What was left of the pavilion had been loaded onto ten carts. The skins — sable and aurochs-hide and one white lion pelt that would have bought a fleet of ships in any of the Free Cities — were stacked beneath the folded silk and cotton, wrapped in oilcloth against the dust. Jhaqo had taken the structure. He had not thought to ask about the contents. That had been his mistake, and Daenerys was choosing not to correct it.
The new tent was twenty feet square, rough linen, open at the front.
It was enough.
Drogo lay on his pallet at the back, behind a screen of woven grass. Qotho sat beside him, straight-backed and silent, maintaining the vigil that the custom required. Haggo lay on the ground near the entrance with his arm over his eyes and the slack looseness of a man who had finished being interested in the world. He said things occasionally to the tent ceiling. Most of them were not worth answering.
"Should have kept the child here," he said, at one point. "Let him go with his father. Cohollo was wrong to listen to her."
Daenerys sat cross-legged in the doorway with a square of yellow silk in her lap and a needle in her hand. She did not look up. The silk was taking shape slowly — a body, roughly infant-sized, open at the neck. She had found the cleanest piece of cotton she owned and cut it into strips to fill it with.
Rhaego's head sat in a wool blanket beside her knee. Jhaqo had kept his word about the rest.
Jorah stood three feet to her left, fully armoured, watching the dark beyond the firelight. He had looked at the silk and needle when she started, and then looked away, and had not looked back. She appreciated this about him — his instinct for when language would be worse than silence.
The fire cracked. The camp was very quiet. One or two hundred people, and almost no sound.
The hoofbeats came from the south.
Quaro went and came back. "Khaleesi. It's Lady Lirys. Jhaqo's Khaleesi. She says she wants to thank you."
Daenerys looked at the bundle in her lap for a moment. Then she set the needle down carefully, folded the silk, and said: "Ask her in."
The fire-carriers arrived first — eight riders with torches, which was more than anyone needed for a social call, and told her everything she needed to know about the tone of the visit before Lirys appeared.
She came out of the dark on a white mare with a silver mane — not Daenerys's silver, the colouring was wrong, but chosen to make a point. She wore a Dothraki painted vest. She sat in the saddle with the careful upright stillness of a woman who was in considerable pain and was not going to show it, and her expression was the expression of someone arriving at a victory.
Daenerys noted all of this and said nothing.
Two women helped Lirys dismount and supported her across the carpet to where Daenerys sat. She lowered herself to the ground with the dignity of someone who has decided that how you do something matters as much as whether you do it, arranged herself cross-legged, and leaned close.
"I hate you," she said quietly, with the satisfaction of someone finally saying a thing they have been saving.
"Yes," Daenerys said. "I know."
Lirys waited for more. When nothing came, she glanced around the camp, located Mirri Maz Duur near the outer fire, and pointed at her. "You saved her too. She still helped kill your husband and your child."
"I did not—" Mirri began, from across the camp.
"I believe her," Daenerys said.
Lirys turned back. "You believe the woman who cursed your husband."
"I believe that Drogo was going to die from the wound regardless. I believe she chose the manner of it." Daenerys picked up the needle and resumed her work. "Those are different things."
Lirys watched her hands for a moment. Then she reached out and lifted the edge of the wool blanket.
She looked at what was beneath it for a moment without speaking. Daenerys did not stop her.
"Small," Lirys said finally. "Smaller than my Jhango. Half the size, at least." She let the blanket fall. "The body's cloth?"
"Jhaqo fed the rest to the dogs."
A silence. Then: "That was Mago's idea. The pole." She said it as information, without particular inflection.
Daenerys set a stitch. "I know."
Something shifted in Lirys's expression — the victory posture relaxing into something less managed. She leaned back on her hands and looked up at the stars. The Dothraki Sea stretched away in every direction, flat and enormous and dark, and above it the sky was extravagant with light.
"I'm a Khaleesi now," she said, to the stars rather than to Daenerys. "I have riders. I have my own small silver mare." A pause. "I have a strong son."
"I know," Daenerys said again.
"I came here to make you feel it. How much worse your situation is than mine." Lirys glanced sideways at her. "You're not performing grief properly. It's annoying."
"I'm sorry to disappoint you."
"You're not, though." Lirys watched her for another moment. Then, without quite intending it to, her face did something unexpected — the corners of her mouth moved, involuntarily, toward something that was not quite a smile and not quite the opposite of one. "You're a terrible person to try to wound."
Daenerys looked up from her sewing. "You came. Whatever you intended by it — you came, and you sat with me, and you told me the truth about the pole. That's more than I expected from you." She held Lirys's gaze. "Thank you."
Lirys stared at her. "You're insane."
"Possibly."
"I hate you."
"You mentioned."
Lirys made a sound in her throat that was nearly a laugh and then wasn't. She pressed her lips together. Looked away. Looked back.
"You want to know why, really?" she said. "Not the politics. Not the succession. The actual reason."
Daenerys waited.
"Illyrio." Lirys's voice had gone flat. "He bought me from the finest house in Lys because he wanted you and couldn't have you. You were Drogo's — untouchable, and therefore the only thing he thought about." She said it without drama, in the way of someone who has had time to reduce a humiliation to its basic facts. "He used me as a substitute. He was not quiet about it."
Daenerys absorbed this. "Illyrio."
"The night before your wedding." Lirys continued without waiting for a response. "Your brother came to Illyrio's manse. Viserys. He'd been drinking. He knew which room you were sleeping in." A pause. "Illyrio stopped him. Told him that if he touched you before Drogo had what he'd paid for, the deal was finished and neither of you would leave Pentos." Another pause. "Then Viserys came to my room instead."
The fire shifted. A log collapsed into coals.
"He was very loud," Lirys said, with a precision that was worse than bitterness, "about whose name he was saying."
The camp was quiet around them — the small sounds of people trying to sleep, the horses shifting, the distant bells of Jhaqo's new khalasar in the darkness to the south. Daenerys sat in the firelight with a cloth body in her lap and a needle in her hand and thought about a boy who had called himself the last dragon, who had carried his sister across half the world and called it protection.
"Viserys is dead," she said.
"I know." Lirys tilted her head. "Does that change it?"
Daenerys considered this honestly. "No," she said. "But it closes the account."
She finished the last stitch, cut the thread, and lifted the cloth body in both hands. It was crude work — she had never been trained for this — but it would hold. She fitted it carefully over what lay in the blanket.
Lirys watched. She did not look away.
When Daenerys was done, she set the bundle down and rested her hands in her lap.
"Your son is alive," she said.
"Yes." Lirys's voice had lost its edge entirely. "He is."
Neither of them said anything else for a while. Above them the stars burned white and cold and indifferent, the way stars do, which is the same in every world.