoiled. Behind them the great horde might tear the earth and muddy the rivers and send upclouds 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 townsfolkwatched anxiously from atop white stucco walls. They forded three wide placid rivers and a fourththat was swift and narrow and treacherous, camped beside a high blue waterfall, skirted the tumbledruins of a vast dead city where ghosts were said to moan among blackened marble columns. Theyraced 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, andthe trunks of the trees were as wide as city gates. There were great elk in that wood, and spottedtigers, and lemurs with silver fur and huge purple eyes, but all fled before the approach of thekhalasar 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 thepain had a sweetness to it now, and each morning she came willingly to her saddle, eager to knowwhat wonders waited for her in the lands ahead. She began to find pleasure even in her nights, and ifshe 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 androde out onto the plain, losing herself in the green, blessedly alone. In the khalasar she was neveralone. 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 theridge, his voice shrill with anger as he shouted at Ser Jorah. She rode on, submerging herself deeper inthe Dothraki sea.
The green swallowed her up. The air was rich with the scents of earth and grass, mixed with thesmell of horseflesh and Dany’s sweat and the oil in her hair. Dothraki smells. They seemed to belonghere. Dany breathed it all in, laughing. She had a sudden urge to feel the ground beneath her, to curlher toes in that thick black soil. Swinging down from her saddle, she let the silver graze while shepulled off her high boots.
Viserys came upon her as sudden as a summer storm, his horse rearing beneath him as he reined uptoo hard. “You dare!” he screamed at her. “You give commands to me? To me?” He vaulted off thehorse, 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 anda painted vest given her as a bride gift. She looked as though she belonged here. Viserys was soiledand stained in city silks and ringmail.
He was still screaming. “You do not command the dragon. Do you understand? I am the Lord ofthe Seven Kingdoms, I will not hear orders from some horselord’s slut, do you hear me?” His handwent 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 himbackward. He went sprawling in the grass, stunned and choking. The Dothraki riders hooted at him ashe struggled to free himself. The one with the whip, young Jhogo, rasped a question. Dany did notunderstand his words, but by then Irri was there, and Ser Jorah, and the rest of her khas. “Jhogo asksif 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 toldher, “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 apuppet on a string. He went sprawling again, freed from the leather embrace, a thin line of bloodunder 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 theridge, 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 neverseen 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 hewas hearing; nor could Dany quite believe what she was saying. Yet the words came. “Let my brotherwalk behind us back to the khalasar.” Among the Dothraki, the man who does not ride was no man atall, 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 thehorsemen would not understand. “Hit her, Mormont. Hurt her. Your king commands it. Kill theseDothraki dogs and teach her.”
The exile knight looked from Dany to her brother; she barefoot, with dirt between her toes and oilin 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 hiseyes were full of poison as they rode away. Soon he was lost in the tall grass. When they could notsee 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 mostsurely 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 theyhad 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 strangedream that she had dreamed. “Ser Jorah, do you think … he’ll be so angry when he gets back …” Sheshivered. “I woke the dragon, didn’t I?”
Ser Jorah snorted. “Can you wake the dead, girl? Your brother Rhaegar was the last dragon, and hedied 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 weresuddenly 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 thatmake 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 athrone?”
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 offagain.
Dany rode close beside him. “Still,” she said, “the common people are waiting for him. MagisterIllyrio says they are sewing dragon banners and praying for Viserys to return from across the narrowsea to free them.”
“The common people pray for rain, healthy children, and a summer that never ends,” Ser Jorahtold her. “It is no matter to them if the high lords play their game of thrones, so long as they are left inpeace.” He gave a shrug. “They never are.”
Dany rode along quietly for a time, working his words like a puzzle box. It went against everythingthat Viserys had ever told her to think that the people could care so little whether a true king or ausurper 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 Aegonthe Conqueror had built. It was Dragonstone where she had been born. In her mind’s eye they burnedwith 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 longtime, she realized. She had known it all her life. Only she had never let herself say the words, even ina 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 coinand the only knight who follows him reviles him as less than a snake. The Dothraki make mock of hisweakness. 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 thesilver to a gallop. Faster and faster she raced, leaving Jorah and Irri and the others far behind, thewarm wind in her hair and the setting sun red on her face. By the time she reached the khalasar, itwas dusk.
The slaves had erected her tent by the shore of a spring-fed pool. She could hear rough voices fromthe woven grass palace on the hill. Soon there would be laughter, when the men of her khas told thestory 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 inthe khalasar.
Dany gave the silver over to the slaves for grooming and entered her tent. It was cool and dimbeneath the silk. As she let the door flap close behind her, Dany saw a finger of dusty red light reachout to touch her dragon’s eggs across the tent. For an instant a thousand droplets of scarlet flameswam 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 puther palm against the black egg, fingers spread gently across the curve of the shell. The stone waswarm. 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 Irriand Jhiqui fetched the big copper tub—another bride gift—from the packhorses and carried waterfrom 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 fromher hair. She had heard that the first dragons had come from the east, from the Shadow Lands beyondAsshai and the islands of the Jade Sea. Perhaps some were still living there, in realms strange andwild.
“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 halfago, during the reign of Aegon III, who was called the Dragonbane. That did not seem so long ago toDany. “Everywhere?” she said, disappointed. “Even in the east?” Magic had died in the west whenthe Doom fell on Valyria and the Lands of the Long Summer, and neither spell-forged steel norstormsingers nor dragons could hold it back, but Dany had always heard that the east was different. Itwas said that manticores prowled the islands of the Jade Sea, that basilisks infested the jungles of YiTi, that spellsingers, warlocks, and aeromancers practiced their arts openly in Asshai, whileshadowbinders and bloodmages worked terrible sorceries in the black of night. Why shouldn’t therebe 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 shewarmed a towel over the fire. Jhiqui and Irri were of an age with Dany, Dothraki girls taken as slaveswhen Drogo destroyed their father’s khalasar. Doreah was older, almost twenty. Magister Illyrio hadfound 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 moonsin the sky, but one wandered too close to the sun and cracked from the heat. A thousand thousanddragons poured forth, and drank the fire of the sun. That is why dragons breathe flame. One day theother 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 isno 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 herbody 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 towash it down. “Doreah, stay and eat with me,” Dany commanded when she sent her other handmaidsaway. 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 nohonor, 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 andlooked at her with surprise. She rose slowly and opened her sleeping silks and let them fall to theground. “This night we must go outside, my lord,” she told him, for the Dothraki believed that allthings 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 toturn 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. Wasshe not khaleesi? His were the only eyes that mattered, and when she mounted him she sawsomething there that she had never seen before. She rode him as fiercely as ever she had ridden hersilver, 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’sstomach with her fingers and said, “Khaleesi, you are with child.”
“I know,” Dany told her.
It was her fourteenth name day.
“Here and now,” Ser Jorah agreed. “You ought to see it when it blooms, all dark red flowers fromhorizon to horizon, like a sea of blood. Come the dry season, and the world turns the color of oldbronze. And this is only hranna, child. There are a hundred kinds of grass out there, grasses as yellowas lemon and as dark as indigo, blue grasses and orange grasses and grasses like rainbows. Down inthe Shadow Lands beyond Asshai, they say there are oceans of ghost grass, taller than a man onhorseback with stalks as pale as milkglass. It murders all other grass and glows in the dark with thespirits of the damned. The Dothraki claim that someday ghost grass will cover the entire world, andthen all life will end.”
That thought gave Dany the shivers. “I don’t want to talk about that now,” she said. “It’s sobeautiful 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 outdistancedthe rest of their party, and now the others were climbing the ridge below them. Her handmaid Irri andthe young archers of her khas were fluid as centaurs, but Viserys still struggled with the short stirrupsand the flat saddle. Her brother was miserable out here. He ought never have come. Magister Illyriohad urged him to wait in Pentos, had offered him the hospitality of his manse, but Viserys would havenone of it. He would stay with Drogo until the debt had been paid, until he had the crown he had beenpromised. “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 himgood fortune.
Dany realized that she did not want to listen to any of her brother’s complaints right now. The daywas too perfect. The sky was a deep blue, and high above them a hunting hawk circled. The grass seaswayed 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. Yethis 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 theridge alone.
The descent was steep and rocky, but Dany rode fearlessly, and the joy and the danger of it were asong in her heart. All her life Viserys had told her she was a princess, but not until she rode her silverhad 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. Saddlesores 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 ignoredher during their wedding, and spent his evenings drinking with his warriors and bloodriders, racinghis prize horses, watching women dance and men die. Dany had no place in these parts of his life. Shewas left to sup alone, or with Ser Jorah and her brother, and afterward to cry herself to sleep. Yetevery night, some time before the dawn, Drogo would come to her tent and wake her in the dark, toride her as relentlessly as he rode his stallion. He always took her from behind, Dothraki fashion, forwhich Dany was grateful; that way her lord husband could not see the tears that wet her face, and shecould use her pillow to muffle her cries of pain. When he was done, he would close his eyes andbegin to snore softly and Dany would lie beside him, her body bruised and sore, hurting too much forsleep.
Day followed day, and night followed night, until Dany knew she could not endure a momentlonger. 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. Herblood, Dany sensed. Its eyes were pools of molten magma, and when it opened its mouth, the flamecame 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 couldfeel her flesh sear and blacken and slough away, could feel her blood boil and turn to steam, and yetthere 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 heardher 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 shell. Black-and-scarlet,she thought, like the dragon in my dream. The stone felt strangely warm beneath her fingers … or wasshe 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; herblisters 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 itwas the filly who was her real teacher. The horse seemed to know her moods, as if they shared asingle mind. With every passing day, Dany felt surer in her seat. The Dothraki were a hard andunsentimental people, and it was not their custom to name their animals, so Dany thought of her onlyas 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. Sherode at the head of the khalasar with Drogo and his bloodriders, so she came to each country freshand unspoiled. Behind them the great horde might tear the earth and muddy the rivers and send upclouds 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 townsfolkwatched anxiously from atop white stucco walls. They forded three wide placid rivers and a fourththat was swift and narrow and treacherous, camped beside a high blue waterfall, skirted the tumbledruins of a vast dead city where ghosts were said to moan among blackened marble columns. Theyraced 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, andthe trunks of the trees were as wide as city gates. There were great elk in that wood, and spottedtigers, and lemurs with silver fur and huge purple eyes, but all fled before the approach of thekhalasar 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 thepain had a sweetness to it now, and each morning she came willingly to her saddle, eager to knowwhat wonders waited for her in the lands ahead. She began to find pleasure even in her nights, and ifshe 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 androde out onto the plain, losing herself in the green, blessedly alone. In the khalasar she was neveralone. 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 theridge, his voice shrill with anger as he shouted at Ser Jorah. She rode on, submerging herself deeper inthe Dothraki sea.
The green swallowed her up. The air was rich with the scents of earth and grass, mixed with thesmell of horseflesh and Dany’s sweat and the oil in her hair. Dothraki smells. They seemed to belonghere. Dany breathed it all in, laughing. She had a sudden urge to feel the ground beneath her, to curlher toes in that thick black soil. Swinging down from her saddle, she let the silver graze while shepulled off her high boots.
Viserys came upon her as sudden as a summer storm, his horse rearing beneath him as he reined uptoo hard. “You dare!” he screamed at her. “You give commands to me? To me?” He vaulted off thehorse, 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 anda painted vest given her as a bride gift. She looked as though she belonged here. Viserys was soiledand stained in city silks and ringmail.
He was still screaming. “You do not command the dragon. Do you understand? I am the Lord ofthe Seven Kingdoms, I will not hear orders from some horselord’s slut, do you hear me?” His handwent 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 himbackward. He went sprawling in the grass, stunned and choking. The Dothraki riders hooted at him ashe struggled to free himself. The one with the whip, young Jhogo, rasped a question. Dany did notunderstand his words, but by then Irri was there, and Ser Jorah, and the rest of her khas. “Jhogo asksif 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 toldher, “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 apuppet on a string. He went sprawling again, freed from the leather embrace, a thin line of bloodunder 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 theridge, 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 neverseen 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 hewas hearing; nor could Dany quite believe what she was saying. Yet the words came. “Let my brotherwalk behind us back to the khalasar.” Among the Dothraki, the man who does not ride was no man atall, 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 thehorsemen would not understand. “Hit her, Mormont. Hurt her. Your king commands it. Kill theseDothraki dogs and teach her.”
The exile knight looked from Dany to her brother; she barefoot, with dirt between her toes and oilin 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 hiseyes were full of poison as they rode away. Soon he was lost in the tall grass. When they could notsee 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 mostsurely 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 theyhad 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 strangedream that she had dreamed. “Ser Jorah, do you think … he’ll be so angry when he gets back …” Sheshivered. “I woke the dragon, didn’t I?”
Ser Jorah snorted. “Can you wake the dead, girl? Your brother Rhaegar was the last dragon, and hedied 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 weresuddenly 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 thatmake 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 athrone?”
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 offagain.
Dany rode close beside him. “Still,” she said, “the common people are waiting for him. MagisterIllyrio says they are sewing dragon banners and praying for Viserys to return from across the narrowsea to free them.”
“The common people pray for rain, healthy children, and a summer that never ends,” Ser Jorahtold her. “It is no matter to them if the high lords play their game of thrones, so long as they are left inpeace.” He gave a shrug. “They never are.”
Dany rode along quietly for a time, working his words like a puzzle box. It went against everythingthat Viserys had ever told her to think that the people could care so little whether a true king or ausurper 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 Aegonthe Conqueror had built. It was Dragonstone where she had been born. In her mind’s eye they burnedwith 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 longtime, she realized. She had known it all her life. Only she had never let herself say the words, even ina 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 coinand the only knight who follows him reviles him as less than a snake. The Dothraki make mock of hisweakness. 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 thesilver to a gallop. Faster and faster she raced, leaving Jorah and Irri and the others far behind, thewarm wind in her hair and the setting sun red on her face. By the time she reached the khalasar, itwas dusk.
The slaves had erected her tent by the shore of a spring-fed pool. She could hear rough voices fromthe woven grass palace on the hill. Soon there would be laughter, when the men of her khas told thestory 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 inthe khalasar.
Dany gave the silver over to the slaves for grooming and entered her tent. It was cool and dimbeneath the silk. As she let the door flap close behind her, Dany saw a finger of dusty red light reachout to touch her dragon’s eggs across the tent. For an instant a thousand droplets of scarlet flameswam 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 puther palm against the black egg, fingers spread gently across the curve of the shell. The stone waswarm. 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 Irriand Jhiqui fetched the big copper tub—another bride gift—from the packhorses and carried waterfrom 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 fromher hair. She had heard that the first dragons had come from the east, from the Shadow Lands beyondAsshai and the islands of the Jade Sea. Perhaps some were still living there, in realms strange andwild.
“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 halfago, during the reign of Aegon III, who was called the Dragonbane. That did not seem so long ago toDany. “Everywhere?” she said, disappointed. “Even in the east?” Magic had died in the west whenthe Doom fell on Valyria and the Lands of the Long Summer, and neither spell-forged steel norstormsingers nor dragons could hold it back, but Dany had always heard that the east was different. Itwas said that manticores prowled the islands of the Jade Sea, that basilisks infested the jungles of YiTi, that spellsingers, warlocks, and aeromancers practiced their arts openly in Asshai, whileshadowbinders and bloodmages worked terrible sorceries in the black of night. Why shouldn’t therebe 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 shewarmed a towel over the fire. Jhiqui and Irri were of an age with Dany, Dothraki girls taken as slaveswhen Drogo destroyed their father’s khalasar. Doreah was older, almost twenty. Magister Illyrio hadfound 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 moonsin the sky, but one wandered too close to the sun and cracked from the heat. A thousand thousanddragons poured forth, and drank the fire of the sun. That is why dragons breathe flame. One day theother 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 isno 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 herbody 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 towash it down. “Doreah, stay and eat with me,” Dany commanded when she sent her other handmaidsaway. 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 nohonor, 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 andlooked at her with surprise. She rose slowly and opened her sleeping silks and let them fall to theground. “This night we must go outside, my lord,” she told him, for the Dothraki believed that allthings 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 toturn 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. Wasshe not khaleesi? His were the only eyes that mattered, and when she mounted him she sawsomething there that she had never seen before. She rode him as fiercely as ever she had ridden hersilver, 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’sstomach with her fingers and said, “Khaleesi, you are with child.”
“I know,” Dany told her.
It was her fourteenth name day.