A Feast for Dragons

rose up and the starving hordes who
had followed her from Yunkai and Astapor poured through the broken gates. Her
Unsullied had finally restored order, but the sack left a plague of problems in
its wake. And so they came to see the queen.
    A rich woman came, whose husband and sons had died defending
the city walls. During the sack she had fled to her brother in fear. When she
returned, she found her house had been turned into a brothel. The whores had
bedecked themselves in her jewels and clothes. She wanted her house back, and
her jewels. “They can keep the clothes,” she allowed. Dany granted her the
jewels but ruled the house was lost when she abandoned it.
    A former slave came, to accuse a certain noble of the Zhak.
The man had recently taken to wife a freedwoman who had been the noble’s
bedwarmer before the city fell. The noble had taken her maidenhood, used her
for his pleasure, and gotten her with child. Her new husband wanted the noble
gelded for the crime of rape, and he wanted a purse of gold as well, to pay him
for raising the noble’s bastard as his own. Dany granted him the gold, but not
the gelding. “When he lay with her, your wife was his property, to do with as
he would. By law, there was no rape.” Her decision did not please him, she
could see, but if she gelded every man who ever forced a bedslave, she would
soon rule a city of eunuchs.
    A boy came, younger than Dany, slight and scarred, dressed
up in a frayed grey
tokar
trailing silver fringe. His voice
broke when he told of how two of his father’s household slaves had risen up the
night the gate broke. One had slain his father, the other his elder brother.
Both had raped his mother before killing her as well. The boy had escaped with
no more than the scar upon his face, but one of the murderers was still living
in his father’s house, and the other had joined the queen’s soldiers as one of
the Mother’s Men. He wanted them both hanged.
    I am queen over a city built on dust and death
.
Dany had no choice but to deny him. She had declared a blanket pardon for all
crimes committed during the sack. Nor would she punish slaves for rising up
against their masters.
    When she told him, the boy rushed at her, but his feet
tangled in his
tokar
and he went sprawling headlong on the purple
marble. Strong Belwas was on him at once. The huge brown eunuch yanked him up
one-handed and shook him like a mastiff with a rat. “Enough, Belwas,” Dany
called. “Release him.” To the boy she said, “Treasure that
tokar
,
for it saved your life. You are only a boy, so we will forget what happened
here. You should do the same.” But as he left the boy looked back over his
shoulder, and when she saw his eyes Dany thought,
The Harpy has another
Son
.
    By midday Daenerys was feeling the weight of the crown upon
her head, and the hardness of the bench beneath her. With so many still waiting
on her pleasure, she did not stop to eat. Instead she dispatched Jhiqui to the
kitchens for a platter of flatbread, olives, figs, and cheese. She nibbled
whilst she listened, and sipped from a cup of watered wine. The figs were fine,
the olives even finer, but the wine left a tart metallic aftertaste in her
mouth. The small pale yellow grapes native to these regions produced a notably
inferior vintage.
We shall have no trade in wine
. Besides, the
Great Masters had burned the best arbors along with the olive trees.
    In the afternoon a sculptor came, proposing to replace the
head of the great bronze harpy in the Plaza of Purification with one cast in
Dany’s image. She denied him with as much courtesy as she could muster. A pike
of unprecedented size had been caught in the Skahazadhan, and the fisherman
wished to give it to the queen. She admired the fish extravagantly, rewarded
the fisherman with a purse of silver, and sent the pike to her kitchens. A
coppersmith had fashioned her a suit of burnished rings to wear to war. She
accepted it with fulsome thanks; it was lovely to behold, and all that
burnished copper would flash prettily in the sun, though if actual battle
threatened, she would sooner be clad in steel. Even a young girl who knew
nothing of the ways of war knew
that
.
    The slippers the Butcher King had sent her had grown too
uncomfortable. Dany kicked them off and sat with one foot tucked beneath her
and the other swinging back and forth. It was not a very regal pose, but she
was tired of being regal. The crown had given her a headache, and her