A Game of Thrones 4-Book Bundle

unsupported from the floor
of the bazaar, reaching toward the high latticed roof.
    Most of the spectators, she noticed, were not of the city: she saw sailors off
trading ships, merchants come by caravan, dusty men out of the red waste,
wandering soldiers, craftsmen, slavers. Jhogo slid one hand about her waist and
leaned close. “The Milk Men shun him.
Khaleesi,
do you see the girl
in the felt hat? There, behind the fat priest. She is
a—”
    â€œâ€”cutpurse,” finished Dany. She was no pampered lady, blind to such
things. She had seen cutpurses aplenty in the streets of the Free Cities,
during the years she’d spent with her brother, running from the Usurper’s hired
knives.
    The mage was gesturing, urging the flames higher and higher with broad sweeps
of his arms. As the watchers craned their necks

upward, the cutpurses squirmed through the press, small blades hidden in their
palms. They relieved the prosperous of their coin with one hand while pointing
upward with the other.
    When the fiery ladder stood forty feet high, the mage leapt forward and began
to climb it, scrambling up hand over hand as quick as a monkey. Each rung he
touched dissolved behind him, leaving no more than a wisp of silver smoke. When
he reached the top, the ladder was gone and so was he.
    â€œA fine trick,” announced Jhogo with admiration.
    â€œNo trick,” a woman said in the Common Tongue.
    Dany had not noticed Quaithe in the crowd, yet there she stood, eyes wet and
shiny behind the implacable red lacquer mask. “What mean you, my
lady?”
    â€œHalf a year gone, that man could scarcely wake fire from dragonglass. He had
some small skill with powders and wildfire, sufficient to entrance a crowd
while his cutpurses did their work. He could walk across hot coals and make
burning roses bloom in the air, but he could no more aspire to climb the fiery
ladder than a common fisherman could hope to catch a kraken in his
nets.”
    Dany looked uneasily at where the ladder had stood. Even the smoke was gone
now, and the crowd was breaking up, each man going about his business. In a
moment more than a few would find their purses flat and empty. “And
now?”
    â€œAnd now his powers grow,
Khaleesi.
And you are the cause of
it.”
    â€œMe?” She laughed. “How could that be?”
    The woman stepped closer and lay two fingers on Dany’s wrist. “You are
the Mother of Dragons, are you not?”
    â€œShe is, and no spawn of shadows may touch her.” Jhogo brushed Quaithe’s
fingers away with the handle of his whip.
    The woman took a step backward. “You must leave this city soon, Daenerys
Targaryen, or you will never be permitted to leave it at all.”
    Dany’s wrist still tingled where Quaithe had touched her. “Where would you
have me go?” she asked.
    â€œTo go north, you must journey south. To reach the west, you must go east. To
go forward you must go back, and to touch the light you must pass beneath the
shadow.”
    Asshai,
Dany thought.
She would have me go to Asshai.
“Will the Asshai’i give me an army?” she demanded. “Will there be gold for
me in Asshai? Will there be ships? What is there in Asshai that I will not find
in Qarth?”
    â€œTruth,” said the woman in the mask. And bowing, she faded back into the
crowd.
    Rakharo snorted contempt through his drooping black mustachios.
“
Khaleesi,
better a man should swallow scorpions than trust in the
spawn of shadows, who dare not show their face beneath the sun. It is
known.”
    â€œIt is known,” Aggo agreed.
    Xaro Xhoan Daxos had watched the whole exchange from his cushions. When Dany
climbed back into the palanquin beside him, he said, “Your savages are wiser
than they know. Such truths as

the Asshai’i hoard are not like to make you smile.” Then he pressed another
cup of wine on her, and spoke of love and lust and other trifles all the way
back to his manse.
    In the quiet of her chambers, Dany stripped off her finery and donned a loose
robe of purple silk. Her dragons were hungry, so she chopped up a snake and
charred the pieces over a brazier.
They are growing,
she realized as
she watched them snap and squabble over the blackened flesh.
They must
weigh twice what they had in Vaes Tolorro.
Even so, it would be years
before they were large enough to take to war.
And they must be