This Dothraki khas had either slipped away from Drogo's main horde or been sent out to forage for food.
The news itself was no surprise. Volantene scouts had already reported that the long siege had bled the nomads dry. Their supplies were gone. The tribute brought in by the kos was a drop in the ocean.
Drogo was now reduced to slaughtering the horses of his dead warriors for meat and cutting the slaves' rations to the bone just to keep breathing.
Hunger had wrapped its cold fingers around the entire khalasar.
Whether this particular khas had been ordered out or had fled in the night made no difference.
What mattered—what the scouts had actually seen—was that the enemy camp had completely fallen apart.
Dothraki camps were always savage and chaotic—fights, rapes, corpses left where they fell. That was simply how they lived.
But according to Rogar's men, who had crept close enough to watch with their own eyes, the disorder here was far worse than anything they had seen before.
Crude hide tents were thrown up at random. Horses wandered loose. Riders drank and brawled openly. There were no sentries, no drills, no defensive positions at all.
The Dragon Claw's own scouts had used Myrish lenses to study the camp from cover. The Lysene among them swore they had never been spotted.
That particular scout—claiming to be the last descendant of a fallen banking house—had sharp eyes and owed Viserys everything. He still remembered the day the prince had pulled him out of a Lysene whorehouse with blood on his hands and a death sentence on his head.
Viserys's mind mapped the situation in an instant.
Right in front of him lay a fat, unguarded prize.
The victory at Salmear had been shared glory among three companies. This time the Dragon Claw could take a clean, solo raid.
The spoils would feed his men. A swift win would sharpen morale after days of hard marching.
Sellswords left too long without fresh blood grew dull. River-supplied grain was useful, but nothing fired a man's blood like meat and wine taken straight from the enemy's hand.
More importantly, he needed to remind Triarch Varyon that the Dragon Claw earned every coin it was paid. Any thought of trimming shares or docking wages would be met with steel.
"Horses!" Viserys ordered after a short, cold calculation.
War never offered perfectly safe choices. Letting an opportunity like this slip away was the only real stupidity.
Sometimes you had to stare danger in the face and strike.
For this raid he took only the Black Knights.
Spearmen and archers would slow them down and rob the charge of its killing speed. Their share of the loot would be smaller too.
But he had already decided: after the fight the infantry would still receive their full portion. He would not let resentment fester inside his own company.
He wanted every man to know their prince remembered them all and would never let any of them ride away empty-handed.
Only then would they willingly die for him—and fight for even greater prizes.
Hooves thundered across the endless grass.
Viserys glanced sideways at the knights riding behind him. Exiles from Volantis, still raw from losing Lavaros. Westerosi exiles looking for either a glorious death or a new reason to live. Cutthroats, desperate men, gutter rats with nowhere else to go.
He was trying to forge all of them into one blade—his own knightly order, his own brotherhood.
Was it even possible?
When Aegon the Conqueror landed at the mouth of the Blackwater, he had brought fewer men, and their quality had been worse.
Valyrian servants, chance adventurers, Essosi sellswords, fishermen's sons, pirate scum… exactly that rabble had placed the crown of the Seven Kingdoms on his head.
But that ancestor had dragons.
He had faced a fractured, feuding continent.
Viserys Targaryen the Third, last dragon-blood of his line, had neither dragons nor allies inside Westeros.
The fire-breathing beasts that once gave Valyria supremacy were extinct. The Usurper's Iron Throne sat secure as a mountain. Robert could raise armies that dwarfed every sellsword company in Essos combined.
Robert himself had grown so fat he could no longer see his own feet, but the hawks and hounds around him would cut Viserys down the moment his boots touched Westerosi soil.
The road home would be paved with mountains of corpses.
But that was tomorrow's war.
Today's task was simple and clear.
Crush the Dothraki camp in front of him.
He did not need to kill every last man. Smash the tents, shatter their order, and the survivors would scatter in terror.
Dothraki conquered everything and defended nothing.
Today the Black Knights would become the raiders they knew so well—falling from the sky with blood and ruin.
Learning from the enemy was no shame. That same tactic had once let the horse-lords trample half of Essos.
In Westeros any lord would have called the plan suicidal madness.
Cavalry charging straight into a camp lost all momentum, tangled in tents and ditches, and were butchered by infantry.
If the enemy did not break, the attackers would be swallowed whole.
But Viserys was not fighting in Westeros.
Only a fool used the same ruler on two completely different battlefields.
He was attacking, not a Westerosi lord's entrenched camp, but a nomad camp that became helpless the moment its riders lost their horses.
He led, not plate-armored heavy knights, but swift, light raiders.
Most important of all, the scouts had confirmed: this khas had no defenses left. Even the most basic Dothraki discipline had vanished.
Was he taking a risk?
Yes.
But war offered no risk-free choices, and he was certain this time the dice were loaded in his favor.
There was no point hiding the cavalry.
Viserys raised his hand. The Black Knights lifted their banners as one. The black dragon snapped and roared in the grass wind, red claw gleaming like a drawn blade.
Let the enemy see them. Let them hear them. Let them face a single, savage, blood-hungry host while they were already weak.
Strength itself was the deadliest weapon.
The crude hide tents finally appeared on the horizon. No palisade. No watchtowers. No defenses of any kind.
Clearly, no one was ready for the Dragon Claw's steel.
"First company—with me!" Viserys roared, voice cutting through the wind.
"Second and third—straight in! Rest of you swing wide, seal the horse pens!"
The screaming warriors finally spotted the oncoming cavalry, but it was already too late.
A few scrambled for their horses. The Dragon Claw's blades were already in the heart of the camp.
Viserys led from the front. His longsword swept sideways and split a Dothraki skull in half. Blood sprayed across his silver hair and armor.
The slaughter had begun.
The savages' screams were ear-splitting. Thousands howled in their guttural tongue. Steel rang, horses shrieked, Black Knights roared.
The knights tore through the tents like a storm, blocking every horse, denying the nomads their only real weapon.
The Dothraki's utter contempt for fighting on foot became their death sentence. They could not form any defense. Every man simply ran for his mount, and the Dragon Claw's only job was to cut that last hope away.
The flanking companies slammed into the horse pens right on time. Terrified animals screamed. The Dothraki's final escape route was gone.
Viserys thrust his sword through a second warrior who tried to stand and fight. Cold killing rage filled him from heel to helm.
This was his war.
No dragons. No songs.
Only blades, blood, and the iron will to keep living.