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November 19 - December 5, 2025
Tonight you must look like a princess.” A princess, Dany thought. She had forgotten what that was like. Perhaps she had never really known.
Dany was thirteen, old enough to know that such gifts seldom come without their price, here in the free city of Pentos.
For a moment she wished she could be out there with them, barefoot and breathless and dressed in tatters, with no past and no future and no feast to attend at Khal Drogo’s manse.
Dany had her own room there, with a lemon tree outside her window.
All that Daenerys wanted back was the big house with the red door, the lemon tree outside her window, the childhood she had never known.
His sister, Daenerys Stormborn, Princess of Dragonstone.
realized, with a sudden start of fear, that she was the only woman there.
“I don’t want to be his queen,” she heard herself say in a small, thin voice. “Please, please, Viserys, I don’t want to, I want to go home.”
That was the only time in all their years that Ned had ever frightened her. “Never ask me about Jon,”
other girls. Sansa’s needlework was exquisite. Everyone said so. “Sansa’s work is as pretty as she is,”
“You woke the dragon,” he screamed as he kicked her. “You woke the dragon, you woke the dragon.” Her thighs were slick with blood. She closed her eyes and whimpered. As if in answer, there was a hideous ripping sound and the crackling of some great fire. When she looked again, Viserys was gone, great columns of flame rose all around, and in the midst of them was the dragon. It turned its great head slowly. When its molten eyes found hers, she woke, shaking and covered with a fine sheen of sweat. She had never been so afraid … … until the day of her wedding came at last.
I am blood of the dragon, she told herself. I am Daenerys Stormborn, Princess of Dragonstone, of the blood and seed of Aegon the Conqueror.
And for the first time in hours, she forgot to be afraid. Or perhaps it was for the first time ever.
All she wanted was for things to be nice and pretty, the way they were in the songs.
As the headsman looked at her, his pale colorless eyes seemed to strip the clothes away from her, and then the skin, leaving her soul naked before him.
“No,” she said. “No, not Lady, Lady didn’t bite anybody, she’s good …”
I’ll make her be good, I promise, I promise
could not find it in him to pray to any gods, old or new. If they were real, he thought, they were as cruel and implacable as winter.
When the snows fall and the white winds blow, the lone wolf dies, but the pack survives.
Sansa … Sansa is your sister. You may be as different as the sun and the moon, but the same blood flows through both your hearts. You need her, as she needs you … and I need both of you, gods help me.”
I can be as strong as Robb.”
“I don’t want to talk about that now,” she said. “It’s so beautiful here, I don’t want to think about everything dying.”
afterward to cry herself to sleep. Yet every night, some time before the dawn, Drogo would come to her tent and wake her in the dark, to ride her as relentlessly as he rode his stallion. He always took her from behind, Dothraki fashion, for which Dany was grateful; that way her lord husband could not see the tears that wet her face, and she could use her pillow to muffle her cries of pain.
She would kill herself rather than go on, she decided one night … Yet when she slept that night, she dreamt the dragon dream again. Viserys was not in it this time. There was only her and the dragon. Its scales were black as night, wet and slick with blood. Her blood, Dany sensed. Its eyes were pools of molten magma, and when it opened its mouth, the flame came roaring out in a hot jet. She could hear it singing to her. She opened her arms to the fire, embraced it, let it swallow her whole, let it cleanse her and temper her and scour her clean. She could feel her flesh sear and blacken and
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they burned with a thousand lights, a fire blazing in every window. In her mind’s eye, all the doors were red.
“Khaleesi, you are with child.” “I know,” Dany told her. It was her fourteenth name day.
poison is a woman’s weapon.”
Jeyne covered her eyes whenever a man fell, like a frightened little girl, but Sansa was made of sterner stuff.
with her hands folded in her lap, watching with a strange fascination. She had never seen a man die before. She ought to be crying too, she thought, but the tears would not come. Perhaps she had used up all her tears for Lady and Bran.
You’re like one of those birds from the Summer Isles, aren’t you? A pretty little talking bird, repeating all the pretty little words they taught you to recite.”
Sansa with her dreams and Arya with her bruises,
yet this seven-times-damned she-wolf Catelyn Stark had outwitted him at every turn.
“You send hired knives to kill a fourteen-year-old girl and still quibble about honor?”
So young, Catelyn thought, trying to remember if she had ever been like that. The girl had lived half her life in summer, and that was all she knew. Winter is coming, child, she wanted to tell her. The words were on her lips; she almost said them. Perhaps she was becoming a Stark at last.
His fingers dug into her arm painfully and for an instant Dany felt like a child again, quailing in the face of his rage.
Dany curled up on her side, pulling the sandsilk cloak across her and cradling the egg in the hollow between her swollen belly and small, tender breasts. She liked to hold them. They were so beautiful, and sometimes just being close to them made her feel stronger, braver, as if somehow she were drawing strength from the stone dragons locked inside.
she smiled, and went to sleep dreaming of home.
She is a fierce little thing, my lord. I have never seen such anger in a girl.”
Alyssa Arryn had seen her husband, her brothers, and all her children slain, and yet in life she had never shed a tear. So in death, the gods had decreed that she would
Catelyn wondered how large a waterfall her own tears would make when she died.
“Life is not a song, sweetling. You may learn that one day to your sorrow.”
“Lady,” she whispered. For a moment it was as if the direwolf was there in the room, looking at her with those golden eyes, sad and knowing. She had been dreaming, she realized. Lady was with her, and they were running together, and … and … trying to remember was like trying to catch the rain with her fingers. The dream faded, and Lady was dead again.
“When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die. There is no middle ground.”
She must not flinch or look afraid. I am the blood of the dragon, she told herself as she took the stallion’s heart in both hands, lifted it to her mouth, and plunged her teeth into the tough, stringy flesh.
The heart of a stallion would make her son strong and swift and fearless, or so the Dothraki believed, but only if the mother could eat it all. If she choked on the blood or retched up the flesh, the omens were less favorable; the child might be stillborn, or come forth weak, deformed, or female.
He was no dragon, Dany thought, curiously calm. Fire cannot kill a dragon.
Fear cuts deeper than swords. The man who fears losing has already lost. Fear cuts deeper than swords. Fear cuts deeper than swords. Fear cuts deeper than swords.
Robb took them all the way down to the end, past Grandfather and Brandon and Lyanna, to show them their own tombs. Sansa kept looking at the stubby little candle, anxious that it might go out. Old Nan had told her there were spiders down here, and rats as big as dogs. Robb smiled when she said that. “There are worse things than spiders and rats,” he whispered. “This is where the dead walk.” That was when they heard the sound, low and deep and shivery. Baby Bran had clutched at Arya’s hand. When the spirit stepped out of the open tomb, pale white and moaning for blood, Sansa ran shrieking for
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Sansa dried her own tears as she struggled to comfort her friend. They went to sleep in the same bed, cradled in each other’s arms like sisters.
A lady remembered her courtesies, and she was resolved to be a lady no matter what.
