The Lhazareen slaves left at a run and did not look back.
Aggo watched them go with the expression of a man who had made a professional assessment and been overruled. "They'll reach the river by tomorrow afternoon," he said. "They'll talk."
"We'll be gone by morning," Daenerys said. "Let them go."
He went to pass the order without further comment, which was the thing she valued most about her riders — they argued once and then they moved.
The pyre stood ready. The oil had been distributed among the carts but not yet poured. The warriors sat in loose groups around it, and the ones farthest from the fire had their heads tilted back, scanning the sky.
She found the old man who had served twelve khals at the edge of the crowd.
"How long?" she asked.
He looked up from his study of the stars. His face creased with pleasure at being consulted directly. "Until we find his star. Could be two hours. Could be—" he spread his hands— "all night. There was once a khal whose star didn't appear until the sun was already rising. We almost burned him in daylight." He chuckled. "Bad form."
Daenerys looked at the sky. Thousands of stars, none of them new, none of them red.
She was about to look away when Rakharo called out.
"There."
Low on the eastern horizon — so low it might have been a trick of the air — a streak of red light. Not a fixed point. Something that moved, barely, with a tail behind it, the colour of fresh blood and banked coals and the heart of a forge. It burned against the dark sky like an accusation.
The camp went very quiet.
Then the old man laughed — the delighted laugh of a man who has been right about something his whole life and is still surprised each time the proof arrives.
"The twelfth," he said, with deep satisfaction.
Daenerys looked at it for a long moment. In another life, she had watched a television screen and seen this comet and understood what it meant in the story's architecture. Here, standing in the red waste with her feet on the earth and the comet burning above her, the meaning felt different. Larger. Less like a symbol and more like an announcement.
"Oil," she said.
The pots came forward. The oil went over the wood in dark cascades, soaking the straw and kindling and dry brush, running down into the timber's gaps and filling them. The smell of it spread outward through the night air — rich and clean beneath the sweet-rot of the pyre itself.
"Bring Mirri Maz Duur."
The maegi had watched the pyre's construction from the edge of the crowd for two days, quiet and self-contained, with the watchfulness of a woman who has learned to observe before she acts. She had seen the head on the pole. She had seen Daenerys's face when it was shown to her. She had drawn her conclusions.
She had not drawn the right one.
Aggo took her by the arms. She began to struggle when she understood where she was being taken — genuinely, with the full force of a small woman who has spent her life managing much larger and more violent people.
"Khaleesi — Khaleesi, listen to me." The words came fast, stumbling over each other. "I helped Lady Lirys. You promised me. I sang for your birth. The child came safely. You can't do this, there's no reason, it isn't—"
Aggo set her at the base of the pyre and two riders took her arms.
Daenerys heard her and did not move.
Then she turned to Doreah. "My eggs."
Jorah was in front of her before the girls returned, both hands raised, his face the colour of old bone.
"Princess. Please." The word came out rougher than he intended. "Whatever you're planning — the eggs alone are worth enough to buy safe passage anywhere in the known world. We could sell one, keep the others, buy a ship—"
"I don't need a ship," Daenerys said.
"You need to live." He grabbed her arm — not with the deference of a sworn man, with the desperation of someone watching a person walk toward the edge of something. "Rhaego is gone. I know. I know what that costs. But you're fourteen years old and there is a future on the other side of tonight if you will only—"
She put her hand over his and removed it from her arm. Gently.
"Jorah." She waited until his eyes focused. "Viserys thought he was a dragon. Do you remember what happened to him?"
He stared at her.
"I'm not Viserys," she said.
The girls came with the eggs. She took them — the black one against her chest, the green one under her left arm, the cream-and-gold one cradled in the crook of her right elbow — and walked to the pyre.
Rakharo and Aggo helped her climb.
Qotho had already drawn his arakh. He lay on his platform with his weapon across his chest and his eyes open, watching the comet, and his face had the stillness of a man who has arrived somewhere he intended to go.
Haggo raised his head from his own platform and looked at Daenerys as she passed.
"She comes with us," he said, to no one in particular. "Good. Drogo will want her."
He laughed — the loose, unguarded laugh of a man who has put everything down and found the weight of nothing to be surprisingly light. Then he drew the blade across his throat in one smooth motion.
The sound of it reached Daenerys as she settled at Drogo's side.
From Qotho's platform, a moment later, the same.
She arranged the eggs. The cream-and-gold one in Drogo's hands, since she had already placed it there once and it felt right. The green one in the space between them. The black one against her own ribs, her arm curved around it, her fingers pressed to its scales.
The fire had not yet been lit. The oil waited.
Mirri's voice came from below — no longer pleading, something harder now.
"You've gone mad," the maegi called up. "That's what this is. When everything beautiful is taken from a person, sometimes what's left goes mad. I've seen it. I understand it." A pause. "You should have taken my offer when you had the chance. Life for life. Death for death. You could have had your husband back. Instead you have—" her voice shifted— "this."
"She's right about one thing," Qotho said, from his platform. His voice was already thickening. "The khal should have lived. He was better than all of us."
The blood was running freely down his neck. He closed his eyes.
Daenerys looked down at the small woman bound at the pyre's base.
"You're not wrong," she said. "About what was done to you. About what the Dothraki are."
Mirri said nothing.
"I pulled four men off you. I saved your life and your temple's last godswife and brought you into my household." She looked at the maegi steadily. "And you killed my husband, and you were going to sacrifice my child."
"Your husband was already dying when I touched him." Mirri's voice was flat and certain. "The wound was septic. The fever had reached his brain. Everything after was only a matter of when."
"I know," Daenerys said.
Mirri's eyes shifted — something moving in them that was not quite surprise.
"I know he was dying," Daenerys continued. "I examined the wound myself. I knew what it meant before I ever summoned you." She kept her voice level. "So when you say I should have accepted your offer — you know as well as I do that there was nothing to offer. You were never going to save him. You were going to take my child."
Silence.
Below, Mirri Maz Duur looked up at her with an expression that was difficult to read — something caught between fury and the particular weariness of a woman who has kept a secret for a long time and is tired of the weight of it.
"I watched them pull my people from my god's own temple," she said. "I watched them burn the sanctuary where I had healed hundreds. I saw the baker who made my bread with his head on a pile of other heads. I saw the boy I cured of greyscale weeping in a slave line." Her voice did not rise. "You rode past. You threw four men off me. And then the man who ordered all of it carried me away as property." She paused. "Tell me again what you saved."
Daenerys was quiet for a moment.
"Eroeh," she said. "And those women. And you." She met Mirri's eyes. "I did what I could do. I know it wasn't enough. I know the accounting doesn't balance."
"No," Mirri said. "It doesn't."
"You screamed for help when they brought you here," Daenerys said. "Before you knew what you were going to do. You screamed and I heard you. If the accounting doesn't balance, that's still true."
Mirri looked at her. The firelight moved across both their faces.
"You won't hear me scream now," the maegi said quietly. "Whatever you're expecting — I won't give it to you."
"I'm not expecting anything," Daenerys said.
She looked at the red comet burning low over the eastern hills. Then she looked at Drogo's face, still and peaceful in the torchlight, the bells in his braid catching the light.
She lay down beside him.
"Light it," she said.
The torches went to the base of the wood, and the oil caught, and the night became day.