Lirys waited for a reaction.
Daenerys thought about Viserys — about the boy who had crossed half the world holding her hand, who had called himself the last dragon, who had needed her to believe it because the alternative was that he was just a frightened child with nothing left. She thought about the things he had done to her when the fear turned outward, and the things he had almost done, and the golden crown he had received in the end.
"He was what he was," she said. "I knew that already."
Lirys studied her with the expression of someone recalculating. Then she turned, located Jorah standing guard at the tent's edge, and pointed at him.
"He also came to me. In Pentos." She smiled at Jorah with the precision of a woman who has spent her career reading men and filing the results. "He didn't say your name. But the way he looked through me—"
"That's enough." Daenerys cut her off before Jorah's face could get any redder. "You're a Khaleesi now. I'd think carefully about what Jhaqo would make of this conversation."
Lirys's smile sharpened. "You think that frightens me?"
"I think you've survived this long by being practical," Daenerys said. "Go home, Lirys."
Lirys rose — slowly, with the careful dignity of a woman in pain who will not show it — and let her attendants guide her back to her horse. At the edge of the firelight she turned once.
"When the khalasar passes through Vaes Dothrak, I'll look for you among the crones," she said pleasantly. "I hope you're still proud then."
She rode away into the dark, her torchbearers forming a column behind her.
Jorah cleared his throat.
"Not a word," Daenerys said.
"I wasn't going to say anything."
"Good."
She picked up the cloth doll from her lap and held it for a moment. Then she set it down carefully beside the wool blanket and looked up at the stars.
The Targaryens had always married within the family — siblings, cousins, the same bloodline folded back on itself for generation after generation. Aegon the Conqueror had taken both his sisters to wife. Her own parents had been brother and sister. Her grandparents the same. Viserys crawling toward her door drunk in Pentos was, by the standards of his family's history, almost conventional. That did not make it less.
But Viserys was dead, and the account was closed, and there was no use spending the night on him.
She stayed by the fire until it burned low, and then she went inside.
Jhaqo's khalasar broke camp before the sky was fully light.
Daenerys woke to the sound of them leaving — hoofbeats and harness and the low voices of people moving in the dark — and lay still and listened until the sound had faded north, toward the Lhazar River and the open sea of grass beyond it. When it was quiet again she rose, dressed, and went out.
The sun was just clearing the eastern hills, coming up hot and immediate the way it did in the waste, without the gradual warming of more temperate places. The red earth threw the light back sharply. She stood in it for a moment, letting it press against her face, and felt it the way she always felt it — as something that belonged to her, that was glad she was there.
The remnant camp was awake. Small sounds came from the nearby shelters — coughing, children's voices, the complaint of horses that had not had grass in three days. A group of women were working by the far fire, doing whatever needed doing.
She had her serving women bring water, ate a little, and moved the camp back to the site of the old pavilion. The hill there would give them shade in the afternoon. It was not much, but it was something.
When the tents were settled, she called a council.
Aggo, Rakharo, Jhogo, Kovarro, Jorah. They sat on the ground in a circle in the shadow of the hill, the way decisions had always been made here — without table, without ceremony, close to the earth.
"Drogo's khalasar is gone," she said.
Jhogo nodded as if she had said that the sun rose in the east. "A khal who cannot ride has no right to lead. The strong follow strength."
"How many remain?"
Aggo answered without hesitation. "Your khas, Khaleesi — all of us. We swore to you, not to the Khal. Every one of us stayed." He said it without pride, simply as a statement of what had happened. "Beyond your khas, there are perhaps two hundred."
"The ones no new khal would take," Jhogo said. "Old men. The sick. Children without parents. Some women." He considered this. "A few cowards. And the weak."
Jorah leaned forward. "That's not nothing. Two hundred people — even if half of them can't fight, that's still warm bodies, people who can work, who know the land. It's a foundation."
"For what?" Rakharo asked.
Everyone looked at Daenerys.
She looked back at each of them in turn. Five men, four Dothraki and one Westerosi knight, sitting in the shade of a hill in the red waste with no water and no grass and a dead man dying thirty feet away.
"I have three dragon eggs," she said. "I know how to hatch them. And I know what happens after."
Silence.
"The strong follow strength," she said, to Jhogo. "That's the law."
"That is the law," he agreed, watching her.
"Then we need to become something worth following." She looked around the circle. "All of you stayed. That matters. But we have people who are old and sick and slow, and we have no water, and we are surrounded by a thousand miles of red stone in every direction."
She let that sit for a moment.
"So we solve those problems first," she said. "One at a time. And we stay alive long enough for the rest to follow."
No one argued. No one suggested Vaes Dothrak. No one mentioned the dosh khaleen.
Aggo spoke for all of them when he said: "Tell us what to do, Khaleesi."