The fall itself had not been severe. Lirys had been riding a small mare — the same low-slung breed as Daenerys's own — and the ground had been soft. The damage was not from the impact.
The baby had shifted.
A malpresentation, the child wedged at an angle that the body had no mechanism to correct on its own. The Dothraki healers had assessed the situation with the brisk pragmatism of women who had seen this before and knew what it meant. They had made their judgment, communicated it to Jhaqo, and been dismissed. The sentence had been delivered not in words but in the form of a slave-cart and a destination at the edge of the camp.
Daenerys stood beside the screened-off corner of the pavilion where Lirys had been laid and looked at the situation with different eyes.
"Send for Mirri Maz Duur," she told Cohollo, when she found him on the hill above the pavilion, organising the camp layout with the focused displeasure of a man who had too many things to worry about and resented each of them.
He stared at her. "The maegi."
"For the woman, not for Drogo."
"I won't fetch her."
"If she can deliver a breech child safely—" Daenerys kept her voice level— "then my child has a better chance. That is the argument. That is the only argument I'm making."
Cohollo looked at her for a long moment, the way he always looked at her — like a man reassessing something he thought he'd already understood. Then he turned and rode down the hill without another word.
She took that as agreement.
While she waited, she sent for Eroeh.
The Lhazareen girl came quickly — she always came quickly, as people do when they have learned that being slow creates worse problems than being fast. She was slight and dark-eyed and she moved through the Dothraki camp with the careful invisibility of someone who had spent months practicing how to take up as little space as possible.
Daenerys set her to work heating water and soaking clean cotton in the pot, then sent the other serving women out. The pavilion needed to be quiet.
Jorah she met at the entrance and spoke to directly, her voice low. "Full armour. From now on, whenever you are near me."
He read her face. "How long does he have?"
"Not long."
He nodded once and went to change.
Cohollo returned with Mirri Maz Duur held at arm's length like something distasteful, which was more or less accurate to how he felt about the situation. The maegi was in a poor state — her robe torn, her face swollen on one side, a missing tooth leaving a gap in her smile that made the smile look more honest than it might otherwise have. Someone had made their feelings clear before handing her over.
Daenerys gave her a horn of mare's milk. Mirri drank it without ceremony.
"You said once that you knew the arts of childbirth."
Mirri wiped her mouth. "My mother was a godswife of the Great Shepherd. She taught me prayers and poultices, the smoke and the ointments." Her Dothraki was accented but clean, the words chosen with precision. "When I was young I travelled with a trading company to Asshai-by-the-Shadow to study with their shadowbinders. Ships from every port in the known world come to Asshai — I stayed long enough to learn from many of them. A moonsinger of the Jogos Nhai taught me her birthing songs. A woman of your horse-lords taught me the magic of grass and grain and horse. And a Westerosi maester — Marwyn, he called himself — he cut open the dead and showed me everything that lives beneath the skin."
She looked past Daenerys to the screened corner where Lirys lay. "The other silver woman?"
"She fell from a horse this morning. The child is turned wrong." Daenerys stepped aside. "She is your task today. Prove yourself useful."
Mirri glanced toward the bed where Drogo lay. "And the great warrior?"
"Not today," Daenerys said. "The woman. Now."
Mirri Maz Duur moved to the screen and ducked behind it without further comment.
The singing started shortly after — a low, braided sound in a language Daenerys didn't recognise, something older than Dothraki, with a rhythm that moved like water over stone. She could not tell if it was medicine or magic or both, and she had decided it didn't matter. What mattered was the outcome.
She settled cross-legged beside the central fire, sent the last of the serving girls away, and took stock of what was in front of her.
The black dragon egg, warm as a hearthstone against her palms. The bone-handled dagger, its edge tested and found clean. The hand-crossbow, strung and loaded — a precaution, nothing more. Silk soaked in milk of the poppy and left to dry, then coiled. Cotton boiled in water and spread on stones in the sun. A length of catgut and a curved needle borrowed from the healers' supplies. A flask of poppy-wine. A block of soft cork.
She had been thinking about this since the night she examined Drogo's wound.
She was seven days from her own estimated date. Maybe less — the child had been heavy and low for several days. The Dothraki healers would attend her when the time came and do what they always did, which was to pray and apply poultices and call on the horse god and wait to see what happened. She had watched them work. She knew what they could and could not do.
She was not going to leave this to chance.
She rubbed poppy-wine across her belly with steady hands — the cool of it briefly clarifying — set the cork between her teeth, and positioned the dagger.
You are a surgeon, she told herself. You have done this. Not like this, not alone, not without—
The black dragon egg in her lap went from warm to searing in the space of a single breath.
The heat flooded up through her hands and arms and into her chest like the first morning after a long fever breaks — total, clarifying, real. The fog at the edge of her thoughts burned away. Her hands stopped shaking.
She worked.
Twenty minutes. Perhaps a little more.
She had lost track in the middle, a brief grey interval where the world had narrowed to the task directly in front of her and nothing beyond it. Then the grey had cleared, and there was a child in her arms.
A boy. Small, and absolutely furious about it, in the way of things that have been kept somewhere tight and are encountering open air for the first time.
She stopped his cry before it became a sound, pressing two fingers gently over his lips, and held him against her chest and let herself feel what she felt for exactly three seconds. Then she poured a small measure of poppy-wine — barely a swallow — between his lips.
"You are going to ride the world," she said, very quietly. "A little milk of the poppy won't stop you."
His eyes, dark and unfocused, blinked once. Then closed.
She set him in the hollow of her crossed legs and tucked the cream-and-gold egg against him — the white one, with its gold-threaded scales. Against her skin it had always been warm. Against his, it became something more than warm. She watched the scales shift in the firelight and did not examine the implication too closely. Not yet.
One thing at a time.
She cleaned what needed cleaning. The bloodied cotton and linen went into the fire, piece by piece, where they caught quickly and were gone. The dagger she wiped and sheathed. The needle and thread she set aside in their case. She worked with the same methodical economy she had learned in the operating theatre, where the habit of leaving nothing out of place was drilled into you until it became reflex.
Behind the screen, Mirri's song continued its low, braided rise and fall.
When the pavilion was in order, Daenerys leaned back against the chest behind her, the black egg cradled to her side, her son warm and drugged and breathing steadily in her lap, and let herself be still for a moment.
She had found, in the worst moment of it, that she could call the dragon dream without waiting for sleep. The black egg had been the bridge — or she had been the bridge, and the egg the other shore. Either way, the distance had closed, and she had drawn from it what she needed, and it had given freely.
The dream and the waking world were not as separate as she had thought.
She closed her eyes. Outside, the camp noise moved around the pavilion like water around a stone — distant, continuous, indifferent.
Inside, a boy slept. A dragon egg glowed.
Daenerys Targaryen breathed in, and breathed out, and did not feel afraid.