Chapter Thirty-One
**Hermione's POV**
Hermione had been distracted lately with far too much work, and two distractions at once was getting annoying.
That was not to mention one moment of weakness shown to that infuriating man, which had made itself known in the form of teasing about wanting to be more than sleeping partners during an important meeting with everyone. She had developed a very efficient system for ignoring this, which was to be extremely busy at all times, and occasionally throw and old leg locker curse, or the odd bat Boogey hex disguised as a sneeze that always seems to hit him unfortunately. Only once did she stoop so low as to use a spell Ronald Weasley of all people thought was cleaver and made him cough up slugs for twenty minutes when he felt the need to pat her on the bottom and whisper something she refused to think about, even if she was started blushing again while walking. So far it was working adequately if not perfectly, him knowing not to push his luck to far.
So when she was called into the main audience room, which was very crowded at the moment, she was surprised to find two very burnt up bodies lying on the ground burned beyond recognition down to the skeleton, and a seemingly grieving man standing before Dany's seat, a hard look on Ser Barristan's face.
Hermione moved directly to the bodies without ceremony and began her inspection.
The grief from the father seemed real enough, but the story of how and why the dragons had killed two boys and then simply not eaten them did not sit right with her. Dragons did not kill for sport not even while young would a dragon waste a good kill. They killed for food or for protection, and if they had killed for food the bodies would not look like this, one way or another there would be no body left.
She worked her way methodically across the smaller body on the left, there a few ribs up she found it...a large gash in the ribcage that looked exactly like what it was. A hard glancing blow from a sharp knife, delivered before the burning.
She reached down, took hold of the long femur bone, and popped it free, the onlookers crying out in alarm.
Then she stood, swung it once for grip, and slammed it hard against the ground, the leg bone making a loud hollow ring on the stone ground.
The crack of it echoed through the audience chamber, gasps followed immediately as well as cry's of alarm. Dany herself was halfway down the steps before Hermione registered her approach.
"What are you doing?" Dany asked, shock and something close to horror written plainly across her face.
Hermione looked at her with an expression she usually reserved for the other students who hadn't done the reading when she was younger. "Didn't you read the book I gave you on dragon husbandry? The section on digestion specifically."
She held up the bone and continued before Dany could answer.
"Dragons don't digest food the same way people do, their flames are magical, they don't only burn from the outside, they burn from the inside out simultaneously. Whatever they eat is broken down to its most basic elements, which means this bone should be so brittle it would practically turn to ash if handled at this stage." She turned the femur over in her hands. "Not only did it not break, but it is also, almost completely unharmed outside the surface fire damage. That tells us this body was not burned with dragon fire." She set the bone down and indicated the ribcage. "Additionally..." she pointed clearly at the charred ribcage, "there is an unambiguous sign that this child was stabbed through the heart before any burning took place."
She straightened up and looked at the man.
The man was sweating profusely, he looked around as people started staring at him now in horror wondering what was going on, then he bolted.
Hermione watched him go with genuine puzzlement, "Why do they always run?" she asked out loud looking around as if waiting for an explanation. He had made it perhaps twenty feet before Dany's order reached the guards, but Hermione had already turned back toward the Throne now that Dany was walking again towards it, someone would catch him, that was not her current problem.
Her current problem was a book, as she walked off and let Dany deal with this mess for now.
---
She only spent an hour looking for it, which was an improvement over last time, the problem was she had only just started the next chapter before she was once again called away. Resigned to fate she put the book down and got up.
It had become a sort of game between herself and Winky. Winky hid it, Hermione found it, read a few pages, and somehow always got called away at precisely the wrong moment, after which the book would vanish again. The maddening part was that it happened even when she was holding it once. The moment her attention slipped for the briefest fraction of a second the thing was simply gone, as though it had never existed and she had imagined the whole enterprise.
She supposed she had to admire the commitment, if not the methodology, as she still could not find Winky at the right time to ask for it back, *Winky was a crafty one*.
Somehow a situation always came up, somehow she was always surprised, somehow her attention was always stolen at exactly the right moment, and she was beginning to suspect that the situations themselves were not entirely coincidental, and that somehow Winky had help from an unknown source.
---
Just this morning Daario had ridden out with Fred happily bouncing on his shoulder as he and a thousand men rode out to the other cities that had reported the same masked individuals attacking guards. Dany, seeing the considerable success of the ever-excited Fred in Meereen, had ordered Daario to clear the remaining cities of the instigators before the problem spread further.
Hermione had been led to one of the captured men the day before. After administering three precise drops of Veritaserum, to which she had very little left, and used it accordingly...she had found her answer. The main culprits were the Iron Bank of Braavos, pulling strings through agents who had been placed well in advance of Dany's arrival, and some after hedging their considerable investment in the continuation of the slave trade against the possibility that someone might actually manage to end it.
Young Griff, along with two thousand men mixed between the Unsullied and the Golden Company with a scattering of volunteer soldiers, had been dispatched to treat with the bank and even open an account. As well as the necessary ships for the men, Winky had reluctantly agreed to lend the use of her flagship for the voyage, to which Hermione still cringed every time she heard the name. With the gold and other treasures loaded in the hold, she calculated the Iron Bank would find dealing with Dany considerably easier and substantially less costly in the end than the alternative of starting a war with both of them.
She hoped they were smart enough to do the mathematics.
---
A debate had been running for some time about the mixing of forces into a single functioning army. It had been resolved eventually and the army had been formally retitled the Dragon Army, its standard the Targaryen three-headed dragon with a shooting star now added to the sigil.
Hermione had been touched by that, more than she had expected to be. She had looked at the new sigil for a longer moment than she intended and then found something else to look at.
Dany had also made her Hand to the Queen, which added considerably to her workload but at least came with a very nice party, and Dany had been so genuinely pleased about it that it was impossible to resent even the paperwork, who knew even medieval times had paperwork.
Ser Jorah had finally taken her advice about confessing his crimes, which had gone approximately as expected, and then slightly better than expected, once the initial shock had worked its way through the room. With Hermione's help a punishment had been constructed that was proportionate, purposeful, and actually useful. Ser Jorah was to take five thousand men, armed with the cure for greyscale, and free as much of the Valyrian Peninsula as they could reach. After that it fell to him to help relocate the affected people or assist them in establishing new settlements on the once ruined land as Hermione planed to rebuild the area one day. He had accepted without argument, he even tried to return the sword Hermione had given to him, to which she just waved off saying that once he returned with his honor hopefully redeemed he would still need a sword and it might help remind him to do better in the future. He would have his chance to return but he had to free those imprisoned by the disease as a penance for the selling those imprisoned as slaves, and he would give knowledge and aid so that they may live in whatever kind of peace they could find.
Rakharo on the other hand had chosen to stay and ride in the north with Rob and Jon. He had come to her himself to explain his reasoning, standing very straight and looking somewhat embarrassed. The futility of trying to protect someone who could be completely across a battlefield before he could blink had made his post effectively impossible to carry out with any dignity, and he wished to be useful rather than decorative. She had thanked him genuinely and told him to watch himself up there, which he had just given her that silly sideways grin of his and rode off.
Winky had reported, in her characteristic way, that she had loaned the other half her fleet to help bring the people stranded at a place the wildlings named as Hardhome. Some thirty to forty thousand souls, the ones too young or too old or too injured to make the overland journey, along with the families who refused to leave them behind. The logistics of this had apparently been worked out entirely by Winky, Rob, Jon and a few of the Wildlings in the space of an afternoon, and Hermione had decided not to examine Winky report too closely.
Rob and Jon were still determined to retake the North from the Boltons, before Dany was able to send them much in the way of help.
She shook her head at this, though in a slightly different way than she had initially. Rob had come to her and explained his reasoning directly one day, which she had not expected. If he didn't retake the North on his own terms, without Dany's armies or Hermione's magic doing the heavy lifting, he would never have the genuine respect of the Northern lords. Every victory would be attributed elsewhere, and a king who couldn't hold his people's respect was not a king for long. She had found she couldn't entirely argue with this, even though she wanted to.
Dany had almost forbidden him to go, that had been an illuminating conversation to witness from the far side of the room, and Hermione had made herself very busy studying a wall hanging during most of it. Rob and Dany had grown considerably closer over the past months. Their shared grief and their shared vision of the future had brought them closer together in ways that had been quiet at first and were becoming less quiet. Lady Stark had noticed, of course Lady Stark was, in fact, visibly trying not to look too pleased about it, which was its own kind of telling.
They were good for each other, Hermione could see that plainly. She just hoped that fool didn't get himself killed in the North of Westeros, before the obvious conclusion of the situation had a chance to present itself to everyone involved. *Why are Men so slow sometimes*
---
She pulled her attention back to the map in front of her and the notes pinned across it.
The afternoon's list was long, the Qarth messenger needed to be received...the Spice lord had proven himself not only ambitious but genuinely resourceful, and had gotten her a lot of "in's" with the right people in different kingdoms. New Ghis was becoming a problem, much as Volantis was becoming. Dany had made considerable enemies when she cut off the sale of slave soldiers to the wider world, and those enemies were beginning to coordinate. She and Dany had a plan for New Ghis. They simply needed Drogon to reach the necessary size, and he was currently just shy of Viserion, a month, perhaps two and everything would be ready.
The Kingdom of Omber was an entirely different matter, they had agreed to abandon slavery and join Dany's cause and become a Servant Kingdom in Dany's *New Empire* on one condition...relief from the Dothraki problem. Every year a tribute was expected from Omber in grain, gems, and people, all paid to be left alone by the Dothraki, and the price kept going up every year. Once Dany's and her plan to consolidate the Dothraki horde entirely was complete, that problem resolved itself. And a unified Dothraki riding under the Dragon standard would make Dany's the largest kingdom this side of the Narrow Sea by a large margin, and one of the firsts stop would be New Ghis.
She had asked the lords of Qarth to carry her and Dany's assurance to the Kingdom of Yi-Ti that Dany had no intention of traveling further east and that the Great Father's Mountain Range would serve as the permanent eastern border of these lands. Qarth would stand as the border city for trade between west and east, making it the most important trade hub on the known world and making its lords extraordinarily wealthier in the process.
She could picture their faces, rolling around in the new wealth like very well-dressed cats in a pile of cushions, or at least she hoped they wore cloths.
That image made her glance suspiciously at the loose coins on her desk, as she shuddered at the thought.
She moved on.
The map held everything. Notes in different colors, question marks in three locations, lines of supply and influence drawn carefully in her smallest handwriting. All of it pointing in one direction. A total and complete restructuring of everything west of the Great Fathers. Not a conquest, or not only that, but the start of something far larger and harder and more worthwhile than conquest, true unification.
Dany wanted to build a world where one day, long after she was gone, the power could be returned to the people themselves. Where they could be guided carefully and patiently until they were ready to choose their own leadership. Hermione had watched this idea take root in Dany after learning about the world she had come from, and had felt something complicated about it. It was the right idea, it would take generations. It would require education reforms, legal frameworks, protections for the vulnerable built into the structure before the structure was even finished. It would require people in power who were more interested in building the thing correctly than in holding it themselves.
It was exactly the right idea, she just hoped they could find a way to do it right, which is why it would take generations in order to help solve problems not even yet thought up that could effect the future.
She needed a break.
She leaned back and looked at the last unopened butter beer she had saved. She had been saving it for a particular low moment, and she was starting to think it might be getting close to time but she held off yet once again.
After nearly two years here, nearly everything she had brought with her had been used up or worn out or broken and replaced with local alternatives. The grog she had planned to give Hagrid was long gone. She had run out of tea from home several weeks ago. Proper tea, the kind that smelled right and tasted right and made her feel briefly like she was somewhere recognizable. That had been a harder moment than she had expected, but she was nothing if not a survivor.
Everything that Harry and the others had helped her prepare...every ingredient, every supply, every familiar small thing from a world she was not going back to...had been used up and replaced. She was surrounded entirely by things that were not from home...
She cleared her head firmly, that line of thinking was not dangerous and she knew where it led.
One piece of parchment caught her eye as she looked back at the desk. An emissary and their apprentice from the Temple of Black and White requesting an audience tomorrow. She noted it and set it aside.
Then she waved her hand.
The girl who had been tailing her since this morning, the one she had caught quietly levitating in place for the better part of an hour or two, the other distraction. While Hermione attended to the man with the burned children and the obvious lie, the girl was frozen and floating three feet above the ground suddenly dropped from the air and hit the floor with a audible thud, she lay on the ground while groaning.
Hermione looked down at her without particular surprise, trying to get comfortable in her seat.
The girl was young, dark-haired, the girl had a wild look in her eyes even as she lay on the floor for a moment longer, collecting herself not much caring about dignity, then looked up.
"Hello there," Hermione said pleasantly, "you must be Arya Stark, it's a pleasure to meet you."
The girl's composure cracked just slightly. "How did you know?"
Hermione took a sip of the plain tea she was forced to drink these days and looked at it afterward with an expression of mild and ongoing grief.
"I miss Earl Grey," she said, to no one in particular.
Arya Stark, still on the floor, stared at her, "Who?"