POV- Aemon Targaryen
He saw the smoke from miles out, a brown smudge low over the God's Eye that thickened as they came on until it hung across the whole northern shore.
Meleys smelled it before he did. He felt her head come up and her wings change their beat, faster, and the long muscles of her neck bunched under his thighs. She had been flying since dawn with the wind against her, and she had not tired once. She was not tired now.
Shiera was flying on Viserion behind him with Daenerys seated behind her in chains.
Monford's smith at High Tide had put her in irons before they left, plain iron cuffs joined by a length of chain. She had not spoken while they did it. She had not spoken since her capture yesterday.
The walls came into sight first, black against the blue water of God's Eye, and the fields around them, and Aemon's stomach tightened.
The fields were dead. Every blade of grass between the walls and the western woods had burned, and the ash was littered with horses. Hundreds of them, lying where they had fallen in heaps. Crows lifted off them in black clouds as Meleys's shadow passed over. He could smell them even from this height.
Then came the eastern wall, and the Dothraki. They were at the foot of it with ladders. Rough things, green saplings laced with rope and horsehide, a dozen of them leaning against the stone, and men going up them with their arakhs held in their teeth. Along the battlements the defenders were shoving the ladders off with forks and poles. Aemon watched one go over backward with four men on it. Another reached the top, and a knot of steel closed around the Dothraki who came over it, and then he was falling too, down the face of the wall, arms spread.
At the gate the outer doors were black with fire and braced from inside with carts and timber. A ram lay abandoned in front of them among its own dead.
The Dothraki were losing, he could see that plainly. They had been losing for a long time, but they had not stopped.
He put his hand on Meleys's neck and she came down along the eastern wall from the north, so low that her wingtip nearly brushed the battlements, and the men on the wall threw themselves flat. The fire went out of her in a long unbroken stream. It struck the foot of the wall and ran along it, and the ladders went up, and the men on the ladders, and the men below them holding them steady. The heat came back up at Aemon off the stone. So did the smell, burnt flesh, hair and fat and horse. The screaming went on underneath them the whole length of the wall.
Meleys climbed and turned. Out on the burned field, beyond bowshot, a mass of riders sat their horses, waiting for their turn at the ladders. They had seen her now. They were already moving, some toward the woods, some east, most of them in no direction at all. Meleys went over them once, and a long swathe of them simply stopped existing, men and horses together, and the rest broke and scattered across the field like chaff.
She wanted to go again. He could feel it in her, a pull toward the running men so strong it went through his own body. He held his hand flat against her neck and after a while she let the pull go and began to circle and soon she began to come down.
There was room for her in the outer ward, just. She came down between the Kingspyre and the Hall of a Hundred Hearths with her wings half folded. Men scattered in every direction from the landing. When the dust settled, Aemon climbed down its neck.
Viserion landed after her and Shiera jumped from him. Daenerys was lifted down after her.
"Take her into the Kingspyre," he told the two Royce knights who had come running with their swords drawn. "There are rooms on the second floor. Put a fire in the hearth and bring her something to eat. Two men on the door and nobody goes in without my leave."
They took her by the arms, not roughly. She went with them across the ward without looking back at him.
Ser Barristan was sitting on a mounting block by the gatehouse arch when Aemon found him. He tried to rise when he saw Aemon coming, and Aemon waved him down, and the old knight sat again with a grunt. He had his helm on the block beside him and his white hair was stuck flat to his skull. There was blood dried black in the rings of his mail from collar to waist, and a dent in his breastplate the size of a fist, and his face was the grey of old tallow.
"Your Grace. You came from the east."
"From the Gullet."
"And?"
"The pretender's dead and so are both their dragons. Daenerys is in the Kingspyre."
Barristan closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them, he only nodded.
"Tell me," Aemon said.
"They came yesterday, at sunset. Circled the walls and shot for an hour, then drew off. When that didn't work out, they brought a ram. They broke the bar on the outer gate, and got into the passage." Barristan's hands were resting on his knees. "We held them in the passage. Tarly's men burned the gap with oil. They tried the same with another ram and we burned that one too, before it reached the gate. This morning, ladders. There were wolves too."
"Wolves." Aemon asked.
"Last night, your grace." Barristan looked toward the western woods, though there was nothing to see from here but the curtain wall. "I've heard wolves in the kingswood, Your Grace, and on many roads I have taken. But never heard anything like that before. They took the Dothraki horse lines in the dark. You saw the fields."
"I saw them."
"After that the savages wouldn't go near the trees. Not for water, not for wood. They drank from the lake at noon with half their number standing guard." He shook his head slowly. "I don't know what that she-wolf is. I don't think I want to."
"Where's Brienne?"
Barristan tipped his head toward the gatehouse arch. "In there. The maester wants her abed. She won't go."
The gate passage stank. Aemon smelled it before he was ten paces in, old smoke and scorched stone and lamp oil gone rancid in the cracks, and under it the other smell, the one the fields had. Men were working in the torchlight with barrows and hooks, dragging Dothraki bodies out through the gap in the outer gate. The stone underfoot was slick. Along the walls of the passage, in the grooves between the flagstones, lay small bright things that caught the light as he walked, and he bent and picked one up. It was a bell, no bigger than his thumbnail, bronze, with a scrap of burnt hair still knotted through the loop at the top. There were dozens of them. Hundreds, maybe, scattered all down the passage in the soot.
Brienne was near the outer gate, telling a pair of Mooton's men where to set a new brace. She turned when she heard his boots.
Someone had stitched a cut above her left eye with black thread, a long ugly line from the brow nearly to the hairline, and the whole left side of her face had swollen until the eye was a slit. Her surcoat was stiff and brown to the knees. She saw him and went down on one knee on the wet stone. "Your Grace."
"Get up, ser Brienne."
She got up. "Your Grace, they're finished. The Dothraki, we watched you from the wall."
"Barristan says the maester wants you in bed."
"The maester has seen it. He stitched it himself." She touched the thread, then took her hand away. "I lost three of Lord Royce's knights beside me when they broke the gate. One of them took an arakh under the arm that was meant for me."
"That is the cost of war, Brienne."
"He had a wife in Runestone. Lord Royce said he would compensate her to his best." Brienne looked down the passage, at the men with the barrows. "Your Grace, I'd rather be doing this than lying in a bed thinking about it."
He turned the little bell over in his fingers. "Then do it for no more than an hour," he said. "After that you go to the maester, and you do what he tells you."
"Yes, Your Grace."
He put the bell in his pocket and went back out into the light. Randyll Tarly was on the eastern wall, where the ladders had been.
The stones there were still hot. Aemon could feel it through his boots as he came along the wall walk. Below, the foot of the wall was a long black trench of ash and bodies, some of them still smoking, and the ladders were charcoal. Randyll stood looking down at it with his bow unstrung in one hand.
"Two hundred and eighteen dead on the walls, your grace" he said as he turned and knelt. "Ninety-four in the gate passage, about three hundred wounded. Maester Cressen has them in the Hall of a Hundred Hearths."
"Your own men?" Aemon asked as he motioned him to stand.
"A hundred and forty of the dead are mine. Horn Hill bowmen, most of them." Randyll's voice did not change. "We have eleven hundred arrows left out of ten thousand. If you'd come tomorrow instead, we'd have been dropping stones and chamber pots on them by nightfall."
"You'd have held."
"Probably." He turned his head, to look down at the battlement. "They'd have broken down first. They were already breaking. But I'd have lost another two hundred men making sure of it."
Aemon looked down at the black trench under the wall. "I want the names of the dead recorded and their families compensated."
"My steward is writing them. I'll have them tonight." Randyll paused. "What do you mean to do with the rest of them? The Dothraki."
"I haven't decided."
"There are near six thousand still out there, by my count. Without horses, half of them, and without the stomach for it, all of them." Randyll's jaw worked. "They came to cut our throats under guest right, Your Grace. Every man on this wall knows that. I'd want to be able to tell them what their dead bought."
"You'll be able to tell them," Aemon said.
Randyll held his eyes for a moment longer, and then nodded, curtly, and went back to looking at the trench.
Aemon went into the Hall of a Hundred Hearths. They had laid the wounded out on the floor in rows, on straw and blankets and cloaks, near the hearths that still had chimneys that drew. Maester Cressen was moving down one row with two septons and many of the squires and pages, young boys carrying basins. The air was thick with smoke and blood and alcohol. Somebody near the back was crying out, over and over, the same word, and Aemon could not make out what it was.
He walked the rows. He did not know what else to do. Men saw him and tried to sit up, and he told them to lie still. A Blackwood archer no older than him had a bolt through the thigh and a face white as milk, and when Aemon knelt beside him the boy asked him whether it was true about the dragons at the Gullet. Aemon told him it was. The boy smiled, and said he'd tell his father, and then shut his eyes for rest.
Near the far end, a Tarly bowman with both hands wrapped in bloody linen watched him come.
"Oil, your grace." the man said, before Aemon could ask. "Pot cracked when I lifted it." He looked down at the wrappings. "Maester says I'll keep the left."
"What's your name?"
"Harlon, Your Grace. From Horn Hill."
"Harlon." Aemon stayed crouched there beside him. "Did it catch the ram?"
"It caught the ram." Something like pride came into the man's grey face. "Caught the ram and the twenty holding it."
"Then it was worth your hand."
"Aye," said Harlon. "That's what I keep telling it."
The rider came at dusk. He came alone, walking his horse through the ash between the dead, and every bow on the eastern wall followed him the whole way in. Aemon went up to the gatehouse roof with Oberyn, Randyll, Beric, and Barristan, and he sent for Daenerys to be brought up too. She came between the two Royce knights with her hands still chained in front of her. Someone had found her a plain wool cloak. She stood at the parapet and looked down, and Aemon watched the rider see her.
He was a big man, heavy through the shoulders, his chest bare under a painted vest. His braid was gone. It had been hacked off close to the skull, raggedly, and what was left of his hair stuck up in black tufts. He stopped fifty yards off and stayed on his horse, and for a long moment he only looked at Daenerys.
Then he called up.
"His name is Jhogo," Oberyn said, after a moment. "Ko Jhogo. He says he rode in Khal Drogo's khalasar as a boy, and in the khaleesi's after. He says his khalasar has cut its braids." Oberyn listened. "He says they were beaten by walls and by wolves and by the red dragon, and there is no shame in yielding to a khal who rides a dragon. He wishes to know the dragon-khal's terms."
"Ask him what he wants."
Oberyn called it down. Jhogo answered at length, in a low, even voice.
"Three things," Oberyn said. "To keep their horses and their arakhs. Without those, he says, they are not men, and they would rather die here. To burn their dead in their own way, on pyres, with the horses that died under them. And the khaleesi." He glanced at Daenerys, then back at Aemon. "He asks what will become of her."
"Tell him they keep their horses and their arakhs. They can burn their dead in the fields tomorrow. Then they ride for Gulltown. There'll be ships there within the week, Velaryon ships. They'll carry them back across the narrow sea to the Dothraki Sea, and they'll never come to this side of it again."
Oberyn translated. Jhogo's face changed at something in it. He answered sharply.
"He says his people crossed the poison water once," Oberyn said. "In the bellies of the wooden horses. A third of their mounts died in the holds, and they threw them over the side, and the ones that lived came off the ships half mad. He asks if there is no other way."
"There is no other way. Tell him they can take the ships," Aemon said, "or they can stay here, and Meleys will see to it that they never need a ship again."
Oberyn translated his words and then there was all but silence and Jhogo sat his horse very still.
Randyll spoke low, at Aemon's shoulder. "You're letting them go."
"I'm sending them home."
"They came to murder guests in their beds, Your Grace. Under guest right."
"They were sent." Aemon did not take his eyes off the rider. "I want the man who sent them. Six thousand dead Dothraki won't bring me an inch closer to him."
Randyll said nothing more, and his face said the rest.
"And the khaleesi," Aemon said to Oberyn. "Tell him she goes with them."
Oberyn turned his head.
"To Vaes Dothrak," Aemon said. "To the dosh khaleen. She was a khal's widow before she was a king's wife. Tell him to take her there and see her safe inside the city."
Oberyn was quiet for a long moment. Then he said, softly, "You're certain, your grace."
"Tell him."
Oberyn told him.
Jhogo did not answer at once. He looked at Daenerys on the gatehouse roof in her plain cloak and her chains, and then he pressed his closed fist to his bare chest, over his heart, and bowed forward until his forehead nearly touched his horse's mane. When he straightened, he spoke slowly, looking at her and not at Aemon.
"He says the dosh khaleen are the voice of the Mother of Mountains," Oberyn said. "No khal would dare raise a hand to one of them, not even in the worst of years and in turn Dosh Khaleen do not meddle in matters beyond the Dothraki Sea. He says he will take the khaleesi there himself. He will ride at her side every league of the way, and if any man touches her on the road, he will cut off his hands and feed them to the dogs." A pause. "He said something else. It is known."
"What does that mean?"
"It means it is so, and no one will argue. The Dothraki say it when a thing is settled."
Daenerys spoke then.
She spoke to Jhogo, not to Aemon. She leaned forward against the parapet, as far as her chains and her guards allowed, and called down to Jhogo in his own tongue, quick and harsh and fluent. Aemon heard his own name in it, once, and the word khal, and something that made Jhogo look up sharply.
The rider answered her briefly. She spoke again, shorter. Then she stepped back from the parapet and kept her eyes on the fires.
Jhogo turned his horse and rode back across the ash toward the fires.
"Well?" asked Beric.
Oberyn took a long time to answer. "She asked him if he would follow her again," he said. "If she ever came out of Vaes Dothrak. He said a khaleesi without dragons does not come out of Vaes Dothrak." Oberyn glanced at Daenerys's back. "Then she asked him to find her a horse. A silver, if he has one. He said he would."
The rooms on the second floor of the Kingspyre had been a Whent lord's once, and the hangings on the walls were so old they had faded to the color of dust. Someone had built up the fire. A tray of food sat untouched on the table beside it; bread, a wedge of cheese, a bowl of pottage gone cold, a cup of watered wine.
Daenerys was sitting by the window with her chained hands in her lap. She kept her face to the glass when the guard let him in.
"You haven't eaten."
"I'm not hungry." She was looking out at the fires on the eastern field. There were fewer of them tonight, and further off. "Are you going to take these off? Or will I wear them to Vaes Dothrak?"
He crossed the room and took the key from his belt and unlocked the cuffs. The skin of her wrists underneath had rubbed raw. She did not rub them. She laid her hands flat on her knees and looked at them.
"I want Irri and Jhiqui," she said. "My handmaids. They were with me in Tywin's camp. If I'm to live in Vaes Dothrak I want them with me. They're Dothraki. They'll be glad to go home."
"I don't know where Tywin's camp is tonight. If they can be found, they'll be sent to you."
"And Ser Jorah."
"If he wants to follow you, I won't stop him."
"He'll want to." Her mouth moved. It was not a smile. "He'll follow me into the Dothraki Sea and live in a hut outside the city walls because men can't go in, and he'll come to the gate every morning to ask how I am." She was quiet a moment. "Do you know what Vaes Dothrak is?"
"I know what the maesters write about it."
"The maesters." She turned from the window then and looked at him. "When Drogo was alive, he took me there. I ate a horse's heart in front of the dosh khaleen. Raw. The whole of it, with my hands. It was the only way to show them my son would be strong. They looked into the smoke and told me he would be the stallion who mounts the world." Her hands closed on her knees. "He died before he drew breath. And now you're sending me back to sit among those women for the rest of my life, and every day they'll look at me and remember what they promised, and what I lost."
He had nothing to say to that.
"Aegon would have killed you," she said. "If it had been the other way, on the dragons. He'd have killed you and been glad of it."
"I know. He tried."
"Then why don't you kill me?"
"Because you're my blood." He said it plainly. It was the only reason he had kept her alive, and to overcome his haunted past. "Because there are too few of us left, and cursed is the kinslayer. And because if I kept you here, some lord would find a way to your door with a crown in his hand inside a year, and I'd have to kill you then, for something you hadn't even done yet."
She studied him for a long time. "When you jumped onto Rhaegal," she said. "Did you know it would be him or you?"
"Yes."
"And you jumped anyway."
"Yes."
She looked back at the window. Outside, the fires on the eastern field had begun to go out, one by one. "Go," she said. "Please."
They brought her a silver mare at dawn. The Dothraki had spent the night burning their dead. The pyres were still going on the eastern field when Aemon came up onto the gatehouse roof, dozens of them in long rows, each with a man and his horse laid out on top, and the smoke went straight up in the windless air and flattened out against the low sky. Below the gate, Jhogo waited with thirty riders, all with their braids cut. One of them led a silver mare on a rope.
Daenerys came out through the postern between her two guards. She walked the rest of the way to the mare herself, in her wool cloak and her stained silks. She put her hand on mares neck and stood there for a moment with her face against its mane. Then she took the reins from the rider who held it and mounted without help, and turned the mare's head east.
She did not look back at the gate as Ser Symond Templeton of Ninestars led the defeated horselords to the port town of Gulltown of Vale.
Above the Kingspyre, Viserion had been circling since first light. He came lower as she rode out, lower, until he passed over the column of riders so close that the horses shied. Daenerys did not look up. She rode on at the head of the column with Jhogo, and Viserion flew away high in the air, Shiera on him.
Aemon watched them go until they were small on the burned field. The khalasar was drawing in around them from every side now, thousands of riders, falling into a great loose column behind her, heading east toward Gulltown.
It took him a while to understand what was wrong with the sight. Then he had it, it was unlike their coming, as the others had described it to him. They rode out in silence. Six thousand Dothraki, and not a single bell among them. He could hear the hooves, and the wind, and the crows.
He took the little bronze bell out of his pocket and turned it over in his fingers, and threw it far away.
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