A Game of Thrones 4-Book Bundle

cage of woven
wood slung between their mounts, and rode close behind her, so Dany was never
out of their sight. It was the only way to keep them quiescent.
    â€œAegon’s dragons were named for the gods of Old Valyria,” she told her
bloodriders one morning after a long night’s journey. “Visenya’s dragon was
Vhagar, Rhaenys had Meraxes, and Aegon rode Balerion, the Black Dread. It was
said that Vhagar’s breath was so hot that it could melt a knight’s armor and
cook the man inside, that Meraxes swallowed horses whole, and
Balerion . . . his fire was as black as his scales, his wings
so vast that whole towns were swallowed up in their shadow when he passed
overhead.”
    The Dothraki looked at her hatchlings uneasily. The largest of her three was
shiny black, his scales slashed with streaks of vivid scarlet to match his
wings and horns.
“Khaleesi,”
Aggo murmured, “there sits Balerion,
come again.”
    â€œIt may be as you say, blood of my blood,” Dany replied gravely, “but he
shall have a new name for this new life. I would name them all for those the
gods have taken. The green one shall be Rhaegal, for my valiant brother who
died on the green banks of the Trident. The cream-and-gold I call Viserion.
Viserys was

cruel and weak and frightened, yet he was my brother still. His dragon will do
what he could not.”
    â€œAnd the black beast?” asked Ser Jorah Mormont.
    â€œThe black,” she said, “is Drogon.”
    Yet even as her dragons prospered, her
khalasar
withered and died.
Around them the land turned ever more desolate. Even devilgrass grew scant;
horses dropped in their tracks, leaving so few that some of her people must
trudge along on foot. Doreah took a fever and grew worse with every league they
crossed. Her lips and hands broke with blood blisters, her hair came out in
clumps, and one evenfall she lacked the strength to mount her horse. Jhogo said
they must leave her or bind her to her saddle, but Dany remembered a night on
the Dothraki sea, when the Lysene girl had taught her secrets so that Drogo
might love her more. She gave Doreah water from her own skin, cooled her brow
with a damp cloth, and held her hand until she died, shivering. Only then would
she permit the
khalasar
to
press on.
    They saw no sign of other travelers. The Dothraki began to mutter fearfully
that the comet had led them to some hell. Dany went to Ser Jorah one morning as
they made camp amidst a jumble of black wind-scoured stones. “Are we lost?” she
asked him. “Does this waste have no end to it?”
    â€œIt has an end,” he answered wearily. “I have seen the maps the traders
draw, my queen. Few caravans come this way, that is so, yet there are great
kingdoms to the east, and cities full of wonders. Yi Ti, Qarth, Asshai by the
Shadow . . .”
    â€œWill we live to see them?”
    â€œI will not lie to you. The way is harder than I dared think.” The knight’s
face was grey and exhausted. The wound he had taken to his hip the night he
fought Khal Drogo’s bloodriders had never fully healed; she could see how he
grimaced when he mounted his horse, and he seemed to slump in his saddle as
they rode. “Perhaps we are doomed if we press on . . . but I
know for a certainty that we are doomed if we turn back.”
    Dany kissed him lightly on the cheek. It heartened her to see him smile.
I
must be strong for him as well,
she thought grimly.
A knight he may
be, but I am the blood of the dragon.
    The next pool they found was scalding hot and stinking of brimstone, but their
skins were almost empty. The Dothraki cooled the water in jars and pots and
drank it tepid. The taste was no less foul, but water was water, and all of
them thirsted. Dany looked at the horizon with despair. They had lost a third
of their number, and still the waste stretched before them, bleak and red and
endless.
The comet mocks my hopes,
she thought, lifting her eyes to
where it scored the sky.
Have I crossed half the world and seen the birth
of dragons only to die with them in this hard hot desert?
She would not
believe it.
    The next day, dawn broke as they were crossing a cracked and fissured plain of
hard red earth. Dany was about to command them to make camp when her outriders
came racing back at a gallop. “A city,
Khaleesi,
” they cried. “A
city