A Feast for Dragons

other sellswords knew the fate of the denizens of
Yezzan’s grotesquerie … but if Pretty Penny needed lies to stop her
mooning, lie to her he would. “If you want to be a slave again, I will find you
a kind master when this war is done, and sell you for enough gold to get me
home,” Tyrion promised her. “I’ll find you some nice Yunkishman to give you
another pretty golden collar, with little bells on it that will tinkle
everywhere you go. First, though, you will need to survive what’s coming. No
one buys dead mummers.”
    “Or dead dwarfs,” said Jorah Mormont. “We are all like to be
feeding worms by the time this battle is done. The Yunkai’i have lost this war,
though it may take them some time to know it. Meereen has an army of Unsullied
infantry, the finest in the world. And Meereen has dragons. Three of them, once
the queen returns. She will. She must. Our side consists of two score Yunkish
lordlings, each with his own half-trained monkey men. Slaves on stilts, slaves
in chains … they may have troops of blind men and palsied children
too, I would not put it past them.”
    “Oh, I know,” said Tyrion. “The Second Sons are on the
losing side. They need to turn their cloaks again and do it now.” He grinned.
“Leave that to me.”
    ----

    THE KINGBREAKER
    A pale shadow and a dark, the two conspirators came together
in the quiet of the armory on the Great Pyramid’s second level, amongst racks
of spears, sheaves of quarrels, and walls hung with trophies from forgotten
battles.
    “Tonight,” said Skahaz mo Kandaq. The brass face of a blood
bat peered out from beneath the hood of his patchwork cloak. “All my men will
be in place. The word is
Groleo.”
    “Groleo.”
That is fitting, I suppose
. “Yes.
What was done to him … you were at court?”
    “One guardsman amongst forty. All waiting for the empty
tabard on the throne to speak the command so we might cut down Bloodbeard and
the rest. Do you think the Yunkai’i would ever have dared present
Daenerys
with the head of her hostage?”
    No
, thought Selmy. “Hizdahr seemed
distraught.”
    “Sham. His own kin of Loraq were returned unharmed. You saw.
The Yunkai’i played us a mummer’s farce, with noble Hizdahr as chief mummer.
The issue was never Yurkhaz zo Yunzak. The other slavers would gladly have
trampled that old fool themselves. This was to give Hizdahr a pretext to kill
the dragons.”
    Ser Barristan chewed on that. “Would he dare?”
    “He dared to kill his queen. Why not her pets? If we do not
act, Hizdahr will hesitate for a time, to give proof of his reluctance and
allow the Wise Masters the chance to rid him of the Stormcrow and the
bloodrider.
Then
he will act. They want the dragons dead before
the Volantene fleet arrives.”
    Aye, they would
. It all fit. That did not
mean Barristan Selmy liked it any better. “That will not happen.” His queen was
the Mother of Dragons; he would not allow her children to come to harm. “The
hour of the wolf. The blackest part of night, when all the world’s asleep.” He
had first heard those words from Tywin Lannister outside the walls of
Duskendale.
He gave me a day to bring out Aerys. Unless I returned with
the king by dawn of the following day, he would take the town with steel and
fire, he told me. It was the hour of the wolf when I went in and the hour of
the wolf when we emerged
. “Grey Worm and the Unsullied will close and
bar the gates at first light.”
    “Better to attack at first light,” Skahaz said. “Burst from
the gates and swarm across the siege lines, smash the Yunkai’i as they come
stumbling from their beds.”
    “No.” The two of them had argued this before. “There is a
peace, signed and sealed by Her Grace the queen. We will not be the first to
break it. Once we have taken Hizdahr, we will form a council to rule in his
place and demand that the Yunkai’i return our hostages and withdraw their
armies. Should they refuse, then and only then will we inform them that the
peace is broken, and go forth to give them battle. Your way is dishonorable.”
    “Your way is stupid,” the Shavepate said. “The hour is ripe.
Our freedmen are ready. Hungry.”
    That much was true, Selmy knew. Symon Stripeback of the Free
Brothers and Mollono Yos Dob of the Stalwart Shields were both eager for
battle, intent on proving themselves and washing out all the wrongs they had
suffered in a tide of Yunkish blood. Only Marselen of the Mother’s Men shared
Ser