A Feast for Dragons

on
Dragonstone. Dany scooped up a handful of water and splashed it on her face.
When she cupped her hands, her knuckles squished in the mud at the bottom of
the stream. She might have wished for colder, clearer water … but no,
if she were going to pin her hopes on wishes, she would wish for rescue.
    She still clung to the hope that someone would come after
her. Ser Barristan might come seeking her; he was the first of her Queensguard,
sworn to defend her life with his own. And her bloodriders were no strangers to
the Dothraki sea, and their lives were bound to her own. Her husband, the noble
Hizdahr zo Loraq, might dispatch searchers. And Daario … Dany
pictured him riding toward her through the tall grass, smiling, his golden
tooth gleaming with the last light of the setting sun.
    Only Daario had been given to the Yunkai’i, a hostage to
ensure no harm came to the Yunkish captains.
Daario and Hero, Jhogo and
Groleo, and three of Hizdahr’s kin
. By now, surely, all of her
hostages would have been released. But …
    She wondered if her captain’s blades still hung upon the
wall beside her bed, waiting for Daario to return and claim them.
“I
will leave my girls with you,”
he had said.
“Keep them safe for
me, beloved.”
And she wondered how much the Yunkai’i knew about what
her captain meant to her. She had asked Ser Barristan that question the
afternoon the hostages went forth. “They will have heard the talk,” he had
replied. “Naharis may even have boasted of Your Grace’s … of your
great … regard … for him. If you will forgive my saying so,
modesty is not one of the captain’s virtues. He takes great pride in
his … his swordsmanship.”
    He boasts of bedding me, you mean
. But
Daario would not have been so foolish as to make such a boast amongst her
enemies.
It makes no matter. By now the Yunkai’i will be marching home
.
That was why she had done all that she had done. For peace.
    She turned back the way she’d come, to where Dragonstone
rose above the grasslands like a clenched fist.
It looks so close. I’ve
been walking for hours, yet it still looks as if I could reach out and touch it
.
It was not too late to go back. There were fish in the spring-fed pool by
Drogon’s cave. She had caught one her first day there, she might catch more.
And there would be scraps, charred bones with bits of flesh still on them, the
remnants of Drogon’s kills.
    No
, Dany told herself.
If I look back
I am lost
. She might live for years amongst the sunbaked rocks of
Dragonstone, riding Drogon by day and gnawing at his leavings every evenfall as
the great grass sea turned from gold to orange, but that was not the life she
had been born to. So once again she turned her back upon the distant hill and
closed her ears to the song of flight and freedom that the wind sang as it
played amongst the hill’s stony ridges. The stream was trickling south by
southeast, as near as she could tell. She followed it.
Take me to the
river, that is all I ask of you. Take me to the river, and I will do the rest
.
    The hours passed slowly. The stream bent this way and that,
and Dany followed, beating time upon her leg with the whip, trying not to think
about how far she had to go, or the pounding in her head, or her empty belly.
Take
one step. Take the next. Another step. Another
. What else could she
do?
    It was quiet on her sea. When the wind blew the grass would
sigh as the stalks brushed against each other, whispering in a tongue that only
gods could understand. Now and again the little stream would gurgle where it
flowed around a stone. Mud squished between her toes. Insects buzzed around
her, lazy dragonflies and glistening green wasps and stinging midges almost too
small to see. She swatted at them absently when they landed on her arms. Once
she came upon a rat drinking from the stream, but it fled when she appeared,
scurrying between the stalks to vanish in the high grass. Sometimes she heard
birds singing. The sound made her belly rumble, but she had no nets to snare
them with, and so far she had not come on any nests.
Once I dreamed of
flying
, she thought,
and now I’ve flown, and dream of stealing
eggs
. That made her laugh. “Men are mad and gods are madder,” she told
the grass, and the grass murmured its agreement.
    Thrice that day she caught sight of Drogon. Once he was so
far off that he might have been an eagle, slipping in and out of distant
clouds, but Dany knew the look of him by