"They are coming."

Stark shot up from his conjured sleeping bag. Harri stopped shaking him and stood.

Tony's heart pounded. "Details, please." Jiri was already up, her horse pawing the ground nervously. The frame of the house was cast in shadow by the new moon. The night was silent save for the rustling of grass.

Harri closed her eyes. Tony swore he felt something then, like someone was dancing on his grave. "Thousands of them. They're searching for the light from the dimensional rift. They were doing it the night before, too, just further away than I was watching."

A shiver crept up his spine. "Infantry? Tanks? Gimme something."

Tony made out disgust on her face. "Horsemen. With swords and shit. And a bunch of archers."

He'd have almost rather it been tanks and gunmen. He was a fair shot. He could do something with a firearm. He peered out into the night and let his eyepiece's filters cycle. Nothing on thermals or night vision. "I don't have a suit. "I'll be no help." he checked his boots. They wouldn't run out of power any time soon, but without gloves for stability, flying was asking for injury. Without Friday, he couldn't even rearrange the nanocells into a gauntlet to defend himself. He needed a workshop, tools, stuff he didn't have.

"I know," Harri said. "I don't have a wand."

"You've done plenty without," Tony said.

She stared at him like he'd said something very stupid. Her eyes were blank.

"Are you going to fight them?"

Jiri got astride Sundancer and cantered up to the top of the gentle slope. Slope was a generous term, Tony thought. It was barely enough to roll a ball down.

At the edge of the horizon, he spotted it. Flickering orange light scattering on the sky, and thin trails of smoke illuminated by their sources.

"You're sure they're hostile?"

She shook her head. "They're called Dothraki and pretty much all they do is run around sacking city states. This place is medieval, Tony. They're not even the biggest group out there. They're- ugh. They're a poison on this whole continent. There's a slavery hub to the south of us, worse than anything Earth has seen. These guys go around raping and killing their way through any communities without massive castle walls and standing garrisons, then take everyone who's left and sell them to the slavers. They have no art, no songs, what 'culture' they have is stolen directly from victims. Honestly, I'd be doing the world a favor by wiping them out."

"Genocide is not cool," Tony warned. The way Harri was talking chilled him. The witch was normally a kind, level-headed person. And when someone who bordered on godhood proposed mass slaughter…well Tony didn't think there was a person in the world who could stop her. He chastised himself for having a 'Fury thought.' What did anyone do when an unstoppable force decided to go crazy? Harri's mood could be dangerous to the entire world.

Harri did not answer. Her gaze got further away. "The Dothraki aren't educated as a rule, but these guys have slaves who were before they got taken. Coruja was from Pentos, a city-state to the west. The only community in Essos who doesn't practice slavery forced them to give it up, and he was one of the lucky ones who managed to escape indentured servitude. The guy was on his way to Braavos when a different horde took him. He's changed hands a few times. The Dothraki kill each other every time they cross another faction's path."

There was more than one Mongol horde running around? Jesus, it only took one to dominate Asia.

She snorted. "These guys are basically the reason why, in eight thousand years of recorded history, they've never managed to make a steam engine. That, and seasons here seem to last years. There's a whole list of great civilizations they've torn down."

"We can have a little chat with Mr. Genghis Khan before the bloodbath starts," Tony insisted.

Harri grumbled. "If this body gets killed, I'll be set back years, and you'll just die for good. It doesn't make sense to take risks. We'd save more lives than we take, killing these guys." That sounded more like Arya.

Jiri was quiet during the whole exchange. Tony knew without a suit, he'd be a liability to Harri. "Come on, kid. Let's head inside. Just don't do anything you'll regret," he called over his shoulder. "This too shall pass and all that."

Tony wished he had a deck of cards or something. The basement was just a wooden box with a bare stone floor and a rough staircase. Just sitting down was uncomfortable. Tony reserved his seat on the bottom step. Jiri sat down stiffly in the middle of the floor, criss-cross applesauce. He couldn't talk to her, offer her assurances or anything. They just sat in the light cast by his eyepiece's holoprojector.

His feet were getting gross, cooped up in the thin layer of nanocells. He wasn't worried about breaking the repulsors by stepping on them, but they kept throwing off his balance when he walked. There was no way he'd get the boots back on if he peeled them off. Without Friday's guidance or past blueprints to follow, the nanocells were stuck in their last configuration. The bloodstains on his clothes had dried, along with sweat and probably some tears. He wanted a shower, he wanted to see Pepper, he wanted Thanos dead and everything back to normal. Pretty fucking stupid that he jumped through a dimensional rift without a plan. None of those things were likely to happen any time soon.

He scrolled through Greatest Hits. There had been a guy on Titan with something similar, hadn't there? Starguy, Starlord. A little pretentious for an alias, but guys named Iron Man shouldn't throw stones. Bringing tunes to a major throwdown, he could totally respect. It brought back memories of Germany. Not the airport, the art gala. Awesome entrance. And it was the first time he met most of the team. The OG Avengers.

He put on I Gotta Feeling and added a few more to the queue. Not too sad (Harri wasn't around to shoot down everything but the miserable) but not too energetic. He was exhausted. Again, Jiri reacted to the music like it was something otherworldly. Had music really changed that much since medieval times? He supposed the Black Eyed Peas would blow Mozart's socks off.

"You're curious?" he guessed. "Different than what you're used to?" He tried to gauge her ethnicity. If Harri was right about the Dothraki, she could be from anywhere on the continent. Instruments and music before globalism were probably pretty local. Woodwinds from forested regions, percussion where trees were scarcer. Jiri had skin a bit darker than olive, hair that might've been straight if it had been washed in her life, and almond-shaped brown eyes.

"Haʊ?" Jiri asked. Tony groused at the language barrier. Jiri tried again, cupping her ear, then shrugging. "Haʊ?"

"How?" Tony guessed. He mimed drumming along. The kid nodded. He had no idea how to pantomime his way through the way sound worked. "Sound, kid. There's a membrane inside the speaker, like the cover of a drum-" his charade skills failed him. He needed some sort of way to visualize- "Aha!"

Tony paged through his eyepiece, running through the tech tree. It had to be past electricity, maybe under radio? He selected the entry and scrolled through the article until he found a diagram for a speaker. He projected it in front of them. Jiri gasped.

The soft ambient light the projector gave off in idle brightened, illuminating the whole basement with blue wireframe. The diagrams filled in with color, floating in midair. He couldn't keep a grin off his face. Holotech was still too expensive to be consumer grade, but god did it look awesome. Jiri reached out gingerly to touch the floating speaker. When her fingers sank into the ethereal light, she breathed out, mouth hanging open in half a grin. The light of understanding quite literally reflected off her dark eyes.

"Haʊ?"

He sighed. "Oh boy. Let's do the sound first."


Harri knew the instant they found them. The trails of torchlight began moving laterally, sharing news from one eagle-eyed outrider. The torrent of minds was too much to look through each and every memory, listen to every internal monologue. Rather, she focused on a few different ones that interested her, and felt the outlier emotions and the general mood of the whole crowd. Excitement rose across the khalasar. Something was happening.

The horde which had been spread as far as possible, as wide a net as they could manage, began to converge. Harri extricated herself from the minds of Coruja, Amilja, Irrin, and Orban and narrowed her focus to Khal Borgo.

"Outriders will fall back or encircle at a distance," he commanded his bloodriders. "None proceed before me." AllSpeak provided a focal point to understanding his foreign thoughts. Harri had to marvel again at the versatility and polish of the Asgardian piece of magic. It was a civilization-defining work, like Harri's own healing spell. The way it interpreted and translated meaning was incredible.

Harri followed the bloodriders' dispersal through the crowd, disseminating the Khal's orders. The cluster of disparate horsemen began forming into a dense, jagged line of lofted torches. The wind shifted. It brought with it a stench of sweat and woodsmoke. The outriders split further off, pinpricks of flame hundreds of yards away. The thunder of hooves rumbled, a rolling roar like a crowd of people talking, or a noisy gymnasium.

Khal Borgo galloped at the head, drawing closer at an alarming pace. Harri formed the earth into a hill beneath her feet and stood at the top of the knoll. Closer and closer and closer he came, bearing down at full speed atop his midnight black mare, as if he meant to run her down. A dozen feet from her, he yanked back. His steed cantered to a halt feet from her, bringing with it the pungent, oily smell of its rider.

He stared down at her. Khal Borgo wore knee-length hide shorts and sandals strapped to filthy feet. He wore nothing above the waist but a golden armband and ornaments threaded onto his oiled dreadlocks, braided all the way to the small of his back with bells and bangles, rings and charms. He had lighter skin than Jiri, but darker eyes and darker brows. Harri took all this in while he stared at her in silence.

"Khal Borgo must know what happened in the sky the night before last," he spoke finally. AllSpeak translated him with an odd mix of Russian and Chinese accents. His syntax was not broken. The Asgardian magic was telling her that he phrased his demand such that it implied his title.

"Why does Khal Borgo think I know?" Harri asked. "Or should tell him, if I did."

The Khal's bloodriders hissed and glared. Borgo did not answer with words. He turned his head and gazed back at the horde of men behind him, many with bows in their laps or spears held loosely in their hands. He turned back to her.

Harri stared him down.

He turned away and gestured to his bloodriders. "Search the place," he commanded. "Khal Borgo does not often hear people speak to him like you. The last man who tried died." His riders began cantering forwards. Harri doubled the gravity in a thick line on either side of her, encircling the foundation, the picnic table and the lumberworks. The first man to cross it grunted. His horse staggered, legs bowing out to keep the unexpected weight off the ground.

"Respect my territory," Harri commanded him without looking. He pushed harder. Harri upped the gravity. His horse shrieked under triple the combined weight of its rider and its own body. The bloodrider clapped his heels against the horse's sides. It struggled to take another step. She increased it again. With a gruesome snapping noise, the horse's legs collapsed. The horse's screaming split the night sky. Behind him, thousands of people watched silently. Neither of them flinched.

Harri entered the suffering gelding's mind and drained every iota of energy she could, all at once. The gelding's mind slipped into the blissful void, abruptly silent. Next to the horse, its bloodrider struggled to draw breath under tremendous force. She repeated the process. Brimming with power that had no outlet, Harri kept her face impassive.

Borgo reached to his waist. A gleaming blade came slithering out of its scabbard, glinting grey and orange in the torchlight. Enormous and curved, the arakh's blade rippled with damascus steel etching. The edge was razor sharp. Behind him, hundreds upon hundreds, thousands of weapons came to ready. A cacophony of creaking bow limbs, ringing drawn blades and rustling of readied spears came forward from the silent khalasar.

"Maegi" the Khal said, without intonation. His face was flat, but his mind betrayed him. Fear and fury in equal measure. Fist held up, the archers kept their arrows trained on her.

Harri held up a hand and furrowed her brows, weaving a complex spell with absolutely zero focus. All the material traits had to line up just right…

A sword gleamed into existence in her grip, five feet long and with the broadness and thickness to support its own weight. She twirled it around like a switch, as effortless as a feather. It threw her balance off even further. She poured all the excess energy she had wicked from the horse and its rider into forcing her idea into reality.

Brogo startled, throwing his hand down like an umpire. Before the first arrow flew, Harri dilated.

The first arrows had not yet left their strings when everything slowed to a crawl. One by one she transfigured them to particles of glowing light. She waited until they were a few feet away and in clear view of everyone to target them, streaks of fairy dust dissolving on the wind.

While they fumbled to nock new arrows, Harri let her perceptual dilation relax. "Maegi," the Khal spat. His eyes were full of wild, unrestrained loathing. Harri wondered how far she could push the man. She felt as if she could just poke and prod him until his head burst in fury.

Khal Borgo gestured to his bloodriders. AllSpeak translated it as 'ready.' They moved to encircle her, but none were willing to step further past her than their fallen brother.

He stabbed without warning, an underhanded thrust with the curved point upwards as if to scoop out her heart. Again, time slowed for Harri.

She pushed back against the ground. Gravity felt syrupy, her limbs thick, and the air like water. Harri watched Borgo's blade approach even as her body soared backwards. She saw the moment he recognized and tried to extend his lunge, but she was soaring back too quickly to catch. She wanted to give her sword a little push, to send its point through the man's neck even as she arched away, but her strength was still so new, she'd thrown herself too far up, and she did not weigh as much as she was accustomed to.

Harri alit half a dozen feet back and drew her sword to ready. Borgo clamped his feet to his mare's sides and cantered around. Harri did not turn to keep him in her view. Rather, she stared out at the horde of silent watchers. At ninety degrees, Borgo seemed to realize moving any further would take him into the zone of death. He surged forwards and slashed down. His horse moved with him, almost like they were a single entity, reading each other's wills.

Harri bent back at the waist just enough to see the arakh swish past her face. She thrust from below, dragging the tip of the two-handed blade up at the mare's neck. The mare reared back out of reach and stomped, tossing its head. Borgo snarled and backed up tangent to the barrier, then charged, galloping at her sword outstretched.

Again, the horse inched through the air, all four hooves suspended over the grass in mid-gallop. Harri waited and watched, letting its hooves touch the ground again, surge backwards, and repeat, each stride bringing it closer until it was mere feet away, Brogo sitting atop it snarling, arakh already falling, driven by bulging muscles.

She stepped into a lunge, forcing her limbs against their own inertia to get herself out of the way. Muscles stronger than any human pushed and pulled on mithril bones, leveraging across joints and heaving on tendons. In perceptual dilation, every limb felt like lead, every muscle like styrofoam. The force of her movement traveled sluggishly along her limbs, impacts rippling through her flesh like molasses.

The horse charged past so close she could rub her chest against its fur. Even as the beast's head drew level, she heaved down on her greatsword. It was many times heavier than her limbs. It felt like pushing a concrete pole through sticky tar. It yielded so little under her muscles, she might have thought it was flexing in the material. Yet little by little, the hilt moved. The shining blade bent back, stubbornly clinging to its state of rest until the rest of the weapon forced it to move. Angular vortices formed on the trailing edges as the steel tore through the sound barrier.

Then something gave.

Shocked by the sudden yielding in her shoulder and wrist, Harri lost her grip on the Occlumatic technique.

Agony shot up her leg from her right ankle. Her right arm shrieked in protest. Khal Borgo sprawled onto the ground, thrown from the saddle of his headless horse and tangled in a mess of limbs. The crack of the blade coming down sounded. The greatsword leapt from her hand like a dart, burying itself in the ground to the hilt, six feet of steel dug into the tough dirt.

Brogo rolled and tumbled another dozen feet. He scrambled off the ground and stared at her hatefully. Harri cradled her arm. Agony flared where her wrist hung off her forearm, her shoulder dislocated. With her offhand she hauled the blade from the dirt, gasping and cradling her wrist. She activated x-ray and glanced down at the joint.

All her healing spell had done was to reset the bones and fill back in the marrow. The mithril bones themselves were still warped, with deep fractures across the joints. If they had not been fixed by the catchall Heal spell, they were beyond magical repair. Harri glanced down at herself, cataloging every region where Thanos had battered her. Her thighs were a spiderweb of fissures. From her vantage point, the mess of tiny bones in her ankle were impossible to diagnose, but something was not working right.

She cursed the fact that her bones didn't have nerves. While Khal Borgo got to his feet, Harri tested her foot against the ground. It sat wrong, and putting weight on it made a disgusting squelching noise. Something warm and sticky filled her shoe. She switched her sword to her left.

The moment Borgo got to his feet, he was on her, hacking with a face screwed up in fury. Harri imposed her sword between herself and his arakh. For the barest hint of an instant, his sword caught. But an instant later, her blade winked out of existence and Borgo was able to drive his own forwards.

Astonished, Harri was a hair too slow to get out of the way. She was forced to lunge on her broken foot, left hand flailing under the abrupt lack of resistance. Even under dilation, she could do nothing to avoid the attack. She pushed in vain against her ruined ankle, testing if she could lunge away. It gave even further. If she dodged, she would absolutely destroy her ankle. The massive sword scored a deep cut through her right side. The hooked blade pierced through by the tip, parting flesh, muscle, and tendons. She was forced to endure the strike in agonizing slow motion, struggling to hold onto perceptual dilation, feeling the icy steel run through, tearing fibers apart on its grim path. It burst from the skin.

It felt like she was being kissed by a dementor. Some terrible thing was pulling greedily, tugging everything it could reach out through the wound, spreading in its place a dreadful emptiness. She cried out in agony.

Khal Borgo bared his teeth and hooked his blade in, shoving it against her ribcage. The moment it struck her mithril bones, the blade shrieked. It burned and vibrated as if someone was striking the hilt with a hammer. Gasping, she clenched her jaw.

Harri dropped her blade and hit his wrist with the back of her own, slamming it and his blade out. She stepped beneath his guard and seized his limp joint with her good hand, snapping it and monkeying her fingers up over his, plucking the hilt of his arakh from his slackened grip. He cursed and swung at her. Harri deflected his arm with her own and stepped right up against him, bashing his bare chest with the spiked pommel of his massive sword. She kicked him down and spat on the dirt, clutching her fingers to her wound. The whole sequence took less than a heartbeat.

"What is this?" She demanded, brandishing the arakh. Her blood slid off the blade like it was hydrophobic, sloughing off the burnt and congealing fluid. The edge was untouched, but the blade had an ugly mark as wide as her thumb and twice as long on either side. She rubbed the spot, her finger sliding down into the blade where it had been eaten away. Curious, she deadened her nerves and sterilized her left hand, then reached across awkwardly to feel for the mithril ribs it had struck. They were misshapen as well, a flat section in the shape of the blemish on the bottom of one and the top of the other. Blood gushed from the wound. She commanded it to heal, but her flesh resisted her efforts. Heal worked sluggishly, muscle fiber and skin creeping together, blood vessels struggling to reconnect.

"Did the blue star mark your arrival?" Borgo spat back.

"I do not need to answer you," Harri said derisively. She withdrew her drenched red hand, leaving a surge of aimless healing magic to finish the job. She fitted a foot beneath his side and kicked him up, seizing his braids and holding his head aloft. Borgo scrambled to get himself beneath his head and support his neck. Blood dripped from her fist and into his oily hair, down his forehead and into his eyes. She stared into his dark pupils and dove in.

Borgo grew up the son of a woman who died in childbirth, scurrying about riding the ponies in camp and sparring with sticks of deadfall pilfered from the firewood cart.

He stared down at the enemy's downed face, begging for mercy. The way his arakh slid into flesh, the tortured shriek of his pathetic foe, begging when he should have died thrashing and biting, anything to stave off defeat a second more, inflict one last bit of damage on his enemy.

The wind in his long hair, unbraided and free, surging across the endless grass.

The city girl moaning and sobbing while he became a man, her blank look when he found her again in the slave train, the despair when she entered beneath the gates of Yunkai.

The Khal before him, dead by his blade, surrounded by his slain bloodriders. His pick of the most beautiful women – no longer did he have to take what he wanted from them. Did that disappoint him?

A brilliant blue light in the fractured sky. He had to find it, had to know what it meant-

Scouts spotted something on the horizon-

A lone woman, marked brow-

Flashing blade-

Agony-

Cold Green Eyes, irises that turned like clockwork, faint lines routing across the sclera, pupils like little machines. Not human.

Khal Borgo slumped to the grass, slackened. Harri choked down bile and glared. "You will all release every one of your slaves to me. Any man, woman, or child here against their will, and all your treasure and half your supplies." Her voice carried across the khalasar, rolling over the heads of thousands and echoing off the empty sky, filling the open air over the Dothraki Sea.

"And let it be known that any escaped slave, bondsman running from debt, daughter forced into an unwanted marriage, any who wish to be free will be harbored safe here."

Borgo's bloodriders were sworn to vengeance. They tried to harass her, surrounding and prodding at her with their spears, screaming like banshees. Harri limped away from the barrier and let them encircle her, hefting the huge arakh. The instant the circle closed, she attacked, whirling and ducking, slashing and leaping. Every step, she was forced to play around her injuries, forced to be wary of reopening the mottled scar across her right side. There would be no toying with her food.

She cut through the first spear to come in range, loping the spearhead off at the neck and ripping the haft from its wielder's hands. She deflected the next thrust with the haft, timing an underhanded toss to trip the next man's horse while contorting out of the way of three other stabs. Leaping backwards, back arched and kicking the air, Harri flipped onto the first man's horse, beheading him with a lazy flick. It was a sloppy, lopsided move that only worked with the timely aid of reduced gravity at the apex of her jump. She kicked him off his saddle. Another hurled his spear at her, but she fell back and let it pierce through the air harmlessly until it struck the gravity zone and was plucked out of the sky.

Two and Three fell off their mounts, struck by the flying corpse of their fellow, and were dispatched when Harri pounced after them, the heel of her left foot caving in Number Two's chest, the arakh making quick work of Three. She leapt into the middle of Four through Ten and forced them to fight with caution, lest they kill their comrades. She wrenched the head off Seven and ran Eight through the nose and out the back of his skull, batting away a desperate slash. A crushing grip ended Six's life. She played Five into Nine by waiting between them until Nine thrust his spear. A slim hand darted out and grabbed the spear just below the head. She twisted away, hurling the spear by the neck behind her. The spear passed clean through Five's stomach, ripping a massive hole in his lower midsection. Four actually dismounted and ran at her screaming, arakh brandished overhead.

She gave him the dignity of clashing blades for one blow, then pushed his blade down with hers and flicked the broad tip through his neck, popping his head off like flipping a pancake. Ten ran, looking over his shoulder while he sprinted, terror flickering in his eyes and radiating from his mind. Harri made a grasping, clawed gesture at one of the bloodriders' fleeing horses. The bay's reigns tautened towards her as if tugged by invisible hands. It galloped towards her. She snagged the bow off its saddle as it passed, drawing back the string and fitting it with a conjured arrow. Her broken wrist and dislocated shoulder shrieked in protest. Baring her teeth, she brought the fletching to her cheek.

Harri sighted the last fleeing man, tracking him with the razor sharp, gleaming steel broadhead. With a quiet exhalation, the bow whispered into the night. Bloodrider Gaq fell face first into the dirt, nailed through the base of the skull.

Borgo watched it all, terror mounting with every kill. "Maegi," he whispered. From his pocket he drew a tiny knife. Harri did not stop him; his intentions were not dangerous to her. He reached behind his head and tugged. Four long, knotted braids fell into the dirt.

He stood, blood trickling from the shallow, spike-shaped wound on his chest. Bowing, he walked back to the line of silent observers. "Do as she bids," he commanded. He caught one of his bloodriders' mounts, a chestnut one with a tiny saddle, and rode without speaking into the Dothraki horde.


Eleven bodies. Tony should be jaded. He'd seen more than eleven bodies, he'd made plenty more by his own hand in Afghanistan alone. But gunshot wounds and repulsor burn marks were different. Harri had picked the attackers apart, inflicting devastating wounds, dismembering and decapitating. Jiri stood over one of them for a long moment, staring at the arrowhead protruding from his mouth. She flipped him on his face with a foot and walked away.

Good to know, he supposed.

The khalasar worked like a shitty machine. There was little organization, few people overseeing logistics, but everyone clearly knew the protocol for 'leave all your treasure to your victorious foe.' The slaves trudged to the front with an air of 'maybe these guys will be nicer than the last ones.' Cart after cart was wheeled up to the homestead, filled with a bunch of different cargo. Some carried sick and wounded, some carried bolts of silk, jars of incense and chests of gold, ivory figurines and such, others carried cuts of meat, bread, and cheese, crude bronze cookware and tools, or bales of deadfall and firewood.

The sun began to dawn on the horizon. Exhausted from an overnight march, people laid down on the grass to catch what sleep they could. Some of the slaves were in horrific condition, with dislocated arms and faces like they'd used a briar bush as a loofah.

"They were dragged behind the horses on foot," Harri reported dispassionately. She was sitting at the picnic table, studying the blade she took from the leader, a massive weapon that looked comical in her hands, more than half as tall as she was.

"Shit," Tony muttered. "New toy? Damascus steel, pretty cool."

"There's something else about it," Harri muttered. "My conjured sword disappeared the instant it made contact, and cuts feel like a dementor bite. It's not healing right, either." She hiked her shirt up and showed him her right side. It was an ugly wound, a ropey scar that went from just two inches right of her navel all the way back to three inches from her spine. It was closed, but Tony had known Harri to heal headshots without much trouble.

"More Frostmourne than Excalibur?" he joked.

"Somebody definitely died to make this," Harri agreed. "The metal is not steel, yet there are iron artifacts from quenching it in blood." she indicated tiny flecks beneath the glossy surface. Without the eyepiece, Tony would not have been able to see them. It was as if the sword had rusted for a minute or two before the sheen sealed them into the metal forever. "And it's got a mournful aspect, to those with the senses to feel it. I want to know the density, it feels too light to be an iron alloy."

"It is Valyrian steel." It took the gears in Tony's head a moment to catch and spin and recognize: he had just heard English. He found a man, maybe thirty with filthy, mousy brown hair and vicious sunburns across his pale skin. "Pardon me if I misspoke. I only heard Westerosi and thought-"

"You speak English!" Tony exclaimed, grinning.

"Welcome, Coruja," Harri said. She did not smile, but Tony had hope. The corner of her lip twitched and the apathetic curiosity with which she studied the blade thawed to amusement. "I watched you since I knew the khalasar was coming. You're a long way from the last place you called home. Would you go back to Pentos if you could?"

Coruja stared like he'd been slapped with rolled-up newspapers. "I would not," he said slowly. "There is nothing left for me there."

"Braavos perhaps?" Harri asked. "You were headed there when the first Dothraki took you."

Coruja shrugged. "We shall see."

"You speak English," Tony pressed. "That means somewhere, everyone does."

"The tongue of the Sunset Kingdom is more common in the west," the man answered. "In Essos we speak Low Valyrian. Odd that you do not speak it. Do you not hail from Asshai?"

"A bit farther than that," Tony said. "Give me the sparknotes."

He frowned. "I do not know this phrase."

"The important bits," Tony said impatiently. "Big details. Where and what is the Sunset Kingdom?"

"In the west," Coruja repeated. Tony got the feeling the guy thought he was not very bright. "That is why it is called Westeros. Um, it is ruled by an old Valyrian family, the Targaryens. It has been for over a century, when Aegon the Conqueror forged the Seven Kingdoms by dragonfire. Home of the last living dragons," he trailed off. "I am sorry, my lord. I am not a historian."

"Tony," he insisted, offering his hand to shake. "It's fine. What did you do for work?"

"Clockwork," Coruja frowned. "Toys for the rich children, mostly. Pentos toils to develop for themselves the same leg up Braavos uses to make itself a naval power. They have not succeeded yet. I was sometimes made to help.."

Delighted, Tony said "You and I will be good friends."


AN: Chapter 3 after a bit of time to think about the direction the story is going to take. Not cancelled or anything. The first couple chapters have been edited. Synopsis: Arya was among the people Snapped before Harri got banished. She's literally wearing one of Arya's bodies right now. Thanks to Max/treebop for beta'ing.