A Feast for Dragons

now, even when he was no more than a
speck. The second time he passed before the sun, his black wings spread, and
the world darkened. The last time he flew right above her, so close she could
hear the sound of his wings. For half a heartbeat Dany thought that he was
hunting her, but he flew on without taking any notice of her and vanished
somewhere in the east.
Just as well
, she thought.
    Evening took her almost unawares. As the sun was gilding the
distant spires of Dragonstone, Dany stumbled onto a low stone wall, overgrown
and broken. Perhaps it had been part of a temple, or the hall of the village
lord. More ruins lay beyond it—an old well, and some circles in the grass that
marked the sites where hovels had once stood. They had been built of mud and
straw, she judged, but long years of wind and rain had worn them away to
nothing. Dany found eight before the sun went down, but there might have been
more farther out, hidden in the grass.
    The stone wall had endured better than the rest. Though it
was nowhere more than three feet high, the angle where it met another, lower
wall still offered some shelter from the elements, and night was coming on
fast. Dany wedged herself into that corner, making a nest of sorts by tearing
up handfuls of the grass that grew around the ruins. She was very tired, and
fresh blisters had appeared on both her feet, including a matched set upon her
pinky toes.
It must be from the way I walk
, she thought,
giggling.
    As the world darkened, Dany settled in and closed her eyes,
but sleep refused to come. The night was cold, the ground hard, her belly
empty. She found herself thinking of Meereen, of Daario, her love, and Hizdahr,
her husband, of Irri and Jhiqui and sweet Missandei, Ser Barristan and Reznak
and Skahaz Shavepate.
Do they fear me dead? I flew off on a dragon’s
back. Will they think he ate me?
She wondered if Hizdahr was still
king. His crown had come from her, could he hold it in her absence?
He
wanted Drogon dead. I heard him. “Kill it,” he screamed, “kill the beast,” and
the look upon his face was lustful
. And Strong Belwas had been on his
knees, heaving and shuddering.
Poison. It had to be poison. The honeyed
locusts. Hizdahr urged them on me, but Belwas ate them all
. She had
made Hizdahr her king, taken him into her bed, opened the fighting pits for
him, he had no reason to want her dead. Yet who else could it have been?
Reznak, her perfumed seneschal? The Yunkai’i? The Sons of the Harpy?
    Off in the distance, a wolf howled. The sound made her feel
sad and lonely, but no less hungry. As the moon rose above the grasslands, Dany
slipped at last into a restless sleep.
    She dreamed. All her cares fell away from her, and all her
pains as well, and she seemed to float upward into the sky. She was flying once
again, spinning, laughing, dancing, as the stars wheeled around her and
whispered secrets in her ear. “To go north, you must journey south. To reach
the west, you must go east. To go forward, you must go back. To touch the light
you must pass beneath the shadow.”
    “Quaithe?” Dany called. “Where are you, Quaithe?”
    Then she saw.
Her mask is made of starlight
.
    “Remember who you are, Daenerys,” the stars whispered in a
woman’s voice. “The dragons know. Do you?”
    The next morning she woke stiff and sore and aching, with ants
crawling on her arms and legs and face. When she realized what they were, she
kicked aside the stalks of dry brown grass that had served as her bed and
blanket and struggled to her feet. She had bites all over her, little red
bumps, itchy and inflamed.
Where did all the ants come from?
Dany brushed them from her arms and legs and belly. She ran a hand across her
stubbly scalp where her hair had burned away, and felt more ants on her head,
and one crawling down the back of her neck. She knocked them off and crushed
them under her bare feet. There were so many …
    It turned out that their anthill was on the other side of
her wall. She wondered how the ants had managed to climb over it and find her.
To them these tumbledown stones must loom as huge as the Wall of Westeros.
The
biggest wall in all the world
, her brother Viserys used to say, as
proud as if he’d built it himself.
    Viserys told her tales of knights so poor that they had to
sleep beneath the ancient hedges that grew along the byways of the Seven Kingdoms.
Dany would have given much and more for a nice thick hedge.
Preferably
one without an anthill
.
    The