A Feast for Dragons

to take the dog and the pig along
.
    “It won’t be so terrible, will it?” Penny whispered. “He
paid so much for us. He’ll be kind, won’t he?”
    So long as we amuse him
. “We’re too valuable
to mistreat,” he reassured her, with blood still trickling down his back from
those last two lashes.
When our show grows stale,
however … and it does, it does grow stale …
    Their master’s overseer was waiting to take charge of them,
with a mule cart and two soldiers. He had a long narrow face and a chin beard
bound about with golden wire, and his stiff red-black hair swept out from his
temples to form a pair of taloned hands. “What darling little creatures you
are,” he said. “You remind me of my own children … or would, if my
little ones were not dead. I shall take good care of you. Tell me your names.”
    “Penny.” Her voice was a whisper, small and scared.
    Tyrion, of House Lannister, rightful lord of Casterly
Rock, you sniveling worm
. “Yollo.”
    “Bold Yollo. Bright Penny. You are the property of the noble
and valorous Yezzan zo Qaggaz, scholar and warrior, revered amongst the Wise
Masters of Yunkai. Count yourselves fortunate, for Yezzan is a kindly and
benevolent master. Think of him as you would your father.”
    Gladly
, thought Tyrion, but this time he
held his tongue. They would have to perform for their new master soon enough,
he did not doubt, and he could not take another lash.
    “Your father loves his special treasures best of all, and he
will cherish you,” the overseer was saying. “And me, think of me as you would
the nurse who cared for you when you were small. Nurse is what all my children
call me.”
    “Lot ninety-nine,” the auctioneer called. “A warrior.”
    The girl had sold quickly and was being bundled off to her
new owner, clutching her clothing to small, pink-tipped breasts. Two slavers
dragged Jorah Mormont onto the block to take her place. The knight was naked
but for a breechclout, his back raw from the whip, his face so swollen as to be
almost unrecognizable. Chains bound his wrists and ankles.
A little
taste of the meal he cooked for me
, Tyrion thought, yet he found that
he could take no pleasure from the big knight’s miseries.
    Even in chains, Mormont looked dangerous, a hulking brute
with big, thick arms and sloped shoulders. All that coarse dark hair on his
chest made him look more beast than man. Both his eyes were blackened, two dark
pits in that grotesquely swollen face. Upon one cheek he bore a brand: a
demon’s mask.
    When the slavers had swarmed aboard the
Selaesori
Qhoran
, Ser Jorah had met them with longsword in hand, slaying three
before they overwhelmed him. Their shipmates would gladly have killed him, but
the captain forbade it; a fighter was always worth good silver. So Mormont had
been chained to an oar, beaten within an inch of his life, starved, and
branded.
    “Big and strong, this one,” the auctioneer declared. “Plenty
of piss in him. He’ll give a good show in the fighting pits. Who will start me
out at three hundred?”
    No one would.
    Mormont paid no mind to the mongrel crowd; his eyes were
fixed beyond the siege lines, on the distant city with its ancient walls of
many-colored brick. Tyrion could read that look as easy as a book:
so
near and yet so distant
. The poor wretch had returned too late.
Daenerys Targaryen was wed, the guards on the pens had told them, laughing. She
had taken a Meereenese slaver as her king, as wealthy as he was noble, and when
the peace was signed and sealed the fighting pits of Meereen would open once
again. Other slaves insisted that the guards were lying, that Daenerys
Targaryen would never make peace with slavers.
Mhysa
, they
called her. Someone told him that meant
Mother
. Soon the silver
queen would come forth from her city, smash the Yunkai’i, and break their
chains, they whispered to one another.
    And then she’ll bake us all a lemon pie and kiss our
widdle wounds and make them better
, the dwarf thought. He had no faith
in royal rescues. If need be, he would see to their deliverance himself. The
mushrooms jammed into the toe of his boot should be sufficient for both him and
Penny. Crunch and Pretty Pig would need to fend for themselves.
    Nurse was still lecturing his master’s new prizes. “Do all
you are told and nothing more, and you shall live like little lords, pampered
and adored,” he promised. “Disobey … but you would never do that,
would you? Not my