DAENERYS
It would have been faster for them both to fly. Khal Jhaqo's bloodriders were still hot on their trail, and there were countless leagues of rugged country between them and any reliable shelter or succor. Dany did not intend to venture remotely near the crones and broken gods of Vaes Dothrak, and there were no other cities in the depths of the Dothraki sea. Jorah said that they were close to its southeastern terminus, where it bordered Lhazar and the sandstone mountains, and they would have to keep striking east with all speed to escape their pursuers.
Thus, it would have been much quicker to wing the miles away on dragonback, together. But Jorah and Drogon were equally mistrustful of having anything to do with each other, and besides, Dany was none so sure that she wanted to permit such intimacy when she still had not entirely forgiven him. If she was in the air and Jorah riding below, on the fine blood-bay stallion they'd managed to steal from Jhaqo's herds, she could always give Drogon the spur, fly off and leave him behind forever. Mayhaps she would do it, too, but not today. Not yet. Of course, the downside to the plan was that on a clear hot day, such as they all were, anyone within a hundred miles could track them at leisure, and Jhaqo's kos were closer than that. With their khal dead, it was their duty only to live long enough to avenge him, then follow him joyously into the night lands.
I should have killed them too. But there had been no time, not with Jhaqo already screaming as he burned. Jorah had sustained a minor wound as he held Jhaqo's two bloodriders off long enough for Dany to mount Drogon and take to the air, but nothing bad enough to slow their escape – though Dany did suspect that it pained him more than he wanted to let on. He will never admit to weakness before me.
She wondered what she'd left behind in that camp. Jhaqo's mighty khalasar would splinter as fast as had her sun-and-stars'; power was always an illusion, but never more so than among the Dothraki. If there was any way to hold them to fealty, she might have led them to Westeros by now, but instead there were merely another dozen khalasars where there had been one, who would roam and fight and decimate each other in turn. It almost made Dany consider if she'd been too hasty in burning Jhaqo. True, the circumstances had not permitted time for reflection, and there had been no doubt that he deserved his fate. But a khal who had become nearly as powerful as Drogo, who'd been willing to travel to Asshai. . .
It was no matter, Dany told herself. Jhaqo betrayed my sun-and-stars while he lay dying, I could not dishonor his memory by then turning to such a man. Yet in her head, she could hear Ser Jorah's voice, as she had so often heard it after she banished him. Drogo is dead and gone, Princess. You owe him nothing. And once you swore that you would never turn to slaves either.
Angrily Dany shook her head, aware of how absurd it was to be arguing with Jorah in her thoughts when the flesh-and-blood man rode just below her. You told me to do that, she accused him. You told me to make for Slaver's Bay – of course you would, you were a slaver when you fled Ned Stark's justice. You told me to buy Unsullied, you sold me, spied on me, kissed me. . . you. . .
She shook her head again, dug her heel against Drogon's side, and had to clutch for dear life as the black dragon shot forward as if launched from a catapult. Wind screamed through her hair, the horizon twisted and turned as they rose and plummeted. Dany held on until her knuckles were white, laughing and screaming all at once. She had ridden Drogon long enough to know that he did it for his amusement as much as hers, but also to remind her that this was his domain, that she always touched him at her peril. Three mounts must you ride, one to bed and one to dread and one to love. . . if Daario was the first and Drogon the second, then who was the third?
Ser Jorah reprimanded her for her carelessness that evening. They had pitched camp near the only fresh water they could find, a spring that had carved out a sandstone cave just large enough for two. Despite which, Dany had insisted Jorah bed down in the grass, and he had not gainsaid her – in that, at least. "My queen, it is too dangerous for you to cavort like that. There are eyes everywhere, and no khalasar rides blind. You have many enemies among the Dothraki, and have just made – "
"A dozen more. I know." Dany knelt in the mud and scooped a handful of the lukewarm, gritty water to her mouth. She had not yet told Jorah where she intended to make – he would undoubtedly be good for a barrage of more objections. Nonetheless, she did not want to visit the feared shadowbinders of the east without at least one stout sword at her back. Mirri Maz Duur told me that she learned her craft there, and if the Asshai'i truly mean me ill, Ser Jorah will not be enough to stop them. But every time she thought of it, the calling grew stronger. When the sun rises in the west and sets in the east. Likely it was but another mad hope, but might she also find the answer to the bloodmagic she had paid for, the cure to her barrenness?
Ser Jorah, meanwhile, was scowling at her. Dany splashed the water on her face and arms, and rose to her feet. "I have told you. I am not your fragile, fainting lady, for you to shelter and coddle. If and when I require your counsel, I will ask for it. I have Ser Barristan, I have not lacked for good advice."
"Is that what Meereen was?" Mormont squatted down, a brutish powerful figure in the gathering dusk, and began to skin a rabbit he'd caught. "Good advice?"
His arrogance still rankled her beyond belief. "By which you mean to say that if I had not been so female and imprudent as to exile you, none of this would have happened?" Dany snapped. "That you alone would have found the Harpy, stopped my dragons from killing children, placated all those who wanted the pits reopened, and known the locusts were poisoned, is that so? Say that is so, Jorah Mormont, and I will name you liar and order you from my sight forever. Do not dare presume that there will be a third chance."
"I do not," he said hoarsely. "The only thing I know for certain is that you would never have had to marry a man who desired to kill you, take your dragons and your crown and everything you have ever stood for, and brazenly rule in your name."
"No man but you, in other words?" Dany was not mollified in the least. "I wed Hizdahr for peace."
"What peace?" her bear asked. "What peace, my queen?"
To disguise the fact that she had no answer for him, Dany turned away. She went to sit by Drogon, who lifted his head and gave her the same look he had when he had allowed Jhaqo to put her into the cage. He blew a languorous gust of smoke from his nostrils, then with a few beats of his wings, lifted off. He looked fiercely primordial against the blue-and-peach shadows of the setting sun, and the chorus of birdsong and small animals in the grass went silent almost immediately. He is not even half grown, if the tales are true.
Dany stood there watching as he banked and soared out of sight. It was wise for him to go; Jhaqo's bloodriders would certainly follow him, and if he led them a merry chase, he could buy her valuable time. Conversely, it also meant that her only protection was Jorah's sword, and she had none at all from Jorah himself. She had so much missed the memory of him, but the man was so contrary, so stubborn, so proud, so. . . real. My bear. But she was no maiden fair.
"You have always given me good counsel," she said at last. "You always protected me against those who would harm me. From everyone except yourself."
Ser Jorah flinched. Without a word he continued skinning and roasting the rabbit over the small cookfire he'd built, with slightly more attention than necessary. Then when it was dripping with crackling, he held it out to her. "Here. You must be hungry."
Dany hesitated, but she was. She accepted the rabbit and began to gnaw; her stomach was still slightly queasy from Drogon's aerial acrobatics and the last traces of the illness that had claimed her in the plains. Yet there was only the one rabbit, she realized when she'd already eaten most of it, and she tried to quash a flicker of guilt. She tore the last leg off and gave it to Jorah.
He looked at her, startled. It is the first gift he has received from my hands since before I knew of his treachery. She hoped he would not make overmuch of it. I merely do not want him to starve. She had meant to be more gracious to him, more queenly, but his continued refusal to humble himself vexed her. If you had but begged my forgiveness in Meereen, after you and Selmy took the city for me, I might have pardoned you then. But you would not, you would not see. . .
Yet watching him as he ate, the slaver's brand on his cheek was the only thing she could see. And it made her wonder how much lower she wanted him brought, so she could inspect his wounds at leisure and determine whether they were as painful as her own. She did want to know where he'd been and what he'd done. He has been made a slave, but what sort of chains has he worn?
"Why did you come here?" It sounded harsh again, too harsh. "Why did you come back?"
He finished the rabbit and tossed the bone into the grass. "Call me a fool."
"You are a fool," Dany told him. "Beyond all doubt. What have you done that you thought I would change my mind?"
He glanced at her again, then away. "I was going to bring you the Imp."
"The Imp?" Dany repeated, voice rising in astonishment. Of all the strange things she had seen across the wide world, all the grotesqueries and menageries both man and beast, the slaves, the pyramids, the harpies, the horses, the weird and the wild and the savage, there was only one man that that name could refer to, a man so infamous that his legend spanned the narrow sea. Jorah had told her about his perversions: Lord Tywin's deformed, debauched dwarf son, a kinslayer and a kingslayer and a rogue, the worst of all the Lannisters if half the tales were true. And her bear, her sweet blind bear, thought that she would welcome the company of such a man as an incentive to forgive him? It was so ludicrous that she could only blurt out, "Why?"
"Tyrion Lannister has had a particularly putrid run of luck recently." Jorah's mouth might have twitched. "His sister the queen offered a lordship and a full pardon to any man, no matter how lowborn or heinous in misdeeds, who brought her his ugly head. If all I wanted was to go home – that would have been sufficient to retire me to Bear Island in peace for the rest of my days – I would have done it."
"Offered a lordship because he killed her son," Dany said, "the boy king, at his own wedding feast. Joffrey Baratheon was a monster and an usurper, and no one grieves his death save his mother, but I still cannot account this to Tyrion's credit."
"Can you not?" Jorah's fists clenched. "Can you understand, then, how fortunate I was to find the Imp in a brothel in Volantis, a chance any exiled, broken man like me would dream of? I could have taken him straight back to King's Landing, I would have had my home, my forgiveness – but I didn't. Can you understand that, my queen? That I came back – that I would have given you the prize – because to go home would have meant nothing without you?"
He was beginning to frighten her. She had never seen her bear angry at her before, not like this. "I do not belong to you," she said weakly. "I am not owed for – "
"No, Daenerys," he said. "Gods, you're not. If all I am to you is a traitor who cannot be redeemed no matter what, I beg of you, make an end. Slit my throat here and now, fly away on your dragon, and be the queen you are meant to be. But for the sake of your vengeance, if nothing else, do not leave me to exist like this."
With that he dropped to his knees, as he had on rescuing her, and laid his knife once more before her feet. "I have wronged you. How many times must I acknowledge it? What other humiliation do you desire of me? When we return to Meereen, you may dress me up as the bear and watch me play out the mummers' farce with the dwarfs. Tyrion and the girl we found, Penny. They joust and ride pigs and dogs. If that is what you want, say so. Laugh. Laugh and be satisfied."
Dany took a step back, unnerved. Yet that jarred something uncomfortably in her memory. Jousting dwarfs. The spectacle at the fighting pit, just before Strong Belwas took violently ill from the poisoned locusts. Hizdahr had told her that lions were meant to be unleashed on the dwarfs, and horrified, she had stopped it. The realization that it must have been Tyrion Lannister whose life she had saved – from being torn apart by a lion, the sigil of his House, in the most monumental of all the literally murderous ironies – almost made her choke.
"I have no need for jousting dwarfs," Dany said instead. "What role do you then imagine Tyrion could have possibly fulfilled for me?"
"Any one you wished." Still on his knees, Jorah shrugged. "From the state he's in, I doubt he'd have scrupled any more than me. All he wants now is to kill the rest of his family, and his family are those whom you could use to be killed. Not that I trust him a brass dam."
Dany flinched, though whether from the rawness in his voice or the bluntness of his words she did not know. She could indeed see that the path had been clear for Ser Jorah to take the Lannister queen's pension and pardon, to have back the life he'd spent so long hungering after from afar, and yet he had not. Mayhaps we can never go home again. In her mind, Dany saw the house with the red door, in Braavos.
"Leaving aside the rest," she said, "how on earth would Tyrion Lannister have happened to turn up in a brothel in Volantis? The brothel part I can well understand, given what is whispered of him, but Volantis, somewhat less."
"He told a fable of traveling up the Rhoyne with a motley band – some surly sellsword named Griff, his son, a septa, a maester, and two orphans of the Greenblood. Possibly others, but I can't recall. Our fat friend Magister Illyrio hid him at his mansion in Pentos, apparently, before sending him off with those folk. I think there must be more to them than meets the eye; the dwarf let slip that they've hired the Golden Company."
Dany frowned. The Golden Company had been founded by Aegor Rivers, Bittersteel, who had lost everything in the Blackfyre Rebellions and fled Westeros to keep the rebel cause alive in exile. They regarded all the Targaryen kings after Aegon the Unworthy as usurpers, a fact which did not presently endear them to her. Sellswords would be sellswords, a lesson she had learned bitterly from the Second Sons, but the fact of this unexpected connection unsettled her. "Does the Imp know who they are?" She could suddenly see a use unfolding for him after all.
"Aye," Ser Jorah answered grimly, "and he's not saying."
"He will." For a moment Dany considered turning back to Meereen, instead of continuing to Asshai. But no, she could not. To go forward you must go back. Everything she endeavored to accomplish would turn to mishap and disaster, unless she faced down her fate at last. And then, then she would –
Jorah's stolen horse, which was picketed nearby, pricked up its ears, tossed its head, and pawed the ground.
Jorah himself was instantly on alert. No longer the supplicant, he picked up his knife and came straight to his feet. There were movements in the dark nearby, and Dany's heart stopped. In the distraction of their argument, she had not even stopped to consider that instead of following the dragon as she expected, Jhaqo's bloodriders might well make for the spot where they'd seen it take off instead.
"Quick!" Jorah, plainly wising to the same thing, undid the hobbles, swung astride, and hauled her up pillion behind him. After almost a week of riding on Drogon's scaly bare back, everything about the horse and saddle felt alien to Dany, but she swallowed her protests. She clutched on tight around Jorah's burly chest as he kicked the stallion, and just in time. No sooner had they leapt the stream and galloped into the steppes than a fleet of arrows rattled onto the rocks where they'd just been sitting.
Dany hung on desperately as they careered and swerved through the long, tangled grass. She could hear shouts and curses in Dothraki, the hiss as another fall of arrows hailed down around them, and craned her head back, looking frantically for Drogon's shadow against the horns of the bloody moon. Undisciplined, inchoate, she tried what had always happened almost without her noticing: reaching beyond her own mind, her own skin, searching for him, searching. . .
The bushes exploded in front of them. Dany screamed, Jorah swore, and he veered the horse away just as the tongues of whips licked out like snakes, followed at once by three of Jhaqo's hard-charging kos. They unslung their arakhs with howls and hoots, and lunged.
Somehow, Jorah got his own longsword out in time. He awkwardly deflected the first blow, badly hampered by the need to protect Dany behind him, the four horses wheeling in a furious, tangled circle. Steel sang over Dany's head, so close that it would have shaved her hair away if it had not already burned. She ducked, struggled once more to reach Drogon, thought she had him, lost him again –
And then suddenly she was the only one on the horse's back, as Jorah vaulted down and came about to plant himself directly in the riders' path. "DAENERYS!" he roared at her. "Ride! Go! Go! Go!"
Is he mad? She recognized two of the kos as the ones who'd wounded him last time; this time, they'd bind him and drag him behind their horses in the dust, as had happened to that wineseller he'd stopped from poisoning her in the Western Market. Which was only necessary since he went tale-bearing to the Usurper that I was carrying Drogo's child. But it was her command that had incinerated Jhaqo, her command that meant they were pursued now. With or without Drogon, I am still a Targaryen. The blood of the dragon does not run.
Instead, she charged.
The three bloodriders were still preoccupied with Jorah. She had not ridden so fast or hard or well since her silver had given her wings for the first time. I am mad, said one voice in her head. Madness and greatness are but two sides of the same coin, said another. And then she smashed into the hindmost rider, whose back was turned to her, at a dead gallop.
He shouted, flailed, and lost his seat, crashing overboard as his arakh went flying out of his hand. He rolled over and tried to get back to his feet, but Dany brought the bay around and rode him down. She could feel the stallion's hooves crush bone and split vital organs, saw the dark glistening pool of blood in the moonlight, hear the horrible convulsive gasping noises he made. I have killed him. It made her want to exult, and it made her want to weep.
Behind her, Jorah was still hard pressed by the two surviving bloodriders, who had now noted that she was not such a negligible threat after all. "You are as much a monster as the great black one, whore," one of them spat, in Dothraki. "When we stake you up in camp, every frothing wood-hound will mount you high and low, and their seed and your westerlands blood will spew from your naked cunt like piss."
Jorah, who had also understood that, responded by charging him. The bloodrider smiled, jumped from his saddle, and crossed blades with the big knight in midair, flipping his arakh from hand to hand and slamming it down. A spray of blood followed, but Dany couldn't tell which of them it came from. Heart in her throat, she edged closer, knowing that she couldn't ride down the ko without riding down Jorah, considered if she should, cursed her hesitation, where was Drogon, gods damn it –
She had only a split second of warning. The first sign was all the hairs on the back of her neck standing cold, in ancient animal instinct. The second was the abrupt look of panic in the other bloodrider's eyes, as he had started to race toward her. He reined up, screaming something to his partner, still grappling on the ground with Jorah –
And then the next moment Dany was on the ground herself, pain exploding in the small of her back, gasping from where her wind had been thoroughly knocked out of her. She was only conscious of the great shadow that had bounded over her, the stallion fallen and screaming in agony, and the young bloodrider backing up and babbling some invocation in Dothraki, his eyes so wide that she could see their whites.
Drogon, she thought for a terrible moment, Drogon's gone mad – but it was not. As it skidded around, snarling, she saw instead.
It was a hrakkar, the monstrous white lion of the Dothraki sea, like the one her sun-and-stars had hunted, killed, and proudly given her its pelt. It stood as high at the shoulder as a good-sized pony, had claws half a foot long and scything, saber fangs. Dany watched it spring in what felt like slow motion.
The bloodrider fighting with Jorah rolled away and tried to cover his head, screaming. Too late. The hrakkar bit into his neck so violently that it almost ripped his head off, and a gush of arterial scarlet dyed the fur on its muzzle. The bloodrider's lips were still moving in agonized prayer when the hrakkar flung him aside like a toy.
The last of Jhaqo's kos was clearly thinking that running away, and thus leaving his khal unavenged, was a far more preferable fate than facing down that beast, the mangled bodies of his fellows lying sprawled and leaking in the grass. If so, he didn't have time to do anything about it. The hrakkar gathered its mighty muscled haunches under it, and leapt.
Man and lion soared, beautifully, then came down to earth with a crash. The bloodrider was trying to wrestle his arm between the snarling jaws and his neck, but so precisely had the hrakkar judged its pounce that his terrified horse was galloping away, riderless, into the brush. With the stallion mortally wounded, it was Dany's only chance. She put her head down and sprinted, trying to block out the horrible cacophony: groans and screams and roars and squelches. She did not dare look to see if the hrakkar was coming for her – dragon, where was her dragon, where was her child –
The horse was still fleeing away from her. She couldn't run fast enough to catch it. Sawgrass and cordweed tangled around her ankles, and she fell headlong again. She heard an unmistakable roar, caught a heart-stopping glimpse of a massive white specter, charging toward her – and then heard Ser Jorah bellow, "BEAST! OVER HERE, BEAST!"
The hrakkar burned to a halt, turned, and took him up on the offer. Dany's heart shriveled in her chest as she pulled herself up again, muddy and sobbing. She could just see the indistinct shapes of her bear and the lion, coming to primal grips in the grass – strong, he'd always been so strong, but no man was that strong. Utterly beyond any semblance of knowing what she was doing, Dany felt around in the darkness, got hold of a nicely sized rock, ran as close to the fight as she dared, and hurled it.
The rock – praise the gods, praise the gods – struck the hrakkar hard and squarely between the eyes, with a sound like a dropped fruit. It rolled off Jorah, leaving him prostrate and bloody on the ground, and turned back toward Dany with murder in its golden eyes.
She stood frozen, empty-handed. Jorah did not appear to be quite dead, but he wasn't getting up. His sword lay at least fifteen feet away from her – she'd never reach it in time, never. She waited for the inevitable. She wanted to close her eyes and pray that it would be over quickly.
And then at last – her mind was not quite her own, was darker and stronger and scaly, alive with flame and a restless, searching intelligence. She could see herself from above, a girl standing before the lion – and am I not indeed? – with the bodies of the three dead bloodriders and Jorah as well. She knew, and she heard, and she answered.
Drogon folded his wings and dove. The hrakkar stood its ground, roaring a challenge, and the dragon's jaws – Dany's jaws – opened in turn. They closed around the thick ruff of the hrakkar's mane, and Dany tasted acrid fur and flesh in her mouth, felt the pain as the lion clamped down on Drogon's vulnerable, leathery wing. Like two titans, the beasts crashed and thundered against each other, talon against claw, Drogon's barbed tail lashing furiously against the hrakkar's back paws. Then she wrenched her head back, and spat flame.
The hrakkar yowled in agony, but its fur was too sodden with the blood of Jhaqo's kos to catch. Snarling, it tightened its grip on Drogon's wing, tearing at the membrane, and Dany, in her own body, knew a sudden, rising panic. If the dragon was too hurt to fly, she was done for.
Somehow, though, she was still one with him, and she gave him what of her strength she could. Drogon blew another gust, hot as the seven hells, and the night was seared with black flame. Blackfyre, she thought inanely. The mud she was lying in felt almost cool. Then the hrakkar was screaming, sounding almost human, and she remembered nothing more for a very long time.
It was Ser Jorah who finally came to lift her up. He was limping horribly, blood staining the cloth he'd tied around his slashed left shoulder, and Drogon himself was keening from the pain of his torn wing. The corpse of the hrakkar was smoking, dawn was turning the eastern sky a pale pearly grey, and Dany felt as fragile and raw and new as if she'd been reborn there in the darkness. Without a word she accepted Jorah's hand, then flung her arms around him, buried her face in his chest, and began to weep.
He held her hard, though the effort of standing upright was clearly excruciating, and did not utter a word until she was through. He offered her a corner of his tunic to wipe her eyes, and she did. Then he said only, "Can Drogon still fly?"
"I – don't know." They had to find somewhere to tend their wounds, that much was plain. But she could not go to Qarth; Xaro Xhoan Daxos had left a bloodstained glove on a pillow before departing Meereen, indicating that he and his noble Qartheen brethren – the Pureborn, the Thirteen, the Tourmaline Brotherhood, the Ancient Guild of Spicers – had declared war on her. It may be the first time they have ever stood together. It had saddened Dany then, and she felt it the more keenly now. All because I struck off the chains of the slaves, and would not set sail for Westeros when he asked of me.
"Where is it we make, my queen?" Ser Jorah asked urgently, reading her mind. "Where now?"
To go forward you must go back. The choice had not changed, nor the need. If Drogon could still fly, they would simply have to do it, as far and as fast as possible. On dragonback for as long as they could stand it, night and day, over the Red Waste, east to the lands under the shadow, they could make it in perhaps a fortnight.
She lifted her eyes to his, wiping the blood out of her eyes. "Asshai," she said. "We must go to Asshai."
For a moment he did not answer, and she feared that he thought she had lost her mind. Then he nodded once and did not ask questions.
Drogon could in fact still fly, it transpired. Dany crawled onto his back; the hrakkar had clawed her, rendering her fully as damaged as the other two, and the wounds throbbed excruciatingly. But she grimaced and settled herself, then beckoned Jorah to sit behind her.
He paused, eyed Drogon with utmost suspicion, then climbed up. He was not immune to the heat emanating from the dragon the way Dany was, would be burned and scabbed from even a few hours' riding, but that could not be helped. He had already taken what supplies they had left from the saddlebags, and he hooked his legs over Drogon's pinions. The dragon huffed and snorted and snapped, but Dany, who had not yet left his mind entirely, calmed him with a touch.
Burdened with the extra weight and his own injury, steaming blood caked on his scales, Drogon flapped into the air. The ground fell away beneath them, the rolling plains of the Dothraki sea turning to nothing more than a blur. And Dany felt her breath or Drogon's, fire and blood, and turned them to the east and struck out for the Shadow.