A Feast for Dragons

betray her, he would master her. She did not know
which of those she feared the most.
    When the gluttony was done and all the half-eaten food had
been cleared away—to be given to the poor who gathered below, at the queen’s
insistence—tall glass flutes were filled with a spiced liqueur from Qarth as
dark as amber. Then began the entertainments.
    A troupe of Yunkish castrati owned by Yurkhaz zo Yunzak sang
them songs in the ancient tongue of the Old Empire, their voices high and sweet
and impossibly pure. “Have you ever heard such singing, my love?” Hizdahr asked
her. “They have the voices of gods, do they not?”
    “Yes,” she said, “though I wonder if they might not have
preferred to have the fruits of men.”
    All of the entertainers were slaves. That had been part of
the peace, that slaveowners be allowed the right to bring their chattels into
Meereen without fear of having them freed. In return the Yunkai’i had promised
to respect the rights and liberties of the former slaves that Dany had freed. A
fair bargain, Hizdahr said, but the taste it left in the queen’s mouth was
foul. She drank another cup of wine to wash it out.
    “If it please you, Yurkhaz will be pleased to give us the
singers, I do not doubt,” her noble husband said. “A gift to seal our peace, an
ornament to our court.”
    He will give us these castrati
, Dany
thought,
and then he will march home and make some more. The world is
full of boys
.
    The tumblers who came next failed to move her either, even
when they formed a human pyramid nine levels high, with a naked little girl on
top.
Is that meant to represent my pyramid?
the queen wondered.
Is the girl on top meant to be me?
    Afterward her lord husband led his guests onto the lower
terrace, so the visitors from the Yellow City might behold Meereen by night.
Wine cups in hand, the Yunkai’i wandered the garden in small groups, beneath
lemon trees and night-blooming flowers, and Dany found herself face-to-face
with Brown Ben Plumm.
    He bowed low. “Worship. You look lovely. Well, you always
did. None of them Yunkishmen are half so pretty. I thought I might bring a
wedding gift for you, but the bidding went too high for old Brown Ben.”
    “I want no gifts from you.”
    “This one you might. The head of an old foe.”
    “Your own?” she said sweetly. “You betrayed me.”
    “Now that’s a harsh way o’ putting it, if you don’t mind me
saying.” Brown Ben scratched at his speckled grey-and-white whiskers. “We went
over to the winning side, is all. Same as we done before. It weren’t all me,
neither. I put it to my men.”
    “So
they
betrayed me, is that what you are
saying? Why? Did I mistreat the Second Sons? Did I cheat you on your pay?”
    “Never that,” said Brown Ben, “but it’s not all about the
coin, Your High-and-Mightiness. I learned that a long time back, at my first
battle. Morning after the fight, I was rooting through the dead, looking for
the odd bit o’ plunder, as it were. Came upon this one corpse, some axeman had
taken his whole arm off at the shoulder. He was covered with flies, all crusty
with dried blood, might be why no one else had touched him, but under them he
wore this studded jerkin, looked to be good leather. I figured it might fit me
well enough, so I chased away the flies and cut it off him. The damn thing was
heavier than it had any right to be, though. Under the lining, he’d sewn a
fortune in coin.
Gold
, Your Worship, sweet yellow gold. Enough
for any man to live like a lord for the rest o’ his days. But what good did it
do him? There he was with all his coin, lying in the blood and mud with his
fucking arm cut off. And that’s the lesson, see? Silver’s sweet and gold’s our
mother, but once you’re dead they’re worth less than that last shit you take as
you lie dying. I told you once, there are old sellswords and there are bold
sellswords, but there are no old bold sellswords. My boys didn’t care to die,
that’s all, and when I told them that you couldn’t unleash them dragons against
the Yunkishmen, well …”
    You saw me as defeated
, Dany thought,
and
who am I to say that you were wrong?
“I understand.” She might have
ended it there, but she was curious. “Enough gold to live like a lord, you
said. What did you do with all that wealth?”
    Brown Ben laughed. “Fool boy that I was, I told a man I took
to be my friend, and he told our serjeant, and my brothers-in-arms come and
relieved me o’