The spear was heavier than it looked.
Viserys had thought that the first time Hazar pressed the ash shaft into his hands, and he thought it again a month later, when his palms had finally hardened enough that the wood no longer split them open by midmorning.
"Grip lower." Hazar circled him slowly, spear resting easy across one shoulder. "You hold it like something meant for display. It is not for display."
"Forgive me if I have not spent a lifetime holding spears."
"You have spent a lifetime holding grudges instead. Heavier thing, and you managed that well enough."
Viserys shot him a look, and found, to his own faint surprise, that he was fighting a smile rather than a retort. He lowered his grip anyway.
It had become the shape of his days. Dawn found him at the low stone wall above the eastern pasture, Hazar already waiting with the patient, unhurried cruelty of a man who had buried better students than Viserys expected to become. They drilled until the flies came out with the heat, and then Viserys went, sore and sweating, to whatever the village needed of him, and in the evening he ate two bowls instead of one, and slept the deep dreamless sleep of a body finally being used for something.
"Again," Hazar said, and came at him.
Viserys caught the strike on the shaft the way he had been taught, hips turning rather than shoulder, and for once the wood did not jar out of his hands. Hazar's brow lifted, half a mountain's worth of surprise on so still a face.
"There," the old man said. "You are not entirely hopeless."
"High praise. I shall have it carved above my tent."
"Do not let it swell your head. You are still hopeless. Merely less hopeless than yesterday."
"You are a cruel teacher."
"I am an honest one. The grass does not care for a man's feelings, and neither do the men who ride across it."
Viserys lowered the spear, breathing hard, sweat stinging where it ran into his eyes. "You still believe they will come."
"I know they will come." Hazar's eyes drifted east, the way they always did when the talk turned to the Dothraki Sea, as though he could see something out there no younger eye could. "Not this season, perhaps. Not the next. But the grass remembers every khalasar that has ever crossed it, and it has never once forgotten the way back to Alzhain."
"Then why teach an exile to hold a spear, and not a dozen of your own sons?"
"Because my sons have no wish to learn, and you," Hazar said, "have nothing left to lose in the learning." He clapped a scarred hand once against Viserys's shoulder, hard enough to stagger him. "That makes you either useless or useful. We shall see which."
The village had a way of pulling a man in without his noticing the moment it happened.
Viserys could not have named the day he stopped counting the hours until his strength returned and started counting, instead, the small satisfactions of an ordinary life. A fence repaired that held through a hard rain. A second bowl handed to him without his having to ask for it. Marei's dry commentary over the crushing of herbs, which had somehow become the part of his evenings he looked forward to most and admitted to least.
"You are smiling," she said one evening, not looking up from her mortar.
"I smile."
"Rarely. And never like that."
"Perhaps I have simply run out of things worth scowling about."
She glanced up at that, something unreadable crossing her face. "A dangerous thing to admit, in a place like this."
"Why dangerous?"
"Because contentment makes a man forget to watch the horizon." She went back to her herbs. "Hazar would tell you the same, if you asked him."
"Hazar tells me a great many things. Mostly that I hold a spear like a fool."
"Do you?"
"Increasingly less so."
That drew a small laugh out of her, quick and surprised, as though she had not expected to give it. He found he liked drawing it out of her more than he liked almost anything else the day offered.
Later, in the temple square, he stood with a cup of goat's milk and watched the whole of Alzhain eat from the same tables without a single man reaching for more than his share. The little girl with the wooden sheep ran past him shrieking with laughter, chased by two boys who could not have been older than eight, and an old woman called out something in Lhazareen that made the whole nearest table erupt into warm, easy laughter.
He had spent most of his life being told what he was owed, and had received almost none of it. Here no one owed him anything at all, and yet he found he had more of worth than he had ever held in memory of grander places. He did not try to explain to any of them who he had once believed himself to be, back across the poison water, in a city he had not seen since he was a child too young to remember it. He suspected, had he tried, none of them would have understood why it should matter. Blood meant kinship here, not entitlement. A man's worth was weighed in the work of his hands and the food he set upon the table, nothing more, and Viserys found, more and more, that he did not mind being weighed by that measure instead.
He wanted, more than he had ever wanted a crown, simply to stay.
The dream came on a night no different from any other.
He had drilled hard that day, hard enough that Hazar had grunted something that might, from a lesser man, have passed for approval, and he had fallen asleep beneath his wool blanket with the distant sound of bells still drifting down from the hillside pens.
In the dream, Alzhain was burning.
He knew it at once for what it was, every stone and tent and worn dirt path exactly as he had walked them a hundred times, and yet wrong, lit orange and flickering, smoke pouring low across the ground like something alive and hunting. The temple's pale walls had gone black with soot. The communal tables where the whole village ate together lay overturned and splintered in the square.
Screams came from everywhere and nowhere at once.
He saw shapes moving through the smoke, low and fast on horseback, curved blades catching the firelight as they rose and fell, and he tried to run toward them, toward the sound of it, and his legs would not obey him, the way legs never obey in dreams. He saw the old baker who had torn him bread on his first hungry morning lying face down across his own threshold. He saw the little girl with the wooden sheep, and he could not make himself look further, and the dream would not let him look away.
Somewhere close by, a voice was calling his name.
Not in the dream. Through it.
"Viserys."
He surfaced from the burning village like a man dragged up from beneath dark water, gasping, tangled in his blanket, heart slamming so hard he could feel it in his throat.
Marei was kneeling over him.
Her hand was on his shoulder, shaking him, and even in the dark of the tent he could see the shape of her fear, wide eyed, her mouth open as though the word she meant to say had frozen somewhere behind her teeth. Outside, past the thin wool walls, he could hear it now, the same sound that had filled his dream a heartbeat before, screaming, real screaming, the frantic bleating of sheep driven mad, somewhere the crack and roar of fire catching where fire had no business catching.
"Marei, what—"
She never finished turning toward the tent flap.
The point of a curved blade burst through the front of her, dark and sudden, and for one endless heartbeat neither of them made a sound at all, as though the world itself had forgotten how. Her eyes found his. Something in them tried, uselessly, to warn him, or to apologize, or simply to hold onto him a moment longer.
Then the blade withdrew, and she fell forward against his chest, and her weight bore him down onto the mats beneath her, and Viserys froze.
He did not move. He could not. His arms had closed around her without his willing them to, her blood already soaking hot and impossible through the front of his tunic, and his mind had gone somewhere very far away, somewhere quiet, somewhere that had not just watched the only person who had ever called him something other than his name or his title go still in his arms.
The man who had killed her stepped through the ruined flap, wiping his arakh unhurried against his own thigh.
A second man followed him in, older, a long braid swinging past his waist, and cuffed the first hard across the back of the head. "Fool," he said, in Dothraki, the words falling on Viserys from very far away, meaning nothing at all. "That one had a soft mouth and soft hands. Worth three horses in a slaver's ring, and you have spilled her on the ground like water."
"She was reaching for a knife."
"She was reaching for nothing. You are wasteful, and wasteful men die poor."
Viserys heard none of it as words. He heard only sound, distant and underwater, while something else rose up behind his eyes and swallowed every careful lesson of the last two turnings whole. There was no grip, no hip, no shaft of ash wood remembered from a hundred quiet mornings. There was only red, total and consuming, and his body was moving before any part of him that still resembled a man had agreed to it.
He went at the nearer one bare handed.
It was not skill. He knew that even as he did it, some small clear part of him standing outside his own fury and noting, almost calmly, that he was no match for either of these men, that he had no blade, that this would very likely be the way he died. The Dothraki turned in surprise more than alarm, already laughing, already raising the arakh for a killing stroke that should have ended it in a single motion.
Viserys did not let him finish raising it.
He drove into the man's chest with his whole weight, the way a boy tackles another boy in a dirt yard, no art in it at all, and the two of them went down together in a tangle of limbs among the scattered mats. The arakh clattered away into the dark. Viserys's hands found the man's throat and would not let go, thumbs digging in with a strength he did not know his body possessed, and the Dothraki bucked and clawed at his wrists and drove a fist twice into Viserys's ribs hard enough to steal his breath entirely, and still he did not let go.
Something cracked beneath his hands.
The man beneath him stopped moving.
The second one was already on him, braid whipping, a curved dagger flashing down toward Viserys's back, and Viserys rolled clear more by luck than judgment, felt the blade open a shallow line of fire across his shoulder instead of finding his spine. He came up with the fallen arakh in his fist before he had decided to reach for it, the grip wrong in his hand, nothing like the balance of Hazar's practice spear, and swung it anyway, wild and desperate and without any shape Hazar would have recognized as a drill.
It caught the older man across the forearm, deep, and the dagger fell from fingers that no longer answered him.
Viserys did not stop to consider mercy. He swung again, and a third time, ugly and graceless and entirely without art, until the man stopped raising his ruined arm to ward the blows away, and the tent held nothing standing in it but Viserys himself.
He stood there a long moment, chest heaving, arms trembling so badly the stolen arakh nearly slipped from his grasp, staring down at two dead men and, beyond them, at Marei, still and small on the mats where she had fallen.
He could not stay in that tent one heartbeat longer.
He stumbled out through the torn flap into a night gone the color of the inside of a forge, and the dream had not lied to him in a single terrible particular.
Alzhain was dying around him.
The temple's pale walls stood scorched black. The long wooden tables where the whole village had eaten together every evening of his life here lay smashed and scattered across the square. Bodies were everywhere, more than he could make his eyes hold at once, old men who had never lifted anything heavier than a shepherd's crook, women, children who had chased lambs through this same square only days before. Those still living were being herded together near the well with ropes already binding their wrists, women weeping, children too frightened even to weep, and here and there among the burning tents Dothraki riders had dismounted, and were doing to some of those women things Viserys's mind refused, even now, even after everything, to let itself fully see.
He turned, searching wildly through the smoke for anything, anyone, some shape that might still be standing.
He found Hazar's shield first, cast aside in the dirt, its scarred face catching the firelight.
Then he found the rest of him.
Hazar's body lay a dozen feet further on, spear still fixed in a dead man's chest where he had driven it home, the old sheepdog gone down at last still fighting, still facing forward, exactly as Viserys had always somehow known he would.
His head lay apart from the rest of him, rolled a short distance into the ashes of the square, eyes open toward the sky the way Drogo's had once been open and seeing nothing at all.
Viserys did not move. Did not breathe.
He only stood there, arakh still in his bloodied hand, and stared.