Drogo kept watch beside the pot, feeding it firewood.
The sun crawled from east to overhead, then tipped west, and he sat there the whole time, staring at the water churning and rolling inside.
He’d sent Haggo off to keep collecting cloth.
Qotho and Cohollo stayed close, with a few dozen Dothraki riders scattered at a distance.
The column pushed east.
Only when the rearguard had vanished from sight did Drogo finally fish out the dragon eggs and set them back in the chest.
“Boiling doesn’t work.
I need to think of something else.
Whatever that last step is, it stays a last resort.”
He closed the lid and handed the chest to Qotho.
“Return the dragon eggs to the Khaleesi.”
Qotho took it, swung up into the saddle, and rode toward the front of the column.
Drogo mounted shortly after.
He and Cohollo pulled ahead, putting a stretch of open ground between themselves and the riders at their backs.
Cohollo glanced behind him, satisfied no one could hear, and spoke.
“What does the Great Stallion’s prophecy have to do with the dragon eggs?”
“My fate is bound to them.” A pause.
His tone turned grave.
“In the prophecy, I saw myself wounded in battle.
Poisoned by a maegi.
Turned into a living dead man by blood magic.”
Said aloud in the modern world, that was superstition.
Said here, before the Dothraki, it was divine revelation.
Cohollo studied Drogo’s face, searching for something: a joke, a test, anything he could work with.
Nothing.
The face was still and hard.
Cohollo forced out a few laughs, trying to ease the air.
“The Great Stallion also prophesied that one man would unite all the Dothraki clans.
No one’s ever managed that either.”
“By now it’s just something people drag out over a meal when conversation runs dry.
You know how it is.
No one actually lives by a prophecy.”
“I will be the one who unites the Great Grass Sea,” Drogo said, his voice leaving no room for argument.
“Who brings every clan under one banner.”
“But first — I have to live.”
Drogo rode on.
Cohollo reined in and stopped, eyes fixed on the Khal’s back.
He stayed there a moment.
Then he spurred his horse and caught up.
“You already know what’s coming,” Cohollo said.
“So you can avoid it.
Just kill every maegi in your path.”
He said it the way you’d talk about slaughtering a few sheep.
Drogo didn’t know whether to laugh or curse.
“If the dragons don’t hatch, what comes after will be worse.
And whatever those disasters are, I don’t know where they’ll come from.
I don’t know what shape they’ll take when they find me.”
“The Great Stallion only prophesies once.
There won’t be a second vision.
Avoiding this particular fate isn’t the hard part.
Avoiding what comes after it, that’s where it gets dangerous.”
He let a beat pass.
“Better to use this one known future to make one small change.
Hatch the dragons.”
Cohollo stared at him with open shock, but fought to hold himself steady.
“You already have a plan?”
Drogo looked at him and nodded.
Then he laid out the whole thing.
When he finished, Cohollo’s mouth was hanging open.
The khal before him couldn’t be described as unfamiliar anymore.
Strange didn’t cover it.
He was a different man.
Ever since Pentos, nothing Drogo did or said made sense.
Not his decisions, not his orders.
Even the small things, the everyday habits, were wrong.
Off in ways Cohollo couldn’t name.
This boy he had watched grow up had become, somewhere along the way, someone else entirely.
Someone he recognized less and less with every passing day.
Drogo pressed his knees into his horse’s flanks and broke into a gallop.
“I need your help.” He didn’t look back.
“But this stays between us.
Qotho and Haggo don’t hear a word.”
The wind took his voice and scattered it.
Cohollo said nothing.
He only urged his horse to follow.
As he rode, Drogo’s mind ran ahead of him.
When the Khal died on that show, half the women watching had cried harder than Dany did, right there in front of their screens.
He’d seen it.
This time would be different.
He was keeping her away from Tyrion Lannister — that self-righteous little dwarf who’d convince her to chain her dragons and call it wisdom, who’d teach her that mercy meant weakness.
If Tyrion hadn’t personally put a crossbow bolt through old Tywin while the man sat on the privy, Drogo might actually suspect he was a Lannister plant.
And Jon Snow.
That nephew who’d talk her into flying a dragon north and handing it straight to the Night King.
All of them could get lost.
He would put her on the Iron Throne himself.
Crown her with his own hands.
Make her the Empress of Westeros.
He rode on.
Cohollo followed close behind.
Midway through, they ran into Qotho heading back after delivering the eggs to Dany, and the three of them rode abreast, closing the distance to the front of the column fast.
Dany was ahead, mounted on her silver-grey filly.
She saw him and smiled.
Drogo smiled back, but she couldn’t sit straight.
She was shifting in the saddle, bracing herself like someone trying not to slide off.
He brought his horse alongside.
“Are you unwell?”
Dany blinked.
She hadn’t expected that from him, from a man who looked like he’d been carved out of the steppe itself.
“Just too long in the saddle.
My legs and back ache.”
The translation came from Jhiqui, her other handmaid, a Dothraki girl, black-haired, brown-skinned.
Drogo knew her.
She was one of the gifts Viserys had presented at the wedding feast, brought specifically to teach Dany the Dothraki tongue.
Viserys had sent two others along with her: Irri, a Dothraki girl tasked with teaching Dany how to ride; and Doreah, a handmaid from Lys, tasked with teaching Dany what to do in a bedchamber.
Viserys had no shortage of petty little schemes.
“Does it hurt?” Drogo asked.
“I’m fine,” Dany said.
But her foot on the stirrup was shaking.
He leaned over and squeezed her calf.
The muscle was locked up solid, hard as stone.
“It’ll pass,” he said.
“A few more days and your body will adjust.”
By the time they made camp at dusk, she needed two handmaids to help her down from the saddle.
Her legs were trembling so badly she couldn’t stand on her own.
Drogo was there before anyone else reached her.
He guided her to a stool and crouched down to look her over.
Her hands were raw and blistered from the reins.
The insides of her thighs were chafed bloody.
Her buttocks had taken the worst of it.
The saddle had done real damage, scraping her open in several places, still bleeding.
Her ankles were red and swollen.
He stayed crouched beside her, lifting her calf onto his knee, and worked the ointment carefully around her ankle, the stuff he’d bought back in Pentos, an herbal remedy for bruises and sprains, for swelling and pain, thick and green, packed on in a generous layer.
“Does it itch?” he asked.
“A little.” She watched his hands.
“Do you…
do this often?
Treat wounds?”
“First time.”
She paused.
“Then why are your hands so practiced?”
His hands stilled for just a moment.
How do I explain that?
Learned it at the gym in a past life?
From twisting my ankle on a basketball court?
“Bumps and scrapes come with living,” he said.
“Everyone picks it up eventually.”
Then he glanced at Jhiqui and Lale and told them to stick to translating and keep their mouths shut.
Dany didn’t press further.
She just watched his face.
There was something measuring in her gaze, quiet scrutiny.
This man was nothing like what Viserys and Illyrio had described to her.
She had always believed the Dothraki were savages.
Brutal, heartless — wild animals that walked upright.
She wasn’t wrong about the Dothraki.
Drogo was simply different.
➤ Next: Truly Seen a Dragon
WEEKLY POWER GOALS: 30→1ch | 50→2ch | 80→5 ch | 100→8 ch | 150→12 ch
Happy reading, everyone!