They buried the pyre's bones in a deep pit before they left — Drogo's charred remains, the bloodriders', the five hundred skulls from the outer tier, all committed to the red earth together. Daenerys stood at the edge while Rakharo's riders filled the hole and thought about how quickly a man's physical evidence could be reduced: the greatest khalasar in living memory, a man who had never lost a fight, and what remained was a pit in the ground and three dragon eggs returned to stone.
She had the eggs anyway. Or what they had become.
The riders who had found them in the ash — three shapes roughly egg-sized, fitted together where the heat had split them along old lines — brought them to her with the careful urgency of people carrying something they did not quite understand. She had turned them over in her hands and said nothing. The shells had cracked cleanly. Whatever had been inside was somewhere else now.
She kept the pieces.
She had instructed the melting of the gold medals salvaged from the pyre before they left — the ones that had not been taken by the departing kos in the first days. Drogo's treasury had been partly illusion, partly luck. The thirty chests of buried gold she had kept hidden were another matter, and she was keeping them hidden still. What the pyre yielded was presented to her riders as Drogo's final gift to those who remained.
It was not a lie, precisely. It was a reframing.
The dragonbone bow she kept herself.
Dragonbone was not metaphor — it was literal bone, black with absorbed iron, harder than the best castle-forged steel, impervious to ordinary fire. Valyria at its height had fielded three hundred dragons, and dragons had lifespans measured in centuries, and bones persisted long after the flesh. The known world still had dragonbone scattered through it, turning up in the workshops of master armorers and the vaults of rich merchants, each piece worth more than most men would see in a lifetime.
She would need the bow. Not now, but later.
The black dragon watched her examine it from his perch on her shoulder, his small head tilted, his iron-red eyes tracking the movement of her hands with the concentrated attention of something that considers all objects potential prey.
The first night's march covered sixty miles.
They followed the old streambed south — what had been a watercourse before Drogo's khalasar of forty thousand had spent a week drawing it down to mud. The stream was gone. The streambed remained, and it pointed south, which was useful.
The second night they covered a hundred miles and stopped at dawn when the scouts found a wide, shallow water pool.
Daenerys had already culled the cattle and the weakest sheep during the first rest stop. The math was simple: livestock competed with horses for water, and horses were not optional. The meat was dried into jerky in the afternoon heat without needing fire. The hides went to the women in the camp who spent the cooler hours of the night cutting and stitching them into hooded cloaks — rough work, the fleece left on the inside, the outer surface unprepared, but functional. A person wrapped in a hide cloak in direct sunlight lost measurably less water than one without.
Doreah modelled the first finished cloak and nearly fainted from the heat of it.
"You wear it," Daenerys told her, "when you're moving and the sun is overhead. In the tent, take it off."
"There's a demon in my chest," Doreah said, with great conviction.
Daenerys looked at her. Her face was flushed deep red, her eyes were glassy, and she was pressing one hand against her sternum with the expression of someone who is certain their diagnosis is correct.
"It's biting my heart," she added. "Gnawing."
"That's heatstroke," Daenerys said.
"What's heatstroke?"
"The demon. Drink this." She pressed her own mare's milk ration into Doreah's hands. When Doreah started to protest, Daenerys folded the girl's fingers around the skin with the finality of someone closing a conversation. "Drink it slowly. Lie down. Don't move until I tell you."
Jorah had stripped his riding vest and was fanning himself with it, the effect somewhat reduced by the fact that the air being moved was also extremely hot. He looked at the pool the scouts had found and then at Daenerys.
"Sulphur," he said.
She could smell it from thirty feet away.
The pool was not large and it was not clean. The water was the colour of old copper, and things floated in it, and the sulphur smell sat over it like a presence. The scouts had already confirmed what was obvious: the horses would not go near it.
Daenerys crouched at the edge and looked into it for a long moment.
"Old Valyria was built on fourteen volcanoes," she said.
Jorah came to stand beside her. "Yes."
"The Summer Sea coast — before the Doom. The land there was similar to this?"
"I've read that it was. Red earth. Dry heat." He paused. "What are you thinking?"
"That the rock under us is thin. That there's something hotter than normal underneath it — close to the surface. It would explain the sulphur. It would explain why the rivers disappear." She looked at the pool. "The water isn't poisoned by demons. It's been sitting over volcanic rock long enough to absorb mineral compounds." She glanced at him. "We can filter it."
Jorah looked at her the way he occasionally looked at her — as if revising an estimate upward, incrementally, for the fourth or fifth time.
Afanti found her while she was working through the filter design.
He was the oldest person in the khalasar by some distance — a small, stooped man with a bald dome fringed by white hair barely long enough to braid, and a face so thoroughly weathered that the individual features had started to merge into the general landscape of age. He had tended horses for twelve khals. He had the eyes of a man who had seen everything and was still, against all reasonable expectation, interested.
"The horses," she said, before he could speak. "How long?"
"The strong ones, with clean water and the devil grass — perhaps half a month." He made the face of a man giving an honest answer that he knows will not be well received. "But most of your horses are not the strong ones, Khaleesi. The strong ones left with the new khals. What remained were the old, the lame, and the difficult."
"The difficult ones are fine," she said. "Difficult means healthy enough to cause problems."
He smiled — a gapped, weathered, genuine smile. "This is true."
"The lame and the old. How many?"
"Perhaps sixty mounts that will not last a month regardless of conditions. Perhaps thirty more that might, under good circumstances."
Ninety horses, roughly. Out of two hundred and thirty people, most of whom needed a mount.
"When the time comes," Daenerys said, "we'll find another use for them."
He nodded. He knew what she meant. He did not look troubled by it — he was a man who had ridden with twelve khals across the Dothraki Sea, and he had long since made his peace with the fact that the world's resources were finite and decisions had to be made.
"I'll manage the culling schedule," he said. "You won't need to think about it until you need to think about it."
"Thank you, Afanti."
He bowed — a small, creaking bow — and shuffled back toward his horses.
Daenerys looked south. The red waste stretched away in every direction under a white sky, and the sulphur smell moved through the air with the slow patience of something that has been here for a very long time and will be here long after everyone who is currently suffering under it is gone.
She went back to the filter.