The sun's rim broke clean over the world, and with it the noise rose. Not wild. Focused almost. Riders gathered in a rough amphitheater; women and boys clung to the margins where they could see; elders found stones and sat with elbows on knees, eyes sharp.
Jorah stood at the edge of the ring with two others Drogo had pointed out—Qharo (the one with the split ear) and Temmo (the arakh-smith)—checking that no one came in with hidden steel.
Drogo stepped into the center of the ring. His shadow was long and straight. He raised one hand; the bells in his braid chimed once.
"Strength," he called. "Hands. No arakh. No daggers. No rocks. Teeth if you must. Yield when you cannot stand. If you draw steel, you leave your hand on the ground."
A low growl of approval. Rules clear enough to chew.
He pointed, not waiting for bluster. "You," he said to a thick-shouldered veteran with a broken nose. The man thumped his chest with his fist and strode in, grinning to show he had teeth left.
They circled. The man led with a feint—shoulder dip, hand flash. Drogo watched the hips, not the hands. When the grab came, he stepped to where the man would be, not where he was, caught the wrist, rolled it over his own forearm, and let the man's weight do what weight always did. The veteran hit dust with a choking grunt.
Drogo let him half rise, then sat him back with a palm under the jaw—not a strike; a placement. The man's eyes cleared with surprise. He banged his knuckles twice to yield and rolled away with a barking laugh, more pleased than angry.
Another came. Younger. Quick feet; quicker mouth. He skipped in and out, slapped the back of Drogo's head like a boy testing a bull, then darted, knee aimed for ribs. Drogo didn't bother with the knee. He caught the ankle instead, lifted it just enough that the boy's balance betrayed him, and turned so the boy's fall was long, humiliating, but harmless.
The ring hooted. The boy bounced up, stung more in pride than bone, then surprised them all by bowing his head quickly and backing out with a grin that admitted the lesson. Drogo nodded to him once. A boy who could take instruction might be worth more than a man who'd never needed it.
The third challenger was meaner luck. A rangy rider with scars like old claws and eyes that liked hurting. He came in with a fistful of dirt hidden in his palm. When he closed, he flung it for Drogo's eyes and lunged for the throat.
The dirt hit. Enhanced vision narrowed the scatter to harmless grit; his eyes watered, yes, but saw. The lunge was clumsy once sight had failed its trick. Drogo slid under it, wrapped the man's arm at the elbow, and pinned him, gently as a man pins a snake just behind the head. He could feel the tendon under his fingers, the place where a squeeze would ruin the hand forever.
He did not squeeze.
"Yield," he said.
The man snarled and twisted, trying to bite. Drogo tilted his jaw away, tucked his chin into the man's hair, and increased pressure a hair's breadth—no more.
"Yield," he said again, unamused.
Teeth snapped, missed. In the man's eyes for an instant Drogo saw something past courage—the flat, empty place where men enjoy wrecking more than winning. He filed that away, then made the only move that left the man's future intact: he rolled them both, let the man take his own weight in his own shoulder, and when the elbow bent the wrong way, he stopped it at the last possible instant and let him feel how close he was to ruin.
The man's breath broke. "Yield," he spat, furious, humiliated, but not broken.
Drogo let him up and pointed with his chin. "Sit. Think." The rider slunk out through a patch of silence that wasn't kind.
He faced the ring. "Enough for strength," he called when sweat slicked his back and the dust had turned the edges of his breath to iron. "You've seen what you need to."
"Now. Endurance."
A rumble of hooves answered. Men brought the unsaddled mounts, manes combed, eyes bright. A boy walked beside each with a hand on the cheek, soothing; Drogo marked which boys could calm a horse with a palm and which couldn't.
He swung onto his stallion's back bare, no rope, no strap. The horse danced under him and then stilled when Drogo's weight found its home. He lifted a hand again.
"Ride to the standing sun," he said. "No water skins. No halt. If you break, break outside the hooves of others."
A dozen riders slid in beside him without waiting for courage to cool: Qharo; Temmo, which surprised him—smith hands could be iron but not always wind; the boy from last night with the too-big arakh (he shot the boy a look that promised he would be watched); three old men who had the long look of former kos; four women—one the knife-lean one from last night, one broad-shouldered with a scar across her scalp, one with a face like a hawk, one young and angry enough to bleed energy.
"Go," Drogo said, and put his heels in.
They started at an easy lope, then stretched. The grass peeled back under the horses' hooves. The world cleared. Endurance was not only for the body. It was decisions: when to lean forward, when to settle, how to breathe so the horse borrowed your rhythm instead of fighting it.
An hour in, the first boy fell. Not off—back. He pulled his horse up trembling, throat raw with effort not to cry. He did not cry. He waved them on with a jaw set too hard for his face. Drogo marked him: not ready now; perhaps later. Another hour, the hawk-faced woman slid off her mount and jogged beside it to keep from cramping, then climbed back when her breath evened. Good.
The standing sun burned toward zenith. Lips cracked. Breath rasped. Saddles were missed; muscles that thought they knew riding learned what riding was when there was nothing to lean on. Temmo's shoulders rolled like a smith at the forge; his seat stayed true. Qharo never looked away from the line Drogo had set—there,there,there—eyes half-lidded like a man who trusts the rhythm and lets the ground come to him.
At the hardest point—when the body lies that it has nothing left—Drogo felt STAMINA answer like a second lung. Breath smoothed. The ache in the hip stopped being a command and settled into being a companion. He did not grin. He kept his jaw loose and his gaze far. The line held.
When the sun stood overhead and began to tip, when the world smelled of hot grass and the backs of horses and the faintest slice of water somewhere that wasn't there, he raised his hand and slowed. Not to a stop—never stop where the strain breaks. He let them come down through the gears—run to canter, canter to trot, trot to walk, walk to halt—and only then slid to the ground.
Men and women bent double, hands on knees. One old ko spat blood and grinned like a wolf. The boy who had jogged earlier stood with shaking legs and a face set in fury against his own limits. Temmo rolled his shoulders, face slate, hands bleeding from where he'd caught mane when his balance faltered once and he refused to fall. Qharo stood very still, chest rising and falling like a bellows. The knife-lean woman had tears on her face and did not pretend otherwise.
Drogo nodded.
"Oath," he said, and they followed him back to the ring with the pride of people who had not broken.
The brazier glowed banked coals. The singer stood with his cracked zither and did not sing; the air didn't want music yet. Daenerys waited on the far side, the dragons restless and curious on a low stand they had made for them from an old shield and three rocks. She looked not like a goddess or a witch, but like a decision that had been made and would not be unmade.
Drogo faced the ring. "Words," he said, "bind as much as blood. Bind them together."
He drew his arakh—not to use, but to hold as a line—and set the flat of it across the brazier so the heat licked steel and did not scorch it. He lifted his other hand, palm out. "Your oath," he said simply. "To me. To her. To the least under our banner."
They came.
Qharo first. He did not posture. He put his palm over the heat and held it a heartbeat longer than comfort, then drew a knife and nicked his thumb clean.
He squeezed blood onto the steel, eyes on Drogo's, then turned and pressed his thumb to the black dragon hatchling's little brow without flinching when it hissed.
"Khal," he said. "Khaleesi."
He found words that belonged to him.
"If she is insulted, I kill. If you are struck, I kill. If a child is taken, I ride until my horse dies and then I run. If you die, I will follow."
"Good," Drogo said, voice not loud. "Stand there." He pointed to his right.
Temmo came next. He did not cut his flesh first. He unwrapped a strip of leather from his wrist—a smith's thong, black with years—and laid it over the arakh's flat until it smoked and shrank, then nicked himself and pressed the blood into the leather.
"I have made edges for men who did not deserve them," he said, voice like a hammer on dull metal.
"I will not again. I am yours." He glanced at Daenerys—at the dragons—at the world beyond them. "I am hers."
Drogo's mouth moved before he could stop it. "Stand to my left."
One by one they came. The hawk-faced woman cut a lock from her own braid—humility—and burned it on the steel; the smoke smelled sharp as pride rearranging itself. The young angry woman pressed her palm and hissed and kept pressing.
The old ko bared his teeth at the pain and then laughed in it, as if to say this is the same old road; I know it. The boy with the too-big arakh looked at his own thin braid, swallowed, cut the end of it—small sacrifice, honest—and held his bleeding hand out without shaking.
Not all passed.
A broad man with gold rings at his wrist stepped forward, opened his mouth, and found his wife looking at him from the ring. Whatever lived in his eyes loosened then and he said, "I cannot."
He stepped back. The air did not hate him; it only moved around him differently. Drogo pointed. "Take what is yours and ride," he said. "No one will chase you. If you turn blade on those who stay, I take your hand." The man nodded once, grateful. There was strength in knowing your shape.
Another hesitated, then tried to make a joke of it. The ring did not laugh. He slunk away red-faced and small. A third made a big show and then burned himself by accident and cursed the fire and the steel and the gods and would not admit that the pain was not the enemy.
Drogo sent him out with a flick of his chin. "Not yet. Maybe never."
When the line thinned, when the brazier's heat had sunk into the ground and into the ring of men and women who now smelled of ash and skin and iron, Drogo lifted the arakh from the coals and sheathed it.
He looked to his right. Qharo stood with his split ear and his steady eyes. To his left, Temmo stilled his burnt hands. They had not asked to be named. They had proven and then kept their mouths shut.
Drogo stepped forward until the ring could taste his breath.
"I said last night," he said, "that I am not whole without shadows. My shadows fell. Today, two rose."
He put his palm to Qharo's chest. The man did not flinch.
"Blood of my blood," Drogo said. The ring made a small sound—satisfaction, surprise.
He turned to Temmo, laid his palm flat over the smith's sternum where skin had reddened from the brazier.
"Blood of my blood." Temmo's scarred hands curled, then settled open again. He did not smile.
He said, simply, "Khal."
The ring breathed out. Men nodded. Women did not nod; they measured.
Daenerys stepped to his shoulder, dragons restless song on the edge of hearing. "Two," she said, approval in the number. "The third will find us when it is time."
"Or we will find them," Drogo said, and did not correct the pronoun.
He lifted his hands one last time, palms open.
"You were buried last night," he said.
"You bled today. You will sweat this afternoon and you will sleep tonight. Then we build."
"What first, Khal?" someone called, younger than the courage in his voice.
Drogo didn't look at the speaker. He looked at the circle—faces that had knelt, bled, and stood. He set his words like stakes.
"First," he said, "we take back what was stolen."
Murmurs—eager, wary.
"Pono rode because he thought me dead," he went on. "Jhaqo took half because he thought me hollow. They did what riders do when a Khal falls. They were not wrong yesterday."
He let that hang for a heartbeat.
"They are wrong now."
Heads lifted. A few smiles, sharp and mean.
He turned enough to catch Daenerys at the edge of his vision. She was already watching him, that small dangerous smile alive again. He spoke for the ring, but the next breath was for her.
"Khaleesi," he said, "gather the tail of the camp to a head. Women to count grain and salt meat. Boys to fetch arrows and mend tack. Old hands to set rope and wheel, to bind what we carry tight."
His voice cut outward again. "If you cannot wield an arakh, you will wield a needle, a hammer, or a pot. Strength is many-shaped."
He pointed, orders thrown into motion.
"Qharo—scouts. Four points of the wind. Bring me where Pono and Jhaqo have gone to by nightfall. Temmo—edge every arakh that stays. Dull steel is shame."
He raised his chin.
"We will ride lean," he said. "We will move like a knife. We will not chase a sea—we will make a current. Those who left rode from a corpse. Let them look up and see a Khal."
He glanced at Daenerys again, voice soft enough for only the nearest to hear.
"Moon of my life—now we shall move."
"We move," she answered, and lifted the black hatchling; its thin scream split the air clean.
Men took the orders and followed with their bodies. Women took it into their hands. Children took it under their feet. The camp moved.
Drogo stepped out of the ring and into the work.