The old man started it near the second hour of the night march.
Afanti had been riding alongside his group of elderly charges with the comfortable loquaciousness of a man who has spent decades learning that most problems can be kept at a manageable distance through the application of words. He had also learned, over the same decades, to read the moods of the people around him — a skill that had kept him alive through twelve khals. What he had not learned, or had chosen not to apply tonight, was when to stop.
"The comet," he said, to no one in particular but loudly enough to carry. "I don't like it."
Several heads turned.
"Red," he continued. "The colour of blood. In a sky that should be blue or black. And here in the red waste, everything already the colour of old wounds—" He shook his head with the considered gravity of a man delivering a verdict. "Something has happened, somewhere. Something that should not have happened."
The riders nearest him began to look at each other in the way that people do when an anxiety they had been managing individually suddenly finds a spokesperson. Then they looked at the sky. The Bleeding Star sat low in the south, red and hard-edged, pulling its faint crimson tail behind it.
Daenerys had heard the whole thing from thirty yards ahead. She turned the silver mare.
"Afanti."
He straightened. "Khaleesi."
"The comet. Did it appear before Khal Drogo's pyre was lit?"
"...No."
"Did it appear after?"
"Yes."
"And Drogo's stallion — what colour was it?"
A pause. "Red. As red as coals."
"And his five hundred warriors — did they die in battle, with blood?"
The riders around Afanti had gone very still. She could see them doing it — the particular stillness of people who are beginning to see a pattern in something they had been afraid of.
"Yes," Afanti said, more quietly.
"Then I will tell you what the Bleeding Star is." She pulled her mare around to face the assembled column, all two hundred of them stretched out along the red ground, the comet burning above the southern horizon behind her. "Our Khal entered the fire and rode his stallion into the night country. The comet is that red horse carrying him. The blood-red trail behind it — long enough to cross the whole sky — is Cohollo at the front and five hundred of his finest warriors behind, riding at their khal's back the way they always did. They died with their heads taken." She looked at Afanti. "How much blood is that? Enough to stain the sky?"
Silence.
"Drogo knows we travel by night," she continued. "He knows we are crossing the waste. He will not leave until we are safe. When we have reached water and shelter, he will ride on."
She did not look at Jorah, who was behind her left shoulder and who she could feel choosing his expression carefully.
She looked at Afanti.
The old man's face had moved through several configurations. It arrived, finally, at something she could only describe as the expression of a man who has been given a better story than the one he had and has accepted the trade.
"You are as wise as the eldest of the dosh khaleen," he said.
"Afanti," she said pleasantly. "Vhaeson is ill and cannot drink water. Give him your mare's milk ration."
She didn't wait for his response. She could hear him beginning to protest behind her as she rode back to the head of the column.
The story moved through the column faster than the march did.
She could track its progress by the change in the conversations she rode past — the shift from the constrained quiet of suppressed anxiety to something looser, more confident, the tone of people who have been given a framework for their fear and can now look at the thing that frightened them without the fear.
By the second hour, someone had added the detail that Drogo was also watching over the dragons.
By the third hour, someone had added that the brightness of the comet was how strongly Drogo felt about the khalasar's survival.
She left these additions alone. They were useful.
What Daenerys did not know, and could not know, was that she was not the only person in the world remaking the comet into something manageable.
In King's Landing, the court called it the Red Messenger — a herald of the new king, they said, the young Joffrey, who had taken the Iron Throne on the death of his father Robert Baratheon. Whether Robert had died of his wounds before Cersei finished the business or after was a question the court had chosen not to examine. The people of the city, who were hungry and angry and had heard things about the queen and her brother that the queen and her brother had not intended them to hear, called it the Red Sword — and said it was the sky's judgment falling on the woman who had put a boy on the throne and called him legitimate.
In the riverlands, the Greatjon Umber, flushed from a victory at the Whispering Wood, had pointed his enormous arm at the comet's trail and laughed and told Robb Stark that the Old Gods were raising a war banner for his father's blood.
At Riverrun, Edmure Tully had looked at the comet, tilted his head, and decided it looked like a fish — a leaping trout, silver-red against the blue, which was the Tully sigil, which meant the gods favoured House Tully in the coming war, which was obvious.
On the Iron Islands, Balon Greyjoy had gathered his captains on the cliff-top in the wind and declared the comet a burning torch, the kind the Drowned God held when he walked up from the sea — and that any man who could not see what this meant for the ironborn had no business holding a sword.
At Dragonstone, where the Targaryen kings had kept their seat before the Conquest, a red woman had led a man with a hard face and a long memory out onto the battlements at night and told him that the time of prophecy was upon him. She had the voice for it, and the certainty, and the fire in her eyes that makes uncertainty seem like a small thing.
The prophecy was very old. It said that after a long summer, when stars wept blood, the cold and dark would come for the world. And in that hour a warrior would be reborn — pulling a burning sword from the fire, Lightbringer, the Red Sword of Heroes — and this warrior would be Azor Ahai come again, and he would drive back the darkness.
"The long summer ends," she said. "The Bleeding Star has come. Azor Ahai will be reborn in smoke and salt, and wake the stone dragons from their sleep."
The man with the hard face looked at the comet for a long time. He was not someone who embraced things easily. He was someone who believed in duty and correct procedure and the laws of succession, and what she was telling him was that the laws of succession were not the point, which ran counter to everything he had built his identity upon.
"Why me?" he said, not loudly. He had the air of a man who has been handed a responsibility he did not request. "I wanted to be a good brother. A loyal subject. Why must it always fall to—"
"Because you are who you are," she said, with the absolute conviction of a woman who has never entertained the possibility of being wrong. "The prophecy does not ask what you want."
He looked at the comet. He did not look comforted.
Far to the east, in the red waste, the subject of other people's prophecies was teaching her riders to dig for water.
She had been watching the devil grass for two days — the way its density varied, the way it tended to cluster along invisible lines that followed the paths of ancient watercourses. Underground, below the stone and baked clay, there was water. Not much. Not clean. But present.
She explained the theory to her centurions from a low ridge, pointing out the grass-lines below.
"Send your strongest riders ahead. Not one group — spread them, each group following a different grass-line. Every half-mile, dig. Deep. Deep enough to feel the soil change from dry to damp."
"What if there's no water?" Rakharo asked.
"If the soil is damp at all, take the mud. Strain it through cloth. It's slow and it's unpleasant and it gives you less than the filter does, but it gives you something."
She climbed down from the ridge, went to the nearest stagnant pool, scooped out the standing water, and began digging into the mud below it. Within ten minutes, water was seeping back into the hole from the sides — cleaner than the pool above had been, still requiring filtration but meaningfully improved.
The riders watched. Then they started digging.
The cheer that went up when the first groundwater seeped was excessive given the quantity of water produced, but it came from genuine relief, and she let it be.
Jorah appeared at her shoulder.
"A word, Princess."
She handed her shovel to Kovarro and followed him a few paces away from the group.
He kept his voice quiet. "You're deploying your best riders to dig wells for people who can't fight and can barely ride. The effort spent keeping the weak alive is coming directly out of your combat strength."
Daenerys looked at him steadily. "Yes."
"If we meet trouble—"
"If we meet trouble," she said, "two hundred people is not meaningfully better than a hundred and twenty. We don't have the numbers to fight anyone regardless." She paused. "What we have is a group of people who have seen me keep them alive in conditions where they expected to die. That is worth more than the difference between fifty and seventy fighters."
Jorah looked at her.
"And," she added, "some of those old people know things. Afanti knows horses. Vhaeson knows—" she paused— "various things. The children will grow."
He was quiet for a moment. Then: "You've thought about this."
"I've thought about everything," she said. "What I haven't done is made peace with all of it. That's different."
She went back to the digging.