The manse of Illyrio Mopatis smelled of oranges and deception, and Daenerys Targaryen had learned to distinguish between the two.
The oranges were real. They grew in the garden courtyard, heavy on branches that had been tended by generations of slaves and servants until the trees produced fruit of such impossible sweetness that even the Magister's jaded palate found them worth mentioning. The deception was subtler, woven into the silk of the curtains and the softness of the beds and the careful, solicitous kindness with which Illyrio treated the last two children of the dragon, hospitality so attentive that it took Daenerys nearly a month to understand that generosity and captivity could wear the same face.
She had been thirteen for three months, and in that time, her world had narrowed from the wide, terrifying freedom of the streets of Pentos to the beautiful, suffocating comfort of a rich man's house, and she was not certain which frightened her more.
The streets had been honest in their cruelty. They had offered hunger, cold, the constant threat of men who looked at a silver-haired girl with the particular interest that she had learned, young and painfully, to recognise as danger. She and Viserys had lived like rats, scurrying between the houses of sympathisers whose sympathy diminished with each visit, selling their mother's jewellery piece by piece, eating when someone remembered to feed them and going hungry when no one did. It had been terrible. But it had been theirs, their suffering and their survival, and the decisions, however limited, had been their own.
Then Illyrio had found them. Or rather, Illyrio had collected them, the way he collected everything, with the patient, methodical efficiency of a man who understood that the value of objects depended on timing, and that the timing for two Targaryen children had finally arrived. He had appeared at the doorstep of their latest refuge, a crumbling house belonging to an exiled knight who had grown tired of sheltering them, and he had offered everything: food, shelter, safety, the promise of restoration. Viserys had accepted instantly, with the desperate gratitude of a starving man offered a banquet. Daenerys had accepted because she had no choice, which was not the same thing, though the result was identical.
Illyrio's manse offered everything the streets had not: food, warmth, safety, clothing that did not smell of other people's charity. But the decisions were no longer theirs. The decisions belonged to Illyrio, whose small eyes moved between the two Targaryen children with the calculating attention of a merchant evaluating stock, and who spoke of their future with the proprietary confidence of a man who had purchased something and was now deciding how best to use it.
Daenerys, sixteen now, stood at the window of her chamber and watched the sun set over the rooftops of Pentos, painting the sky in colours that reminded her, with the particular cruelty of beauty encountered in unhappy circumstances, of the dragon eggs that Illyrio kept in a chest in his private rooms.
She had seen them once, when a servant had left the door ajar and she had passed close enough to glimpse the interior. Three eggs, each the size of a man's head, resting on velvet cushions in colours that seemed to shift and change as the light touched them: one pale cream streaked with gold, one deep green with veins of bronze, one black as midnight with scales that caught the candlelight and scattered it in scarlet fragments. They were the most beautiful things she had ever seen, and they were also, she understood without being told, the reason Illyrio's hospitality had limits that were not immediately apparent.
The eggs were valuable. The Targaryen children were valuable. And valuable things, in Daenerys's experience, were never free.
"Daenerys."
Viserys entered without knocking, because Viserys never knocked. He was her brother, three years her elder, and he carried the Targaryen name with the fierce, desperate pride of a man clinging to a raft in a storm. He was thin, beautiful in the way that all Targaryens were beautiful, with silver-gold hair and lilac eyes and the kind of bone structure that sculptors would have fought to capture. But there was something wrong beneath the beauty, something that had cracked and hardened during the years on the streets, turning what might have been regal composure into something that more closely resembled madness controlled by willpower and less by reason.
"Illyrio wishes to speak with us," Viserys said. His voice carried the particular quality of barely contained excitement that Daenerys had learned to associate with bad news presented as opportunity. "He has arranged something. Something important."
"What has he arranged?"
"Our future, sweet sister. Our restoration. The return of House Targaryen to its rightful place." Viserys's eyes were bright, feverish, and his hands moved with the nervous energy of someone who could not quite contain what he was feeling. "We are going to reclaim the Iron Throne. Illyrio has found us an army."
Daenerys felt something cold settle in her stomach, the way a stone settles to the bottom of a pool, heavy and irrevocable and impossible to ignore.
"What kind of army?"
"The Dothraki. The finest cavalry in the known world. Forty thousand riders under a khal named Drogo, the most powerful warlord the Great Grass Sea has produced in a generation." Viserys moved to the window and stood beside her, his gaze fixed on the horizon as though he could already see the Seven Kingdoms waiting to receive him. "Illyrio has been negotiating on our behalf. Khal Drogo requires only one thing in exchange for his army."
The cold thing in Daenerys's stomach grew heavier.
"What does he require?"
Viserys turned to her, and his expression was the one she feared most: the expression of a man who was about to do something terrible and who had convinced himself it was necessary.
"A bride," he said. "A Targaryen bride, to seal the alliance and bind the khal to our cause."
Daenerys did not move. She did not speak. She stood at the window and looked at her brother and felt the world contract around her, the walls of Illyrio's beautiful prison closing in until there was no air left, no space, no possibility of the future she had secretly, foolishly, desperately hoped might include a choice.
"You mean me," she said.
"You are a princess of House Targaryen. Your marriage to Khal Drogo will unite our bloodline with the most powerful military force in the East. When Drogo crosses the Narrow Sea with his khalasar, every lord in Westeros will kneel or be destroyed." Viserys took her hands, and his grip was tight, almost painful, the grip of a man who needed her to agree and could not afford to consider the possibility that she would not. "This is our destiny, Daenerys. This is what we were born for. You will be a queen, the queen of the greatest cavalry army in the world, and I will be king, and House Targaryen will rise again."
"And if I do not want to marry a Dothraki warlord?"
The change in Viserys was instantaneous and terrifying. The excitement drained from his face like water from a cracked vessel, replaced by something harder, colder, and infinitely more dangerous.
"You will do as you are told," he said, and his voice was the voice of the dragon, the voice that their father had used, according to the stories, when he burned men alive in the throne room. "You will do this because I command it, because our house requires it, because I am your king and you are my subject and you will obey me or face the consequences."
His hand found her arm, his fingers closing around her wrist with a pressure that would leave bruises. It was not the first time. The marks usually faded within a day, hidden beneath the long sleeves that Daenerys had learned to wear regardless of the weather, the small accommodations that one made when living with someone whose love and fury occupied the same emotional space and could not always be distinguished from each other.
"Do not wake the dragon, Daenerys," Viserys whispered, and his breath was hot against her face, and his eyes were the same lilac as her own but without the gentleness that she sometimes caught in her reflection, and the dragon he was warning her about was not the legacy of House Targaryen but the beast that lived inside him, the coiled, violent thing that the streets had fed and the manse had refined and that nothing, she understood with the cold clarity of long acquaintance, would ever fully tame.
He released her hands and left. The door closed behind him with a sound that was, in its quietness, more violent than any slam.
Daenerys stood alone in her chamber and did not cry, because crying was a luxury she could not afford and because tears, she had learned, changed nothing except the clarity of one's vision, and she needed her vision clear.
She was going to be sold. Sold to a barbarian warlord, in exchange for an army that would serve her brother's delusions, to fight a war that would almost certainly end in the destruction of everyone involved. Her consent had not been requested because it was not considered relevant. She was a Targaryen princess, which meant she was a tool, an asset, a thing to be deployed in service of a cause that had consumed her family for seventeen years and that she had never been given the opportunity to question.
She did not want to marry Khal Drogo. She did not want to cross the Great Grass Sea or ride with the Dothraki or produce heirs for a man she had never met. She did not want any of this.
But wanting and receiving were different things. She had learned that early.
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