Chapter Three
**Rakharo's POV**
Rakharo had never felt so alive and free in his life.
He was riding hard toward his Khaleesi and the Khalasar with five fully loaded horses, and he was hooting, loudly embarrassingly loudly, he didn't care even a little he was alive and he was bringing help, his pray was answered.
Whatever spell the pretty witch with a lion's mane had cast on the horses, had unlocked speeds he never would have felt otherwise not on the finest stallion of the Dothraki Sea, not even in the stories the old men told around fires. The wind was stealing the sound right out of his throat, and he just made more of it.
The witch had told him she'd catch up.
She had to deal with the captive blood riders first; he didn't want to know. Then her exact words afterwards, "I need to clean-up, if I'm going to be meeting a Princess, first impressions are important," he didn't understand what she meant but he didn't need to."
He understood even less now that he had taken every single horse, due to her refusing one saying, "she didn't need one", and it "would only slow me down". He didn't know how she planned to catch up, maybe she could fly thru the skies, he was not fully convinced she was not a goddess pretending to be mortal, he had never seen a being like these two before. But at this moment he didn't want to think about it.
*Magic*, The word alone was giving him a headache.
At the very least, the little elf creature Winky had loaded the saddlebags with as much water as the horses could carry before sending him off, not sure if he would find his people before they caught up first. Even if nothing else came from this strange, impossible day, his people would have water for a few extra days.
He spotted his camp on the horizon and pulled back on the reins.
The dust, he'd kicked up an enormous cloud riding at those speeds. From camp it would look like an attacking horde bearing down on them.
Rakharo sighed through his nose.
He was absolutely going to get a lecture.
**Daenerys POV**
Ser Jorah had come into my tent not five minutes before, already in his armor.
"Your Grace." His voice was measured but his eyes weren't. "I don't know what drives these riders, but you must stay inside. Do not come out unless I come for you personally."
I opened my mouth to respond but he raised his hand — gently, carefully, the way you stop someone from stepping off a ledge.
"Please, Khaleesi. Let us do our jobs."
I looked at him. Truly looked. He was exhausted in the way that went past tired into something structural, like the exhaustion had become almost to much for the old bear. Sun-beaten and thirsty and standing there in armor that had to be its own particular
misery in this heat, and he was doing it without complaint because there was simply no one else.
I nodded.
What else could I do? If this was an attack, we were already finished and we both knew it. My people were beyond tired they were hollow and it would not be long before hollow became something worse.
The hoofbeats came fast.
And then, cutting clean through the tension, shouts
"Rakharo"! "Rakharo"!
I was outside before I'd decided to move, I knew Ser Jorah would be upset but I needed to know.
He was standing by his horse in the middle of camp, and he was wrong in a way that took me a moment to name, not wrong like danger, wrong like something out of a dream. He was completely clean not a trace of dust or weariness anywhere on
him, he looked healthy, genuinely healthy, with a fullness to his face I hadn't seen in weeks. But how it had only been a bit over a day? He was grinning, that wide, helpless, completely unguarded Rakharo grin that I had seen almost every day for the past year.
"How is this possible?"
Ser Jorah was beside me, sword already out, pointing at Rakharo with the careful wariness of a man who no longer trusted his own eyes.
What followed was nearly an hour of talking.
Some refused to believe it, but most listened and I understood why. They had seen me walk out of fire, they had watched three dragons crack out of stone that had sat cold for a century, and everyone had seen the Pillar of light even during the noon sun it was impossible to miss. The world had already split itself open around
us once. A witch in the desert felt almost modest by comparison.
Perhaps the gods had sent her, perhaps this was simply what it looked like when help arrived strange and small and nothing like you expected, the murmuring began about how the gods have blessed the Khalessi.
They were still murmuring when a shout came from the edge of camp.
Someone was pointing back the way Rakharo had come.
A cloud was moving toward us but wrong for dust, too fast too deliberate. And it shone, silver-white in the afternoon sun, racing across the flat earth like something that had never heard of the concept of distance skipping over rocks half flying half gliding towards them.
People began to scramble back, but I held my ground.
The cloud touched down.
The light broke apart like breath in cold air in a vibrant display of silver light, and standing in the middle of it was a girl.
She looked about my own age, she was wearing a dress that stopped me completely deep blue and rich green, woven through with what could only be described as star constellations in gold thread, everything edged in silver.
It was extraordinary, it belonged in a Braavosi theatre or one of Viserys's better stories.
The moment was ruined when, she was bent over double coughing.
She waved both hands in front of her face, dispersing the last curls of silver smoke, and between coughs, managed — "Sorry 'bout that" — then cleared her throat with great dignity.
"I think I need more practice with the Obscuro's form," she muttered to herself.
Then she straightened up and tried to look imposing.
It wasn't working, mostly because she looked thoroughly exhausted and faintly irritated at herself, which was an expression I recognized with uncomfortable familiarity. Something unknotted slightly in my chest, just slightly at the sheer ridiculousness of all of this.
Then I saw the creature beside her.
Small, Greenish grey in the impossible afternoon light. Eyes enormous and dark and somehow deeply, earnestly kind. Ears like a pair of sails, it was wearing a small patchwork dress covered in flowers and patches that had clearly been assembled with great love and very little regard for symmetry, and it was gazing up at me with an expression of such pure curiosity that something in my chest did something complicated.
Rakharo had described it perfectly and still done it absolutely no justice.
Ugly wasn't the right word... It was so entirely itself that the normal measures stopped applying. It was...and I was willing to admit this, privately, completely adorable.
I thought of the stories Viserys used to tell me when I was small enough that he was still capable of kindness. Grumpkins, Snarks, Creatures from the old world, that lived in the north and ate babies. I had filed them away as nonsense by the time I was old enough to be afraid of practical things.
I shivered despite the heat.
What else might be real?
The girl smoothed her extraordinary dress with both hands, and I noticed what she was holding loosely in her right, a slender piece of dark wood, narrow and but adorned with beautiful patterns. The wand, Rakharo had mentioned it, the way she never fully broke
contact with it, casual, almost careless, but never letting go, told me exactly how cautious she actually was beneath all of that composed exhaustion, he had mentioned her hardly using it thou.
She met my eyes.
Then she dropped into a curtsy. A real one precise and courtly and completely at odds with the desert and the dust and everything around her.
"Pleasure to meet you," she said, voice clear and steady with tiredness running underneath it like a current. "I'm Hermione Jean Granger, and this is Winky " the creature beside her dipped immediately into its own small bow, ears swinging forward, "she is my dearest friend and companion. How do you do."
She waited.
I drew myself up.
"I am Daenerys Targaryen." Ser Jorah inclined his head beside me, still watching her the way he watched things he hadn't decided about yet. "This is Ser Jorah Mormont, and I believe you've already met Rakharo." I kept my voice measured, careful. "He tells me you may be willing to offer us aid?"
She was looking at me the way someone looks when they're solving something, not unkindly, just working.
Then she tilted her head slightly, and her expression shifted into something that looked almost like trying to remember a market road name.
"You wouldn't happen to know a..." She frowned. "R something... Rhaegar, yes, Rhaegar Targaryen, do you know of him?"
No malice, no cruelty, she asked it the way you ask for directions, the fact that this girl did not know she was her brother's sister was odd to her.
"He was my eldest brother," I said. I was proud of how level it came out. "Before his death at the Usurper's hands. What of him?"
She looked at me for a long moment.
Something moved across her face heavy, complicated, not entirely without grief.
"Well," Hermione Granger said, and she sounded if anything even more tired than before.
"It seems we have a great deal to talk about, Your Princess."