The grass had gone the color of old bronze, and still Qotho would not let the matter rest.
Jhaqo had watched him circle the fire twice already, arakh loose in his hand, the way a man tests the weight of a thing he already means to use. Around them the khalasar had drawn back into a wide ring without anyone ordering it so, the way water finds its own level. No one wished to stand close to a bloodrider with murder in his eyes. Not even another bloodrider.
"You wear a sword like an Andal wears his manhood," Qotho said, and there was no laughter left in it now, though he had been laughing an hour before. "Long, and heavy, and no good to anyone."
Jorah Mormont did not answer him. He had drawn already, Jhaqo had not seen him do it, which said something about the exile that Jhaqo filed away the way he filed away all such things, the small true facts a man could trade for his life someday. The longsword hung low and easy in the knight's hand, no boasting in it, no flourish. An Andal blade for an Andal war, Jhaqo thought. We shall see if the grass cares for their wars any more than it cares for ours.
"Stand aside, Qotho," Jorah said. His Dothraki had grown better than Jhaqo would have credited a man of the poison water for, though the shape of his mouth still fought the words. "This is not your quarrel."
"It became my quarrel the moment the mare's mother whispered maegi filth into a khal's tent." He spat into the fire. It hissed. "You would let her poison him. I will not."
"She means to save him."
"She means to be Khaleesi still when the sun rises." Qotho's eyes had not left the knight's face, not once, and Jhaqo understood that look, he had worn it himself, hunting. "A dead khal makes a widow of her. A living one, even broken, still makes her someone. She would trade his life for her name. I have seen women do worse for less."
"That is not for you to decide."
"No," Qotho agreed, almost gently. "It is for the arakh to decide."
He did not wait for another word.
He came on with the speed of a striking snake, low and sudden, the arakh singing a bright curve toward the side of Jorah's neck where the gorget did not quite meet the collar. Jhaqo had seen Qotho kill three men in his life and wound a dozen more, and he had never once seen the first blow miss its mark by choice. Qotho did not test a man, he ended him, quickly, the way a hunter ended a snared hare rather than let it suffer.
Steel met steel instead of flesh.
The knight had caught the curved blade high on his crossguard, boots skidding a handspan in the trampled grass, and for a moment the two of them stood locked together, close enough to smell each other's breath, the fire throwing their shadows huge and wrestling across the tents behind them.
Qotho twisted free before the Andal could push the advantage, light as smoke, and laughed, but it was a thinner laugh than before, and Jhaqo, who knew him, heard the surprise buried in it.
"So slow," Qotho said anyway, because a Dothraki did not admit surprise even to himself.
He came again, low, a sweeping cut meant for the tendon behind the knee, the kind of stroke that did not kill a man so much as unmake him, leave him crawling in the dirt to be finished at leisure. Jorah stepped back rather than block it, just far enough that the arakh bit only earth, and answered with a short brutal thrust that would have opened Qotho's belly had the bloodrider not knocked it wide with the flat of his blade, more instinct than plan.
Steel rang out over the camp a second time, and a third, and the sound of it seemed to travel very far in the flat black country, out past the horse lines, out past the reach of the firelight, as though the grass itself were listening.
No man spoke. It was not done. Two men had drawn blood-oath and grass together beneath the eyes of the Great Stallion, and the gods did not care for meddling children.
Jhaqo watched the shape of the fight the way he watched the shape of a hunt, because in the end there was no difference. Qotho struck and withdrew, struck and withdrew, never lingering, a horseman's instinct even on foot, close, cut, clear, before the longer blade could answer in kind. It was how the Dothraki had always fought, how they had always won, against knights and pit fighters and the soft armored men of the cities beyond the Bone Mountains.
The Andal understood the shape of it too, though. That was what unsettled Jhaqo, watching. Jorah did not chase. His sword stayed close to his body, small economical motions, nothing wasted, nothing offered. He was not fighting to win the exchange. He was fighting to survive it, again and again, until something changed.
Qotho's grin had gone by the fourth pass. Jhaqo saw it go and understood, in the way a man understands a storm by the color of the sky before the first drop falls, that the foreigner was waiting for a mistake, and that Qotho, furious, righteous, sure of his gods and his grass, was about to give him one.
It came on the fifth.
Qotho feinted high, a cut toward the temple that any green boy would have flung his sword up to catch, and dropped low instead, the arakh reversing to take the knight's leg out from under him. It was a beautiful piece of work. Jhaqo had seen him teach it to younger riders a hundred times.
Jorah did not retreat from it. He stepped into it.
The arakh's edge shrieked across his breastplate instead of his shin, throwing a fan of sparks into the dark, and for one heartbeat Jhaqo was certain the Andal had simply misjudged his death, too close, far too close, the blade had very nearly found the gap beneath his arm, and then the pommel of the longsword came around and caught Qotho full across the face.
The sound of it was wrong. A wet, cracking sound, bone giving way beneath steel, and Qotho staggered back with his free hand flying to his ruined nose, blood already sheeting black in the firelight.
It cost him only an instant.
An instant was enough.
Jorah's sword drove forward before Qotho's balance had returned to him, and the point found the gap beneath his ribs where the boiled leather did not reach, where no man's harness in the world could have stopped it. Jhaqo heard the sound the blade made going in, soft, almost polite, nothing like the ring of the parries before it.
Qotho looked down at the hilt against his own chest as though someone else had put it there. His mouth opened. Nothing came out of it but a thin dark thread of blood.
Jorah wrenched the sword free in one hard motion, and Qotho folded to his knees and then onto his side, and did not move again.
No one moved. No one breathed, or so it seemed to Jhaqo, standing there with the taste of copper somewhere at the back of his own throat though he had drawn no blade at all. The blood spread out beneath Qotho black as spilled oil, soaking into ground that had drunk the blood of a thousand years of Dothraki dead and had never once, in all that time, drunk the blood of one killed by an Andal's hand.
One of Khal Drogo's own bloodriders. Not felled by another khal's warriors in a raid worth singing of. Not gored by a boar or thrown by a horse or struck down by lightning as the gods sometimes did to men who displeased them. Killed by an exile from across the poison water, over a woman who was not even Dothraki born.
Jhaqo looked down at Qotho's body, and then at the knight standing over it breathing hard with his sword still dripping, and then, last of all, toward the closed flap of Khal Drogo's tent, where none of this seemed yet to have been heard at all.
The camp had changed. He felt it the way he felt weather coming, in his skin, before his mind had put words to it.
It would never again be the camp it had been an hour before.
The first scream came from inside the tent before the ring of the swords had properly finished echoing.
Not Drogo's. Drogo had not made a sound in three days, not since the wound Mago had given him had begun to run hot and foul beneath its poultice of herbs.
It was Daenerys.
Every head that had been fixed on Qotho's body turned as one toward the tent instead, and a second scream followed the first, longer this time, sharper, curling up into the dark like something with claws in it. Jhaqo had heard women labor before. Every khalasar had. This did not sound like any birthing he had ever stood near.
It was too soon besides. He had counted the moons himself, as every man did who watched a khaleesi's belly grow with something like a nation's future in it. The child was not due for another turning at least.
The screaming came again, and this time it was not alone. A second voice joined it from within the tent, older, foreign, chanting in a tongue that belonged to none of the Dothraki gods, the Lamb Woman's voice, rising and falling in some rhythm that had nothing of prayer in it and everything of something else, something that made the hair rise on Jhaqo's arms though he could not have said why.
The sound crawled beneath a man's skin and stayed there.
Somewhere behind him a horse screamed too, high and human sounding, and then another, and the whole picket line was suddenly alive with animals hauling back against their tethers, eyes rolled white, as though the smell of whatever was happening inside that tent had reached them on the wind before it reached any man's understanding.
One horse went down thrashing and did not get up again.
Haggo muttered something under his breath that might have been a prayer to the Great Stallion or might only have been a curse; in that moment there was little difference between the two. Cohollo stood with his eyes fixed on the tent flap as though he expected something to come crawling out of it on its belly.
No man went closer. Even Jorah, who had just killed one of Drogo's own for the right to stand near that tent, stood rooted a dozen feet from it with his bloody sword still in his hand, and did not go in.
The flap did not move. Smoke began to seep out along its seams instead, thin ribbons of it at first and then thicker, and it was the wrong color for cookfire smoke, black and greasy and foul smelling even from that distance, the smell of hair burning, the smell of something that should never have been put to flame.
Then came a sound that was neither the chanting nor the screaming.
A high wet shriek, thin as a knife's edge, gone almost before Jhaqo's mind had finished naming it, not the cry of any newborn he had ever heard, not the cry of anything he wished to imagine too closely.
It lasted the space of one heartbeat.
Then there was nothing at all.
The chanting stopped as if a hand had closed around the Lamb Woman's throat. Even the wind seemed to hold itself still, and for a long, terrible while the only sound in the whole dark camp was Qotho's blood still finding its slow way into the thirsty ground.
The tent flap did not open again until the black of night had gone the color of ash, that dead hour before true dawn when even the horses stand quiet. Three midwives stumbled out into the grey light on legs that did not seem to belong to them.
Their hands would not stop shaking. One fell to her knees in the wet grass and began retching, bringing up nothing but bile, her whole body shuddering with it. Another stood with her arms wrapped so tightly around herself that her knuckles had gone the color of bone. The eldest of them, a woman who had pulled three generations of Dothraki children into the world and had never once been seen afraid of anything, made the sign against evil without seeming to know her own hand had moved.
Jhaqo rose from where he had been keeping his vigil among the others.
"What happened in there."
None of the three would look at him.
At last the eldest found enough of her voice to whisper it. "The child."
She stopped. Swallowed. Tried again.
"It was never meant to breathe the air of this world."
The youngest of them began to shake harder, arms still locked around her own ribs. "It had scales. Like a lizard. Like something out of the shadow lands."
The third woman was weeping now, openly, the tears cutting clean tracks through the soot and blood that had dried on her face. "Wings," she said. "Small wings, folded wrong. And where its eyes should have been, there was only smooth skin. It never drew breath. Thank every god it never drew breath."
No rider standing near enough to hear wished to hear more of it. No one asked the question that pressed behind Jhaqo's teeth, whether the maegi had made the child so or whether the child had always been so and the blood magic had only let them see it before the ground did. It did not matter. A stillborn abomination was a stillborn abomination whatever door it had come through, and the Dothraki did not linger over such doors.
Daenerys did not come out. Nor did the Lamb Woman, still shut somewhere within, alone now with whatever she had wrought.
It was only when the sun stood fully over the grass that Ser Jorah finally stepped out through the flap, and the sight of him silenced even the muttering that had begun to spread through the gathered riders. He looked to have aged twenty years in a single night. His armor was streaked black with blood gone dry, his face hollowed out beneath the eyes as though something had reached in and scooped away everything but the shape of him.
Jhaqo did not need to ask. He asked anyway, because a thing said aloud was a thing made real, and the Dothraki did not let such things stand unspoken.
"The child."
Jorah's eyes dropped to the trampled grass between them.
"Dead," he said. "He never lived at all."
No one spoke.
"And the khal."
The knight was slow in answering, and when he did his voice had gone very quiet, as though speaking louder might make the words truer than he could bear.
"He lives."
For one breath, hope moved through the gathered riders like wind through the grass, quick and bright and gone almost before it had come.
"But the man you followed does not live in him any longer."
Jhaqo went into the tent without asking leave of anyone, and no man moved to stop him.
Drogo lay upon a bed of thick furs, chest rising, falling, rising again, each breath slow and even as a sleeping child's. His eyes stood open toward the roof of the tent, fixed on some point far beyond the hide and the smoke hole, as though he watched birds wheeling in a sky no other man in that tent could see.
Jhaqo came and knelt beside him.
"Khal."
Nothing.
No blink. No turn of the head. No flicker of the black eyes that had once made lesser khals kneel in the dust before they had even crossed swords with him.
"Drogo. It is Jhaqo."
He might as well have spoken to a stone left out on the grass since the beginning of the world. The strongest rider the Dothraki Sea had produced in a generation, the man who had burned cities and broken khalasars twice his own size and taken a Targaryen princess to wife on nothing more than the strength of his own name, had gone somewhere Jhaqo's voice could not follow him, though his heart went on beating in the body he had left behind.
Jhaqo stayed a long while on his knees beside him before he rose and went back out into the light.
The riders had gathered in a loose ring outside the tent by then, uneasy, none of them looking directly at any other, the way men look when a decision is coming and no one wishes to be the one who names it first.
Cohollo broke the silence at last, his gaze fixed on the closed flap.
"The khal is gone."
"He breathes still," someone said from the back of the gathering.
"He does," Cohollo agreed. "But he does not ride."
No one argued the point.
"He does not lead."
Still no one spoke against it.
"He does not speak, does not command, does not sit his horse. A man who cannot ride is no khal at all, whatever breath is left in him."
Every rider standing in that circle knew the truth of it before Cohollo had finished saying it aloud. It was the oldest law the grass had ever taught them, older than any khal's name, older than the Great Stallion's own bones. A khalasar did not follow a man. It followed strength, and when the strength went out of a man, whatever remained of him belonged to the vultures and to memory, not to the horde.
Eyes began to turn toward Jhaqo.
Not because he was the eldest among them. He was not. Not because he had ridden longest at Drogo's side, or spilled the most blood in his name, for others in that circle could claim both those things before he could. They turned to him because men had always listened when he spoke, had done so since he was young enough that it should not yet have been so, and because in a khalasar strength was not only measured in a man's own sword arm but in how many other arms would move at his word.
Jhaqo let the silence hold a while longer before he broke it, his eyes going one last time to the shut tent where the greatest khal the grass had known lay staring at nothing.
"I followed him from the time I could first sit a horse," he said. "I followed the greatest khal these lands have seen in a hundred years."
No man disputed him.
"He conquered where lesser men only bargained. He rode where other khals feared to send even their scouts. He gave every man in this khalasar victories enough to fill ten lifetimes of songs."
He turned slowly, meeting the eyes of the riders around him one by one.
"But the stallion has fallen. Whatever breathes in that tent now is not Khal Drogo, and a khalasar does not stand vigil beside a dying horse waiting for it to rise again. We honor him best by remembering what he was, not by starving beside what he has become."
The words settled over the gathered riders like a weight none of them could put down again.
Daenerys came out of the tent before any man could answer him, leaning heavily on Ser Jorah's arm, her face gone the pale grey of old ash, her whole body seeming smaller than it had been the day before, as though something essential had been cut away from her along with the child.
She had heard enough of it.
"You cannot leave."
No one answered her.
"You are his blood. All of you swore yourselves to him."
Still no one spoke.
"He still lives."
At that, Jhaqo finally turned to face her fully, and there was neither cruelty nor pity in his voice when he answered her, only the flat certainty of a man stating the color of the sky.
"No."
"The man inside that tent lives," he said. "Our khal does not."
Her lips trembled, though she did not weep, not in front of them, and Jhaqo gave her that much respect at least.
"You swore an oath."
"We did."
"Then honor it."
His eyes went past her, toward the tent, toward the man who lay within it staring at nothing.
"My oath ended the moment his horse stopped running."
"You would abandon him. Abandon all of us."
"I would remember him as he was," Jhaqo said. "That is more honor than most khals are given when their strength leaves them."
The riders began moving before the sun had climbed much higher, and there was no panic in it, no disorder, only the quiet, practiced motion of people who had broken camp a thousand times before and would break it a thousand times again. Horses were untied. Sleeping mats rolled and lashed. Leather bags packed with the swiftness of long habit. Women gathered children onto hips grown used to the weight of them, and slaves were divided out among the riders who claimed them without a word of protest from anyone.
Within the hour the camp had become a place of leaving.
Jhaqo mounted his stallion and did not look back at the tent again. Behind him, nearly half the khalasar gathered, drawn to his banner without any banner having been raised at all. The strongest riders. The youngest and hungriest warriors. Many who had ridden at Drogo's side since before Jhaqo himself had earned his first bells.
He looked once more toward the silver haired khaleesi, standing alone now beside the tent with Ser Jorah at her shoulder and a small huddle of frightened slaves behind them, all that remained visible of a khal who had once commanded forty thousand riders across the whole breadth of the Dothraki Sea.
Jhaqo touched two fingers to his brow.
Not a salute. A farewell.
Then he turned his horse toward the east, and the thunder of thousands of hooves rolled out across the grass behind him, and the camp grew smaller with every stride until it was only a scattering of tents lost against the horizon, and then not even that.
Before him lay nothing but the endless grass, waiting the way it always waited, patient and indifferent to the names of khals.
Behind him he left a dead child no one would sing of, a living man who was no longer a man at all, a widow who was not yet a widow in name though she was one in every way that mattered, and a silence over what remained of the camp that even the wind seemed unwilling to disturb.