The night Daenerys gave birth to Rhaego, the camp tore itself apart.
Not because of Cohollo — the old bloodrider had already gone by then, slipping north in the dark with five hundred of Drogo's finest riders, using the chaos as cover the way experienced soldiers use weather. By the time the shouting had reached the pavilion's outer perimeter, he was already past the edge of the firelight and into the open dark of the waste.
The chaos itself came from Pono.
Daenerys learned this the following morning from Aggo, who had spent the night on the camp's outer edge watching. Pono had spent days doing what she had not thought to watch for — moving quietly between the smaller khas, talking to minor kos, building the thing that leaders build before they announce themselves. When he finally moved, he moved with twenty thousand riders.
The men who tried to stop him provided the noise and the fire.
By morning, there were twenty thousand fewer Dothraki in the camp. The remaining two were distributed among a dozen kos who spent the next two days looking at each other with calculating eyes, and then dispersed in turn — smaller numbers, different directions, the way water finds its way around an obstacle.
By the fourth day, Daenerys stood on the hill above the remnant camp and looked at what was left.
A hundred and twelve riders. Four serving women. One maegi. Jorah Mormont, still in full plate. The pavilion. Three dragon eggs. One dead man who had not finished dying.
She had planned for this. She had planned for almost all of it.
The riders came from the southwest, a thousand of them, arriving against a sunset so red it looked like the sky had been opened.
Jhaqo.
He rode at the head of his new khalasar with the careful posture of a man who had not yet fully settled into what he had become and was practicing the weight of it. His braid was pulled forward over his shoulder — she could see the new bells from forty feet away, bright against the dark hair.
Her riders formed up without being told. Jorah was already at the gate, sword drawn, the closed visor giving him the featureless severity of something not quite human. Eighty riders behind him, dressed for a fight they could not win.
Jhaqo did not acknowledge Jorah. He rode to within ten feet of the gate, stopped, and threw something.
It landed at her feet and rolled.
Cohollo's face looked upward at the red sky with his mouth open — not in the expression of a man who had given up. In the expression of a man who had kept going until the last possible moment. She looked at it for exactly as long as she needed to understand it, and then she looked up.
The rest came one by one. Each rider passing at a trot, each depositing a head with the casual economy of men returning borrowed objects. They built up at the base of the fence like offerings at a shrine.
Five hundred men. Five hundred.
When the last rider had passed, Jhaqo pulled a pole from the hands of the man beside him — four metres of smoothed wood — and raised it.
The crying from her serving women started before she could make out what was on it. She made herself look anyway.
The head was very small.
Dark hair. Bronze skin. Almond eyes with a trace of violet in them that had not come from Drogo.
Daenerys stood in the red light and did not move.
"Why." It came out flat. Not a question, precisely. More the sound a person makes when they need a moment more before the next thing begins.
Jhaqo's expression was the expression of a man delivering information. "It is the Dothraki way to kill the sons of fallen khals." He looked at his riders. "It is known."
"It is known," they answered.
"Your oath. Your arrangement with the dosh khaleen." He shrugged, the bells along his braid catching the last of the light. "Cohollo told us everything before the end. But this is not our tradition, woman. The horse people have no custom of sworn renunciations." He smiled. "It is known."
"It is known."
"You were a day behind him," Daenerys said. "Three hundred miles, at least. You couldn't have caught him alone." She looked at the thousand riders behind him and did the arithmetic. "Pono helped you."
Jhaqo's smile widened slightly. "Pono found the trail first. We all arrived eventually. Though I was fortunate enough to encounter the remnants myself — thirteen riders by the end, and a bloodrider and a small khal among them." He reached up and touched the new bells in his braid with evident satisfaction. "Old men and stragglers, mostly. Still, they killed nearly three thousand of us before the last of them fell. Drogo trained his men well."
He said it with the tone of a professional compliment.
"Now." He looked past her at the pavilion. "The khal's palace. Only a khal rides beneath such a roof. A widow of the dosh khaleen has no need of it." He pointed with his riding crop. "Have your women take it down."
Jorah turned to look at her. His right hand was on his sword. His left hand had already moved to the visor clasp.
Daenerys shook her head.
She turned to Quaro. "Tell the women to strike the pavilion."
The tents came down in silence.
While her serving women worked and Jhaqo's riders watched, Aggo came quietly to her side and spoke low. He told her what had happened to Eroeh.
She listened to all of it without interrupting. When he was done, she said nothing for a long moment.
Mago. She filed the name beside Jhaqo's in the place where she kept accounts of this kind.
She had learned, in the months since her wedding, that the Dothraki ran on tradition the way water runs on gravity — not because anyone chose it, but because it was the shape of the ground they moved across. It is known was not an argument. It was the end of arguments. It meant: this is what we are, and we have always been this, and there is no appeal.
She intended to become something that tradition could not account for.
Near dark, Jhaqo's riders began to make their own camp. The three dragon eggs had been moved first, wrapped in the best of the remaining wool and placed in a cart with Irri sitting on top of them. Drogo had been carried out and laid under the open sky — there was no tent left for him.
Daenerys sat beside him.
He was breathing. Still. Whatever Mirri Maz Duur had done to him — whatever the black magic had made of what should have been a natural death — it was still holding. He breathed and he did not die and he did not wake, and his chest rose and fell with the mechanical regularity of a body running on something other than life.
She sat with him until the stars appeared.
Then she stood, straightened her robes, and went to find Jorah.
"In the morning," she said, "we begin the funeral rites."
He looked at her for a moment. Looked at the cart where the eggs were. Looked at her face.
"And after?" he asked.
"After," she said, "we go north."
She did not explain the rest. There would be time.