Several servants scrambled into action, and a simple tent went up in short order.
It wasn’t just the handmaidens, either.
Three Dothraki riders Drogo had assigned to guard Daenerys were at it too: Quaro, Jhogo, and Rakharo, and they were considerably faster about it.
The tent was small, a round dome of horsehide felt, entrance flap facing east.
Everyone on the grasslands camped this way.
When the sun rose, the first light came straight through the door.
Two layers of woolen blankets covered the floor, soft underfoot, though nothing like the plush cushioning of the bedchambers back in the Pentos manse.
Against the far side sat a low bed spread with animal hides.
The horsehair-woven pillow was stiff as a board.
A wooden rack stood beside it, a few spare robes hanging from the crossbar.
An oil lamp burned in the center of the tent.
Beside it sat a silver platter loaded with fruit, cheese, fried bread, and a jug of honeyed wine.
Daenerys lay on her belly, face turned to the side, silver hair spilling loose across the hides.
Drogo was applying ointment to the wound on her backside and wrapping it with gauze.
She couldn’t lie flat, so this was the only position she could manage.
“Still hurts?” Drogo asked.
Lale stood by the silver platter and translated.
Daenerys shook her head.
“Much better.”
She paused.
“That ointment of yours…
it actually works.”
“Tomorrow when you ride, spread a wool blanket over the saddle,” he said, still not looking up.
The Dothraki did have wagons, tall-wheeled things that creaked and groaned with every roll.
It was just that only eunuchs, cripples, women on the verge of giving birth, and the old, the weak, and the very young rode in them.
Daenerys was the wife of the khal.
Even if the saddle rubbed her raw, she had to endure it.
She lay there watching him.
Watching him for a good while.
“You and the other Dothraki…” she started, then stopped.
Lale waited to translate.
Daenerys waved her off, and in the halting Dothraki she’d only been learning for a short time, she stammered it out herself: “You and the other Dothraki…
are different.”
Drogo caught the meaning.
The corner of his mouth shifted.
“Different how?”
Daenerys thought for a moment.
“My brother says the Dothraki have very strange appetites.
That even little boys, horses, and sheep can be…”
She didn’t finish the sentence.
“Magister Illyrio says you are uncivilized, brutal savages — that you rape and plunder and kill, and do everything except good.”
When she finished, Lale’s eyes looked ready to fall out of her head.
Her mouth hung open.
She didn’t move for a long moment.
Drogo looked at her.
She still hadn’t translated.
“Give me the full translation,” he said.
“Word for word.”
Lale’s throat worked.
She opened her mouth, voice already shaking, each word seeming to be dragged up from somewhere deep in her chest.
When she reached “little boys,” her whole body flinched inward.
By the time she got to “horses and sheep,” her voice was trembling so badly it was nearly gone.
Even lying on her belly, Daenerys caught the wrong note in Lale’s voice.
She reached out and grabbed Drogo’s wrist.
“It’s what I said.
It has nothing to do with her.”
Lale finished the last sentence and immediately threw herself flat on the ground, face pressed to the earth, not daring so much as a twitch.
Drogo heard it all out.
He didn’t grow angry.
He laughed, not a cold laugh, not a mocking one, but a real laugh, genuine sound escaping his throat.
It lasted a short while.
He tried to picture what the actual Khal Drogo would have done on hearing those words.
He couldn’t manage it.
Only the three of them were in the tent.
The other three handmaidens — Irri, Jhiqui, and Doreah, ranked lower than Lale and were outside at that moment, preparing the evening meal.
Drogo was not particularly fond of the dark brown skin common to Dothraki women.
Doreah was a Lysene girl too, but her figure was nowhere near Lale’s.
“Your brother is wrong,” Drogo said.
“I have never seen any Dothraki do the things he described.”
He thought to himself: Honestly, on that front, the Dothraki are more unjustly slandered than any man alive.
“As for the raiding and killing — that part is true enough.
I do hope to change those habits over time.
But these customs are thousands of years old.
They can’t be undone overnight.
Force the issue and the tribes revolt.”
He reached down and pulled Lale to her feet in one motion.
She stood, and translated his words sentence by sentence.
He was genuinely a little surprised, he realized, that Daenerys had come out with all of that so directly.
When she first met Drogo, she had watched him the way a lamb watches a wolf, keeping her distance, never raising her head, barely speaking above a murmur even when asked a direct question.
Before the dragons hatched, he had done everything he could to keep the story on its original course.
No mishaps.
No deviations.
But his gentleness with her, his patience, his effort to actually understand her, it had changed something in her, whether he’d intended it or not.
Daenerys listened to the translation, and her eyes lit up.
“You’re the khal.
If you give the order, they’ll obey.”
Drogo looked at her.
Still too naive.
“You’re oversimplifying it,” he said.
He reached out and rested his hand on her head.
The silver hair was soft against his palm.
He couldn’t tell her: that there would be a man named Mago who would challenge him over the spoils of war, draw a blade, wound him, and give a witch the opening she needed.
That he would become something between the living and the dead.
That Daenerys herself would be the one to finish it.
He could only say: “Some things can’t be fixed just by giving an order.”
“And besides,” he added, “I have more important matters to deal with right now.”
“You mean hatching the dragon eggs?” Daenerys said suddenly.
“Why do you boil them?”
Drogo thought for a moment, then answered honestly.
“I want to hatch them.”
“Illyrio said they can’t be hatched.”
“He’s wrong.”
Daenerys looked at him, doubt in her eyes, but something else underneath it.
Something like hope.
“Have you ever seen a dragon?”
Drogo thought: Seen one?
Not just seen one, I’ve had one in my service.
The tent flap lifted.
Irri, Jhiqui, and Doreah carried in steaming bowls of mutton.
The offal was heaped high, steam curling upward, the gamey smell hitting alongside the richness of the meat and filling the tent in an instant.
Drogo tilted his chin toward Jhiqui.
“You tell her.”
Jhiqui blinked, set her bowl down.
“Khaleesi…
dragons have been gone a long time.”
“Ages and ages,” Doreah added.
“They all died out.”
“Everywhere?” Daenerys said, disappointment flattening her voice.
“There are no dragons,” Irri said, with the certainty of someone stating the ground is hard.
Drogo spoke then, unhurried:
“Unless these three eggs hatch.”
“But no one has hatched a dragon in hundreds of years!” Daenerys said.
Drogo answered simply: “Because there was no dragon mother.”
The moment the words left his mouth, something cracked open in his mind.
CRACK, BOOM.
Dragon mother.
Of course.
Dragon eggs needed a dragon mother to hatch.
He’d said it without thinking.
Said it, and only understood what he’d said after it was already out in the air between them.
Daenerys had no real reaction.
She just listened, taking it as an ordinary remark.
But her fingers moved on their own, drifting to those three eggs, stroking them softly, the way you might reach for a dream you aren’t quite sure you had.
➤ Next: Teaching Her to Use Chopsticks
WEEKLY POWER GOALS: 30→1ch | 50→2ch | 80→5 ch | 100→8 ch | 150→12 ch
Happy reading, everyone!