A Feast for Dragons

sweetlings.” He reached down and pinched Penny on her cheek.
    “Two hundred, then,” the auctioneer said. “A big brute like
this, he’s worth three times as much. What a bodyguard he will make! No enemy
will dare molest you!”
    “Come, my little friends,” Nurse said, “I will show you to
your new home. In Yunkai you will dwell in the golden pyramid of Qaggaz and
dine off silver plates, but here we live simply, in the humble tents of
soldiers.”
    “Who will give me one hundred?” cried the auctioneer.
    That drew a bid at last, though it was only fifty silvers.
The bidder was a thin man in a leather apron.
    “And one,” said the crone in the violet
tokar
.
    One of the soldiers lifted Penny onto the back of the mule
cart. “Who is the old woman?” the dwarf asked him.
    “Zahrina,” the man said. “Cheap fighters, hers. Meat for
heroes. Your friend dead soon.”
    He was no friend to me
. Yet Tyrion Lannister
found himself turning to Nurse and saying, “You cannot let her have him.”
    Nurse squinted at him. “What is this noise you make?”
    Tyrion pointed. “That one is part of our show. The bear and
the maiden fair. Jorah is the bear, Penny is the maiden, I am the brave knight
who rescues her. I dance about and hit him in the balls. Very funny.”
    The overseer squinted at the auction block. “Him?” The
bidding for Jorah Mormont had reached two hundred silvers.
    “And one,” said the crone in the violet
tokar
.
    “Your bear. I see.” Nurse went scuttling off through the
crowd, bent over the huge yellow Yunkishman in his litter, whispered in his ear.
His master nodded, chins wobbling, then raised his fan. “Three hundred,” he
called out in a wheezy voice.
    The crone sniffed and turned away.
    “Why did you do that?” Penny asked, in the Common Tongue.
    A fair question
, thought Tyrion.
Why
did I?
“Your show was growing dull. Every mummer needs a dancing
bear.”
    She gave him a reproachful look, then retreated to the back
of the cart and sat with her arms around Crunch, as if the dog was her last
true friend in the world.
Perhaps he is
.
    Nurse returned with Jorah Mormont. Two of their master’s
slave soldiers flung him into the back of the mule cart between the dwarfs. The
knight did not struggle.
All the fight went out of him when he heard
that his queen had wed
, Tyrion realized. One whispered word had done
what fists and whips and clubs could not; it had broken him.
I should
have let the crone have him. He’s going to be as useful as nipples on a
breastplate
.
    Nurse climbed onto the front of the mule cart and took up
the reins, and they set off through the siege camp to the compound of their new
master, the noble Yezzan zo Qaggaz. Four slave soldiers marched beside them,
two on either side of the cart.
    Penny did not weep, but her eyes were red and miserable, and
she never lifted them from Crunch.
Does she think all this might fade
away if she does not look at it?
Ser Jorah Mormont looked at no one
and nothing. He sat huddled, brooding in his chains.
    Tyrion looked at everything and everyone.
    The Yunkish encampment was not one camp but a hundred camps
raised up cheek by jowl in a crescent around the walls of Meereen, a city of
silk and canvas with its own avenues and alleys, taverns and trollops, good
districts and bad. Between the siege lines and the bay, tents had sprouted up
like yellow mushrooms. Some were small and mean, no more than a flap of old
stained canvas to keep off the rain and sun, but beside them stood barracks
tents large enough to sleep a hundred men and silken pavilions as big as
palaces with harpies gleaming atop their roof poles. Some camps were orderly,
with the tents arrayed around a fire pit in concentric circles, weapons and
armor stacked around the inner ring, horse lines outside. Elsewhere, pure chaos
seemed to reign.
    The dry, scorched plains around Meereen were flat and bare
and treeless for long leagues, but the Yunkish ships had brought lumber and
hides up from the south, enough to raise six huge trebuchets. They were arrayed
on three sides of the city, all but the river side, surrounded by piles of
broken stone and casks of pitch and resin just waiting for a torch. One of the
soldiers walking along beside the cart saw where Tyrion was looking and proudly
told him that each of the trebuchets had been given a name: Dragonbreaker,
Harridan, Harpy’s Daughter, Wicked Sister, Ghost of Astapor, Mazdhan’s Fist.
Towering above the tents to a height