Nadia came to her that night.
The woman entered the chamber with the quiet competence of a servant who had been invisible for so long that invisibility had become her natural state. She was perhaps thirty, with dark hair and olive skin and the kind of unremarkable face that one passed over in crowds without registering. She had been part of Illyrio's household staff for approximately six months, assigned to Daenerys's care after the previous attendant had been dismissed for some infraction that no one had bothered to explain. She was efficient, gentle, and possessed of a warmth that Daenerys had instinctively trusted from their first meeting, the warmth of someone who cared about people not because she was paid to but because caring was her nature.
Daenerys was sitting on her bed, fully dressed, staring at the far wall with the fixed, unfocused gaze of someone who was trying very hard not to think about anything.
"My lady," Nadia said, setting down a tray of tea and small cakes that Daenerys knew she would not eat. "I have brought refreshments."
"I am not hungry."
"No. I did not expect you to be." Nadia closed the door, and something in the way she did it, the care she took to ensure the latch engaged fully, the brief, practised glance she cast along the corridor before the door shut, suggested that the refreshments were not the primary purpose of her visit. "Your brother came to see you earlier."
"He told me I am to be married. To a Dothraki khal."
"I know. The household has been preparing for the announcement. The other servants have been speaking of little else." Nadia sat on the edge of the bed, a liberty that a servant would not normally take but that Daenerys had long since granted her. "How do you feel?"
The question was simple, direct, and astonishingly unusual. No one had asked Daenerys how she felt about anything since she could remember. Her brother told her what to feel. Illyrio arranged her feelings for her, presenting circumstances in which only certain emotions were appropriate. The servants were kind but not curious, dutiful but not intimate. No one asked.
Nadia asked.
"I feel trapped," Daenerys said, and the honesty of the answer surprised her as much as the question had. "I feel as though every door is closing and I am standing in a room that is getting smaller and there is nothing I can do to stop it."
"There is always something you can do. Even when the doors are closing, there are windows. Even when the room is shrinking, there are walls that can be broken."
Daenerys looked at her, really looked, in a way she had not done before. She saw the same dark hair and olive skin and unremarkable features. But she also saw something else, something that had been there all along but that she had not been paying enough attention to notice: a quality of stillness that was not passive but poised, the stillness of someone who was waiting for the right moment to move.
"Who are you, Nadia?"
"I am your servant, my lady."
"That is what you do. It is not who you are."
Nadia was quiet for a long moment, and in the silence, something shifted between them, some barrier of pretence that had maintained the fiction of their relationship dissolving with the slow, inevitable collapse of a structure that had served its purpose.
"I am someone who was placed in this household to help you," Nadia said. "Not by Illyrio. Not by your brother. By people who believe that a sixteen-year-old girl should not be sold to a warlord, regardless of who her ancestors were."
Daenerys's heart was beating very fast, the way it beat when she was afraid, but this was not exactly fear. It was the feeling that came before fear, the moment when the world revealed that it contained possibilities you had not been aware of, and you did not yet know whether those possibilities were salvation or a different kind of danger.
"What people?"
"I cannot tell you that. Not yet, not here, where the walls have ears and the ears have owners who would be very interested to learn what I am about to offer." Nadia leaned forward, and her voice dropped to a register so quiet it was almost breath. "I can tell you this: if you do not want to marry Khal Drogo, you do not have to. There are people who are prepared to help you leave this place, tonight if necessary, tomorrow if you need time to decide. They have prepared a route, a destination, and the means to keep you safe. All they need is your consent."
"My consent." The word tasted strange in Daenerys's mouth, like something she had once known the meaning of but had forgotten through disuse. "No one has ever asked for my consent."
"Then it is past time someone did." Nadia took her hand, and the gesture was so unexpected and so gentle that Daenerys felt the tears she had been refusing to shed begin to gather behind her eyes. "You are not a commodity, my lady. You are not a bargaining chip or a broodmare or a tool for your brother's ambitions. You are a person, a young woman, and you deserve the right to choose what happens to your own life. If you want to stay and marry the khal, I will support you. If you want to leave, I will help you. But the choice must be yours."
Daenerys looked down at her hand, enclosed in Nadia's, and felt something she had not felt in so long that she almost did not recognise it.
Hope.
It was small and fragile and terrified, the hope of someone who had been disappointed so many times that hoping felt like an act of reckless courage. But it was there, warm and persistent, and Daenerys held onto it the way a drowning person holds onto anything that floats.
"If I leave," she whispered, "Viserys will come after me. He needs me for his alliance. He will not let me go."
"Viserys will not know until you are already gone. And by the time he learns, you will be somewhere he cannot reach."
"And the eggs?"
Nadia's expression shifted, a fractional tightening that Daenerys might not have noticed if she had not been watching so intently. "The eggs?"
"The dragon eggs. In Illyrio's rooms. They belong to my family. If I am leaving, they are coming with me."
A pause. Longer than the previous pauses, heavier, filled with the kind of recalculation that suggested Nadia had not anticipated this particular complication.
"That will make things considerably more difficult," she said.
"I know. But they are mine. They are the last remnants of what House Targaryen was before the Doom, before the rebellion, before everything was taken from us. I will not leave them in the hands of a man who considers them currency."
Nadia studied her for a long moment, and something in her expression changed again, shifting from professional assessment to something that looked remarkably like respect.
"Then we will take the eggs," she said. "But you must understand what that means. Stealing from Illyrio Mopatis is not the same as slipping away in the night. It is an act that will make him an enemy, and Illyrio is a man who does not forget enemies. He will send men after you. He will offer rewards. He will use every contact he has in every city between Pentos and Asshai to find you and bring you back."
"Then we will need to move quickly and not stop moving."
"We will. But you must be prepared for what that life looks like. It will not be comfortable. It will not be safe, not for a long time. You will be hunted, and the people hunting you will have resources that we do not."
Daenerys considered this. She thought about the streets, about the years of running and hiding and the constant, grinding fear that had been her companion since she was old enough to understand what fear was. She thought about the manse, about the silk and the oranges and the beautiful prison that Illyrio had built around her. And she thought about the dragon eggs, those ancient, impossible objects that pulsed with a warmth that felt, in some way she could not articulate, like home.
"I am a Targaryen," Daenerys said, and for the first time in as long as she could remember, the name did not feel like a burden. It felt like a blade. "We do not forget either."
* * *
The days that followed were the most difficult of Daenerys's life, and she had lived a life that had prepared her extensively for difficulty.
The betrothal ceremony took place three days after Viserys's announcement, in a pavilion in Illyrio's garden that had been draped in Targaryen black and red, the colours chosen, Daenerys suspected, more for the impression they would make on the Dothraki delegation than for any genuine reverence for the dragon bloodline. Khal Drogo came with a retinue of fifty riders, hard men on harder horses, their leather-dark skin painted with the blue and ochre marks of their rank, their long braids swinging with the bells that denoted their victories in battle.
Drogo himself was enormous. Not fat, not bulky, but massive in the way that certain men were massive, as though the gods had taken the raw material intended for two ordinary people and compressed it into a single frame. His face was hard and weathered, his eyes dark and intelligent, and he moved with the fluid economy of someone who had spent his entire life on horseback and who regarded walking as an inconvenience that gravity had unfairly imposed. His braid was long, impossibly long, reaching nearly to his thighs and weighted with small bells that chimed softly when he moved, each bell representing a victory in battle, and there were very many bells.
He looked at Daenerys, and Daenerys looked at him, and what passed between them was not recognition or attraction or anything that the songs would have called romantic. It was assessment. He was measuring her, determining her value, calculating what she was worth to him in terms of beauty, bloodline, and the political leverage that a Targaryen bride would provide. And she was measuring him, though her calculations were different: she was determining how much time she had, how carefully she would need to move, and how far she would need to run.
She noted the way his riders watched him, not with fear but with the absolute, instinctive loyalty of men who followed strength because strength was the only currency the grasslands recognised. She noted the way they looked at her, their dark eyes assessing her the way horsemen assessed a filly at market, evaluating conformation and spirit and the indefinable quality that separated a mount worth riding from one worth eating. She noted the way Illyrio watched the entire transaction, his fat fingers moving ceaselessly across the rings on his hands, his small eyes bright with the particular satisfaction of a merchant who is about to close the deal of a lifetime.
And she noted, with the quiet, desperate clarity of a girl who had been trained by circumstance to notice every potential exit in every room she entered, that Nadia was watching too. Standing at the edge of the pavilion with the other servants, her dark eyes moving between the principals with an attention that was too focused, too systematic, to be the idle curiosity of household staff.
Viserys was ecstatic. He preened and postured beside Illyrio, speaking of the Iron Throne with the feverish certainty of a man who had confused imagination with prophecy, and the Dothraki riders watched him with the particular expression of men who had encountered many kinds of madness and who recognised the variety that was most likely to get its possessor killed.
Through it all, Daenerys smiled and nodded and performed the role that was expected of her, because that was what Targaryen women did. They smiled. They endured. They waited for the moment when endurance transformed into action.
And at night, in the quiet hours when the manse slept and the guards changed and the corridors were briefly, vulnerably empty, she met with Nadia.
Their planning was meticulous. Nadia, it transpired, was not alone. She had connections, contacts, women who were embedded in the household staff and who had been preparing for exactly this kind of operation for longer than Daenerys had been living in the manse. There were ten of them in total, servants and washerwomen and kitchen workers, unremarkable women who had been hired at various points over the preceding months and who had, while performing their domestic duties with faultless competence, been mapping the manse's layout, timing the guard rotations, identifying the exits, and preparing a route that would take Daenerys from her chamber to the harbour without passing a single guard post that could not be circumvented.
"How long have you been planning this?" Daenerys asked, during one of their midnight sessions.
"Six months. Since before the marriage was discussed. We were placed here as a precaution, in case something like this occurred."
"You expected this?"
"We expected something. The Targaryen children have been in Illyrio's care for long enough that his intentions were becoming clear to anyone who was paying attention. A girl of your age, with your bloodline, was always going to be used as a bargaining chip. The only questions were when, to whom, and whether you would want to be rescued."
"And if I had not wanted to be rescued? If I had chosen to marry Drogo?"
"Then we would have remained in the household, continued our duties, and reported back to our contacts that the operation was unnecessary." Nadia's voice was calm, factual, stripped of drama. "No one was going to force you to do anything, my lady. That is the entire point. The choice is yours. It has always been yours. We are simply here to ensure that you have one."
"Who are your contacts? Who sent you?"
Nadia hesitated, and in that hesitation, Daenerys saw the boundary of what she was willing to share. "There are people, across the Narrow Sea, who believe that the world is about to change. Who have been preparing for that change. Who understand that certain people, certain bloodlines, certain legacies, are worth protecting because of what they represent, not because of what they can be sold for." She paused. "I cannot tell you more than that. Not now. Perhaps not ever. But I can tell you that wherever you end up, you will be safe, and you will be free to make your own decisions about your future."
It was not a complete answer. It was not even a particularly satisfying answer. But it was honest, and honesty, Daenerys had learned, was considerably more rare and considerably more valuable than completeness.
"The wedding is set for the full moon," Daenerys said. "Eight days from now."
"Then we move on the seventh night. The preparations for the wedding feast will have the household in chaos, and the guards will be focused on the arriving Dothraki rather than on the interior of the manse." Nadia drew a breath. "The eggs will be the most difficult part. They are kept in Illyrio's private chambers, which are guarded at all hours. We will need a distraction."
"I will provide the distraction," Daenerys said. And something in her voice, something quiet and certain and ancient, made Nadia look at her with an expression that was, for the first time since their conversation had begun, genuinely surprised.
* * *