The healers were still there when she returned.
Three of them, moving in a slow circle around the bed — old women, desiccated as roots pulled from dry earth, their grey hair loose and swinging with each step. The fire in the centre of the yurt guttered in time with their singing, flaring orange and high, then dropping almost to nothing, the coals pulsing like something breathing. The sound they made was not music. It occupied the space between chanting and keening, and it pressed against the inside of Daenerys's skull.
She stood at the entrance and did not go in.
It's just a healing ritual. You have seen worse today. You are Daenerys Targaryen and you will walk through that door.
The figure on the bed convulsed and screamed.
It was not the sound of a man in fever. It was the sound of a man with no distance left between himself and the thing being done to him — raw and total, stripped of everything except the fact of pain.
Daenerys had seen Drogo take a blade across his chest and laugh. She had watched him fight three men and come back with less blood on him than on his arakh. An infected wound, even a badly infected wound, produced delirium, weakness, unconsciousness. It did not produce this — this nightly performance of agony that had been going on since Mirri Maz Duur laid her hands on him.
She had suspected it for days. Now she was certain.
The maegi was not healing him. She was keeping him alive just long enough to make it last.
Daenerys waited until the healers finished, bowed to her, and shuffled out into the dark. Then she let Jhiqui help her to the bedside and held out her hand.
"Bring me a dagger. Sharp."
Jhiqui found it in the carved chest by the far wall — a thirty-centimeter blade with a yellowed bone handle, curved like a miniature arakh, sheathed in brown leather. She held it out with both hands.
"The Khal's dragonbone dagger, Khaleesi."
The blade came free with a clean ring. In the torchlight it was white as a crescent moon, the edge unbroken along its entire length. Daenerys turned it once, satisfied, and passed the flat of it through the outer flame of Doreah's tallow candle.
Jorah materialized at her elbow. "Khaleesi, let me—"
She moved past him without looking up.
The dressings came away in layers. Silk first, foul and stuck to the skin — she cut it free with short, precise strokes, the blade barely touching the tissue beneath. Underneath the silk was the first layer of poultice: a hard, cracked shell of blue mud and dried fig leaves. Then another. Then another. Seven or eight layers in total, each one applied by the healers over the previous, building up like plaster over a wound they had no intention of actually treating.
Jorah had gone quiet. She could feel him watching her hands.
The outermost layer was still damp. The ones beneath were dry as old mortar, and they fractured cleanly when she tapped them — she worked her way inward with the methodical patience of someone who had debrided worse than this in a teaching hospital, on a body that had been through worse than this, under far less flattering lighting.
Doreah made a sound and took a step back. Then another. Then she handed her candle to Jorah and walked quickly to the tent flap, and outside came the sound of her being sick.
Irri held the wooden tray. It filled slowly with fragments of dried mud and blackened leaf matter and things that had once been part of a living wound.
When the last layer came away, Daenerys sat back on her heels and looked.
The wound was the size of a palm, set into the left side of Drogo's chest. What had been a clean cut was now a crater of black and purple tissue, glistening in the candlelight with a wet, organic shine that had nothing healthy in it. Three channels of dark blood wept from the centre as he breathed, soaking slowly into the lamb's wool beneath him. The smell hit the back of the throat and stayed there — sweet and rotten simultaneously, the specific sweetness of tissue that had turned.
Jorah said her name twice. Then a third time.
She sent Irri and Jhiqui for hot water and strong wine and waited until they were gone.
"You see it," Jorah said. It wasn't a question.
"I see it."
She already knew what was underneath the wound. Fluid in the chest cavity, certainly. The heart sitting in a bath of infected blood, kept beating by Mirri Maz Duur's working for no reason except that a swift death would have been mercy, and mercy was not what the maegi had come to give. Even if the curse were broken tonight, even with every resource a modern hospital could offer, the damage was irreversible. There was no surgery for this. There was no treatment.
He was already dead. He just hadn't been permitted to finish.
"What do you want to do?" Jorah asked.
Daenerys set the dagger down. "What do you want me to do?"
He exhaled. "Leave. Tonight, if we can manage it quietly. Take your khas, ride south. Asshai is far, but it's a port — from there we could find passage to Pentos, and from Pentos—"
"We'd be dead before we reached the Lhazar River." She kept her voice level. "Too few riders to defend ourselves properly. Enough riders to be seen the moment we move. Forty thousand warriors between us and the perimeter, Jorah. They're not blind."
"Then tell me what you're planning to do instead."
She looked at Drogo's chest rising and falling — the ugly, laboured rhythm of a man being kept alive against his will.
"How long before he dies?"
Jorah hesitated. "Days. Perhaps less."
"And if he dies before the child comes—" She pressed one hand against her belly. "I'm still Khaleesi. Dothraki law protects a widowed Khaleesi. They can't harm me. The worst they can do is send me to Vaes Dothrak."
Jorah's expression shifted.
"To join the dosh khaleen," he said quietly. "Yes. That's true." He paused. "Daenerys. Have you noticed that none of the crones in Vaes Dothrak have children?"
She had noticed. She hadn't let herself follow the thought to its end.
"You're not the first Khaleesi to lose her husband while carrying his child," Jorah said. "You won't be the last. But the child — particularly this child, after what the dosh khaleen prophesied under the Mother of Mountains — no successor khal will permit him to grow up. A boy who was promised to ride the world does not get to live long enough to try." He stopped. Then, more quietly: "You remember what happened to Rhaegar's children."
She did.
Rhaegar Targaryen had died on the Trident fourteen years ago, a year before she was born, Robert Baratheon's warhammer finding him in the middle of the river. His daughter Rhaenys had been three years old. His son Aegon had been an infant, still nursing.
Neither had survived the night King's Landing fell.
The men who had done it had been knights. Men of houses with words and sigils and codes of honour stretching back centuries. Men who knelt before a king and swore before the Seven.
They had done it anyway.
The Dothraki had no knights, no codes, no Seven. They had strength and appetite and the absolute conviction that anything they could take was theirs to take.
"So," Daenerys said. "The dosh khaleen won't have me with a living child. And if the child is born before Drogo dies—"
"The kos will be watching. Jhaqo, Pono, the others. The moment Drogo is gone, the succession begins. Your child is a threat to every one of them." Jorah looked at the bed, and for a moment his face was simply tired. "Drogo never forgave a rival. His son wouldn't either. They know that."
The fire had burned low while they talked. Outside, the camp noise had settled into its night rhythms — the distant sound of singing somewhere, a horse moving, the wind across the tent skins.
Daenerys sat with her hand on her belly and looked at the man dying on the bed in front of her and thought about Rhaegar's daughter, who had been three years old.
"Then we need a different answer," she said.
Jorah said nothing.
"There has to be one." She looked up at him. "Find me one."