A Game of Thrones 4-Book Bundle

Dany the old and the scrawny, the sickly and the lame, the broken animals
and the ill-tempered. It was the same with the people.
They are not
strong,
she told herself,
so I must be their strength. I must show no
fear, no weakness, no doubt. However frightened my heart, when they look upon
my face they must see only Drogo’s queen.
She felt older than her fourteen
years. If ever she had truly been a girl, that time was done.
    Three days into the march, the first man died. A toothless oldster with cloudy
blue eyes, he fell exhausted from his saddle and could not rise again. An hour
later he was done. Blood flies swarmed about his corpse and carried his ill
luck to the living. “His time was past,” her handmaid Irri declared. “No man
should live longer than his teeth.” The others agreed. Dany bid them kill the
weakest of their dying horses, so the dead man might go

mounted into the night lands.
    Two nights later, it was an infant girl who perished. Her mother’s anguished
wailing lasted all day, but there was nothing to be done. The child had been
too young to ride, poor thing. Not for her the endless black grasses of the
night lands; she must be born again.
    There was little forage in the red waste, and less water. It was a sere and
desolate land of low hills and
barren windswept plains. The rivers they crossed
were dry as dead men’s bones. Their mounts subsisted on the tough brown
devilgrass that grew in clumps at the base of rocks and dead trees. Dany sent
outriders ranging ahead of the column, but they found neither wells nor
springs, only bitter pools, shallow and stagnant, shrinking in the hot sun. The
deeper they rode into the waste, the smaller the pools became, while the
distance between them grew. If there were gods in this trackless wilderness of
stone and sand and red clay, they were hard dry gods, deaf to prayers for
rain.
    Wine gave out first, and soon thereafter the clotted mare’s milk the horselords
loved better than mead. Then their stores of flatbread and dried meat were
exhausted as well. Their hunters found no game, and only the flesh of their
dead horses filled their bellies. Death followed death. Weak children, wrinkled
old women, the sick and the stupid and the heedless, the cruel land claimed
them all. Doreah grew gaunt and hollow-eyed, and her soft golden hair turned
brittle as straw.
    Dany hungered and thirsted with the rest of them. The milk

in her breasts dried up, her nipples cracked and bled, and the flesh fell away
from her day by day until she was lean and hard as a stick, yet it was her
dragons she feared for. Her father had been slain before she was born, and her
splendid brother Rhaegar as well. Her mother had died bringing her into the
world while the storm screamed outside. Gentle Ser Willem Darry, who must have
loved her after a fashion, had been taken by a wasting sickness when she was
very young. Her brother Viserys, Khal Drogo who was her sun-and-stars, even her
unborn son, the gods had claimed them all.
They will not have my
dragons,
Dany vowed.
They will not.
    The dragons were no larger than the scrawny cats she had once seen skulking
along the walls of Magister Illyrio’s estate in
Pentos . . . until they unfolded their wings. Their span was
three times their length, each wing a delicate fan of translucent skin,
gorgeously colored, stretched taut between long thin bones. When you looked
hard, you could see that most of their body
was neck, tail, and wing.
Such
little things,
she thought as she fed them by hand. Or rather, tried to
feed them, for the dragons would not eat. They would hiss and spit at each
bloody morsel of horsemeat, steam rising from their nostrils, yet they would
not take the food . . . until Dany recalled something Viserys
had told her when they were children.
    Only dragons and men eat cooked meat,
he had said.
    When she had her handmaids char the horsemeat black, the dragons ripped at it
eagerly, their heads striking like snakes. So long as the meat was seared, they
gulped down several times

their own weight every day, and at last began to grow larger and stronger. Dany
marveled at the smoothness of their scales, and the
heat
that poured
off them, so palpable that on cold nights their whole bodies seemed to
steam.
    Each evenfall as the
khalasar
set out, she would choose a dragon to
ride upon her shoulder. Irri and Jhiqui carried the others in a