A Feast for Dragons

free them from the woes of the world, to accompany their beloved master to
the grave and serve him in the afterlife.”
    Sweets should know. His will be the first throat slit
.
    The goat boy spoke up. “The silver queen—”
    “—is dead,” insisted Sweets. “Forget her! The dragon took
her across the river. She’s drowned in that Dothraki sea.”
    “You can’t drown in
grass,”
the goat boy
said.
    “If we were free,” said Penny, “we could find the queen. Or
go search for her, at least.”
    You on your dog and me on my sow, chasing a dragon
across the Dothraki sea
. Tyrion scratched his scar to keep from
laughing. “This particular dragon has already evinced a fondness for roast
pork. And roast dwarf is twice as tasty.”
    “It was just a wish,” said Penny wistfully. “We could sail
away. There are ships again, now that the war is over.”
    Is it?
Tyrion was inclined to doubt that.
Parchments had been signed, but wars were not fought on parchments.
    “We could sail to Qarth,” Penny went on. “The streets are
paved with jade there, my brother always said. The city walls are one of the
wonders of the world. When we perform in Qarth, gold and silver will rain down
on us, you’ll see.”
    “Some of those ships out on the bay are Qartheen,” Tyrion
reminded her. “Lomas Longstrider saw the walls of Qarth. His books suffice for
me. I have gone as far east as I intend to go.”
    Sweets dabbed at Yezzan’s fevered face with a damp cloth. “Yezzan
must live. Or we all die with him. The pale mare does not carry off every
rider. The master will recover.”
    That was a bald-faced lie. It would be a wonder if Yezzan
lived another day. The lord of suet was already dying from whatever hideous
disease he had brought back from Sothoryos, it seemed to Tyrion. This would
just hasten his end.
A mercy, really
. But not the sort the
dwarf craved for himself. “The healer said he needs fresh water. We will see to
that.”
    “That is good of you.” Sweets sounded numb. It was more than
just fear of having her throat cut; alone amongst Yezzan’s treasures, she
actually seemed fond of their immense master.
    “Penny, come with me.” Tyrion opened the tent flap and
ushered her out into the heat of a Meereenese morning. The air was muggy and
oppressive, yet still a welcome relief from the miasma of sweat, shit, and
sickness that filled the inside of Yezzan’s palatial pavilion.
    “Water will help the master,” Penny said. “That’s what the
healer said, it must be so. Sweet fresh water.”
    “Sweet fresh water didn’t help Nurse.”
Poor old Nurse
.
Yezzan’s soldiers had tossed him onto the corpse wagon last night at dusk,
another victim of the pale mare. When men are dying every hour, no one looks
too hard at one more dead man, especially one as well despised as Nurse.
Yezzan’s other slaves had refused to go near the overseer once the cramps
began, so it was left to Tyrion to keep him warm and bring him drinks.
Watered
wine and lemonsweet and some nice hot dogtail soup, with slivers of mushroom in
the broth. Drink it down, Nursey, that shitwater squirting from your arse needs
to be replaced
. The last word Nurse ever said was, “No.” The last
words he ever heard were, “A Lannister always pays his debts.”
    Tyrion had kept the truth of that from Penny, but she needed
to understand how things stood with their master. “If Yezzan lives to see the
sunrise, I’ll be stunned.”
    She clutched his arm. “What will happen to us?”
    “He has heirs. Nephews.” Four such had come with Yezzan from
Yunkai to command his slave soldiers. One was dead, slain by Targaryen
sellswords during a sortie. The other three would divide the yellow enormity’s
slaves amongst them, like as not. Whether any of the nephews shared Yezzan’s
fondness for cripples, freaks, and grotesques was far less certain. “One of
them may inherit us. Or we could end up back on the auction block.”
    “No.” Her eyes got big. “Not that. Please.”
    “It is not a prospect I relish either.”
    A few yards away, six of Yezzan’s slave soldiers were squatting
in the dust, throwing the bones and passing a wineskin from hand to hand. One
was the serjeant called Scar, a black-tempered brute with a head as smooth as
stone and the shoulders of an ox.
Clever as an ox too
, Tyrion
recalled.
    He waddled toward them. “Scar,” he barked out, “the noble
Yezzan has need of fresh, clean water. Take two men and bring back as many
pails