A Feast for Dragons

dragon’s back and flew away,”
insisted a tall brown woman.
    “She tried,” said the old man, “but she couldn’t hold on.
The crossbows wounded the dragon, and the queen was struck right between her
sweet pink teats, I hear. That was when she fell. She died in the gutter,
crushed beneath a wagon’s wheels. I know a girl who knows a man who saw her
die.”
    In this company, silence was the better part of wisdom, but
Tyrion could not help himself. “No corpse was found,” he said.
    The old man frowned. “What would you know about it?”
    “They were there,” said the brown woman. “It’s them, the
jousting dwarfs, the ones who tilted for the queen.”
    The old man squinted down as if seeing him and Penny for the
first time. “You’re the ones who rode the pigs.”
    Our notoriety precedes us
. Tyrion sketched a
courtly bow, and refrained from pointing out that one of the pigs was really a
dog. “The sow I ride is actually my sister. We have the same nose, could you
tell? A wizard cast a spell on her, but if you give her a big wet kiss, she
will turn into a beautiful woman. The pity is, once you get to know her, you’ll
want to kiss her again to turn her back.”
    Laughter erupted all around them. Even the old man joined
in. “You saw her, then,” said the redheaded boy behind them. “You saw the
queen. Is she as beautiful as they say?”
    I saw a slender girl with silvery hair wrapped in a
tokar
, he might have told them.
Her face was veiled, and I
never got close enough for a good look. I was riding on a pig
.
Daenerys Targaryen had been seated in the owner’s box beside her Ghiscari king,
but Tyrion’s eyes had been drawn to the knight in the white-and-gold armor
behind her. Though his features were concealed, the dwarf would have known
Barristan Selmy anywhere.
Illyrio was right about that much, at least
,
he remembered thinking.
Will Selmy know me, though? And what will he do
if he does?
    He had almost revealed himself then and there, but something
stopped him—caution, cowardice, instinct, call it what you will. He could not
imagine Barristan the Bold greeting him with anything but hostility. Selmy had
never approved of Jaime’s presence in his precious Kingsguard. Before the
rebellion, the old knight thought him too young and untried; afterward, he had
been known to say that the Kingslayer should exchange that white cloak for a
black one. And his own crimes were worse. Jaime had killed a madman. Tyrion had
put a quarrel through the groin of his own sire, a man Ser Barristan had known
and served for years. He might have chanced it all the same, but then Penny had
landed a blow on his shield and the moment was gone, never to return.
    “The queen watched us tilt,” Penny was telling the other
slaves in line, “but that was the only time we saw her.”
    “You must have seen the dragon,” said the old man.
    Would that we had
. The gods had not even
vouchsafed him that much. As Daenerys Targaryen was taking wing, Nurse had been
clapping irons round their ankles to make certain they would not attempt escape
on their way back to their master. If the overseer had only taken his leave
after delivering them to the abbatoir, or fled with the rest of the slavers
when the dragon descended from the sky, the two dwarfs might have strolled away
free.
Or run away, more like, our little bells a-jingle
.
    “Was there a dragon?” Tyrion said with a shrug. “All I know
is that no dead queens were found.”
    The old man was not convinced. “Ah, they found corpses by
the hundred. They dragged them inside the pit and burned them, though half was
crisp already. Might be they didn’t know her, burned and bloody and crushed.
Might be they did but decided to say elsewise, to keep you slaves quiet.”
    “
Us
slaves?” said the brown woman. “You wear
a collar too.”
    “
Ghazdor’s
collar,” the old man boasted.
“Known him since we was born. I’m almost like a brother to him. Slaves like you,
sweepings out of Astapor and Yunkai, you whine about being free, but I wouldn’t
give the dragon queen my collar if she offered to suck my cock for it. Man has
the right master, that’s better.”
    Tyrion did not dispute him. The most insidious thing about
bondage was how easy it was to grow accustomed to it. The life of most slaves
was not all that different from the life of a serving man at Casterly Rock, it
seemed to him. True, some slaveowners and their overseers were brutal and
cruel, but the same was