The khalasar did not sleep past dawn.
By the time Daenerys had dressed and ducked through the tent flap, the camp was already mid-demolition — women shouting instructions at children, warriors hauling tent poles free and stacking them onto carts, horses stamping and shifting in the cool grey light. Iron pots steamed over low fires. The smell of boiling mutton drifted past on the same breath as fresh dung and crushed grass, and somewhere behind her a horse screamed and was answered by three others.
The sun was barely a red sliver above the horizon. She guessed the fifth hour past midnight, maybe less.
She had slept four hours and felt better than she had in days.
Breakfast was mutton broth — barley, onion, carrot, turnip, mutton, seasoned with pepper and saffron and left to simmer since before she woke. Her serving girls had been at the fire long before she opened her eyes. She ate a full copper bowl of it sitting cross-legged on a mat outside the pavilion, watching the camp dissolve around her, and was faintly startled by how much she wanted a second bowl.
She ate the second bowl.
The black dragon egg rested in her lap, warm against her palms in the way only she could feel. She turned it slowly and thought about the dream, and the three things she now knew, and what she was going to do with them.
Within half an hour of breaking camp, the last tent had been loaded and the khalasar was moving — a vast dark smear against the early morning gold, a hundred thousand souls and twice as many horses flowing west across the trampled grassland. In their wake the earth was bare and brown, the way earth looks after something has consumed everything that was growing on it.
Drogo rode at the head of it, as he always did.
He had not recognised her this morning.
She had been standing two feet from him when his eyes moved across her face with the flat incuriosity of a man looking at a stranger, and then moved on. The food Irri had prepared sat untouched. The mare's milk had gone down perhaps a third of the way before his attention drifted elsewhere. The body that had once looked as though it had been assembled specifically to intimidate had shed flesh with a speed that still unsettled her — the broad chest now angular, the great arms loose in their skin, the jawline too sharp below the matted braid.
She rode behind him and watched the blood flies gather.
They were large, heavy-bodied things, tinged purple, with a wet iridescent sheen to their wings that made them unpleasant to look at directly. They bred in still water and carrion. They were drawn to the dying.
Once, Drogo had plucked them from the air one-handed without breaking conversation. She had seen him do it a dozen times — a casual snap of the fist, a pause, and then he would open his fingers and what remained would be a small red smear on his palm.
Now one crawled along the neck of his horse and the animal's tail worked uselessly against it. Another circled his shoulder. A third landed on his bare arm and walked toward his throat, unhurried, and Drogo did not move. The reins hung loose in his hand. His gaze rested somewhere on the middle distance between his horse's ears and the horizon.
A fourth fly climbed his jaw.
Daenerys watched it reach his cheekbone and start toward his nose.
Drogo swayed in the saddle — a slow, heavy tilt, the kind that comes just before a fall.
Her left hand shot out and caught his arm.
The flies scattered. Drogo blinked, steadied, and the reins tightened automatically in his grip. The whole thing lasted the space of two heartbeats.
Behind her, the whisper moved through the column like a wave rolling inward from the sea — low, urgent, unstoppable.
The Khal almost fell.
From his own horse.
She turned around.
"He is on his horse," she said, loud enough to carry. "He has not fallen. Be quiet."
The whispering thinned but did not stop entirely. It never would. She had bought time, not silence.
Drogo's eyes found her face — slowly, with effort, the way a man looks through fog.
"Moon of my life," he said.
His voice was barely there. But he had said it.
Something shifted in her chest that she did not examine closely. "My sun and stars," she said back, because those were the words, and because it cost her nothing to give them. "Shall we rest?"
She did not wait for him to answer before turning to face the riders gathering behind her. Cohollo was already there — he moved like water finding its level, that old man, always present at the precise moment he was needed.
"By the Khal's order," she said clearly. "We make camp here. Find water and set the pavilion in its shadow."
Haggo's jaw tightened. "It's the middle of the afternoon—"
"Find water," Cohollo said.
Haggo looked at him. Looked at Daenerys. Spat, and rode.
Qotho followed without a word.
Scouts returned within the hour with news of a stream half a mile north. The khalasar bent toward it like a slow river finding its course, and Daenerys rode alongside the column as it moved — watching, filing things away, doing what she had been doing since she arrived in this body.
She was nearly past the slave carts when she heard it.
A voice, thin as thread, coming from between the wooden slats of one of the carts. "Water. Please. Someone — water—"
She knew the voice.
The cart held one woman, lying on her back across bare boards, her yellow lace dress — Myrish, expensive, meant for a magisters' hall in Lys — soaked dark from the waist down. One gold sandal missing. Her silver hair was loose and tangled. Her belly was wrong — the shape of it off in a way that Daenerys recognised and did not want to name.
"Stop the cart," she said.
The woman driving it — a heavy-set woman, dark-skinned, who had the face of someone who had learned that bad things happened and the best response was to stop being surprised — pulled up immediately and dropped her eyes.
Daenerys held her sleeve over her nose and leaned forward to look. "What happened? Why hasn't she been treated? Where are her attendants?"
The cart-woman's voice was carefully toneless. "Lady Lirys fell from her horse this morning, Khaleesi."
Daenerys went still.
She had said it as a parting remark. There has never been a Khaleesi who could not ride. A social weapon, aimed and released, and then she had ridden away and stopped thinking about it.
"She tried to ride," Daenerys said.
"Yes, Khaleesi."
On the cart, Lirys turned her head toward the sound of voices. Her eyes were fever-bright and only partially focused. "My child," she said, to the sky above her. "Jhaqo's son. He will be Ko one day — you have to help him — I am Khaleesi, I am—"
The cart-woman flinched so visibly it was almost a full-body movement. She dropped to her knees in the dirt. "Forgive me, Khaleesi — I'll drag her out immediately, Ko Jhaqo's orders, she's to be left at the perimeter—"
"Left for what?"
A pause. "For the dogs, Khaleesi."
Daenerys looked at her. "She's carrying his child."
"The healers say neither of them will survive." The cart-woman kept her eyes on the ground. "She has been bleeding since the fall and will not stop. Ko Jhaqo had the healers removed. She keeps saying—" A careful hesitation. "Things that cannot be said."
On the cart, Lirys had stopped speaking. Her lips were still moving, but no sound came out, and her hand was pressed against the side of her belly in the particular way of a woman trying to feel something that has stopped responding.
Daenerys looked at the blood soaking the cart boards. She looked at the belly, and the stillness of it. She looked at the one gold sandal on the pale foot, and the bare foot beside it.
She had said four words to this woman. There has never been a Khaleesi who could not ride.
Four words. And here was the result of them.
"Bring her to my tent," Daenerys said.
The cart-woman looked up sharply. "Khaleesi—"
"She is not going to the dogs." Daenerys turned her mare. "Bring her."