“The Dothraki sea,” Ser Jorah Mormont said as he reined to a halt beside her on the top of theridge. Beneath them, the plain stretched out immense and empty, a vast flat expanse that reached tothe distant horizon and beyond. It was a sea, Dany thought. Past here, there were no hills, nomountains, no trees nor cities nor roads, only the endless grasses, the tall blades rippling like waveswhen the winds blew. “It’s so green,” she said.

“Here and now,” Ser Jorah agreed. “You ought to see it when it blooms, all dark red flowers fromhorizon to horizon, like a sea of blood. Come the dry season, and the world turns the color of oldbronze. And this is only hranna, child. There are a hundred kinds of grass out there, grasses as yellowas lemon and as dark as indigo, blue grasses and orange grasses and grasses like rainbows. Down inthe Shadow Lands beyond Asshai, they say there are oceans of ghost grass, taller than a man onhorseback with stalks as pale as milkglass. It murders all other grass and glows in the dark with thespirits of the damned. The Dothraki claim that someday ghost grass will cover the entire world, andthen all life will end.”

That thought gave Dany the shivers. “I don’t want to talk about that now,” she said. “It’s sobeautiful here, I don’t want to think about everything dying.”

“As you will, Khaleesi,” Ser Jorah said respectfully.

She heard the sound of voices and turned to look behind her. She and Mormont had outdistancedthe rest of their party, and now the others were climbing the ridge below them. Her handmaid Irri andthe young archers of her khas were fluid as centaurs, but Viserys still struggled with the short stirrupsand the flat saddle. Her brother was miserable out here. He ought never have come. Magister Illyriohad urged him to wait in Pentos, had offered him the hospitality of his manse, but Viserys would havenone of it. He would stay with Drogo until the debt had been paid, until he had the crown he had beenpromised. “And if he tries to cheat me, he will learn to his sorrow what it means to wake the dragon,”

Viserys had vowed, laying a hand on his borrowed sword. Illyrio had blinked at that and wished himgood fortune.

Dany realized that she did not want to listen to any of her brother’s complaints right now. The daywas too perfect. The sky was a deep blue, and high above them a hunting hawk circled. The grass seaswayed and sighed with each breath of wind, the air was warm on her face, and Dany felt at peace.

She would not let Viserys spoil it.

“Wait here,” Dany told Ser Jorah. “Tell them all to stay. Tell them I command it.”

The knight smiled. Ser Jorah was not a handsome man. He had a neck and shoulders like a bull,and coarse black hair covered his arms and chest so thickly that there was none left for his head. Yethis smiles gave Dany comfort. “You are learning to talk like a queen, Daenerys.”

“Not a queen,” said Dany. “A khaleesi.” She wheeled her horse about and galloped down theridge alone.

The descent was steep and rocky, but Dany rode fearlessly, and the joy and the danger of it were asong in her heart. All her life Viserys had told her she was a princess, but not until she rode her silverhad Daenerys Targaryen ever felt like one.

At first it had not come easy. The khalasar had broken camp the morning after her wedding,moving east toward Vaes Dothrak, and by the third day Dany thought she was going to die. Saddlesores opened on her bottom, hideous and bloody. Her thighs were chafed raw, her hands blisteredfrom the reins, the muscles of her legs and back so wracked with pain that she could scarcely sit.

By the time dusk fell, her handmaids would need to help her down from her mount.

Even the nights brought no relief. Khal Drogo ignored her when they rode, even as he had ignoredher during their wedding, and spent his evenings drinking with his warriors and bloodriders, racinghis prize horses, watching women dance and men die. Dany had no place in these parts of his life. Shewas left to sup alone, or with Ser Jorah and her brother, and afterward to cry herself to sleep. Yetevery night, some time before the dawn, Drogo would come to her tent and wake her in the dark, toride her as relentlessly as he rode his stallion. He always took her from behind, Dothraki fashion, forwhich Dany was grateful; that way her lord husband could not see the tears that wet her face, and shecould use her pillow to muffle her cries of pain. When he was done, he would close his eyes andbegin to snore softly and Dany would lie beside him, her body bruised and sore, hurting too much forsleep.

Day followed day, and night followed night, until Dany knew she could not endure a momentlonger. She would kill herself rather than go on, she decided one night …Yet when she slept that night, she dreamt the dragon dream again. Viserys was not in it this time.

There was only her and the dragon. Its scales were black as night, wet and slick with blood. Herblood, Dany sensed. Its eyes were pools of molten magma, and when it opened its mouth, the flamecame roaring out in a hot jet. She could hear it singing to her. She opened her arms to the fire,embraced it, let it swallow her whole, let it cleanse her and temper her and scour her clean. She couldfeel her flesh sear and blacken and slough away, could feel her blood boil and turn to steam, and yetthere was no pain. She felt strong and new and fierce.

And the next day, strangely, she did not seem to hurt quite so much. It was as if the gods had heardher and taken pity. Even her handmaids noticed the change. “Khaleesi,” Jhiqui said, “what is wrong?

Are you sick?”

“I was,” she answered, standing over the dragon’s eggs that Illyrio had given her when she wed.

She touched one, the largest of the three, running her hand lightly over the shell. Black-and-scarlet,she thought, like the dragon in my dream. The stone felt strangely warm beneath her fingers … or wasshe still dreaming? She pulled her hand back nervously.

From that hour onward, each day was easier than the one before it. Her legs grew stronger; herblisters burst and her hands grew callused; her soft thighs toughened, supple as leather.

The khal had commanded the handmaid Irri to teach Dany to ride in the Dothraki fashion, but itwas the filly who was her real teacher. The horse seemed to know her moods, as if they shared asingle mind. With every passing day, Dany felt surer in her seat. The Dothraki were a hard andunsentimental people, and it was not their custom to name their animals, so Dany thought of her onlyas the silver. She had never loved anything so much.

As the riding became less an ordeal, Dany began to notice the beauties of the land around her. Sherode at the head of the khalasar with Drogo and his bloodriders, so she came to each country freshand unspoiled. Behind them the great horde might tear the earth and muddy the rivers and send upclouds of choking dust, but the fields ahead of them were always green and verdant.

They crossed the rolling hills of Norvos, past terraced farms and small villages where the townsfolkwatched anxiously from atop white stucco walls. They forded three wide placid rivers and a fourththat was swift and narrow and treacherous, camped beside a high blue waterfall, skirted the tumbledruins of a vast dead city where ghosts were said to moan among blackened marble columns. Theyraced down Valyrian roads a thousand years old and straight as a Dothraki arrow. For half a moon,they rode through the Forest of Qohor, where the leaves made a golden canopy high above them, andthe trunks of the trees were as wide as city gates. There were great elk in that wood, and spottedtigers, and lemurs with silver fur and huge purple eyes, but all fled before the approach of thekhalasar and Dany got no glimpse of them.

By then her agony was a fading memory. She still ached after a long day’s riding, yet somehow thepain had a sweetness to it now, and each morning she came willingly to her saddle, eager to knowwhat wonders waited for her in the lands ahead. She began to find pleasure even in her nights, and ifshe still cried out when Drogo took her, it was not always in pain.

At the bottom of the ridge, the grasses rose around her, tall and supple. Dany slowed to a trot androde out onto the plain, losing herself in the green, blessedly alone. In the khalasar she was neveralone. Khal Drogo came to her only after the sun went down, but her handmaids fed her and bathedher and slept by the door of her tent, Drogo’s bloodriders and the men of her khas were never far,and her brother was an unwelcome shadow, day and night. Dany could hear him on the top of theridge, his voice shrill with anger as he shouted at Ser Jorah. She rode on, submerging herself deeper inthe Dothraki sea.

The green swallowed her up. The air was rich with the scents of earth and grass, mixed with thesmell of horseflesh and Dany’s sweat and the oil in her hair. Dothraki smells. They seemed to belonghere. Dany breathed it all in, laughing. She had a sudden urge to feel the ground beneath her, to curlher toes in that thick black soil. Swinging down from her saddle, she let the silver graze while shepulled off her high boots.

Viserys came upon her as sudden as a summer storm, his horse rearing beneath him as he reined uptoo hard. “You dare!” he screamed at her. “You give commands to me? To me?” He vaulted off thehorse, stumbling as he landed. His face was flushed as he struggled back to his feet. He grabbed her,shook her. “Have you forgotten who you are? Look at you. Look at you!”

Dany did not need to look. She was barefoot, with oiled hair, wearing Dothraki riding leathers anda painted vest given her as a bride gift. She looked as though she belonged here. Viserys was soiledand stained in city silks and ringmail.

He was still screaming. “You do not command the dragon. Do you understand? I am the Lord ofthe Seven Kingdoms, I will not hear orders from some horselord’s slut, do you hear me?” His handwent under her vest, his fingers digging painfully into her breast. “Do you hear me?”

Dany shoved him away, hard.

Viserys stared at her, his lilac eyes incredulous. She had never defied him. Never fought back.

Rage twisted his features. He would hurt her now, and badly, she knew that.

Crack.

The whip made a sound like thunder. The coil took Viserys around the throat and yanked himbackward. He went sprawling in the grass, stunned and choking. The Dothraki riders hooted at him ashe struggled to free himself. The one with the whip, young Jhogo, rasped a question. Dany did notunderstand his words, but by then Irri was there, and Ser Jorah, and the rest of her khas. “Jhogo asksif you would have him dead, Khaleesi,” Irri said.

“No,” Dany replied. “No.”

Jhogo understood that. One of the others barked out a comment, and the Dothraki laughed. Irri toldher, “Quaro thinks you should take an ear to teach him respect.”

Her brother was on his knees, his fingers digging under the leather coils, crying incoherently,struggling for breath. The whip was tight around his windpipe.

“Tell them I do not wish him harmed,” Dany said.

Irri repeated her words in Dothraki. Jhogo gave a pull on the whip, yanking Viserys around like apuppet on a string. He went sprawling again, freed from the leather embrace, a thin line of bloodunder his chin where the whip had cut deep.

“I warned him what would happen, my lady,” Ser Jorah Mormont said. “I told him to stay on theridge, as you commanded.”

“I know you did,” Dany replied, watching Viserys. He lay on the ground, sucking in air nois............