A Feast for Dragons

and hands and spikes. Hizdahr’s kin of the ancient line
of Loraq seemed to favor
tokar
s of purple and indigo and lilac,
whilst those of Pahl were striped in pink and white. The envoys from Yunkai
were all in yellow and filled the box beside the king’s, each of them with his
slaves and servants. Meereenese of lesser birth crowded the upper tiers, more
distant from the carnage. The black and purple benches, highest and most
distant from the sand, were crowded with freedmen and other common folk. The
sellswords had been placed up there as well, Daenerys saw, their captains
seated right amongst the common soldiers. She spied Brown Ben’s weathered face
and Bloodbeard’s fiery red whiskers and long braids.
    Her lord husband stood and raised his hands. “
Great
Masters!
My queen has come this day, to show her love for you, her
people. By her grace and with her leave, I give you now your mortal art.
Meereen!
Let Queen Daenerys hear your love!”
    Ten thousand throats roared out their thanks; then twenty
thousand; then all. They did not call her name, which few of them could
pronounce.
“Mother!”
they cried instead; in the old dead tongue
of Ghis, the word was
Mhysa!
They stamped their feet and
slapped their bellies and shouted,
“Mhysa, Mhysa, Mhysa,”
until
the whole pit seemed to tremble. Dany let the sound wash over her.
I am
not your mother
, she might have shouted, back,
I am the mother
of your slaves, of every boy who ever died upon these sands whilst you gorged
on honeyed locusts
. Behind her, Reznak leaned in to whisper in her
ear, “Magnificence, hear how they love you!”
    No
, she knew,
they love their mortal
art
. When the cheers began to ebb, she allowed to herself to sit.
Their box was in the shade, but her head was pounding. “Jhiqui,” she called,
“sweet water, if you would. My throat is very dry.”
    “Khrazz will have the honor of the day’s first kill,”
Hizdahr told her. “There has never been a better fighter.”
    “Strong Belwas was better,” insisted Strong Belwas.
    Khrazz was Meereenese, of humble birth—a tall man with a
brush of stiff red-black hair running down the center of his head. His foe was
an ebon-skinned spearman from the Summer Isles whose thrusts kept Khrazz at bay
for a time, but once he slipped inside the spear with his shortsword, only
butchery remained. After it was done, Khrazz cut the heart from the black man,
raised it above his head red and dripping, and took a bite from it.
    “Khrazz believes the hearts of brave men make him stronger,”
said Hizdahr. Jhiqui murmured her approval. Dany had once eaten a stallion’s
heart to give strength to her unborn son … but that had not saved
Rhaego when the
maegi
murdered him in her womb.
Three
treasons shall you know. She was the first, Jorah was the second, Brown Ben
Plumm the third
. Was she done with betrayals?
    “Ah,” said Hizdahr, pleased. “Now comes the Spotted Cat. See
how he moves, my queen. A poem on two feet.”
    The foe Hizdahr had found for the walking poem was as tall
as Goghor and as broad as Belwas, but slow. They were fighting six feet from
Dany’s box when the Spotted Cat hamstrung him. As the man stumbled to his
knees, the Cat put a foot on his back and a hand around his head and opened his
throat from ear to ear. The red sands drank his blood, the wind his final
words. The crowd screamed its approval.
    “Bad fighting, good dying,” said Strong Belwas. “Strong
Belwas hates it when they scream.” He had finished all the honeyed locusts. He
gave a belch and took a swig of wine.
    Pale Qartheen, black Summer Islanders, copper-skinned
Dothraki, Tyroshi with blue beards, Lamb Men, Jogos Nhai, sullen Braavosi,
brindle-skinned half-men from the jungles of Sothoros—from the ends of the
world they came to die in Daznak’s Pit. “This one shows much promise, my
sweet,” Hizdahr said of a Lysene youth with long blond hair that fluttered in
the wind … but his foe grabbed a handful of that hair, pulled the boy
off-balance, and gutted him. In death he looked even younger than he had with
blade in hand. “A boy,” said Dany. “He was only a boy.”
    “Six-and-ten,” Hizdahr insisted. “A man grown, who freely
chose to risk his life for gold and glory. No children die today in Daznak’s,
as my gentle queen in her wisdom has decreed.”
    Another small victory. Perhaps I cannot make my
people good
, she told herself,
but I should at least try to
make them a little less bad
. Daenerys