Rhaego will be in the next chapter, I promise!
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The Wanderer
Chapter 4: Where are the seats at the feast?
The Khaleesi's khas were all waiting dutifully outside the entrance of the tent. Miiqa stood amongst them, silent and tired. They had stood vigil all night, hoping for some news about the Khal or Khaleesi or their child, but none came. Only screams and whimpers from inside the tent, and when Jorah departed from the shelter, he said nothing to them.
The khalasar was gone. The bodies of fallen warriors still littered the ground, the ones left too weary to collect and burn them just yet. Just over a dozen horses were walking over the scorched earth, searching for any small bites of dried grass that they could find. Only the most tattered tents remained, along with a few bedrolls.
Where there were once forty thousand Dothraki, no more than a hundred stayed. Pono was the first to name himself Khal the day before and thousands had packed up and followed him. Jhaqo did the same. The rest of the khalasar had slipped away in the night, littering the Dothraki sea with bands of misplaced warriors and stolen slaves. Some children were left, and the old. A few slaves lingered, along with the Khaleesi's khas and handmaids, Ser Jorah, Miiqa, and the maegi.
The godswife meant to walk passed them; to leave the tent with naught a word of explanation nor reassurance. She passed the prophetess without a glance, but Rakharo stopped her. "What of the Khal?" he asked.
"He yet lives," Mirri Maz Duur said, shading her eyes with a hand and looking forward into the empty distance. Smoke and dust was all that was left.
"And the Khaleesi?" the kha asked.
"She needs her rest."
Miiqa let out a silent sigh, but she was not relieved as she should have been. "Rhaego?" she asked the godswife.
That's when the maegi put down her hand and stared at the troop. Miiqa could have sworn that she saw the hint of a smile graze her flat face, but it was gone as quick as it came. "The baby was monstrous," she explained. "It came out blind, with leather wings. Its scaled flesh burned my hands as I held it, before it fell off." The woman showed her palms, ridged with dark red blisters. "Inside it, there was only graveworms."
Without another word, Mirri Maz Duur left the bewildered group. Miiqa said a small invocation for the departed prince. Baby Rhaego would be too young to ride into the night lands as the other Dothraki. He must be born again.
-X-x-X-
The maegi was bound hand and foot, sitting on the hard ground beneath the blazing sun. The Khaleesi's foragers had wandered off in search of any wood that they could use for Drogo's funeral pyre. Others gathered in small clusters, confused and waiting.
Miiqa approached Mirri Maz Duur slowly and cautiously, but the woman only smiled up at her as if she was not tied up and helpless. The prophetess kneeled down in front of her. "Why did you do it?" she asked. "Is your heart so black? So withered?"
"The Khaleesi asked for life," the maegi said. "She paid for life."
Miiqa shook her head. "She paid with life," the woman explained. "But not the one you intended."
The godswife looked at her curiously, but continued. "The stallion who mounts the world will burn no cities now. His khalasar shall trample no nations into dust."
For the first time in her life, the prophetess smiled a broad, cruel smile. "He will," she told the woman. "With your help, he will. With your death. Only death pays for life, is that not what you said?"
"Nothing can be done," Mirri Maz Duur told her, but her voice did not have the same confident tone and her smile faltered.
Miiqa stood and hovered over the old godswife. "It is already done."
A shuffling was heard from behind the prophetess and she turned just as a stallion fell, blood flowing from a wound between its eyes. The Khal's red had met its fate in the tent, but this horse would leave the world with Drogo and carry him into the night lands.
"It is not enough to kill a horse," the old woman called to Daenerys. "By itself, the blood is nothing. You do not have the words to make a spell, nor the wisdom to find them. Do you think bloodmagic is a game for children? You call me a maegi as is it were a curse, but all it means is wise. You are a child, with a child's ignorance. Whatever you mean to do, it will not work. Loose me from these bonds and I will help you."
"She does not need your magic," Miiqa whispered to the woman with a silent smile and after that, the godswife kept quiet.
"We will dine on her heart!" Rakharo growled as he came to stand by Miiqa, baring his teeth as the godswife.
"It is black," the prophetess said once again. "And withered."
Hearing their words, Aggo approached them. "Where are the seats at the feast?" he asked.
Daenerys called what was left of the khalasar around her - the children, and the weak, and the old. Miiqa and the khas left the godswife and stood in front of their Khaleesi.
"You will be my Khalasar," the silver-haired queen told them. "I see the faces of slaves. I free you. Take off your collars. Go if you wish, no one shall harm you. If you stay, it will be as brothers and sisters, husbands and wives." As she said this, people started to scurry away, and behind the group, the maegi laughed. "I see the children, women, the wrinkled faces of the aged," Daenerys continued. "I was a child yesterday. Today I am a woman. Tomorrow I will be old. To each of you I say, give me your hands and your hearts, and there will be a place for you."
The girl turned to her khas. "Jhogo, to you I give the silver-handled whip that was my bride gift, and name you ko, and ask your oath, that you will live and die as blood of my blood, riding at my side to keep me safe from harm."
Jhogo took the whip from her hands, but his face was confused. "Khaleesi," he said with hesitation, "this is not done. It would shame me, to be bloodrider to a woman."
The Khaleesi ignored Jhogo's words, and instead she addressed the other two. To Aggo she gave her dragonbone bow and to Rakharo her arakh. To both she requested the same - that they ride with her as her ko. To be bloodriders to a Khaleesi.
"Miiqa," she said to the surprised prophetess, "to you I give the sword that was my bride gift, and name you my counsel, and ask your oath, that you will ride by my side and through your wisdom, you will keep the khalasar safe from harm."
Daenerys held out the sword and, though it was still in its scabbard, Miiqa could picture it well. It was presented to the Khaleesi on her wedding day. Its mirrored blade blazed with the light of the sun, though it was made of valyrian steel, dark as smoke. It was a sword befitting a king, but since that day it had been packed up, never before used, for Khal Drogo would only wield his arakh.
"I cannot take it, Khaleesi," Miiqa told her regretfully. "Fate calls me from across the Dothraki sea and I must answer. But you have my oath that I will do everything I can to help you on my journey."
The Khaleesi listened to her words, but handed her the sword anyway. "I shall hold you to that oath."