[Daeron Targaryen]
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"You've been playing at Kinging for the last sixteen years, Uncle. It's time to pass the crown to someone who knows how to win the game."
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Essos, Pentos, Illyrio Mopatis' Estate.
"Nyke'll daor ivestragī bisa māzigon naejot rēbagon," her nephew promised, his elegant fingers cupping her face a bit more roughly than he probably meant. "Pack aōha ra. Nyke've ivestragī bisa jikagon va syt tolmiot tolī bōsa." Daeron had always been very protective of her—far more than her brother had ever been.
(I'll not let this come to pass. Pack your things. I've let this go on for far too long)
Daenerys would have liked nothing more than to do as her nephew bid her, but sixteen years of living in terror of their king's rage had quelled any notion of rebellion on her part. "Īlon kostagon daor," Dany said meekly, gripping Daeron's wrists tightly. "Ziry'll follow īlva naejot se mōris hen vys." And it was true; Viserys would never stop chasing them. Not until he was dead. But her brother was too stubborn to die, as the years since their flight from Dragonstone proved.
(We can't. He'll follow us to the end of the world)
Daeron weighed her long and hard with his eyes. Purple eyes, deep and dark and beautiful. His was a gaze able to tear the clothes right off even the most steadfast maidens. "You will not marry the savage." His jaw tightened as he touched his forehead to hers. "I won't let him sell you like a broodmare, Dany. Not you." Dany felt her heart swell—he always made her feel loved, and she was sure he didn't even realise how much that meant.
"Daenerys!"
A flicker of murderous fury passed through her nephew's stunning eyes, and a low growl reverberated from his throat before he stepped away from her and looked at the door. For an instant, Dany thought Daeron might kill Viserys. She did not want her nephew to be branded a kingslayer and a kinslayer, so she stepped in front of him and looked at her brother while reaching to hold Daeron's hands behind her back. A sigh escaped her nephew's lips, and he placed the sweetest kiss on the top of her head. Dany took strength from that.
"There's our bride-to-be," Viserys called, approaching them with a dress in his arms. "This is beauty. Go on. Touch it."
Dany reluctantly released her nephew's hands and touched it. The cloth was so smooth it seemed to run through her fingers like water. She couldn't remember wearing anything so soft. It frightened her. She pulled her hand away. "Is it really mine?" It pained Daeron, she knew, to hear the fear in her voice from such a trivial thing...
"A gift from Illyrio," Viserys smiled. Her brother was in a high mood tonight. "The colour will bring out the violet in your eyes. And you shall have gold as well, and jewels of all sorts. Illyrio has promised. You must look like a princess."
'A princess,' Dany thought. She had forgotten what that was like. Perhaps she had never really known. "Why does he give us so much?" She asked. "What does he want from us?" They'd lived in the magister's house for a year—eating his food, pampered by his servants. Dany was sixteen, old enough to know that such gifts seldom come without their price, here in the free city of Pentos.
"Well, Illyrio's no fool," he said. He was a gaunt man with nervous hands and a feverish look in his pale lilac eyes; her brother was... pathetically average when compared to Daeron. Her nephew knew how to ride and fight and plot, and he knew when to be kind and when to be ruthless, but Viserys had none of those talents. "The magister knows I'll not forget my friends when I come into my throne." Behind her, Daeron snorted in disdain as he moved to a table along a wall bedecked with refreshments—exotic cheeses, cool meats, sweet fruits.
"Illyrio plays you for a fool, Uncle," Daeron said, popping a small cube of cheese into his mouth. He swallowed. Dany watched her brother narrow his eyes; he had never liked Daeron. His was not the blood of the dragons, her brother's favourite words. It was tainted by the whore. Viserys had never said these things in their nephew's hearing, though.
Dany said nothing, though she worried Daeron was pushing it. Magister Illyrio was a dealer in spice, gemstones, and other, less savoury things. He had friends in all the Nine Free Cities, she had heard, and even beyond, in the city the horselords called Vaes Dothrak and the fabled lands beside the Jae Sea. Dany had also heard that he'd never had a friend he wouldn't cheerfully sell for the right price. Dany listened to the talk in the streets, and she knew her nephew did the same, but she knew better than to question her brother when he wove his webs of dreams.
Daeron had no such qualms.
"If you bring an army of savages into the Seven Kingdoms," Daeron continued, pouring himself some wine into a gold goblet encrusted with gemstones, "they will burn the fields, rape the women, enslave the children. You will rule over a lawless land and look over your shoulder until the day someone sheathes a dirk in your spine." Dany silently agreed with him—even she knew that Dothraki in Westeros was a bad idea. It could only end in disaster.
Viserys wouldn't hear any of it. "You still slouch," he said with a tinge of annoyance. "Straighten yourself." Her brother pushed back her shoulders with his hands, moving one down her spine to pull her Pentoshi gown loose. "You have a woman's body now." Daeron's back was to her, so still he might have been carved from stone.
Swallowing her terror, she looked at Viserys.
His fingers brushed lightly over her breasts and tightened on a nipple. Dany tried not to wince; that would only make him angrier. "I need you to be perfect today. Can you do that for me?" Viserys asked her. "You will not fail me... If you do, it will go hard for you. You don't want to wake the dragon, do you?" His fingers twisted her, the pinch hard against her bare nipple. He repeated, "Do you?"
"No," Dany said meekly.
Viserys smiled at her. "Good." He touched her hair, almost with affection, then turned to leave. At the door, he looked at her again. "When they write the history of my reign, sweet sister, they will say it began today." As the door swung shut behind him, Dany went to the window and looked out wistfully on the waters of the bay.
The square brick towers of Pentos were black silhouettes outlined against the setting sun. Dany heard the red priests chanting as they lit their night fires—The Prince! The Prince has come!—and the shouts of ragged children playing games beyond the walls of the estate. For a moment, she wished she could be out there with them, with no past and no future and no feast to attend at Khal Drogo's manse.
Somewhere beyond the sunset, across the narrow sea, lay a land of green hills and flowered plains, where towers of dark stone rose amidst magnificent blue-grey mountains, and armoured knights rode to battle beneath the banners of their lords. The Dothraki called that land Rhaesh, Andahli, the land of the Andals. In the Nine Free Cities, they talked of Westeros and the Sunset Kingdoms. Her brother had a simpler name. "Our land," he called it. The words were like a prayer with him. "Ours by blood right, taken from us by treachery, but ours, ours forever. The dragon remembers."
And perhaps the dragon did remember, but Dany could not. She had never seen this land her brother said was theirs by blood right, this realm beyond the narrow sea. These places he talked of, Casterly Rock and the Eyrie, the Vale of Arryn and Highgarden, Dorne and the Isle of Faces; she glanced at Daeron, now standing with his hands pressed on the refreshments' table as he calmed himself down; or Winterfell and the Wall. Viserys had been a boy of eight when they fled King's Landing to escape the advancing armies of the Usurper, but Daenerys had been only a quickening in their mother's womb.
Yet, sometimes, Dany would picture the way it had been, so often had her brother told the stories. The midnight flight to Dragonstone, moonlight shimmering on the ship's black sails. Her brother Rhaegar battling the Usurper in the dark and blood waters of the Trident and dying for the women he loved. The sack of King's Landing, where Daeron lost an infant brother and a three-year-old sister. The polished skulls of the last dragons staring down sightlessly as Father's throat was opened with a golden sword.
She'd been born on Dragonstone nine moons after their flight, while a raging summer storm threatened to shatter the island's fastness. They said the storm was terrible. The Targaryen fleet was smashed while it lay at anchor, and huge stone blocks were ripped from the parapets and sent hurtling into the wild waters of the narrow sea. Her mother had died birthing her, and for that, her brother had never forgiven her.
She did not remember Dragonstone either. They had run again, just before the Usurper's brother set sail with a new fleet. By then, only Dragonstone itself, the ancient seat of their House, had remained of the Seven Kingdoms that the Conquerors had forged. It would not remain for long. The garrison had been prepared to sell them to the Usurper, but one night Ser Willem Darry and four loyal men had broken into the nursery and stolen them both and set sail under the cover of darkness for the safety of the Braavosian coast.
She remembered Ser Willem dimly, a great grey bear of a man, half-blind, roaring and bellowing orders from his bed. The servants had lived in terror of him, but he had always been king to the youngest Targaryens. He called Daeron "Dragonwolf" and sometimes "My Lord," and he called Dany "Little Princess," and his hands were soft as old leather. He never left his bed, though, and the smell of sickness clung to him day and night, a hot, moist, sickly sweet odour. That was when they had lived in Braavos, in the big house with the red door. Dany had her own room there, with a lemon tree outside her window. After Ser Willem had died, the servants had stolen what little money they had left, and soon after they had been put out of the big house. Dany had cried when the red door closed behind them forever, and Daeron had committed the servants' names and faces to memory.
They had wandered since then, from Braavos to Myr, from Myr to Tyrosh, and on to Qohor and Volantis and Lys. Her brother would not allow them to stay long in any one place. The Usurper's hired knives were close behind them, he'd insisted, though Dany had never seen one.
At first, the magisters and archons and merchant princes were pleased to welcome the last Targaryens—or the son of Rhaegar, she never could discern—but as years passed and the Usurper continued to sit upon the Iron Throne, all doors closed to them and their lives grew meaner. Years ago, they had been forced to sell their last treasures, and now even the coin they had gotten from Mother's crown had gone. In the alleys and wine sinks of Pentos, they called her brother "the beggar king." Dany did not want to know what they called her.
"We will have it all back someday, sweet sister," he would promise her. Sometimes his hands shook when he talked about it. "The jewels and the silks, Dragonstone and King's Landing, the Iron Throne and the Seven Kingdoms, all of which they have taken from us, we will have it back." Viserys lived for that day. All that Daenerys wanted back was the big house with the red door, the lemon tree outside her window, and the childhood she had never known.
There came a soft knock on her door. "Come," Dany said, turning away from the window. Illyrio's servants entered as she did, bowed, and set about their business. They were slaves, a gift from one of the magister's many Dothraki friends. There was no slavery in the free city of Pentos. Nonetheless, they were slaves. The old woman, small and grey as a mouse, never said a word, but the girl made up for it. She was Illyrio's favourite, a fair-haired, blue-eyed wench of sixteen who chartered constantly as she worked.
They filled her bath with hot water brought up from the kitchen and scented it with fragrant oils. The girl gathered the plum silks from the floor and tossed them aside before helping her into the tub. The water was scalding, but Dany did not flinch or cry out. She liked the heat. It made her feel clean. Besides, her brother had often told her that it was never too hot for a Targaryen. "Ours is the blood of the dragon," he would say. "The fire is in our blood."
The old woman washed her long, silver-pale hair and gently combed out all the snags, all in silence. The girl washed her back and feet and told her how lucky she was. "Drogo is so rich that even his slaves were golden collars." Dany's tummy twisted. "A hundred thousand men ride in his khalasar, and his palace in Vaes Dothrak has two hundred rooms and doors of solid silver." There was more like that, so much more.
But Dany said nothing, only looking at her nephew as he stood on the terrace, his hands pressed flat against the stone border. It was not hard for her to see his growing anger—where Viserys displayed his wroth outwardly, Daeron kept it in until it simmered, then turned cold and hard and mean. Dany did not know whose anger she feared more.
"Leave us," Daeron commanded. The old woman and the young girl stopped what they were doing and looked at the Silver Prince's only surviving issue. He did not turn around to address them. "I wish to speak to my aunt privately." As Illyrio's servants turned to Dany, she nodded and sank into the water until only the top half of her head was visible.
When they were gone, Daeron turned to her.
"We are leaving." It was not a suggestion. "Viserys' madness has reached new heights. I won't allow this to go on for any longer. We will humour this mummer's farce Illyrio has fooled him with, but no more. My ship's been waiting long enough as it is."
Dany resurfaced the surface of the water just above her nipples. "Your ship?"
"Did you think I've been sitting idly by for sixteen years as your brother ran our name into the dirt? No," he said with a strange smile. "Pack your things, Daenerys. We leave under the cover of night. If you aren't ready by the hour of the wolf, I will carry you over my shoulder if that's what I must do to get you on that ship."
Somehow, she knew he was not jesting...