A Feast for Dragons

buttocks
had gone to sleep. “Ser Barristan,” she called, “I know what quality a king
needs most.”
    “Courage, Your Grace?”
    “Cheeks like iron,” she teased. “All I do is sit.”
    “Your Grace takes too much on herself. You should allow your
councillors to shoulder more of your burdens.”
    “I have too many councillors and too few cushions.” Dany
turned to Reznak. “How many more?”
    “Three-and-twenty, if it please Your Magnificence. With as
many claims.” The seneschal consulted some papers. “One calf and three goats.
The rest will be sheep or lambs, no doubt.”
    “Three-and-twenty.” Dany sighed. “My dragons have developed
a prodigious taste for mutton since we began to pay the shepherds for their
kills. Have these claims been proven?”
    “Some men have brought burnt bones.”
    “Men make fires. Men cook mutton. Burnt bones prove nothing.
Brown Ben says there are red wolves in the hills outside the city, and jackals
and wild dogs. Must we pay good silver for every lamb that goes astray between
Yunkai and the Skahazadhan?”
    “No, Magnificence.” Reznak bowed. “Shall I send these
rascals away, or will you want them scourged?”
    Daenerys shifted on the bench. “No man should ever fear to
come to me.” Some claims were false, she did not doubt, but more were genuine.
Her dragons had grown too large to be content with rats and cats and dogs.
The
more they eat, the larger they will grow
, Ser Barristan had warned her,
and the larger they grow, the more they’ll eat
. Drogon
especially ranged far afield and could easily devour a sheep a day. “Pay them
for the value of their animals,” she told Reznak, “but henceforth claimants
must present themselves at the Temple of the Graces and swear a holy oath
before the gods of Ghis.”
    “It shall be done.” Reznak turned to the petitioners. “Her
Magnificence the Queen has consented to compensate each of you for the animals
you have lost,” he told them in the Ghiscari tongue. “Present yourselves to my
factors on the morrow, and you shall be paid in coin or kind, as you prefer.”
    The pronouncement was received in sullen silence.
You
would think they might be happier
, Dany thought.
They have what
they came for. Is there no way to please these people?
    One man lingered behind as the rest were filing out—a squat
man with a windburnt face, shabbily dressed. His hair was a cap of coarse
red-black wire cropped about his ears, and in one hand he held a sad cloth
sack. He stood with his head down, gazing at the marble floor as if he had
quite forgotten where he was.
And what does this one want?
Dany
wondered.
    “All
kneel for Daenerys Stormborn, the Unburnt, Queen
of Meereen
,
Queen of the Andals and the Rhoynar and the First
Men
, Khaleesi
of Great Grass Sea, Breaker of Shackles, and
Mother of Dragons,”
cried Missandei in her high, sweet voice.
    As Dany stood, her
tokar
began to slip. She
caught it and tugged it back in place. “You with the sack,” she called, “did
you wish to speak with us? You may approach.”
    When he raised his head, his eyes were red and raw as open
sores. Dany glimpsed Ser Barristan sliding closer, a white shadow at her side.
The man approached in a stumbling shuffle, one step and then another, clutching
his sack.
Is he drunk, or ill?
she wondered. There was dirt
beneath his cracked yellow fingernails.
    “What is it?” Dany asked. “Do you have some grievance to lay
before us, some petition? What would you have of us?”
    His tongue flicked nervously over chapped, cracked lips.
“I … I brought …”
    “Bones?” she said, impatiently. “Burnt bones?”
    He lifted the sack, and spilled its contents on the marble.
    Bones they were, broken bones and blackened. The longer ones
had been cracked open for their marrow.
    “It were the black one,” the man said, in a Ghiscari growl,
“the winged shadow. He come down from the sky and … and …”
    No
. Dany shivered.
No, no, oh no
.
    “Are you deaf, fool?” Reznak mo Reznak demanded of the man.
“Did you not hear my pronouncement? See my factors on the morrow, and you shall
be paid for your sheep.”
    “Reznak,” Ser Barristan said quietly, “hold your tongue and
open your eyes. Those are no sheep bones.”
    No
, Dany thought,
those are the bones
of a child
.
    ----
    The
Iron Captain
    T he wind was blowing from the north as the Iron
Victory came round the point and entered the holy bay called Nagga’s
Cradle.
    Victarion joined