Beggar king no more[Game of throne/twilight vampire si]

[foreverimmortal]

Year 298 AC

[Pentos, Illyrio's manse]



Daenerys

The room she had been given was the second-best room in the manse. She knew that because she had worked it out on her third day, the way she had worked out everything about a new house she was brought to. The best room was Illyrio's own, three doors down the corridor. The second-best was this one, because it had the sea-facing window and the bed with the carved posts and the little balcony that looked out over the harbor, and the second-best was where a guest was put when the host wanted to impress without committing.

She had counted the colors of the sunset from the balcony every evening for two weeks. There were eleven colors, if you counted the pink. There was a name for each of them in the Braavosi dialect that Ser Darry had taught her when she was six, and she said the names out loud, one for each stripe, like counting beads.

Lilac. Rose. Copper. Cream. Apricot. Gold. Amber. Bronze. Salmon. Wine. Pink.

She was two and ten years old. She had been in eleven cities in her life. She could read and write in three languages and speak five. She could count the beads on any merchant's abacus faster than the merchant's clerk. She could name every house in the Seven Kingdoms and every great house in every free city. She had never been to school. She had never stayed in one place longer than a year. She had never owned anything she could not carry.

The manse was Illyrio Mopatis' house, and it had been his house for twenty years, and before that it had belonged to a Pentoshi merchant family who had gone bankrupt when the last of the Braavosi trade had moved west. Illyrio had bought it for a third of what it was worth and had spent fifteen years making it look like he had always owned it. The tapestries were from Lys. The silk cushions were from Yi Ti. The red marble floor in the entry hall had come from a quarry in the Disputed Lands that had been abandoned after the last war, and Illyrio had bought the quarry's entire remaining stock for a price that he mentioned to every guest who ever visited. The house was not a home. It was a statement, and the statement was that Illyrio Mopatis was a man who could buy any house he wanted and any person he wanted and any thing he wanted and had the money to prove it.

Dany had learned all of this in two weeks. She had learned it from the servants, mostly. Illyrio's household was a village of servants — cooks, maids, grooms, guards, stewards, and a maester who had been hired for the year and did not seem to know what he was doing there. The head cook was a woman named Vaela who had come from Volantis and had a burn scar across her throat that she did not talk about. The head maid was a woman named Meralyn who had been with the household for eleven years and had a granddaughter in Braavos that she wrote to every month. The stablemaster was a man named Beqqo who spoke four languages and had been a sellsword before he had taken an arrow in the knee and been bought out of his company by Illyrio as a favor to a friend.

There were forty-one servants in the manse. Dany had counted them. Counting was one of the things she did.

Vis had been strange for a month now. Near two. It had started the night Ser Darry's ring went missing — the ring, not the man, though the man had been gone for two years by then, and the ring had been all they had left of him — and it had not stopped.

The first three days, she had not noticed. He had been quieter than usual, and quieter was not a thing Viserys had ever been, but she had thought he was sick. He had a way of being sick as a child that made him quieter, and she had assumed this was the same thing.

The next week, she had noticed. He stopped shouting. He stopped hitting. He stopped drinking at dinner, and then he stopped eating at dinner, and then he stopped eating at breakfast, and then he stopped eating altogether. The servants noticed. Vaela started preparing plates for him that were meant to look eaten and were not. The steward started reporting to Illyrio that the young Targaryen was not taking meals, and Illyrio started laughing it off, and Illyrio stopped laughing it off in the second week.

By the end of the first month, Vis was calmer than she had ever known him to be. He was calm the way a pond is calm, and there was a cold coming off him at all hours, and his hands were cold, and his eyes had changed.

She had first noticed the eyes on the fourth day. She had been sitting across from him at a meal she had barely eaten and he had looked at her over the table and for a moment she had thought she was looking at someone else. The eyes were violet. They were violet the way Targaryen eyes had been violet for three hundred years. But there was a red in them now, under the violet, moving, and then the red had come up into the violet and swallowed it, and his eyes had been red for a moment, and then they had been violet again, and then they had been red.

She had not said anything. She had finished her meal. She had gone to her room. She had lain awake for a long time.

Over the next weeks, the red had taken over. Now the violet was gone entirely. His eyes were red, deep and even and unchanged, every time she saw him, and the red was the red of a wound left open, and nobody said anything about it.

The servants had learned, in that month, not to say anything to him about anything. The servants had also learned that the manse was quieter at night and that if they were going to leave, they should leave in the daylight and not say where they were going.

The servant came to fetch her on the fourteenth evening of the second month, and she was shaking.

"Princess," the woman said, and her voice was very careful. "The King is waiting. He asks that you follow me."

The woman's name was Serra. She had been in the household for four years and Dany had spoken to her twice. She had a husband in the stables and a son of eight and had once, in the second week, taught Dany a Pentoshi card game that she had then taught to Doreah.

"What does he want," Dany said.

"He did not say, princess."

"Is he angry."

"I do not know, princess."

"Is he going to hurt anyone."

Serra did not answer. That was an answer.

They walked through the manse. The corridor from Dany's room to the courtyard was one she had walked every day for two weeks, and she knew it the way she knew the rooms of every house she had been brought to. There was a mosaic in the floor halfway along, small tiles in shades of blue and gold, showing a dragon fighting a harpy. The dragon had been given red tiles for eyes by the mosaicist. Dany had always thought the red was wrong — dragons had violet eyes in every story she had ever heard — but she had not said anything because the mosaic had been there for a hundred years and she had been there for two weeks.

The tapestries along the west wall showed scenes from the life of a Pentoshi prince who had ruled four hundred years before and whose name nobody in the household now remembered. The tapestries were dusty. Illyrio had never bothered to have them cleaned. He had bought the manse for the marble and the tiles and the courtyard, and the tapestries had come with the walls, and the walls had been left alone because cleaning was an expense and Illyrio had spent his money on the things that would impress.

They passed the kitchens. Vaela was not there. The second cook was there, and a kitchen boy, and both of them were standing very still and looking at the doorway that led to the courtyard.

They passed the steward's office. The steward, a man named Qarro who had been with Illyrio since before Dany was born, was sitting at his desk with his back to the door and his head down and his hands flat on the wood in front of him. He did not look up as they passed. He had the look of a man who had made a decision about how the rest of the day was going to go and was waiting to see whether he had been right.

They reached the arch that led to the courtyard. The arch was old, older than the manse, older than the pentoshi family that had built the manse on top of whatever had been here before. The stone was worn smooth at the base where a hundred years of feet had passed through, and the lintel was carved with a harpy's head, and the harpy had been defaced sometime in the last century by someone who had chiseled out its eyes.

The smell came through the arch before she got there. It was the smell of burning wood and burning oil and something else, something she had never smelled before, and she did not know what the something else was until she was through the arch and into the courtyard and saw the pile.

The courtyard was red.

It had always been red — the tiles were a red marble from a quarry in the Disputed Lands — but tonight the red of the tiles was under a different red. There was a pile of bodies by the east wall and there were men on the pile and the pile was on fire, and the fire was a normal fire, the kind of fire you would build in a hearth, and the men on the pile had been burned alive, and Dany knew that because she could see one of them moving.

The smell was the smell of burning flesh. She had never smelled it before and she would remember it for the rest of her life. She doubled over and her stomach emptied itself onto the tiles and she was still bent over with her hands on her knees when she heard the voice.

"I told you," Vis said, "to have her at the table. Not to fetch her like a message."

It was his voice. It was always his voice. But it was pleasant. That was the thing she had noticed in the last month that she had not been able to name until now. His voice had become pleasant. It was the voice of a man discussing the seating at a dinner. It was the voice of a man discussing the wine. It was the voice of a man who had decided that nothing in the world was going to disturb him tonight.

The woman who had been told to fetch her — Serra — was on her knees at the edge of the courtyard with her forehead pressed to the tiles. She was not crying. She was shaking. She was holding onto her own wrists with her own hands, the way a person holds onto a thing they are afraid they will drop.

"Stand up," Vis said to her, without looking at her. "You have work to do. The kitchens need to make a meal for my sister and I. Tell Vaela to use the good dishes."

Serra stood up. She did not look at Dany. She walked past Dany and through the arch and was gone.

Vis came across the courtyard toward Dany. He was wearing his armor. He had not worn his armor in weeks — the armor was for the wedding, for the Khal, for the Dothraki who would not care about the black and silver but would care that a king dressed like a king — and tonight he was wearing it, the black plate with the silver trim, and the long red cape, and the silver vambraces, and there was a sword at his side that he had not worn before, and there was blood on the cape, and there was blood on his boots, and there was blood on his hands, and the blood on his hands was not his.

He came to her and put his hand on her face.

It was cold. It was always cold. She had noticed the cold a month ago and had told herself it was the wind coming off the harbor. She had told herself that for two weeks. She had stopped telling herself that a week ago and had started telling herself instead that it did not matter.

"Dany," he said. "Are you alright."

She opened her mouth. She did not have a word for what she was. She was standing in a courtyard that was on fire with a pile of bodies at one end and her brother's hand on her face and the smell of burning flesh in her nose, and she was two and ten years old, and she did not have a word for what she was.

"There are bodies on the fire," she said.

"Yes," he said. "There are."

"They are children."

"Some of them were," he said. "That was Illyrio's doing, not mine. I gave them the choice to leave. They chose to stay and serve the man who sold my sister to a horselord."

"You gave them a choice."

"I did."

"What kind of choice."

"The kind where one answer ends with them leaving and the other answer ends with them staying and me remembering it."

She looked at him. She looked at him for a long moment. The hand on her face was cold and the eyes watching her were red and the man standing in front of her had been her brother for two and ten years and had been something else for one month.

"Vis," she said.

"Dany. Look at me."

She looked at him.

"Are you alright."

"I don't know."

"That is an honest answer. I will take it." His voice went soft. It did that sometimes. It had done that more in the last month than it had in the previous year. When it went soft, she remembered the boy who used to tell her stories before she slept. The boy who used to carry her on his back when she was too tired to walk. The boy who had once, when she was five years old, sold their mother's silver hairbrush so that he could buy her a lemon cake on her name day, and had told her he had found the silver on the street, and had then spent the next week eating only bread so that she would not notice he had not eaten the cake himself.

"I know it looks bloody," he said. "I did this for us. You are not marrying the horselord. And I have one more thing for you."

"What thing."

"You will see."

He waved his hand. One of the Unsullied — she had seen the Unsullied in the courtyard, a dozen of them, standing along the walls with their spears — came forward carrying a chest. The chest was old. It was ironwood with iron fittings and it had been in the magister's storerooms since before Dany was born.

The Unsullied knelt in front of her and held the chest up in both hands and bowed his head.

"Open it, Dany," Vis said.

He kissed her forehead. His lips were cold. She had noticed that before.

She opened it.

There were three eggs in the chest.

The first egg was a deep green, the green of a forest in summer shade. The second was a gold that was almost too bright to look at directly, the gold of a coin that has just been minted. The third egg, the one in the middle, was black, and the black was not the black of tar or the black of a moonless night or the black of a dress at a funeral. It was the black of the sky just before the last of the light goes, when the orange has almost faded and the first of the stars is beginning to show and the world has gone a shade of blue so dark it is almost black but not quite.

She stood there for a long time. She did not say anything. She could not have said anything if she had wanted to. She had heard stories about dragon eggs her entire life. Ser Darry had told her about them when she was small — they were the last treasure of the Targaryens, he had said, and they were lost, and they had been lost for a hundred years, and they were not going to be found. He had told her this the way he told her all the true things, which was gently and without hope.

And now here they were, in a chest, in the courtyard of a Pentosian magister's house, with the sky orange and the pile of bodies burning and her brother standing beside her with blood on his hands.

"Where," she said, and then stopped, because the question was not the right question.

"The magister had them," Vis said. "From the very beginning. He thought he could keep them. He thought he could hide them under his own floor and laugh at me behind his own hand and arrange a wedding to a horselord that would have ended the Targaryen line for good, and he thought he could do all of this in a house I was living in, with the eggs I had come to Pentos to find, and he thought I would not notice."

"He was wrong," Dany said.

"Yes," Vis said. "He was wrong."

"Are they real."

"As real as you."

"How are they warm."

There was a pause. She had said the thing she had been not saying for the entire conversation. The eggs were warm. She had not needed to touch them. She could feel the warmth coming off them from a hand's width away. The chest had been held by an Unsullied who was not reacting to it, which meant the Unsullied had not been told what they were carrying, which meant Vis had known and had not said.

"I do not know yet," Vis said. "I have some ideas. None of them are things I want to test in front of you."

"What does that mean."

"It means I love you and I am not going to frighten you twice in one evening."

He turned her by the shoulders and made her look at the man on the ground. Illyrio. She had not recognized him at first, because his face was wrong. He was on his knees in the middle of the courtyard with his hands bound behind his back and there were guards around him with spears and his face was wrong, and it took her a long moment to understand that the wrongness was that he was not crying, and that he was not crying because he had not yet decided what to do, and that he was watching Vis with the expression of a man who had bet everything on a hand and was waiting to see whether the other man would show his cards.

"Who are they," Dany asked. She meant the guards.

"They are Unsullied," Vis said. "They obey the man with the whip." He showed her a whip. The whip had a gold handle and the handle had been carved with a harpy. "I bought them this morning. Well. I took them this morning. The buying was a formality."

"You bought slaves."

"I bought soldiers. It is not the same thing."

"Vis. They are slaves."

"Dany. They are the finest soldiers in the world and they answer to whoever holds this whip, and I intend to be the only person who ever holds it. That is not the same as what Illyrio did. Illyrio sold people for profit. I am going to use them to take a kingdom back."

"That is what every slaver says."

He looked at her for a long moment. Then he did something she did not expect. He laughed. It was the real laugh, the one from before, the one from the house with the red door, the one from the lemon tree and the man who read them stories and the years when their mother was still alive and Vis was still Vis and Dany had not yet learned to be afraid of her own name.

"You are going to be a very good queen," he said, "if you keep asking questions like that."

"I am not trying to be clever."

"I know. That is why it is going to work."

He turned away from her and walked toward the man on the ground, and the Unsullied parted for him, and he did not make a sound on the tiles. She had noticed that before, too. She had noticed it in the first week and had told herself it was a trick of the wind. In the second week she had told herself it was a trick of the stone. In the third week she had stopped telling herself anything, because by the third week she had started watching for it and had started hearing the silence the way you hear a sound, which is to say she had started hearing it all the time.

"Illyrio," Vis said, and crouched down beside the man, "I am going to explain something to you now, and I would like you to listen, because I do not intend to repeat it."

The man said something in a language Dany did not understand. He was not crying. His voice was steady. He was saying something in the language of the Free Cities that Dany had heard before, in the mouths of merchants and magisters and men who had been caught doing something they should not have been doing, and the language had a word in it that Dany did not know but that she understood from the tone, and the word meant bargaining.

"Yes," Vis said. "I know. You have a family. Everyone has a family. I have a family too. I have a sister. You tried to sell her to a horselord. You called the horselord here, to your house, to my table, and you thought I would smile and hand her over and drink your wine. You thought I was stupid."

The man said something else. His voice was still steady. The steady was worse than the crying would have been.

"You did," Vis said. "You did, Illyrio. You have been laughing at me for three years. Every meal. Every gift. Every time you called me 'my king' with that little smile in the corner of your mouth. I saw it. I always saw it. I was simply waiting."

The man said something else. The word that meant bargaining was in the sentence, and then a second word that Dany did not recognize but that she understood from the way the man said it to mean an offer.

"You called the horselord here," Vis said, ignoring the offer. "That was the mistake. That was the only mistake you made, and it was enough."

He stood. He took a spear from the hand of the nearest Unsullied — the Unsullied gave it up without a sound, without a pause, without a look at the man on the ground — and he put the spear into the man's leg. The man screamed. It was the first sound he had made that Dany had understood without translation. It was the sound a man makes when he has just been told that the bargaining is over.

"Do not look away, Dany," Vis said, without looking at her. "Open your eyes and see how the world works."

"Vis. I don't—"

"Open your eyes."

She opened her eyes. He waved his hand. The spears went in all at once. The man stopped. The blood on the tiles was not the kind of thing she had ever seen before, and she had seen a great many things in her two and ten years, and none of the things she had seen had prepared her for this.

Vis came back to her. He was not breathing hard. He had not raised his voice once this evening. There was a little blood on his hands and none on his face and none on the parts of his armor that were not covered by the cape, and the cape had been red to begin with, so the blood did not show.

"I am proud of you," he said. "I know now you will not disappoint me."

"I didn't do anything."

"You watched. That is enough."

He hugged her. She did not hug him back. When he pulled her against his chest she did not hear anything under her ear. No beat. No thump. No rise and fall of breath. There had never been anything under there, not for the last month, not since the night Ser Darry's ring had gone missing, and she had known this for a month and had not said it and had not thought about it and had kept it in the smallest room in her mind and had closed the door and had not opened the door, and now the door was open and she could not close it.

"Come," he said. "I had them make your favorites."

He turned to the Unsullied.

"Bring the chest. Burn the body with the others. Take the statue down. And you — woman. Stand up. Stop crying. If you serve me well your son will live."

The woman on the ground — Serra — was the woman Dany had forgotten about. She was still on her knees at the edge of the courtyard. She had been there the whole time. She had watched the whole thing. And she was not crying for the magister. She was crying for the son Vis had just mentioned, and Vis had mentioned him because he knew that mentioning him would do what the crying was afraid of doing, which was to give a reason for the crying that could be used.

"Thank you, my king," the woman said. "Thank you. Thank you—"

"Do not thank me," Vis said. "Just be useful."

He said it kindly. He said everything kindly.

Dinner was the strangest meal Dany had ever eaten.

The table was laid with the good dishes. Vaela had made the lamb in honey sauce that Dany had mentioned once in the second week, and the pastries with rosewater and nuts, and the figs and cream that were a Pentoshi specialty and that Dany had eaten only twice in her life. There was wine in a crystal pitcher and there were candles in silver holders and there was a fire in the hearth that had been laid before the meal and lit just as they sat down.

The servants did not talk. The Unsullied along the walls did not talk. Vis talked. He talked about the ship he had bought, which was called Aegon's Revenge, and which he was very pleased with. He talked about the Unsullied, and how they had been trained, and how they were the best soldiers in the world. He talked about the cities of Slaver's Bay and the cities of the Free Cities and the cities of Westeros and the cities he had heard of but had never been to. He talked and he laughed and he drank from his cup and pushed his food from one side of his plate to the other with his fork, and he ate nothing.

Dany watched him for a full quarter of an hour. She did not see a single bite pass his lips. He moved the food. He arranged it. He piled the lamb on one side and the vegetables on the other and then spread them around again. He lifted the fork to his mouth twice and each time the fork went past his mouth to the far side of his plate, and each time Dany watched the fork and watched his mouth and watched the space between them and nothing went into it.

"You're not eating," she said.

"I ate earlier."

"You did not. I was with you all afternoon."

He looked at her. He did not look caught. He looked pleased, the way a man looks when a pupil gets a difficult sum right.

"You are paying attention," he said. "That is good."

"Vis. Why are you not eating."

"I am not hungry."

"You are never hungry. You have not eaten in a month."

"You have been watching me."

"Of course I have been watching you. You are my brother."

He set down his fork. He did not answer. He called one of the small children over — Vaela's grandson, a boy of six whose name Dany did not know, who had been sitting on a stool in the corner of the kitchen the whole meal — and he had the child taste his food first.

"Eat this," Vis said to the child. "Tell me if it is good."

The child ate. The child nodded. The child was shaking. Vis looked at Dany and raised one eyebrow.

"One can never be too careful," he said. "With food."

"With food," she said.

"With food."

Everyone at the table looked at the floor. Dany looked at her brother.

After dinner she went to her room. She lay on the bed with the black egg beside her and she listened to the manse. She had counted the sounds of the manse every night for two weeks and she knew the rhythm of it — the kitchen sounds fading after the last meal, the sound of the Unsullied changing shifts at the gate, the sound of the harbor at night which was different from the harbor during the day, softer and slower and further away.

Tonight none of the sounds were there. The manse had never been this quiet. She lay on the bed for a long time. Then she got up and walked to his room, because she had questions and because she had decided that she was not a child anymore.

The door was not quite shut. She stopped outside it because she heard something, and she looked through the gap.

There was a woman in the room. It was Doreah. Doreah was the Lyseni girl who had come to the manse with the household of Illyrio six months ago, and who had taught Dany to braid her hair, and who had been kind to Dany in the small ways that servants are sometimes kind to girls who are about to be sold. Doreah was on the bed. Vis was kneeling in front of the bed with his head between her legs, and Doreah was making a sound that Dany had heard once or twice before, through the walls of other houses, in other cities, on other nights, and that she had learned to recognize but not to name.

"It occurred to me," Vis said, without lifting his head, "that I have been very demanding these past days, and it seemed fair to let you have something."

"My king is too generous," Doreah said.

"I am not generous. I am thorough. There is a difference, and I would like you to learn it."

Dany stepped back from the door. She went back to her room. She lay down with the black egg. She stared at the ceiling. She did not sleep. She did not cry. She did not do anything except lie there with the egg beside her and listen to the manse being quiet.

A month ago her brother had been a man who shouted. He had been a man who hit. He had been a man who wept in the night when he thought she was asleep. He had been a man who had sold their mother's hairbrush for a lemon cake.

Now he was a man who did not raise his voice. Who did not eat. Who did not sleep. Who did not bleed. Whose eyes were red. Who could kill a man without changing his tone. Who could have killed her, if he had wanted to, and had not, and had instead given her three dragon eggs and a promise that she would not be sold.

She did not know which of those two men she was more afraid of.

The questions could wait for tomorrow. That is what she told herself.

She told herself that a lot.

 

[foreverimmortal]

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