She was breaking her fast on a bowl of cold shrimp-and-persimmon soup when
Irri brought her a Qartheen gown, an airy confection of ivory samite patterned
with seed pearls. “Take it away,” Dany said. “The docks are no place for lady’s
finery.”
If the Milk Men thought her such a savage, she would dress the part for them.
When she went to the stables, she wore faded sandsilk pants and woven grass
sandals. Her small breasts moved freely beneath a painted Dothraki vest, and a
curved dagger hung from her medallion belt. Jhiqui had braided her hair
Dothraki fashion, and fastened a silver bell to the end of the braid. “I have won
no victories,” she tried telling her handmaid when the bell tinkled softly.
Jhiqui disagreed. “You burned the maegi in their house of dust and sent their
souls to hell.”
That was Drogon’s victory, not mine, Dany wanted to say, but she held her
tongue. The Dothraki would esteem her all the more for a few bells in her hair.
She chimed as she mounted her silver mare, and again with every stride, but
neither Ser Jorah nor her bloodriders made mention of it. To guard her people
and her dragons in her absence, she chose Rakharo. Jhogo and Aggo would ride
with her to the waterfront.
They left the marble palaces and fragrant gardens behind and made their way
through a poorer part of the city where modest brick houses turned blind walls to
the street. There were fewer horses and camels to be seen, and a dearth of
palanquins, but the streets teemed with children, beggars, and skinny dogs the
color of sand. Pale men in dusty linen skirts stood beneath arched doorways to
watch them pass. They know who I am, and they do not love me. Dany could tell
from the way they looked at her.
Ser Jorah would sooner have tucked her inside her palanquin, safely hidden
behind silken curtains, but she refused him. She had reclined too long on satin
cushions, letting oxen bear her hither and yon. At least when she rode she felt as
though she was getting somewhere.
It was not by choice that she sought the waterfront. She was fleeing again. Her
whole life had been one long flight, it seemed. She had begun running in her
mother’s womb, and never once stopped. How often had she and Viserys stolen away in the black of night, a bare step ahead of the Usurper’s hired knives? But
it was run or die. Xaro had learned that Pyat Pree was gathering the surviving
warlocks together to work ill on her.
Dany had laughed when he told her. “Was it not you who told me warlocks
were no more than old soldiers, vainly boasting of forgotten deeds and lost
prowess?”
Xaro looked troubled. “And so it was, then. But now? I am less certain. It is
said that the glass candles are burning in the house of Urrathon Night-Walker,
that have not burned in a hundred years. Ghost grass grows in the Garden of
Gehane, phantom tortoises have been seen carrying messages between the
windowless houses on Warlock’s Way, and all the rats in the city are chewing
off their tails. The wife of Mathos Mallarawan, who once mocked a warlock’s
drab moth-eaten robe, has gone mad and will wear no clothes at all. Even fresh-
washed silks make her feel as though a thousand insects were crawling on her
skin. And Blind Sybassion the Eater of Eyes can see again, or so his slaves do
swear. A man must wonder.” He sighed. “These are strange times in Qarth. And
strange times are bad for trade. It grieves me to say so, yet it might be best if you
left Qarth entirely, and sooner rather than later.” Xaro stroked her fingers
reassuringly. “You need not go alone, though. You have seen dark visions in the
Palace of Dust, but Xaro has dreamed brighter dreams. I see you happily abed,
with our child at your breast. Sail with me around the Jade Sea, and we can yet
make it so! It is not too late. Give me a son, my sweet song of joy!”
Give you a dragon, you mean. “I will not wed you, Xaro.”
His face had grown cold at that. “Then go.”
“But where?”
“Somewhere far from here.”
Well, perhaps it was time. The people of her khalasar had welcomed the
chance to recover from the ravages of the red waste, but now that they were
plump and rested once again, they began to grow unruly. Dothraki were not
accustomed to staying long in one place. They were a warrior people, not made
for cities. Perhaps she had lingered in Qarth too long, seduced by its comforts
and its beauties. It was a city that always promised more than it would give you,
it seemed to her, and her welcome here had turned sour since the House of the
Undying had collapsed in a great gout of smoke and flame. Overnight the
Qartheen had come to remember that dragons were dangerous. No longer did
they vie with each other to give her gifts. Instead the Tourmaline Brotherhood
had called openly for her expulsion, and the Ancient Guild of Spicers for her
death. It was all Xaro could do to keep the Thirteen from joining them.
But where am I to go? Ser Jorah proposed that they journey farther east, away from her enemies in the Seven Kingdoms. Her bloodriders would sooner have
returned to their great grass sea, even if it meant braving the red waste again.
Dany herself had toyed with the idea of settling in Vaes Tolorro until her
dragons grew great and strong. But her heart was full of doubts. Each of these
felt wrong, somehow . . . and even when she decided where to go, the question
of how she would get there remained troublesome.
Xaro Xhoan Daxos would be no help to her, she knew that now. For all his
professions of devotion, he was playing his own game, not unlike Pyat Pree. The
night he asked her to leave, Dany had begged one last favor of him. “An army, is
it?” Xaro asked. “A kettle of gold? A galley, perhaps?”
Dany blushed. She hated begging. “A ship, yes.”
Xaro’s eyes had glittered as brightly as the jewels in his nose. “I am a trader,
Khaleesi. So perhaps we should speak no more of giving, but rather of trade. For
one of your dragons, you shall have ten of the finest ships in my fleet. You need
only say that one sweet word.”
“No,” she said.
“Alas,” Xaro sobbed, “that was not the word I meant.”
“Would you ask a mother to sell one of her children?”
“Whyever not? They can always make more. Mothers sell their children every
day.”
“Not the Mother of Dragons.”
“Not even for twenty ships?”
“Not for a hundred.”
His mouth curled downward. “I do not have a hundred. But you have three
dragons. Grant me one, for all my kindnesses. You will still have two, and thirty
ships as well.”
Thirty ships would be enough to land a small army on the shore of Westeros.
But I do not have a small army. “How many ships do you own, Xaro?”
“Eighty-three, if one does not count my pleasure barge.”
“And your colleagues in the Thirteen?”
“Among us all, perhaps a thousand.”
“And the Spicers and the Tourmaline Brotherhood?”
“Their trifling fleets are of no account.”
“Even so,” she said, “tell me.”
“Twelve or thirteen hundred for the Spicers. No more than eight hundred for
the Brotherhood.”
“And the Asshai’i, the Braavosi, the Summer Islanders, the Ibbenese, and all
the other peoples who sail the great salt sea, how many ships do they have? All
together?” “Many and more,” he said irritably. “What does this matter?”
“I am trying to set a price on one of the three living dragons in the world.”
Dany smiled at him sweetly. “It seems to me that one-third of all the ships in the
world would be fair.”
Xaro’s tears ran down his cheeks on either side of his jewel-encrusted nose.
“Did I not warn you not to enter the Palace of Dust? This is the very thing I
feared. The whispers of the warlocks have made you as mad as Mallarawan’s
wife. A third of all the ships in the world? Pah. Pah, I say. Pah.”
Dany had not seen him since. His seneschal brought her messages, each cooler
than the last. She must quit his house. He was done feeding her and her people.
He demanded the return of his gifts, which she had accepted in bad faith. Her
only consolation was that at least she’d had the great good sense not to marry
him.
The warlocks whispered of three treasons . . . once for blood and once for
gold and once for love. The first traitor was surely Mirri Maz Duur, who had
murdered Khal Drogo and their unborn son to avenge her people. Could Pyat
Pree and Xaro Xhoan Daxos be the second and the third? She did not think so.
What Pyat did was not for gold, and Xaro had never truly loved her.
The streets grew emptier as they passed through a district given over to
gloomy stone warehouses. Aggo went before her and Jhogo behind, leaving Ser
Jorah Mormont at her side. Her bell rang softly, and Dany found her thoughts
returning to the Palace of Dust once more, as the tongue returns to a space left
by a missing tooth. Child of three, they had called her, daughter of death, slayer
of lies, bride of fire. So many threes. Three fires, three mounts to ride, three
treasons. “The dragon has three heads,” she sighed. “Do you know what that
means, Jorah?”
“Your Grace? The sigil of House Targaryen is a three-headed dragon, red on
black.”
“I know that. But there are no three-headed dragons.”
“The three heads were Aegon and his sisters.”
“Visenya and Rhaenys,” she recalled. “I am descended from Aegon and
Rhaenys through their son Aenys and their grandson Jaehaerys.”
“Blue lips speak only lies, isn’t that what Xaro told you? Why do you care
what the warlocks whispered? All they wanted was to suck the life from you,
you know that now.”
“Perhaps,” she said reluctantly. “Yet the things I saw . . .”
“A dead man in the prow of a ship, a blue rose, a banquet of blood . . . what
does any of it mean, Khaleesi? A mummer’s dragon, you said. What is a
mummer’s dragon, pray?” “A cloth dragon on poles,” Dany explained. “Mummers use them in their
follies, to give the heroes something to fight.”
Ser Jorah frowned.
Dany could not let it go. “His is the song of ice and fire, my brother said. I’m
certain it was my brother. Not Viserys, Rhaegar. He had a harp with silver
strings.”
Ser Jorah’s frown deepened until his eyebrows came together. “Prince
Rhaegar played such a harp,” he conceded. “You saw him?”
She nodded. “There was a woman in a bed with a babe at her breast. My
brother said the babe was the prince that was promised and told her to name him
Aegon.”
“Prince Aegon was Rhaegar’s heir by Elia of Dorne,” Ser Jorah said. “But if
he was this prince that was promised, the promise was broken along with his
skull when the Lannisters dashed his head against a wall.”
“I remember,” Dany said sadly. “They murdered Rhaegar’s daughter as well,
the little princess. Rhaenys, she was named, like Aegon’s sister. There was no
Visenya, but he said the dragon has three heads. What is the song of ice and
fire?”
“It’s no song I’ve ever heard.”
“I went to the warlocks hoping for answers, but instead they’ve left me with a
hundred new questions.”
By then there were people in the streets once more. “Make way,” Aggo
shouted, while Jhogo sniffed at the air suspiciously. “I smell it, Khaleesi,” he
called. “The poison water.” The Dothraki distrusted the sea and all that moved
upon it. Water that a horse could not drink was water they wanted no part of.
They will learn, Dany resolved. I braved their sea with Khal Drogo. Now they
can brave mine.
Qarth was one of the world’s great ports, its great sheltered harbor a riot of
color and clangor and strange smells. Winesinks, warehouses, and gaming dens
lined the streets, cheek by jowl with cheap brothels and the temples of peculiar
gods. Cutpurses, cutthroats, spellsellers, and moneychangers mingled with every
crowd. The waterfront was one great marketplace where the buying and selling
went on all day and all night, and goods might be had for a fraction of what they
cost at the bazaar, if a man did not ask where they came from. Wizened old
women bent like hunchbacks sold flavored waters and goat’s milk from glazed
ceramic jugs strapped to their shoulders. Seamen from half a hundred nations
wandered amongst the stalls, drinking spiced liquors and trading jokes in queer-
sounding tongues. The air smelled of salt and frying fish, of hot tar and honey, of
incense and oil and sperm. Aggo gave an urchin a copper for a skewer of honey-roasted mice and nibbled
them as he rode. Jhogo bought a handful of fat white cherries. Elsewhere they
saw beautiful bronze daggers for sale, dried squids and carved onyx, a potent
magical elixir made of virgin’s milk and shade of the evening, even dragon’s
eggs which looked suspiciously like painted rocks.
As they passed the long stone quays reserved for the ships of the Thirteen, she
saw chests of saffron, frankincense, and pepper being off-loaded from Xaro’s
ornate Vermillion Kiss. Beside her, casks of wine, bales of sourleaf, and pallets
of striped hides were being trundled up the gangplank onto the Bride in Azure, to
sail on the evening tide. Farther along, a crowd had gathered around the Spicer
galley Sunblaze to bid on slaves. It was well known that the cheapest place to
buy a slave was right off the ship, and the banners floating from her masts
proclaimed that the Sunblaze had just arrived from Astapor on Slaver’s Bay.
Dany would get no help from the Thirteen, the Tourmaline Brotherhood, or
the Ancient Guild of Spicers. She rode her silver past several miles of their
quays, docks, and storehouses, all the way out to the far end of the horseshoe-
shaped harbor where the ships from the Summer Islands, Westeros, and the Nine
Free Cities were permitted to dock.
She dismounted beside a gaming pit where a basilisk was tearing a big red dog
to pieces amidst a shouting ring of sailors. “Aggo, Jhogo, you will guard the
horses while Ser Jorah and I speak to the captains.”
“As you say, Khaleesi. We will watch you as you go.”
It was good to hear men speaking Valyrian once more, and even the Common
Tongue, Dany thought as they approached the first ship. Sailors, dockworkers,
and merchants alike gave way before her, not knowing what to make of this slim
young girl with silver-gold hair who dressed in the Dothraki fashion and walked
with a knight at her side. Despite the heat of the day, Ser Jorah wore his green
wool surcoat over chainmail, the black bear of Mormont sewn on his chest.
But neither her beauty nor his size and strength would serve with the men
whose ships they needed.
“You require passage for a hundred Dothraki, all their horses, yourself and
this knight, and three dragons?” said the captain of the great cog Ardent Friend
before he walked away laughing. When she told a Lyseni on the Trumpeteer that
she was Daenerys Stormborn, Queen of the Seven Kingdoms, he gave her a
deadface look and said, “Aye, and I’m Lord Tywin Lannister and shit gold every
night.” The cargomaster of the Myrish galley Silken Spirit opined that dragons
were too dangerous at sea, where any stray breath of flame might set the rigging
afire. The owner of Lord Faro’s Belly would risk dragons, but not Dothraki. “I’ll
have no such godless savages in my Belly, I’ll not.” The two brothers who captained the sister ships Quicksilver and Greyhound seemed sympathetic and
invited them into the cabin for a glass of Arbor red. They were so courteous that
Dany was hopeful for a time, but in the end the price they asked was far beyond
her means, and might have been beyond Xaro’s. Pinchbottom Petto and Sloe-
Eyed Maid were too small for her needs, Bravo was bound for the Jade Sea, and
Magister Manolo scarce looked seaworthy.
As they made their way toward the next quay, Ser Jorah laid a hand against
the small of her back. “Your Grace. You are being followed. No, do not turn.”
He guided her gently toward a brass-seller’s booth. “This is a noble work, my
queen,” he proclaimed loudly, lifting a large platter for her inspection. “See how
it shines in the sun?”
The brass was polished to a high sheen. Dany could see her face in it . . . and
when Ser Jorah angled it to the right, she could see behind her. “I see a fat brown
man and an older man with a staff. Which is it?”
“Both of them,” Ser Jorah said. “They have been following us since we left
Quicksilver.”
The ripples in the brass stretched the strangers queerly, making one man seem
long and gaunt, the other immensely squat and broad. “A most excellent brass,
great lady,” the merchant exclaimed. “Bright as the sun! And for the Mother of
Dragons, only thirty honors.”
The platter was worth no more than three. “Where are my guards?” Dany
declared. “This man is trying to rob me!” For Jorah, she lowered her voice and
spoke in the Common Tongue. “They may not mean me ill. Men have looked at
women since time began, perhaps it is no more than that.”
The brass-seller ignored their whispers. “Thirty? Did I say thirty? Such a fool
I am. The price is twenty honors.”
“All the brass in this booth is not worth twenty honors,” Dany told him as she
studied the reflections. The old man had the look of Westeros about him, and the
brown-skinned one must weigh twenty stone. The Usurper offered a lordship to
the man who kills me, and these two are far from home. Or could they be
creatures of the warlocks, meant to take me unawares?
“Ten, Khaleesi, because you are so lovely. Use it for a looking glass. Only
brass this fine could capture such beauty.”
“It might serve to carry nightsoil. If you threw it away, I might pick it up, so
long as I did not need to stoop. But pay for it?” Dany shoved the platter back
into his hands. “Worms have crawled up your nose and eaten your wits.”
“Eight honors,” he cried. “My wives will beat me and call me fool, but I am a
helpless child in your hands. Come, eight, that is less than it is worth.”
“What do I need with dull brass when Xaro Xhoan Daxos feeds me off plates of gold?” As she turned to walk off, Dany let her glance sweep over the
strangers. The brown man was near as wide as he’d looked in the platter, with a
gleaming bald head and the smooth cheeks of a eunuch. A long curving arakh
was thrust through the sweat-stained yellow silk of his bellyband. Above the
silk, he was naked but for an absurdly tiny iron-studded vest. Old scars
crisscrossed his tree-trunk arms, huge chest, and massive belly, pale against his
nut-brown skin.
The other man wore a traveler’s cloak of undyed wool, the hood thrown back.
Long white hair fell to his shoulders, and a silky white beard covered the lower
half of his face. He leaned his weight on a hardwood staff as tall as he was. Only
fools would stare so openly if they meant me harm. All the same, it might be
prudent to head back toward Jhogo and Aggo. “The old man does not wear a
sword,” she said to Jorah in the Common Tongue as she drew him away.
The brass merchant came hopping after them. “Five honors, for five it is
yours, it was meant for you.”
Ser Jorah said, “A hardwood staff can crack a skull as well as any mace.”
“Four! I know you want it!” He danced in front of them, scampering
backward as he thrust the platter at their faces.
“Do they follow?”
“Lift that up a little higher,” the knight told the merchant. “Yes. The old man
pretends to linger at a potter’s stall, but the brown one has eyes only for you.”
“Two honors! Two! Two!” The merchant was panting heavily from the effort
of running backward.
“Pay him before he kills himself,” Dany told Ser Jorah, wondering what she
was going to do with a huge brass platter. She turned back as he reached for his
coins, intending to put an end to this mummer’s farce. The blood of the dragon
would not be herded through the bazaar by an old man and a fat eunuch.
A Qartheen stepped into her path. “Mother of Dragons, for you.” He knelt and
thrust a jewel box into her face.
Dany took it almost by reflex. The box was carved wood, its mother-of-pearl
lid inlaid with jasper and chalcedony. “You are too generous.”
