A Feast for Dragons

Drogon did not seem to share.
    The dragonlords of old Valyria had controlled their mounts
with binding spells and sorcerous horns. Daenerys made do with a word and a
whip. Mounted on the dragon’s back, she oft felt as if she were learning to
ride all over again. When she whipped her silver mare on her right flank the
mare went left, for a horse’s first instinct is to flee from danger. When she
laid the whip across Drogon’s right side he veered right, for a dragon’s first
instinct is always to attack. Sometimes it did not seem to matter where she
struck him, though; sometimes he went where he would and took her with him.
Neither whip nor words could turn Drogon if he did not wish to be turned. The
whip annoyed him more than it hurt him, she had come to see; his scales had
grown harder than horn.
    And no matter how far the dragon flew each day, come
nightfall some instinct drew him home to Dragonstone.
His home, not mine
.
Her home was back in Meereen, with her husband and her lover. That was where
she belonged, surely.
    Keep walking. If I look back I am lost
.
    Memories walked with her. Clouds seen from above. Horses
small as ants thundering through the grass. A silver moon, almost close enough
to touch. Rivers running bright and blue below, glimmering in the sun.
Will
I ever see such sights again?
On Drogon’s back she felt
whole
.
Up in the sky the woes of this world could not touch her. How could she abandon
that?
    It was time, though. A girl might spend her life at play,
but she was a woman grown, a queen, a wife, a mother to thousands. Her children
had need of her. Drogon had bent before the whip, and so must she. She had to
don her crown again and return to her ebon bench and the arms of her noble
husband.
    Hizdahr, of the tepid kisses
.
    The sun was hot this morning, the sky blue and cloudless. That
was good. Dany’s clothes were hardly more than rags, and offered little in the
way of warmth. One of her sandals had slipped off during her wild flight from
Meereen and she had left the other up by Drogon’s cave, preferring to go
barefoot rather than half-shod. Her
tokar
and veils she had
abandoned in the pit, and her linen undertunic had never been made to withstand
the hot days and cold nights of the Dothraki sea. Sweat and grass and dirt had
stained it, and Dany had torn a strip off the hem to make a bandage for her
shin.
I must look a ragged thing, and starved
, she thought,
but
if the days stay warm, I will not freeze
.
    Hers had been a lonely sojourn, and for most of it she had
been hurt and hungry … yet despite it all she had been strangely
happy here.
A few aches, an empty belly, chills by
night … what does it matter when you can fly? I would do it all again
.
    Jhiqui and Irri would be waiting atop her pyramid back in
Meereen, she told herself. Her sweet scribe Missandei as well, and all her little
pages. They would bring her food, and she could bathe in the pool beneath the
persimmon tree. It would be good to feel clean again. Dany did not need a glass
to know that she was filthy.
    She was hungry too. One morning she had found some wild
onions growing halfway down the south slope, and later that same day a leafy
reddish vegetable that might have been some queer sort of cabbage. Whatever it
was, it had not made her sick. Aside from that, and one fish that she had
caught in the spring-fed pool outside of Drogon’s cave, she had survived as
best she could on the dragon’s leavings, on burned bones and chunks of smoking
meat, half-charred and half-raw. She needed more, she knew. One day she kicked
at a cracked sheep’s skull with the side of a bare foot and sent it bouncing
over the edge of the hill. And as she watched it tumble down the steep slope
toward the sea of grass, she realized she must follow.
    Dany set off through the tall grass at a brisk pace. The
earth felt warm between her toes. The grass was as tall as she was.
It
never seemed so high when I was mounted on my silver, riding beside my
sun-and-stars at the head of his khalasar
. As she walked, she tapped
her thigh with the pitmaster’s whip. That, and the rags on her back, were all
she had taken from Meereen.
    Though she walked through a green kingdom, it was not the
deep rich green of summer. Even here autumn made its presence felt, and winter
would not be far behind. The grass was paler than she remembered, a wan and
sickly green on the verge of going yellow. After that would come brown. The
grass was dying.
    Daenerys