The dosh khaleen had been right about one thing.
He will be the stallion who mounts the world — that was the prophecy spoken under the Mother of Mountains, the old woman's voice carrying across the gathered khalasar while the firelight turned everything gold. Daenerys had stood there with her swollen belly and her borrowed memories and understood, in a way none of them could, exactly what the words meant.
Not a son. Not a conqueror on horseback.
Three dragons.
The Dothraki measured greatness in horseflesh — speed, power, the thing that carried you above the ground and made you faster than anything that walked on two legs. What rode the world, then, if not a dragon? What was larger, older, more absolute?
She had kept that thought to herself. She intended to keep it to herself for a long time yet. The eggs sat in their cedar chest looking like polished stone, which was exactly what everyone believed them to be — fossilised relics from Asshai, worth a fortune as curiosities, worth nothing as anything else. That was the only reason she still had them. The moment anyone understood what she was carrying, she would have far larger problems than a dying husband.
She set the thought aside and focused on what she could actually do tonight.
The dressings she made from silk boiled in milk of the poppy were not a cure. She knew that before she started. The wound was past curing — the corruption had gone too deep, the blood magic wound through it like roots through old stone, and no amount of hot wine and clean linen was going to change the outcome. But there was a difference between dying in agony and dying with the pain blunted, and she could at least give him that much.
She wrapped the soaked silk around his chest in careful layers, working by candlelight while Irri held the bowl. When she was done, Drogo's breathing was still laboured, but the rigid tension in his jaw had eased slightly. His hands uncurled from the furs.
She watched him for a moment. Then she stood, pressed one hand to the small of her back, and turned away.
"Doreah. Move the bed."
Doreah looked up from where she was folding linen. "Khaleesi?"
Daenerys pointed at the central firepit — the iron-framed hearth set into the floor of the yurt, open to the sky through a gap in the ceiling above. The fire there burned clean and steady, throwing orange light across the wide tent floor.
"There. As close as it will go."
"You'll roast," Doreah said, with the particular frankness of a woman who had spent years saying difficult things to people who didn't want to hear them.
"I don't feel heat the way you do." Daenerys said it simply, because it was true, and because she was too tired to construct a more careful answer.
She had noticed it from the moment she woke up in this body. The sun that made everyone else squint and sweat had pressed against her skin like a warm hand, pleasant rather than punishing. The cooking fires that made the serving girls step back had drawn her forward. She had assumed at first it was the body's natural tolerance — some aspect of Dothraki life she hadn't accounted for.
She had stopped assuming that sometime around the third day.
While Doreah arranged the bedding, Daenerys opened the cedar chest.
They lay in their nest of dark velvet, the same as always — three eggs, each the size of a large melon, their surfaces covered in tiny interlocking scales that caught the light and threw it back in metallic ribbons. The deep green one with its bronze-dark markings. The pale cream one threaded through with gold. The black one, which was not quite black — in firelight it showed dark red at the heart of every scale, like coals seen through a grate.
She reached in and lifted the black egg with both hands.
The heat that moved through her palms was immediate and deep, the kind of warmth that reached past skin and settled somewhere underneath. She exhaled without meaning to. In another life she would have called it the feeling of a bath that was exactly the right temperature, or the first moment of sun after a long winter. Here, alone in a dying man's tent, she just held it against her chest and let her eyes close for a moment.
"Khaleesi?"
Doreah was watching her with an uncertain expression. Daenerys held out the egg.
"Tell me if it feels warm."
Doreah ran her palms over all three in turn, turning them slowly. "Cold," she said. "Same as always. Like river stones."
Daenerys took the black egg back without comment.
So. Only her.
She filed that away and called for supper.
The goose had been roasted with turnips and apple slices, the fat rendering down into the vegetables and turning everything soft and slightly sweet. It was the best thing she had eaten in this body — possibly the best thing she had eaten in either body, though her previous body had subsisted largely on hospital canteen rice and instant noodles through most of her twenties, so the competition was not fierce.
She ate until she felt the child shift in protest at the lack of space, and then she ate a little more.
Jhiqui and Irri picked at the roasted vegetables and left the meat mostly untouched. The Dothraki girls had been raised on horsemeat and mare's milk and found everything else faintly suspicious. Doreah had half a bowl of broth and declared herself full, in the serene way of a woman from Lys who had learned early that appetite was something you managed.
"Give the rest to Ser Jorah," Daenerys said, when she finally set down the bread she'd been using to clean the pot. "All of it."
She bathed, checked that Irri had given Drogo his mare's milk, and climbed into the bed that Doreah had positioned close to the firepit. The warmth pressed against her face and bare arms. She pulled the furs up anyway — not for warmth, but because there was something grounding about weight.
Irri was asleep within minutes, her breathing slow and even, utterly unbothered by the sound of Drogo's discomfort from across the yurt. Dothraki girls slept the way they rode — without wasted effort, deeply committed.
Daenerys lay awake.
She drew the black egg close, tucking it against the curve of her belly, and felt the two sources of heat press together — the egg and the child, both alive in their own way, both hers to protect.
The original girl's memories came in fragments when she didn't try to force them. A cold room in Braavos when she was very small. A kind old knight whose face she could see clearly but whose name kept slipping sideways. The years after — Pentos, Myr, Tyrosh, Qohor, city after city, the two silver-haired Targaryens showing up at magisters' doors and being received warmly until they weren't, sleeping in the best guest rooms until those rooms became servants' quarters and then stopped being offered at all.
Viserys had called himself the last dragon. He had believed it with the total conviction of a man who needed to believe it to survive. He had made her carry that belief with her everywhere, because if she doubted it she became another weight to manage, and he had enough weights already.
She had been afraid of everything for so long that she had stopped noticing the fear. It had become the baseline. The texture of every day.
The fire crackled. Somewhere outside, a horse shifted and was still.
You took this body, she thought, looking at the orange light through the dark wool of her lashes. You owe it something. The least you can do is try.
She turned the thought over. Examined it from different angles. Reached a conclusion.
Then she sat up, moved the egg gently aside, and extended her bare hand toward the firepit.
Not close enough to feel the heat yet. Then closer. Then closer still, until the warmth became pressure, became the edge of something she would normally have pulled back from.
She did not pull back.
The flame bent toward her fingers — slightly, just slightly, the way a candle bends toward a draft. She felt it against her skin the way she felt the sun: present, alive, not quite painful. The fine hairs on the back of her hand did not singe. The skin did not redden.
She held it there for a long moment, watching.
Then she drew her hand back, curled her fingers in, and sat very still in the firelit dark.
Alright, she thought. Alright then.
She settled back into the furs, pulled the black egg close again, and closed her eyes.