A Feast for Dragons

almond-shaped eyes, but girls all the same. They had
been given to her when she wed Khal Drogo. It was Drogo who had given her the
pelt she wore, the head and hide of a
hrakkar
, the white lion
of the Dothraki sea. It was too big for her and had a musty smell, but it made
her feel as if her sun-and-stars was still near her.
    Grey Worm appeared atop the steps first, a torch in hand.
His bronze cap was crested with three spikes. Behind him followed four of his
Unsullied, bearing the dead man on their shoulders. Their caps had only one
spike each, and their faces showed so little they might have been cast of
bronze as well. They laid the corpse down at her feet. Ser Barristan pulled
back the bloodstained shroud. Grey Worm lowered the torch, so she might see.
    The dead man’s face was smooth and hairless, though his
cheeks had been slashed open ear to ear. He had been a tall man, blue-eyed and
fair of face.
Some child of Lys or Old Volantis, snatched off a ship by
corsairs and sold into bondage in red Astapor
. Though his eyes were
open, it was his wounds that wept. There were more wounds than she could count.
    “Your Grace,” Ser Barristan said, “there was a harpy drawn
on the bricks in the alley where he was found …”
    “… drawn in blood.” Daenerys knew the way of it by now.
The Sons of the Harpy did their butchery by night, and over each kill they left
their mark. “Grey Worm, why was this man alone? Had he no partner?” By her
command, when the Unsullied walked the streets of Meereen by night they always
walked in pairs.
    “My queen,” replied the captain, “your servant Stalwart
Shield had no duty last night. He had gone to a … a certain
place … to drink, and have companionship.”
    “A certain place? What do you mean?”
    “A house of pleasure, Your Grace.”
    A brothel
. Half of her freedmen were from
Yunkai, where the Wise Masters had been famed for training bedslaves.
The
way of the seven sighs
. Brothels had sprouted up like mushrooms all
over Meereen.
It is all they know. They need to survive
. Food
was more costly every day, whilst the price of flesh grew cheaper. In the
poorer districts between the stepped pyramids of Meereen’s slaver nobility,
there were brothels catering to every conceivable erotic taste, she knew.
Even
so …
“What could a eunuch hope to find in a brothel?”
    “Even those who lack a man’s parts may still have a man’s
heart, Your Grace,” said Grey Worm. “This one has been told that your servant
Stalwart Shield sometimes gave coin to the women of the brothels to lie with
him and hold him.”
    The blood of the dragon does not weep
.
“Stalwart Shield,” she said, dry-eyed. “That was his name?”
    “If it please Your Grace.”
    “It is a fine name.” The Good Masters of Astapor had not
allowed their slave soldiers even names. Some of her Unsullied reclaimed their birth
names after she had freed them; others chose new names for themselves. “Is it
known how many attackers fell upon Stalwart Shield?”
    “This one does not know. Many.”
    “Six or more,” said Ser Barristan. “From the look of his
wounds, they swarmed him from all sides. He was found with an empty scabbard.
It may be that he wounded some of his attackers.”
    Dany said a silent prayer that somewhere one of the Harpy’s
Sons was dying even now, clutching at his belly and writhing in pain. “Why did
they cut open his cheeks like that?”
    “Gracious queen,” said Grey Worm, “his killers had forced
the genitals of a goat down the throat of your servant Stalwart Shield. This
one removed them before bringing him here.”
    They could not feed him his own genitals. The
Astapori left him neither root nor stem
. “The Sons grow bolder,” Dany
observed. Until now, they had limited their attacks to unarmed freedmen,
cutting them down in the streets or breaking into their homes under the cover
of darkness to murder them in their beds. “This is the first of my soldiers
they have slain.”
    “The first,” Ser Barristan warned, “but not the last.”
    I am still at war
, Dany realized,
only
now I am fighting shadows
. She had hoped for a respite from the
killing, for some time to build and heal.
    Shrugging off the lion pelt, she knelt beside the corpse and
closed the dead man’s eyes, ignoring Jhiqui’s gasp. “Stalwart Shield shall not
be forgotten. Have him washed and dressed for battle and bury him with cap and
shield and spears.”
    “It shall be as Your Grace