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A Game of Thrones, Daenerys III

The knight gave his heels to his mount and started off again.

Dany rode close beside him.

“Still,” she said, “the common people are waiting for him. Magister Illyrio says they are sewing dragon banners and praying for Viserys to return from across the narrow sea to free them.”

“The common people pray for rain, healthy children, and a summer that never ends,” Ser Jorah told her.

“It is no matter to them if the high lords play their game of thrones, so long as they are left in peace.”

He gave a shrug. “They never are.”

Dany rode along quietly for a time, working his words like a puzzle box.

It went against everything that Viserys had ever told her to think that the people could care so little whether a true king or a usurper reigned over them.

Yet the more she thought on Jorah’s words, the more they rang of truth.

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A Game of Thrones, Daenerys III

“He is still the true king. He is…”

Jorah pulled up his horse and looked at her. “Truth now. Would you want to see Viserys sit a throne?”

Dany thought about that. “He would not be a very good king, would he?”

“There have been worse…but not many.”

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A Game of Thrones, Daenerys III

“I hit him,” she said, wonder in her voice. Now that it was over, it seemed like some strange dream that she had dreamed.

“Ser Jorah, do you think…he’ll be so angry when he gets back…” She shivered.

“I woke the dragon, didn’t I?”

Ser Jorah snorted. “Can you wake the dead, girl?

“Your brother Rhaegar was the last dragon, and he died on the Trident. Viserys is less than the shadow of a snake.”

His blunt words startled her. It seemed as though all the things she had always believed were suddenly called into question.

“You…you swore him your sword…”

“That I did, girl,” Ser Jorah said. “And if your brother is the shadow of a snake, what does that make his servants?” His voice was bitter.

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A Game of Thrones, Daenerys III

[Viserys] kept his silence, but he would not move, and his eyes were full of poison as they rode away.

Soon he was lost in the tall grass.

When they could not see him anymore, Dany grew afraid. “Will he find his way back?” she asked Ser Jorah as they rode.

“Even a man as blind as your brother should be able to follow our trail,” he replied.

“He is proud. He may be too shamed to come back.”

Jorah laughed. “Where else should he go? If he cannot find the khalasar, the khalasar will most surely find him. It is hard to drown in the Dothraki sea, child.”

Dany saw the truth of that. The khalasar was like a city on the march, but it did not march blindly.

Always scouts ranged far ahead of the main column, alert for any sign of game or prey or enemies, while outriders guarded their flanks.

They missed nothing, not here, in this land, the place where they had come from.

These plains were a part of them…and of her, now.

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A Game of Thrones, Daenerys III

“Take his horse,” Dany commanded Ser Jorah.

Viserys gaped at her. He could not believe what he was hearing; nor could Dany quite believe what she was saying. Yet the words came.

“Let my brother walk behind us back to the khalasar.”

Among the Dothraki, the man who does not ride was no man at all, the lowest of the low, without honor or pride.

“Let everyone see him as he is.”

“No!” Viserys screamed.

He turned to Ser Jorah, pleading in the Common Tongue with words the horsemen would not understand.

“Hit her, Mormont. Hurt her. Your king commands it. Kill these Dothraki dogs and teach her.”

The exile knight looked from Dany to her brother; she barefoot, with dirt between her toes and oil in her hair, he with his silks and steel.

Dany could see the decision on his face.

“He shall walk, Khaleesi,” he said. He took her brother’s horse in hand while Dany remounted her silver.

Viserys gaped at him, and sat down in the dirt.

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A Game of Thrones, Daenerys III

“I warned him what would happen, my lady,” Ser Jorah Mormont said. “I told him to stay on the ridge, as you commanded.”

“I know you did,” Dany replied, watching Viserys.

He lay on the ground, sucking in air noisily, red-faced and sobbing.

He was a pitiful thing. He had always been a pitiful thing. Why had she never seen that before?

There was a hollow place inside her where her fear had been.

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A Game of Thrones, Daenerys III

One of the others barked out a comment, and the Dothraki laughed. Irri told her, “Quaro thinks you should take an ear to teach him respect.”

Her brother was on his knees, his fingers digging under the leather coils, crying incoherently, struggling for breath. The whip was tight around his windpipe.

“Tell them I do not wish him harmed,” Dany said.

Irri repeated her words in Dothraki.

Jhogo gave a pull on the whip, yanking Viserys around like a puppet on a string.

He went sprawling again, freed from the leather embrace, a thin line of blood under his chin where the whip had cut deep.

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A Game of Thrones, Daenerys III

Crack.

The whip made a sound like thunder. The coil took Viserys around the throat and yanked him backward.

He went sprawling in the grass, stunned and choking. The Dothraki riders hooted at him as he struggled to free himself.

The one with the whip, young Jhogo, rasped a question. Dany did not understand his words, but by then Irri was there, and Ser Jorah, and the rest of her khas.

“Jhogo asks if you would have him dead, Khaleesi,” Irri said.

“No,” Dany replied. “No.”

Jhogo understood that.

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A Game of Thrones, Daenerys III

He was still screaming.

“You do not command the dragon. Do you understand? I am the Lord of the Seven Kingdoms, I will not hear orders from some horselord’s slut, do you hear me?”

His hand went under her vest, his fingers digging painfully into her breast. “Do you hear me?”

Dany shoved him away, hard.

Viserys stared at her, his lilac eyes incredulous.

She had never defied him. Never fought back.

Raged twisted his features. He would hurt her now, and badly, she knew that.

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A Game of Thrones, Daenerys III

Viserys came upon her as sudden as a summer storm, his horse rearing beneath him as he reined up too hard.

“You dare!” he screamed at her. “You give commands to me? To me?”

He vaulted off the horse, stumbling as he landed. His face was flushed as he struggled back to his feet.

He grabbed her, shook her. “Have you forgotten who you are? Look at you. Look at you!”

Dany did not need to look. She was barefoot, with oiled hair, wearing Dothraki riding leathers and a painted vest given her as a bride gift. She looked as though she belonged here.

Viserys was soiled and stained in city silks and ringmail.

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A Game of Thrones, Daenerys III

She rode on, submerging herself deeper in the Dothraki sea.

The green swallowed her up.

The air was rich with the scents of earth and grass, mixed with the smell of horseflesh and Dany’s sweat and the oil in her hair.

Dothraki smells. They seemed to belong here.

Dany breathed it all in, laughing.

She had a sudden urge to feel the ground beneath her, to curl her toes in that thick black soil. Swinging down from her saddle, she let the silver graze while she pulled off her high boots.

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A Game of Thrones, Daenerys III

At the bottom of the ridge, the grasses rose around her, tall and supple.

Dany slowed to a trot and rode out onto the plain, losing herself in the green, blessedly alone.

In the khalasar she was never alone.

Khal Drogo came to her only after the sun went down, but her handmaids fed her and bathed her and slept by the door of her tent, Drogo’s bloodriders and the men of her khas were never far, and her brother was an unwelcome shadow, day and night.

Dany could hear him on the top of the ridge, his voice shrill with anger as he shouted at Ser Jorah.

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A Game of Thrones, Daenerys III

By then her agony was a fading memory.

She still ached after a long day’s riding, yet somehow the pain had a sweetness to it now, and each morning she came willingly to her saddle, eager to know what wonders waited for her in the lands ahead.

She began to find pleasure even in her nights, and if she still cried when Drogo took her, it was not always in pain.

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A Game of Thrones, Daenerys III

They crossed the rolling hills of Norvos, past terraced farms and small villages where the townsfolk watched anxiously from atop white stucco walls.

They forded three wide placid rivers and a fourth that was swift and narrow and treacherous, camped beside a high blue waterfall, skirted the tumbled ruins of a vast dead city where ghosts were said to moan among blackened marble columns.

They raced down Valyrian roads a thousand years old and straight as a Dothraki arrow.

For half a moon, they rode through the Forest of Qohor, where the leaves made a golden canopy high above them, and the trunks of the trees were as wide as city gates.

There were great elk in that wood, and spotted tigers, and lemurs with silver fur and huge purple eyes, but all fled before the approach of the khalasar and Dany got no glimpse of them.

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A Game of Thrones, Daenerys III

As the riding became less an ordeal, Dany began to notice the beauties of the land around her.

She rode at the head of the khalasar with Drogo and his bloodriders, so she came to each country fresh and unspoiled.

Behind them the great horde might tear the earth and muddy the rivers and send up clouds of choking dust, but the fields ahead of them were always green and verdant.

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A Game of Thrones, Daenerys III

The khal had commanded the handmaid Irri to teach Dany to ride in the Dothraki fashion, but it was the filly who was her real teacher.

The horse seemed to know her moods, as if they shared a single mind.

With every passing day, Dany felt surer in her seat.

The Dothraki were a hard and unsentimental people, and it was not their custom to name their animals, so Dany thought of her only as the silver.

She had never loved anything so much.

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A Game of Thrones, Daenerys III

Day followed day, and night followed night, until Dany knew she could not endure a moment longer. She would kill herself rather than go on, she decided one night…

Yet when she slept that night, she dreamt the dragon dream again.

Viserys was not in it this time. There was only her and the dragon.

Its scales were black as night, wet and slick with blood. Her blood, Dany sensed.

Its eyes were pools of molten magma, and when it opened its mouth, the flame came roaring out in a hot jet.

She could hear it singing to her.

She opened her arms to the fire, embraced it, let it swallow her whole, let it cleanse her and temper her and scour her clean.

She could feel her flesh sear and blacken and slough away, could feel her blood boil and turn to steam, and yet there was no pain.

She felt strong and new and fierce.

And the next day, strangely, she did not seem to hurt quite so much. It was as if the gods had heard her and taken pity.

Even her handmaids noticed the change. “Khaleesi,” Jhiqui said, “what is wrong? Are you sick?”

“I was,” she answered, standing over the dragon’s eggs that Illyrio had given her when she wed.

She touched one, the largest of the three, running her hand lightly over the shell. Black-and-scarlet, she thought, like the dragon in my dream.

The stone felt strangely warm beneath her fingers…or was she still dreaming? She pulled her hand back nervously.

From that hour onward, each day was easier than the one before it.

Her legs grew stronger; her blisters burst and her hands grew callused; her soft thighs toughened, supple as leather.