She had given Jorah the opportunity to tell the truth, and he had told it — which she respected — and the truth was that the first thing he had noticed about her was a resemblance to Lynesse Hightower.
She sat with this for a moment.
Lynesse Hightower, who had left him for a trade prince the day after he rode away on a contract. Lynesse, who had taken his jewellery and his gold and moved into a better house without looking back. Lynesse, who was currently the favourite consort of the wealthiest man in Lys and showed no apparent inclination to revisit the choices she had made.
She looks like her, he had said. When I first saw her.
"I am nothing like her," Daenerys said. Not angrily — she had no anger about it. Just clearly. "I don't think you believe we're similar. I think you saw a young woman with silver hair and you were already half in love with the idea before you knew who I was."
Jorah said nothing.
"And I think you have transferred a great deal onto me that belongs to a person who is not me, and who treated you very badly." She looked at him steadily. "I was fond of Drogo. In the end, more than fond. But he is gone, and I will not take another husband. Not soon. Perhaps not ever." A pause. "This is not cruelty. This is clarity. I would rather give you clarity than waste your time."
He was quiet for a long moment.
Then he straightened.
"I am your queensguard," he said. "That is all I am, and all I choose to be."
He said it without self-pity, which was the only way it could have been said with dignity, and he meant it, which she could see.
The Kingsguard gave up everything: title, inheritance, marriage, children. The white cloak was the end of a certain kind of life and the beginning of another. She had offered him the equivalent, and he had taken it with both hands.
"Good," she said. "Then I'll see you at dawn."
He made a formal bow — the bow of a sworn sword to his queen, correct and deliberate — and walked away with the heavy, measured steps of a man carrying weight he has chosen to carry.
She watched him go.
She thought: He is a better man than his history suggests, and his history is not entirely his fault, and neither of those things changes what I have to do next.
She thought: Good men who are in love with you are the most dangerous kind of complication.
She went to bed.
She was up before dawn.
The three dragons were already awake when she lifted the basket lid — they were always awake before she was, their internal rhythm running faster than hers, their bodies demanding the first meal of the day with an urgency that overrode any consideration of hour. She fed them the previous night's scorched scraps, watched them consume the equivalent of a small dog each without slowing, and then began the morning's real work.
The gold chains were ready.
She had spent the previous night at the forge with the old blacksmith slaves — former slaves, she corrected herself — melting down Drogo's tournament medals. The gold was soft and easy to work, and what she wanted was simple: small links, finger-thick, each length about three inches, each one designed to clip around a hatchling's ankle without restricting the joint's movement but adding approximately a pound of weight per leg.
She had made three sets.
The city was still, the mist lying thin along the white streets, the comet fading in the dawn sky, when she rode the silver mare out through the narrowed gate and onto the flat ground south of the walls. The dragons rode in their basket and complained about it in the sharp, continuous way of creatures who know they are about to be let out and feel the wait is unreasonable.
She stopped at a wide flat area of hard-packed red clay where she had been training them for the past several days.
She fitted the chains.
Drogon submitted to this with the particular quality of attention that meant he was filing the information and forming an opinion he would express later. Ivory protested actively. Jade seemed not to notice, which was either a good sign or a concerning one.
She threw Drogon first.
He went up, beat hard, and made it eight feet before the weights threw off his angle and he came down nose-first into the clay.
"Get up," she said.
He lay there for a moment. The iron-red eyes found her.
"Get up," she said again. "Walk back."
He got up.
He walked back with the deliberate, offended dignity of a creature who considers falling beneath him and is reassigning blame to the nearest available party.
She threw him again.
This time he made twelve feet and managed a controlled landing, wings out, finding the balance point a half-second before impact. Not elegant. But not a fall.
Ivory made it four feet on the first attempt and promptly produced a stream of fire in the direction of the weights, which were unaffected. Daenerys walked over, flicked her finger against the top of his skull — not hard, just a sharp tap — and pointed back at the starting position.
Ivory hissed.
"Yes," she said. "Walk."
She could not dragon-dream Ivory. The connection she had with Drogon — the secondary awareness, the shared horizon — simply wasn't there with the other two. They were hers in the way that any creature is yours when it has known no other caretaker, but the deep bond was elsewhere. She had to work with them through gesture and repetition and the patient accumulation of learned responses, which was slower and more frustrating and also, she suspected, better in the long run for their independence.
A dragon that only followed orders when it could feel her in its mind was a limited asset.
By mid-morning all three were landing more reliably than they had at dawn, and Jade had managed a full circuit of the training ground — fifty yards out, banking, fifty yards back — before the weight distribution defeated her on the landing. Daenerys noted this with satisfaction.
Afanti appeared on the ridge above the training ground with three of the older riders, conducting the morning's pastoral survey of the surrounding area. He raised a hand when he spotted her.
"Khaleesi! Scorpions!"
She looked up.
He was pointing at a cluster of red sandstone rocks thirty yards north, where a shallow overhang had created the kind of shaded microclimate that the waste's limited fauna preferred. She could see movement.
Drogon had already seen it.
He went still with the specific quality of stillness that meant he had identified prey and was calculating distance. Then his neck extended — the dark, fast movement of a striking snake — and she saw his jaws close around something at the base of the rock.
She heard the impact of the stinger even from where she stood.
Then again.
Then three more times in rapid succession, the dull sound of a barbed tail against the inside of a mouth.
She was running before she had consciously decided to run.
"Drogon. Drop it. Drop—"
He swallowed.
She reached him and crouched, hands on either side of his jaw, turning his face toward her. His mouth was open, pink-black inside, and she could see where the stinger had connected — small marks on the soft tissue at the corner of his mouth, already showing a slight discolouration.
She held his jaw and watched.
"Afanti," she said, without raising her voice. "The red scorpions. The ones that paralysed the horse."
"Yes, Khaleesi?"
"How quickly did the horse go down?"
"Very quickly. Two minutes, perhaps three."
She counted.
She counted to sixty. Drogon was watching her with an expression that she had learned to read as you are behaving strangely and I am watching you until this is over. His pupils were normal. His breathing was normal — the slightly elevated rate he always had after exercise, not distressed. He was warm against her hands, which was always true, but the warmth was the same warmth it always was.
She counted to a hundred and twenty.
Nothing.
She counted to a hundred and eighty.
Drogon had begun to lose interest in being examined and was attempting to turn his head toward the rock cluster where additional scorpions presumably remained.
She let go of his jaw.
"Good," she said. Not to him — to herself, or to the observation. She sat back on her heels and breathed.
Jorah had told her, weeks ago, that no dragon in recorded history had ever been poisoned. She had accepted this as a general principle without stress-testing it, because stress-testing it had not previously been an option. Now she had data.
She thought about the temperature of Drogon's skin under her hands — the consistent, steady heat of it, the warmth that didn't fluctuate. She thought about what that temperature implied for the blood underneath, for the metabolic processes, for the physiological environment a toxin would have to survive in order to do any damage.
Most proteins denatured above a certain temperature.
Venom was protein.
She filed this.
"Afanti," she said.
"Khaleesi."
"Count the scorpion holes. I want to know how many are under that overhang."
He looked at the rock with the expression of a man being asked to census something he would rather leave alone.
"For the dragons," she said. "They need to learn what they can eat without wasting fire."
He looked at her. He looked at the rock. He took a very long breath.
"Yes, Khaleesi," he said.