The first question was answered quickly: her khas had stayed complete. All sixty riders, not one gone.
Jorah gave her the rest of the numbers. Two hundred and twelve people in total. Perhaps ninety capable of fighting. Sixty of those were her sworn riders. The others were what the departing khals had left behind — the old, the ill, children without parents, a few women with nowhere else to go, some men whose nerve had failed them during the chaos and who had stayed out of paralysis rather than loyalty.
Cattle and sheep combined: just over two hundred. Water: a stream five miles north, still running, barely. Horses: enough for everyone, since the departing kos had taken their riders and left the injured animals.
"The devil grass in the rock cracks will sustain them for a few more days," Rakharo said. "After that—" He shook his head. "We must move."
"Where?" Daenerys asked.
No one answered immediately. The four Dothraki looked at each other with the wariness of men being asked to step onto ground they couldn't see.
She let the silence sit. "Two days," she said. "After the funeral."
Jorah stood as she finished speaking, drew his sword in a single motion, and went down on one knee. The blade lay flat on the red earth in front of her.
"I swear to serve you, Princess. Your will before my own. Your life before mine." He looked up at her, and then at the four Dothraki around the circle. "By my sword and the sigil of my house — no one takes you to Vaes Dothrak against your will. Not while I live."
The four riders looked at each other again. Then at Daenerys.
She nodded once at Jorah. "Stand up," she said quietly. "There's work to do."
She sent everyone else out first.
Qotho was still beside the pallet, keeping his vigil. Haggo had not moved from the ground. She told them both to go and prepare themselves, and waited until the tent was empty.
Drogo's breathing was still there — shallow, irregular, the sound of a body running on something that was not life. Half his chest had gone black. The smell in the tent was the smell of rot and the sweet underlying note of the poppy-soaked dressings she had kept changing, uselessly, because it was the only thing she could do.
He had not been conscious in four days.
She picked up the pillow from beside his head. Held it for a moment. Thought about who he had been — not in the show she had watched in another life, not in the role he'd played in someone else's story, but the man she had actually lived beside. The one who had laughed at his own strength and been tender with her horses and made a sound like the earth cracking when something truly surprised him.
She pressed the pillow down.
It took three minutes. She kept her hands steady throughout.
When it was done, she set the pillow aside and called Irri and Jhiqui back in.
They worked for two hours.
The girls washed his hair and combed it out and rebraided it from the root — tight and clean, the way it had been the first time Daenerys had seen him. She threaded bells onto the braid herself: gold, silver, bronze, more than he had worn in years, enough to fill the silence around him when he rode into whatever came after.
Doreah dressed him from the feet up — the horsehair leg-wraps, the tall boots, the heavy belt hung with its gold and silver medals. The painted vest last, old and faded, the one he had always chosen over the newer ones. It covered the worst of the wound.
She packed the chest cavity with fragrant resin and sealed the skin with wax. It was not the work of a surgeon. It was the work of someone who had decided that the last thing she could give him was the appearance of wholeness.
When it was done, he looked like himself again. Diminished — the flesh had gone from his face and arms — but himself.
Rest, she thought. It was not a prayer, exactly. More a permission.
The pyre took the rest of the day and most of the next to build.
Jorah organised the labour. The wood came from twenty miles in every direction, riders going out in the dark and coming back with bundles lashed across their horses. There was not enough — there was never enough in the waste — and in the end Qotho rode north and returned with Khal Odo's outriders, who brought ten carts of split timber and six of castor oil in sealed pots.
They also brought two hundred Lhazareen slaves tied in a line.
"They will ride with the Khal into the night country," Qotho said.
Daenerys looked at the line of people — their faces, the specific quality of despair that comes from having had everything taken and now waiting for the rest. She thought about a Lhazareen girl who had been left in pieces near her tent three days ago.
"No," she said.
"Khaleesi—"
"The Khal has five hundred of his own warriors to ride with him." She kept her voice level. "He doesn't need strangers."
Qotho raised his whip.
"Put that down." She did not raise her voice. Rakharo and Aggo had arrows nocked behind her, and Qotho knew it.
He lowered the whip. His eyes told her what he thought of her. She filed it away.
The slaves were cut loose. They ran without looking back, which was the sensible thing to do.
By late afternoon the structure was complete.
Four metres at its peak — the khal's platform, built from the largest timber, elevated above everything around it. Below it to north and south, two smaller platforms for the bloodriders, each dressed with weapons and tack and the goods of a warrior's life. Extending outward from those, a third tier of two metres, built from branches and brush, laid from north to south to mark the span from ice to fire.
On the outer tier, five hundred heads. Cohollo's men, arranged in rows. At the summit of the khal's platform, one more, placed to his right: Cohollo himself, who had ridden north carrying a child and a promise and had made the Khal's enemies work for their victory.
Drogo lay at the centre on his own silk and pillows, head turned toward the northeast, toward the Mother of Mountains. His arakh lay along his right side. His dragonbone bow — strung, with an arrow nocked, ready — along his left. His horse whip was coiled across his chest, the gift from his father when he came of age.
Daenerys had added one thing: a layer of gold medals across the platform beneath him, catching the last of the afternoon light.
The red stallion was led out by Rakharo.
It was an extraordinary animal — the colour of banked coals, the muscle moving under its coat the way water moves under ice. It had killed a grass lion once, during an afternoon's riding that Drogo had described afterward with total satisfaction. It had never, in Daenerys's memory, been entirely still.
It was still now.
Rakharo brought it to the east side of the platform and it went without resistance, placing its feet carefully, its head up. It turned toward Drogo and stretched its neck until its muzzle found his face, and it stayed there for a long moment — breathing against his skin, its dark eyes open, its whole body motionless.
Then it lifted its head. Two lines of moisture ran from its eyes down the long face and dripped from its jaw onto Drogo's braid.
Daenerys held out the dried apple from her vest pocket.
The horse took it from her hand with complete gentleness. Chewed it slowly. Stamped once, and was still.
Rakharo's axe was clean and his aim was precise. The stallion dropped without a sound.
The warriors around the pyre were quiet. All of them, all two hundred, watching.
Qotho and Haggo climbed to their platforms without being asked. They lay down with their weapons and folded their hands across their chests and looked up at the sky, and their faces, for the first time in days, were at peace.
Daenerys stood before the pyre with a torch in her hand and the sun going down behind the hills, and the whole red waste stretching away in every direction, and she thought: I knew you for six months. I learned your language and your customs and I was afraid of you for most of it. And then I wasn't.
She touched the torch to the base of the wood.