The hatchlings were growing.
They had emerged from the pyre at the size of cats — under-nourished cats, at that, thin enough that each individual rib was visible through the skin, the neck and tail and wings distinct but the body between them somehow seeming inadequate to connect them. Held in the palm, they weighed almost nothing.
But the wings, when extended, spanned three times the body length. Each one was a sail of semi-transparent skin, veined and iridescent, drum-tight between the long finger-bones — the colours shifting between amber and green and deep violet depending on the angle of the light.
Feeding them had taken three days to solve.
Dried meat: they smelled it and turned their heads away. Fresh blood-warm meat: same result. Mare's milk, cooked strips, minced portions — nothing. They were losing weight visibly, their small bodies growing more angular by the hour, and Daenerys was running out of ideas when the black one wriggled free during a fire-bath, launched himself at a charred rib bone at the fire's edge, and began tearing into it with a concentrated ferocity entirely out of proportion to his size.
She stood in the fire and watched him eat.
Then she understood: they needed the meat cooked past done. Scorched. Burnt black. As though the cooking itself were part of the food.
Once she knew what they wanted, the quantity became the next revelation.
The black dragon ate until she was certain he was finished, then ate again, then ate again. She put her hand against his belly and felt the movement inside — slow, continuous, the sensation of something processing at a rate that nothing biological should be able to sustain. She checked the food she had set out. It was gone.
She put out more.
He ate that too.
She did the arithmetic. He had consumed approximately three times his own body weight in a single sitting.
She checked the arithmetic.
It still said three times.
The green and cream dragons performed the same feat. She watched all three of them carefully for several minutes afterward, looking for any sign of distress. There was none. They showed no sign of fullness, no sign of discomfort — just the mild, satisfied alertness of creatures who have had enough for the moment.
For the moment.
Flight training happened in the hour after dawn.
Daenerys had a woven grass basket — wide, shallow, padded with the softest wool she'd been able to find — that she wore on her back for transport between the fire and the training ground. The three dragons had begun to treat the basket as their territory and climbed into it of their own accord when they recognised the routine.
The process was straightforward. Find open ground. Pick up a dragon, toss it gently upward, step back. The dragon would beat its wings, travel some distance in a shape somewhere between flight and controlled falling, and eventually contact the earth again at the far end of the throw. Then it would walk back to her, sort itself out, and queue for another attempt.
The black one was the best at it. The cream-and-gold one was the most determined. The green one had a tendency to drift sideways, which was interesting from a technical standpoint but resulted in a great deal of landing in unexpected places.
By the third day, all three could maintain true low flight for a distance of twenty or thirty yards — not powered, more a sustained glide, but horizontal and controlled and no longer ending in a tumble.
She had a small audience most mornings. The children of the khalasar had found a low ridge that gave them a sightline to the training ground, and they gathered there in their minimal clothing with their newly shorn heads and their wide almond eyes and watched with the focused, completely undisguised attention of children watching something that exceeds their ability to predict. Occasionally one of them would make a sound.
Then the mothers called them home to sleep, and by mid-afternoon the column was moving again.
The first person to fall from their horse did so on the third evening, twenty minutes after the column set out.
Daenerys heard it from the front — the signal moving up through the decurion structure with the efficiency that the new system was already beginning to develop. She turned the silver mare and rode back along the column.
The man lying in the red dust was old. Not Dothraki-old — old old, the kind of age that doesn't come from hard living but despite it. Blue eyes, milky with what might have been cataracts. Pale skin, sun-darkened over decades but fundamentally northern in origin. Hair white at the ends and gold at the roots.
Not Dothraki. A slave — or rather, a former slave, since she had removed all the iron collars on the first day and declared everyone in the column a member of the khalasar.
His left arm was broken. The break was complete and the arm lay at an angle that made Rakharo, standing nearby, look carefully at the middle distance.
"What is your name?" Daenerys asked.
"Vhaeson, Khaleesi." His voice was thin but clear. He was conscious, which was encouraging.
She set the arm herself — stripped two flat boards from the edge of a supply cart, used strips of spare leather for binding, worked as quickly and cleanly as she could. There was no poppy milk, no numbweed, nothing. He made sounds but did not pull away.
When it was done she told Afanti to put him in the cart and redistribute the load.
"He should be left here," Irri said, from behind her. Not cruelly — the tone was matter-of-fact, the tone of someone stating a known truth. "No one ought to live longer than their teeth."
Several riders nodded.
"And yet he has," Daenerys said. "Which means someone found him useful." She looked at Afanti. "What does he do?"
Afanti had the expression of a man about to deliver information he was not certain would be well received. He cleared his throat. He looked at the sky briefly.
"He is... accomplished," he said. "In the arts of the bedchamber."
Daenerys blinked.
"Twelve disciplines," Afanti added, with a tone of genuine admiration. "Even the finest houses in Lys only teach seven. Vhaeson was trained in Volantis, in techniques that were passed down from the Valyrian dragonlords themselves. Only five survived the Doom, but—"
"Afanti."
"Yes, Khaleesi."
"He is an elderly man with a broken arm and no teeth."
"He is also," Afanti said carefully, "the father of the Khal Haggo."
Daenerys looked at him. "The bloodrider Haggo is dead."
"Not that Haggo. Blue-Eyed Haggo. Twenty years ago, perhaps more. A half-blood — his mother was Dothraki, his father—" Afanti indicated Vhaeson with a slight inclination of his head. "His son grew to be a ko. Then a khal. Rode the Dothraki Sea for ten years and was feared from the Lhazar to the Ghost Grass."
"A slave's son became a khal," Daenerys said slowly.
"The blood runs where it will, Khaleesi. Vhaeson served his khal well, and the khal acknowledged the son, and the son was strong." Afanti shrugged. "It is not so unusual. Strength is strength."
Daenerys thought about this for a moment. Then: "What happened to Blue-Eyed Haggo?"
"He met Khal Drogo's father." Afanti's voice was neutral. "Before Drogo was born."
She considered this. The column was waiting; she could feel the stillness of two hundred people pausing, the horses shifting. She made a mental note to ask the rest of the question later.
"Put him in the cart," she said again. "He knows things. People who know things are worth keeping."
She turned the mare to head the column.
"Khaleesi—" Afanti's voice came from behind her. "About Blue-Eyed Haggo—there is something you may not know."
She waited.
"You know that Khal Drogo was stolen as a child? That Cohollo retrieved him at the cost of his face?"
"Yes."
"And you know who took the child?"
She turned the mare fully around. "Blue-Eyed Haggo?"
Afanti met her eyes.
"Drogo was two years old," he said quietly. "Blue-Eyed Haggo wanted him for leverage. To make Drogo's father give him territory on the eastern sea." He paused. "He did not get the territory. He got Drogo's father's arakh across the throat, three months later."
Daenerys looked at the pale old man lying in the cart with his arm splinted and his blue eyes fixed on the sky.
"And you kept him alive all this time because—"
"Because Drogo's father gave the order, and then no one countermanded it," Afanti said. "And because what he knows about horses is also worth having. And because—" he hesitated— "because Drogo had a fondness for his father's enemies when they were old and harmless. He said it reminded him of what his father had survived."
The column waited. The sun was moving.
"He rides in the cart," Daenerys said. "We move."