…

XII.

Collars and Capers

The Yunkish encampment was not one camp but a hundred camps raised up cheek by jowl in a crescent around the walls of Meereen.

Between the siege lines and the bay, tents had sprouted up like yellow mushrooms. Some were small and mean, no more than a flap of old stained canvas to keep off the sun, but beside them stood barracks tents large enough to sleep a hundred men and silken pavilions as big as palaces with harpies gleaming atop their roof poles. Some camps were orderly, with the tents arrayed around a fire pit in concentric circles, weapons and armor stacked around the inner ring, horse lines outside. Elsewhere, pure chaos seemed to reign.

Tyrion Lannister walked the encampment with Penny, Jorah Mormont, and Nurse, their new master's overseer. Nurse had a long narrow face, a chin beard bound about with golden wire, and stiff black hair swept out from his temples to form a pair of taloned hands.

Tyrion, Penny, and Jorah Mormont were the property of Yezzan zo Qaggaz, a Master of Yunkai. Now slaves, the two dwarfs wore heavy gilded iron collars around their necks with Yezzan's name incised into the metal in Valyrian glyphs. A pair of tiny bells were affixed to them, so the wearer's every step produced a merry little tinkling sound. Mormont wore no collar; instead, a demon-mask slave tattoo had been branded into his cheek.

The dry, scorched plains around Meereen were flat and bare and treeless for long leagues, but the Yunkish ships had brought lumber and hides up from the south, enough to raise six huge trebuchets. They were arrayed on three sides of the city, all but the river side, surrounded by piles of broken stone and casks of pitch and resin just waiting for a torch. One of the soldiers walking along beside the cart saw Tyrion was looking and proudly told him that each of the trebuchets had been given a name: Dragonbreaker, Harridan, Harpy's Daughter, Wicked Sister, Ghost of Astapor, Mazdhan's Fist. Towering above the tents to a height of forty feet, the trebuchets were the siege camp's chief landmarks. "Just the sight of them drove the dragon queen to her knees," he boasted. "And there she will stay, sucking Hizdahr's noble cock, else we will smash her walls to rubble."

Tyrion saw a slave being whipped, blow after blow, until his back was nothing but blood and raw meat. A file of men marched past in irons, clanking with every step; they carried spears and wore shortswords, but chains linked them wrist to wrist and ankle to ankle. The air smelled of roasting meat, and he saw one man skinning a dog for his stewpot.

He saw the dead as well, and heard the dying. Under the drifting smoke, the smell of horses, and the sharp salt tang of the bay was a stink of blood and shit. The flux, he realized, as he watched two sellswords carry the corpse of a third from one of the tents. That made his fingers twitch. Disease could wipe out an army quicker than any battle, he had heard his father say once.

All the more reason to escape, and soon.

A quarter mile on, he found good reason to reconsider. A crowd had formed around three slaves taken whilst trying to escape.

"I know my little treasures will be sweet and obedient," Nurse said. "See what befalls ones who try to run."

The captives had been tied to a row of crossbeams, and a pair of slingers were using them to test their skills. "Tolosi," one of the guards told them. "The best slingers in the world. They throw soft lead balls in place of stones."

Tyrion had never seen the point of slings, when bows had so much better range…but he had never seen the Tolosi at work before. Their lead balls did last vastly more damage than the smooth stones other slingers used, and more than any bow as well. One struck the knee of one of the captives, and it burst apart in a gout of blood and bone that left the man's lower leg dangling by a rope of dark red tendon. Well he won't run again, Tyrion allowed, as the man began to scream. His sheiks mingled in the morning mist with the laughter of the camp followers and the curses of those who'd wagered good coin that the slinger would miss. Penny looked away, but Nurse grasped her under the chin and twisted her head back around. "Watch," he commanded. "You too, bear."

Jorah Mormont raised his head and stared at Nurse. Tyrion could see the tightness in his arms. He's going to throttle him, and that will be the end for all of us. But the knight only grimaced, then turned to watch the bloody show.

To the east, the massive brick walls of Meereen shimmered through the morning heat. The refuge hundreds of poor fools had followed the last Targaryen to was closed and barred now.

All three of the would-be escapees were dead before Nurse gathered up the reins again. The mule cart rumbled on.

Mormont paid no mind to the mongrel crowd. Even in chains with a slave's brand, the knight looked dangerous. A hulking brute with big, thick arms and sloped shoulders, the coarse dark hair on this chest made him look more beast than man. Both his eyes were blackened; two dark pits in that grotesquely swollen face. His eyes were fixed beyond the siege lines, on the distant city with its ancient walls of many-colored brick. Tyrion could read that look as easy as a book: so near and yet so distant. Mhysa, the slaves called her. Someone had told him that meant Mother. The slaves whispered that soon the silver queen would come forth from her city, smash the Yunkai'i, and break their chains.

Tyrion had no faith in royal rescues. If need be, he would see to their deliverance himself.

Their master's camp was south and east of the Harridan, almost in its shadow, and spread over several acres. The tents of Yezzan zo Qaggaz were a sprawl of lemon-colored silk. Gilded harpies sat on top the center poles of each peaked roof, shining in the sun. Lesser tents ringed it on all sides.

Nurse left them at their tent—a small carpeted space large enough for four to sleep. Beside them, other tents housed the others in Yezzan's grotesquerie collection: a boy with twisted, hairy "goat legs," a two-headed girl out of Mantarys, a bearded woman, and a willowy creature called Sweets who dressed in moonstones and Myrish lace and possessed the genitalia of both a man and a woman. The bearded woman spoke in an incomprehensible variety of Ghiscari, the goat boy some guttural sailor's pigeon called trade talk. The two-headed girl was feeble minded; one head was no bigger than an orange and did not speak at all, the other had filed teeth and was like to growl at anyone who came too close to her cage. But Sweets was fluid in four languages, one of them High Valyrian.

They had been bathed, given plain but clean clothes to wear, soft slippers, and their many wounds, cuts, and Tyrion's lashes had been cleaned and attended to. Penny's hair was cut, and Tyrion's beard received a trim.

As evening fell, Nurse returned to tell them that it was time to down their mummer's plate. Yezzan would be hosting the Yunkish supreme commander, the noble Yurkhaz zo Yunzak, and they would be expected to perform. "Shall we unchain your bear?"

"Not this night," Tyrion said. "Let us joust for our master first and save the bear for some other time."

"Just so. After your capers are concluded, you will help serve and pour. See that you do not spill on the guests, or it will go ill for you."

A juggler began the evening's frolics. Then came a trio of energetic tumblers. After them the goat-legged boy came out and did a grotesque jig whilst one of Yurkhaz's slaves played on a bone flute. Tyrion had half a mind to ask him if he knew "The Rains of Castamere."

As they waited their own turn to perform, he watched Yezzan and his guests. The human prune in the place of honor was evidently the supreme commander, who looked about as formidable as loose stool. A dozen other Yunkish lords attended him. Two sellsword captains were on hand as well, each accompanied by a dozen men of his company. One was an elegant Pentoshi, grey-haired and clad and silk but for his cloak, a ragged thing sewn from dozens of strips of torn, bloodstained cloth. The other captain was a man who had tried to buy them that morning, the brown-skinned bidder with the salt-and-pepper beard. "Brown Ben Plumm," Sweets named him. "Captain of the Second Sons."

A Westerosi and a Plumm.

"You are next," Nurse informed them. "Be amusing, my little darlings, or you will wish you had."

Tyrion had not mastered half of Groat's old tricks, but he could ride the sow, fall off when he was meant to, roll, and pop back onto his feet. All of that proved well received. The sight of little people running about drunkenly and whacking at one another with wooden weapons appeared to be just as hilarious in a siege camp by Slaver's Bay as at Joffrey's wedding feast in King's Landing. Contempt, thought Tyrion, the universal tongue.

Their master Yazzan laughed loudest and longest whenever one of his dwarfs suffered a fall or took a blow, his whole vast body shaking like suet in an earthquake. His guests waited to see how Yurkhaz no Yunzak responded before joining in. The supreme commander appeared so frail that Tyrion was afraid laughing might kill him. When Penny's helm was struck off and flew into the lap of a sour-faced Yunkishman in a striped green-and-gold tokar, Yurkhaz cackled like a chicken. When said lord reached inside the helm and drew out a large purple melon dribbling pulp, he wheezed until his face turned the same color as the fruit. He turned to his host and whispered something that made their master chortle and lick his lips…though there was a hint of anger in those little yellow eyes, it seemed to Tyrion.

Afterward the dwarfs stripped off their wooden armor and the sweat-soaked clothing beneath and changed into the fresh yellow tunics that had been provided them for serving. Tyrion was given a flagon of purple wine, Penny of flagon of water. They moved about the tent filling cups, their slippered feet whispering over thick carpets. It was harder work than it appeared. Before long his legs were cramping badly, and one of the cuts on his back had begun to bleed again, the red seeping through the yellow linen of his tunic. Tyrion bit his tongue and kept on pouring.

Most of the guests paid them no more mind than they did the other slaves…but one Yunkishman declared drunkenly that Yezzan should make the two dwarfs fuck, and another demanded to know how Tyrion got his scar. I shoved my face in your wife's cunt and found a dagger there, he almost replied…but the storm had persuaded him that he did not want to die as yet, so instead he said, "It was cut off to punish me for insolence, lord."

Their gargantuan master fell into a drunken sleep during the games following the last course, his goblet slipping from his yellowed fingers to spill its contents on the carpet, but perhaps he would be pleased when he awakened.

When the supreme commander Yurkhaz departed, supported by a pair of burly slaves, that seemed to be a general signal for the other guests to take their leave as well. After the tent had emptied out, Nurse reappeared to tell the servers that they might make their own feast from the leavings. "Eat quickly. All this must be clean again before you sleep."

Tyrion was on his knees, his legs aching and his bloody back screaming with pain, trying to scrub out the stain that the noble Yezzan's spilled wine had left upon the noble Yezzan's carpet, when the overseer tapped his cheek gently with the end of his whip. "Yollo. You have done well. You and your wife."

"She's not my wife."

"Your whore, then."

Tyrion scrubbed the stain with a gargoyle grimace as Nurse walked away from him. The weight of the iron collar made his neck ache viciously. Blood ran down his lower back. Somewhere a god is laughing.

…

"I reminded him that he slings enough insults to make it poor form for him to become so irritable over yours," Dany told her, frowning. "I forbade him from touching you again with hand or weapon."

"Thank you." Alyce kicked away the silken bedfittings on Daenerys' wide bed. The night was warm and the girls whispered so as to not wake the little scribe Missandei who was sleeping curled on a divan near the bedchamber terrace where the breeze came in. "I apologize for making him slightly less pretty for a while."

Dany smiled indulgently. "I am giving him the small punishment that he is bereft of my company tonight. You will share my bed instead." She put an arm behind her head. "Ser Barristan told me Daario meant to grab you by the throat, but you blocked him and attacked in response. Did you really slice his swordbelt in two?"

"He is in need of another," was Alyce's cool reply. Dany's eyebrows rose.

"He was not here when you threatened me that first day," she said. "He did not know your speed or skill."

"He knows now."

"But you shan't hurt him again," she said, growing serious. "I will not allow or forgive it."

Alyce glanced at her, and the corner of her mouth lifted slightly. "Aye."

"Even Dario would have said 'Yes, my queen,' you impudent thing," Dany scolded softly.

The start of a soft laugh passed Alyce's lips. "I'm supposed to call you 'Your Grace' in the times we trade whispers like this?" Dany lay on her stomach beside her, bare to the waist, while Alyce ran her hand up and down her bare back. "Any other time, for sure and certain, but not these. In the dark you could be my nina, my little sister."

Dany seemed pleased by that. "You'd make a fearsome ohni." 'Elder sister' in High Valyrian.

"Aye." Alyce scratched her back, but Dany sat up a little.

She asked, "Is this sisterly affection all you feel for me?" There was a playful smirk on her delicate face. Alyce smirked in response, enjoying the queen's teasing.

"Perhaps, perhaps not," she replied with teasing aloofness in her air. "It depends on my mood at the time."

"Wench."

Alyce sniggered and hauled the girl close against her, tucked against her chest. Dany settled her head and they were quiet for a time while she traced little patterns on Alyce's hard, muscled stomach with her fingertips.

Dany murmured in a different tone of voice, "If your lord does arrive at my gates with Ser Jorah…I do not know if I should even receive Ser Jorah. I sent him from me on threat of death should I see him again."

"How did you find out he was informing on you?"

"Ser Barristan knew of his allegiances from his time at court under the Usurper."

"Both Barristan and Mormont worked for King Robert. Why forgive one and not the other?"

Dany shifted, frowning. "After both truths came out, I sent them both into the sewers of Meereen to take the city. A sort of punishment—and a test of their devotion. When they delivered me the city, Ser Barristan begged my forgiveness with humility and respect. But Ser Jorah insisted that I owed him forgiveness because of his past service and the many times he had saved my life. I had intended to forgive him all along, but after that… His presumption awoke my temper." Her body had grown stiff. "Ser Jorah always saw me as… He saw me as a little girl and then he began to see me as a lover sees another. But never did he see me as a queen."

Alyce nodded. "You knew of his feelings and were fond of him, yet you saw how his behavior undermined you and you made a decision worthy of a firm ruler. You were in the right. Yet, I think if you refuse to receive him when he returns, you won't be able to decide whether or not he has found the humility he needed before."

"And your dwarf lord?" Dany demanded softly, turning to prop herself on her elbow to look at her. "The brother in law of the Usurper who murdered my family? Is he to be received with courtesy?"

"That is for you to decide."

Dany looked unconvinced of the sincerity of that statement. She rolled her eyes slightly. "I will receive him because you have made me curious, but do not think him safe, regardless of your vows. I would be a fool to so easily trust all these old friends of my enemy."

"You trust Ser Barristan with your life."

"And you with it as well, though you are Lord Varys'." She slipped into a frown.

"All those from Westeros you will meet lived under King Robert and pledged allegiance to him. You will not be able to find any true loyalists to you. All kingdoms had to bend the knee. But with him dead, the Lannisters have shown their true colors to be bloody and unjust. Many have turned from them, including Varys, Barristan, Jorah, Tyrion, and myself." She looked away from the queen. "Children can want different things than their parents. Blood does not always tell."

"Children? Are you speaking of Tyrion again? I told you already I would hear him."

"And…myself as well."

Dany tilted her head back to look at her. "Your blood? What do you mean?"

Alyce steeled herself. Better now from mine own lips than from Ser Barristan when he finally realizes where he has seen my eyes before.

The betrayal in Dany's face if she were to find out from someone else was something Alyce never wanted to see.

Better she know now. She deserves the truth.

"I did not intend to tell you because I worried for my safety," Alyce murmured, her voice low. She did not meet Dany's eyes. "But now that you…now that we are closer than I assumed we would be…I don't think it right to conceal my parentage to you any longer. I would not wish for you to find out from someone else and think that I was trying to deceive you. I…"

Daenerys' eyes had hardened to purple stones in the dimness of the single candle lit across the room. Her body was rigid. "Your father?"

"I never spoke to him, Your Grace. I…I cannot help who sired me—"

"Name him."

Alyce sat up in bed with her arms around her legs. She could not look at the queen while she admitted the truth. But before she could answer, Dany whispered in a shocked voice, "You're his, aren't you? Robert Baratheon's."

"He fucked my mother, but that does not make me his." Alyce's jaw was set hard. She had begun to love this girl in her way, and now that time was likely done. "But yes, I am one of his many bastard children."

Daenerys was silent for a long time, her jaw working, her purple eyes like cut gems, the skin around them tight and angry.

Finally she whispered in a hard voice, "You should have admitted it to me sooner."

"Most people would never have told you." Alyce scratched viciously at an itch on her arm. "I didn't want to sleep in your arms anymore without you knowing. So you know. And that's all my damned secrets."

"Not all," Dany snapped. "You're in love with Tyrion."

Alyce closed her eyes with a grimace. "Seven hells. Fine. Yes. That's all my secrets." She rubbed at her face. But the queen was not commanding she be thrown back into a cell. Yet. Hope that perhaps Daenerys would not look her up somewhere in the pyramid bloomed tentatively inside her.

The queen sighed. "You are not a large enough lackwit to tell me of your parentage if you were plotting against me. But it is still… unsavory."

Alyce nodded. "I understand. I can excuse myself if you wish."

Dany sighed heavily, as if weary of the world. "Just be quiet for a while."

Alyce lay back down beside the queen and the two gave court to their own thoughts for a while. At length, as the candle began to flicker and gutter out, Dany murmured, "You are here with me because I'm fond of your strength and wit and even your insolence, and I've trusted you since that first day when you could have sliced my throat open and did not."

Alyce hauled the girl into her arms again and put her mouth to her forehead. "No one will harm you tonight while I am beside you."

They slept.

…