She had misjudged Vhaeson.
She found this out the evening after the funeral, when she finally opened the book in the privacy of her tent with the three dragons asleep in their basket and the camp quiet around her.
The page that had fallen open during the incident — that page was part of a twelve-page section near the middle. Twelve pages out of several hundred. The rest of the book was something else entirely.
Maps. Detailed ones, hand-drawn in a fine careful hand, covering most of the known world east of Westeros. The Free Cities, the Dothraki Sea, Slaver's Bay, the Summer Isles, the coasts of the Jade Sea. Each map was annotated in small Valyrian script — population estimates, trade goods, military dispositions, the depth of harbour channels, the positions of watchtowers, the names of harbour-masters who could be bribed.
Interspersed with the maps were journals of a different kind. Rainfall patterns across the Dothraki Sea, season by season, with notes on which areas flooded and which dried out and in which years. The location of waterholes and their reliability. The range and behaviour of grass lions. Medicinal plants and their uses, learned apparently from every healer Vhaeson had encountered in sixty years of travel. Grazing patterns. Plague vectors. Winter temperatures along the eastern coast by city and year.
It was the life's work of a man who had spent sixty years in the company of a khal's household with nothing to do but observe, and who had observed everything.
She turned a page and found a hand-drawn table comparing the defensive walls of the nine Free Cities — height, construction material, estimated garrison strength, known weaknesses.
She sat with the book in her lap for a long time.
Blue-Eyed Haggo, she thought. If he'd lived. If he'd had this and known what to do with it.
She thought about what a khal with Dothraki strength, his father's tactical flexibility, and this document could have done with the resources of the Dothraki Sea.
She thought about what she could do with the same combination.
She made a decision about how carefully to pack this book for the rest of the journey.
The funeral had been, by the standards of available resources, a success.
The central problem was the horse. Dothraki tradition required a horse for the journey to the night country. Horses were currently the most valuable resource the khalasar possessed. She had solved this by separating the two requirements: the horse's spirit and the horse's body were not the same thing, and only the spirit was needed for the journey.
She had explained this in front of the assembled camp with the confident authority of someone who has committed fully to a thing and will not be entertaining questions.
The ritual had involved a copper basin, an old recalcitrant horse, a straw effigy in horse-shape made by the eldest rider in her force, and a speech in four languages delivered with the gestures of a woman performing magic she had invented thirty seconds earlier.
When she pointed at the straw horse and announced that the transfer was complete, the camp had believed her.
When she ordered the real horse processed for food, no one had objected.
She had walked away from the fire toward the dragon training ground with the dragons in their basket and the sound of her people eating behind her, and she had thought: I am not sure if this is the beginning of something good or something I will eventually regret.
Then she had decided it was both, and continued walking.
The fourth day's march was the most efficient yet.
The forward scouts had marked twenty-three water caches along their route. Of these, nineteen still had usable seepage when the main column arrived. Daenerys moved through each one without stopping, emptying the residual water into prepared bags, leaving the filter apparatus for the rear riders to retrieve.
A baby died in the third hour. Six months old, a girl. Her mother had been one of the women left behind by the departing kos — too old to be useful to a new khalasar, not old enough to be sent to the dosh khaleen. The infant had had diarrhea since the first day and Daenerys had done what she could with boiled water and diluted salt, which was not enough.
The ten-riders who included the mother slowed to help. The rest of the column kept moving.
Daenerys stayed until the small grave was covered and the mother had been steadied and remounted. Then she rode to the head of the column without speaking.
The black dragon flew on the fifth morning.
Not glided — flew. He beat his wings twice, found the angle, and went up. She watched him circle once, low, then once higher. Then he folded his wings partially and went up again, hard, and in ten wingbeats he had become a black point against the pale sky.
She stood in the red dust with her hand raised, tracking him.
He was still going up.
She felt the pull of the dream before she understood what was happening — the sense of her consciousness tilting, as though the world had developed an incline in a direction she had not previously known existed. She had been in dragon-dream before, but always with physical contact, always with the egg or the hatchling in her hands.
The black dragon was forty feet above her and climbing.
The dream took her anyway.
It was not like the earlier experiences — not the sensation of merging, of one plus one becoming one. This was more like standing in two places at once. She was still in her own body, on the ground, watching the sky. She was also, at some secondary level of awareness that she had not previously had access to, watching the ground.
From above.
The camp was very small from up here. The silver mare was a white-grey shape among the brown tones of the waste. She could see the line of the column — the riders, the carts, the loose horses — stretching back north along the route they had come. She could see the comet from a different angle: not a scratch in the sky but a shape with depth, a three-dimensional smear of light against the dark of space beyond the atmosphere.
She blinked.
She was on the ground.
She was also still up there.
The dragon banked. She felt it as a movement in the secondary self — a slight shift in perceived gravity, the adjustment of angle. She did not control it. She was a passenger.
Interesting, she thought, in both bodies at once.
She had known, in an abstract way, that the Stark children were wargs — that the bond between a direwolf and its human had a depth that was more than affection. She had seen it in glimpses, in Arya's sleep, in Bran's raven-riding that she had read about in Jorah's reports.
She had not fully considered what it meant that she had the same bond with three dragons, and that dragons were, by any meaningful measure, more than wolves.
The black dragon wheeled south, corrected, turned east, drifted north. Testing. She watched him test and felt, very faintly, the pleasure of it — the particular satisfaction of a body discovering what it can do.
She let the contact thin gradually, the way you ease out of sleep without forcing yourself awake. When it released fully she was standing in the red waste with her arm still raised, Aggo beside her.
"He's flying," Aggo said, with the reverence of a man watching something he will describe for the rest of his life.
"Yes," Daenerys said. She lowered her arm. "He is."
She looked at her other hand, which was empty, which had not been in contact with any dragon, and which had nonetheless just experienced forty feet of altitude.
She thought: I need to understand what I can do before I accidentally do more of it than I intend.
She thought: I also need to learn to call him back down.
The black dragon was now a point she could barely see.
"Drogon," she said, quietly.
The name had come without decision, the way names do. She had not been planning it.
But it was right.