A tall lord with copper skin and silver-gold hair stood beneath the banner of a fiery stallion, a burning city behind him.
- A Clash of Kings
Her khalakka was seven the first time he took a man's head.
Rhaego had seen men die since he was old enough to remember, Lamb Men and Lion Men, red men from the desert wastes and brindled men from the green jungles. And once even his father's khas, Jhogo, blood of his blood but who had grown proud and faithless and thought to make himself khal in Drogo's place. But it was outside the walls of Pentos, with the city burning behind them, that Khal Drogo handed his son his very own arakh and bid him take the prince's head. It was a wicked thing of Valyrian steel, black as tar, and most precious to the khal. Rhaego had never even been permitted to touch it before.
He glanced once at his mother, seated on her silver as though it were her throne, and Daenerys gave him a tiny nod. That was enough. The boy's bloodriders had forced the defeated Prince of Pentos on to his knees, his hands bound behind his back with coarse rope. His brightly colored silks were soiled and torn for he had been dragged through the streets of the conquered city, behind Drogo's stallion for half a league. His face had the squeezed look of a pinched lemon and he had pissed himself in his fear. He really was a pitiful thing but Daenerys Targaryen had no mercy in her heart for him.
This is not a world for fat men who cower behind brick walls and hope their gold will keep them safe, she thought with contempt. This is a world for riders and those who are ridden.
The prince was long in his dying. Rhaego had the enthusiasm but not the skill or strength to make a clean, swift cut as his father would have. After the half-dozenth blow, Daenerys stopped counting. The man bleated like a sleep being slaughtered but Rhaego had not the wisdom to slice off his tongue beforehand. He was growing frustrated, she could see. With one final savage blow, he took the man's head off at last. It rolled a few feet away and he kicked at it angrily. He was splattered with sticky blood and sweat clung to his brow. The first person he looked at was his father but Drogo's face was, as always, expressionless.
"My father was ashamed of me," he told Daenerys later. She had brought him to the late prince's manse and now she washed him clean as he soaked sulkily in the terrace pools. Lilies floated on the clear green water and incense sweetened the air. Candles had been set in niches along the walls, softening the purple gloom of dusk. It was an oasis of calm and peace in the city weeping red.
"He was not," she told him. "Never think that."
"He said nothing to me," Rhaego said with a child's petulance, "he did not even look at me."
"If you wanted praise and sweet words you should have prayed that your mother lay with the Lamb Men to bear you," she said sharply. "You will never have those from the khal. But what would you rather have? Pentos and the great wide world beyond or pretty nothings?"
Rhaego quelled at that. But after a moment he asked her, "Why is he not here with us?"
"He does not like to be hemmed in between walls," she explained. "He will sleep outside the gates with the khalasar as he has always done whenever he came to Pentos."
"But not us?"
"Your father is Dothraki but we are of the Sunset Kingdoms," she told him, stroking his hair. It fell to his shoulders, bright as moonlight. In a few short years he would begin to braid it. Her throat tightened queerly at that. "One day you will be king. It is best that you learn now how kings live."
"I don't want to be king. I want to be khal."
One day you will be both king and khal, a king such as no one has ever seen before for you are the Stallion that Mounts the World. She had not yet told him this and had forbidden Drogo from doing so as well. He was only a child, it would go to his head. Like Viserys, she thought. Her brother had been told that he was the only rightful king since he was eight years old.
"To be khal you must first be a man," she told him. "Today was a good start." She wrapped him in a towel and said, "Go play with your sister. I will call you after I have bathed."
Doreah came to bathe her. "How does it feel like to be back in Pentos again?" she asked her handmaid. "You left a slave, you returned a lady."
Doreah bowed her head shyly. She had rings on every finger and jade drops hung heavy in her ears. "All I have is by your kindness, khaleesi."
All she had was by Doreah's skills, Daenerys thought. The girl had schooled her in the arts of love and it was only after her teaching that she had learned to please the khal - and herself - and had conceived Rhaego. "You shall have your own manse," she promised the girl dreamily as she massaged her temples with fragrant oils. "Servants to dress you in silk, sapphires to match your eyes and a green parrot in a silver cage to amuse you." She was a generous mistress to those who served her well. To her enemies however...
Afterwards, she donned a gown. The prince's pampered mistress had left behind a lavish wardrobe. The gown was a pale, pale gold, like the light that a firefly might cast, and sewn with baby pearls. It still felt strange, constricting after the lightness and freedom of the open vest and trousers she wore among the Dothraki. She had bidden Rhaego's attendants dress him in a tunic and trousers and boots, garments that he wore reluctantly.
"You look very handsome, my prince," she told him when they brought him to her in the old prince's hall.
He scowled darkly up at her. "I feel stupid."
They sat together on an ebon bench, piled high with cushions as they waited for the sellsword captains. The high windows of the hall on all sides offered views of the courtyard and the gardens and the pleasure pool. Daenerys saw her three-year-old daughter playing a game of catch with her handmaids and smiled to herself. Saeri was growing up like a little princess, petted and pampered and protected as her mother never had been. She was her father's heart and her brother's darling.
First to arrive was the Tattered Prince, she had expected that. He was of Pentos. A new strip of silk had been sewn into his ragged cloak, she noted, this one brighter than the others for it was newer. It had come from the old prince's cloak, the one Rhaego had slain the morning. The captain of the Windblown took a knee before them.
"Dothraki do not hide behind walls of brick or stone," she told him. She spoke in Valyrian, a language which Rhaego was learning though which he was still very shaky in. His command of the Common Tongue was even poorer but he would have to learn it quickly. "Dragons do not plant trees. The city burns but it was a goodly place and once, for however short a time, my home. I would not see it ravaged beyond repair. You are of Pentos and know its customs and rules. Do with it as you like." She might have given the city to a wise and seasoned ruler or she might have given it to a madman. She could not be sure. But that was not her concern, she had handled one pressing matter and that as all. The good folk of Pentos might hunker down under the Windblown's rule or rebel, that was their concern.
"Your Grace is wise beyond measure." Within the walls of the city, she was Her Grace. Outside she would be khaleesi. The Tattered Prince looked up to Rhaego. "You were brave today, my prince."
Rhaego bristled up proudly. "I know," he said haughtily.
"Killing an old man with his hands tied behind his back is not brave work," Daenerys declared. It was her duty as his mother to put him in his place when he grew too proud. "It was child's play but then Rhaego is still only a child." She steepled her fingers together. "I want Illyrio Mopatis' servants and slaves questioned. And then extend the search to his business partners, his friends, his family, anyone that you can find. Sweetly to begin with but sharply if they do not begin to mewl. I want that traitor found."
"Your Grace knows that he is not in Pentos."
"Yes, but bedmaids and laundresses, bearers and cooks are sharper than they seem. Perhaps one of them might have some inclination of where he vanished to." She rapped her fingers angrily on her thigh. The merchant had declared his support for a feigned boy that he called Prince Aegon two years ago. Rhaegar's son died an infant, Daenerys told herself. A boy with silver hair and purple eyes is as like to be a Lysene bedslave as a Targaryen prince.
Rhaego spoke up unexpectedly. "I will string him up by his entrails from a tree myself," he piped up. "And then I will eat his heart, cooked with salt and pepper. The hearts of my enemies will make me grow stronger."
"Your Grace has been listening to pit fighters," the Tattered Prince said, smiling faintly as though amused.
"Perhaps if you had eaten your enemies' hearts, you might have captured Pentos years ago, Tatters," Rhaego said. "You're just a sad old man with white hair now. You had to wait till my mother and my father gave you back your city." He laughed scornfully. Daenerys rested her hand on his head to quieten the boy but she did not say anything against him. He was a Dothraki boy, high-spirited and wilful. He did not really mean what he said.
"We should have marched to Westeros years ago," Daenerys said absently. "Before kings began sprouting up like mushrooms after a hard rain." There were others beyond Mopatis who had lent the princeling their support and that was disturbing. Dorne where he had made a marriage pact with their princess. Griffin's Roost whose sellsword lord, an old companion of Prince Rhaegar's, had declared him to be the true Aegon. The stormlands. The Golden Company.
The Tattered Prince looked at her curiously. He did not ask her but she told him anyway - him and Rhaego, for whom the words were meant. "There's a lesson to be learned there. I learned contentment in the grasslands. Happiness of a sort. I planned a family and a future for myself - but not the one that was right for me. Happy men plant trees, they grow gardens. Small men with small happinesses. They will leave behind no legacies. They will vanish off the face of this world, like footprints in the sand, once they draw their last breath. But I am a Targaryen and so is my son. We were not meant to fade away. We were meant for so much more."
The other sellsword captains began to trickle in. A great map had been laid before her on a round table and she nodded to them to sit around it. It was time to plan.
Afterwards she tucked her son into bed as she had done every night of his life, with a bedtime story about the home land that she had never seen. All the stories she knew of the Sunset Kingdoms, she knew from her brother or Ser Jorah or captured slaves. After her son was born, she had ceased to dream of houses with red doors for she had known herself to be home at last. She had never spoken again to Drogo about the Iron Throne and her rights, although she could have, although she should have. She had grown content - weak and fat and pathetic. And Drogo for his part, as khal, had other matters to think of. But Illyrio Mopatis and his treachery had torn all that away from her.
It did not matter that he was trying to take her birthright away from her, what was more was that he was trying to steal Rhaego's.
"Will I look strange in Westeros?" he asked her. "Jhiqui and Irri told me that the people all look like you."
She laughed at that. His anxiety was so endearing. "No stranger than me," she said. "I have the Valyrian look and you the Dothraki. Most of the common Westerosi look like Jorah the Andal. We will both stand out in Westeros."
"Will you be queen in the Sunset Kingdoms?"
"Yes, my heart. Until you are old enough to be king."
He looked at her apprehensively. "And after I am king, I will never be khal," he said. "I will have to spend all my days sitting on that stupid Iron Chair and wearing those stupid clothes and I will never be able to ride again." His vehemence surprised her.
"It is your birthright-" she began.
"No!" he said. "It's yours, mother. I don't want it but you do. You should be queen."
"But who will come after me then? A queen must have heirs and you are mine."
"I am father's," he said stubbornly. "You can make Saeri queen after you. She can never be khal anyway. And she's too little now that it won't matter if you tell her that she has to be queen everyday from now on. But you never told me, not till two years ago. And I already knew what I wanted to be then. I knew I wanted to ride til the ends of the world and kill all the khals in the world and make all their khalasars my own." He studied her. "Father doesn't want to either. Cross the black water or see me king. He only does it because of you."
"He made me a vow before you were born," she told him. "Wicked men, sent by the Usurper, tried to kill me and you inside me. When he heard, he swore to me that he would give me back my father's throne someday." She scowled, rage bubbling inside her as it always did at the memory of Mopatis' treachery. "My throne. Mine. Not some foul pretender's. Rhaego, I swear to you, when I get my hands on him and his feigned boy, I will give them to the fire to see if he is a true Targaryen as he claims. Fire cannot hurt a dragon. And I will smile while they scream."