A feeling that wasn't her. Like a sensation she had woken from too soon. Heat that did not hurt.
Her dragons eggs.
Not alive. Not yet. But their forms in her mind were more than stone.
She looked at the three eggs stacked near the pyre, just beyond the spill of oil: green as deep forest; cream flecked like old bone; black that drank the light. She had slept with them close when her belly had still been full. She had held them when the boy inside her had kicked. She had whispered to them because it made her feel less alone.
Now the air above them wavered. The patterns in their shells caught the fire and sent it back in different colors: green inside gold, bone inside ember, black inside blue.
The song reached a place it could not go past and climbed anyway. Mirri's voice rasped. The flames swallowed nearly all of her from the waist up. The smell was horrible, but the sound was worse.
Daenerys took a step nearer the eggs. Heat shimmered between her and them like a veil. For the first time since she had lifted the brand, her face softened.
"Khaleesi," Jorah said, because he could not help himself.
"Stop," Drogo said again, and this time he did not need to look at the man to make it law.
"What do you feel?" he asked Daenerys, quiet enough that the nearest ranks had to strain to hear.
Daenerys did not lie. "A feeling," she said. "Like the tide you told me of."
She didn't know what Drogo meant by the call of the tides but she felt it was what she was feeling now.
Drogo understood. A small, fierce light moved behind his eyes.
He stepped to the eggs and crouched. He held his hand over the green one first, then the cream, then the black. His skin prickled, not only from heat. There was… a thrum. A heartbeat too slow for any beast he knew, too old for any man.
He stood. He faced the ring. "This is not witchcraft," he said, and the words were for them and for himself and for the woman he loved. "This is not the maegi's doing. This is destiny."
Mirri laughed again—shredded, broken—and then the flames took her voice.
Daenerys looked at Drogo. She had never been more beautiful or more terrible. Ash had dusted her hair like frost. The heat made her eyes into sapphires that bled fire.
"I know what I must do," she said.
Jorah breathed in, sharply, and several riders shouted at once:
"She will burn—"
"Hold her—"
"Khaleesi—"
Drogo lifted one hand and the noise fell away as if he had struck it with a blade.
"Tell me," he said to her.
"I will give them what they need," she said, eyes never leaving his.
"I will give us what we are."
He nodded, once.
"Then do it."
Her shoulders loosened. She looked down at her silks. She began to unfasten them.
From the ring: gasps, curses, prayers, silence. The old ko who had argued earlier put a fist against his mouth and said nothing. Temmo the arakh-smith bowed his head without knowing why. The singer put a palm to the zither's cracked face.
Daenerys folded her garments and set them aside, neither coy nor ashamed. She lifted the green egg first, cradled it to her breast. It was heavy, yes—but not as heavy as it had been. Or else her arms had learned the weight.
She carried it to the pyre and set it carefully where the flames licked at the edges, as close as she could without letting them take her skin. She repeated the act with the cream, then with the black, and with each one something inside the fire answered—a change in the crackle, a lower hum under the roar, an attention.
A rider whispered, "Madness."
Another whispered back, "Wonder."
Daenerys returned to Drogo and took his hand in both of hers. Her fingers were warm but not shaking.
"If I fall," she said, "remember me as I am now."
"You will not fall," he said.
"You cannot know that."
"I do," he said, and his voice had the certainty of stones that had never moved.
They touched foreheads. It was not a goodbye. It was not a prayer. It was a thing that could have only one answer.
She turned.
She did not run.
She did not pause.
She stepped into the fire.
*
*
*
The flames swallowed her. The khalasar cried out as one body. Horses reared. A child screamed and was hushed by small, desperate hands. Jorah took an involuntary step, then froze as if he had reached the end of a cliff and looked down.
Drogo did not move.
His face was calm, but his chest rose and fell like a war drum. The heat pushed against him, bowed his braids away from his shoulders, seared the small hairs along his forearms. He did not blink.
Inside the pyre, Daenerys walked like a woman crossing a shallow stream. The fire made a veil around her. It clung to her skin and did not hurt her. It breathed with her.
She reached the eggs.
The green pulsed once—so faint that even the fire seemed not to notice. The cream glowed along old cracks that had never been cracks, only paint hiding what lay beneath. The black took nothing from the flames and gave nothing back… and then, for the smallest fraction of a breath, its darkness deepened as if a star had fallen through it and been caught.
Daenerys knelt.
She set her hands on the black shell.
In the ring, riders stopped breathing because their bodies forgot how. The singer slipped his fingers under the zither strings and did not pluck them; he only felt the tautness as if it might tell him something. The old ko's lips moved around a prayer to no god he had ever bothered with before.
"Khaleesi…" Jorah's voice was a ghost.
"She is not alone," Drogo said, and heard his own words as if someone else had put them in his mouth. The sea inside him surged. The air tasted like salt that had never been here.
Daenerys closed her eyes. She did not speak. She did not need to. Her thoughts were clear and simple and terrible.
Live.
The sound came from nowhere and everywhere.
Not a human sound. Not an animal's. A crack. A sharp report like a whip across stone. Then another. Then a hiss that wasn't fire.
The ring recoiled as one.
The black shell split.
A line ran down it like a smile opening. A small, clawed foot pressed through, slick and furious. A snout followed, teeth like splinters of moonlight, eyes blind and already hungry. Wings unfolded—fragile, wet, perfect knives of night.
The creature screamed.
The green and the cream answered, their shells fracturing in a storm of glittering shards. The fire leapt higher as if greedy for more life and got it.
Daenerys did not flinch. She lifted the first of them in both hands—black, wild, writhing—and drew it to her breast. It clawed her and she bled and she did not seem to mind at all. The second climbed her shoulder on wet, clumsy talons. The third found the hollow between her collarbones and settled there like a heartbeat given wings.
The flames, which should have eaten her, curled around her like tame things and then bowed.
The pyre collapsed in a rush. Wood fell. Sparks rose. Smoke boiled outward.
For a terrible moment there was nothing but ash and a single ringing in the Khal's ears.
Then she stepped forward.
Daenerys, skin streaked with soot, hair burnt away, eyes luminous—carrying fire that had learned to breathe.
The khalasar collapsed onto their knees as if struck behind them. The world narrowed to a woman and the three small monsters that clung to her.
Drogo's throat tightened. He did not kneel yet. He only took three steps and another and another until the heat of the fire still warming her skin brushed his chest.
She looked up at him. The smallest one—the cream—lifted its head and hissed at him, and he almost laughed because it sounded like a baby trying to curse.
"Fire lives," she said, voice ragged and triumphant and quiet all at once.
"And rides," he answered.
He went down on one knee then—not to worship, not to yield, but to recognize. His braid bells chimed once, the sound so pure it made a few men cry without knowing why.
"Khaleesi," he said.
She reached for his face with fingers that should have blistered and had not. Her hand was very soft. She leaned, and he stood, and for a breath the world had no spectators and no horses and no gods and no judgments—only the two of them and the three newborn things that had changed everything.
Behind them, in ever widening rings, the kneeling spread and held; in the spaces between the bodies, fear rose and then thinned, and awe took its place.
Drogo turned to the khalasar at last, voice carrying like a thrown spear.
"Look," he said. "Remember. Tell it to those who left. Tell it to those who doubt. This is not witchcraft. This is not the witch's filth. This is the blood of the woman who rides with me, of the house that once taught the sky to burn."
He lifted his chin, eyes hard. "If you fear it, learn to fear it with your mouth closed. If you honor it, stand. If you cannot do either, ride out now and do not look back."
No one moved.
The dragons shrieked again—thin, knife-sharp, glorious.
Daenerys smiled, small and dangerous and bright as new metal.
Drogo breathed deep. The air smelled of ash and beginnings.
"Destiny," he said, and in his mouth the word felt like a blade that had just found its grip.