She sent Drogon first.
He went willingly — he had been showing increasing inclination toward independent flight, and the chance to go ahead of the column rather than circle it was received with what she could only interpret as enthusiasm. She settled into the secondary awareness and let him lead.
Aggo and nineteen riders followed on the ground, keeping the black shape in sight overhead.
The approach took an hour. She spent most of it watching through Drogon's eyes from the back of her silver mare, which required a degree of divided attention she was still learning to manage — the constant low-level adjustment of staying on a horse while simultaneously being forty feet in the air.
She was getting better at it.
The orchards announced themselves first.
She had been watching the usual landscape — red stone, devil grass, the thin shimmer of heat over flat ground — when the colour changed. Green. A definite, saturated green, the colour of living things with access to water, spreading across several acres in the lee of the city's western wall.
Not wild grass. Rows. Organised planting. Trees.
She came back to herself so quickly that the silver mare shied.
"Figs," she said, to Doreah, who was nearest. "Grapes. There are peach trees." She grabbed the girl's wrist. "There are orchards. Inside the walls."
Doreah stared at her.
"The city has water," Daenerys said. "Enough to sustain trees. Enough for us."
She turned the mare and raised her voice to carry back along the column: "We move. Now. Not at dusk — now. It's two hours' ride. Aggo's riders are already there preparing water and fruit. We move."
The wall appeared out of the heat-haze like something from a story.
It was white. Not the grey-white of limestone bleached by decades of sun — a living white, almost luminous, the kind of white that suggested the stone had been chosen for its colour as much as its strength. Thirty feet high, dressed and fitted with precision, with rounded towers at intervals that had survived intact where everything behind the wall had not.
"I've never seen anything like it in Westeros," Jorah said, pulling up beside her. He was looking up at the walls with the expression of a man who has spent his life in stone castles and recognises quality work. "Not at this scale. Not in this material."
Daenerys looked at the walls. She thought about Vhaeson's journal, which she had not yet read far enough into to find information about this part of the world.
She thought: This is mine now.
"I name it Vaes Ledan," she said. The White City. She said it in Dothraki and then in High Valyrian and then in the Common Tongue, so everyone around her heard it in at least one language they understood. Then she kicked the silver mare through the broken gate.
The inside was what ruins always were: the gap between the outside promise and the interior truth.
The streets were wide and well-laid, the stone beneath the horses' hooves still mostly flat and sound. Between the paving stones, devil grass had found its way up through every crack wide enough to admit a root. Vines had colonised the fallen buildings, pulling the walls further apart with every season, patient as water. In the centre of one intersection, a jujube tree had grown to the thickness of a man's thigh from what had been, at some point, a seed dropped by a bird or carried by the wind.
"How long?" Daenerys asked.
Jorah looked at the tree. "Longer than thirty years. This tree alone—"
"A hundred years," she said. "At minimum."
"The walls suggest it was a significant city," he said. "Something happened to it well before living memory."
She was about to respond when Aggo's voice came from ahead, sharp with discovery.
"Khaleesi. The plinth."
The six-road intersection was the city's centre — the geometry made that clear, six streets converging on a wide open plaza. In the middle of the plaza was a marble pedestal, chest-high, broad enough to have supported a substantial statue. The statue was gone.
The pedestal had been dragged slightly off-centre, probably in the process of removal. There were marks on the marble consistent with ropes.
"Dothraki," Jorah said.
She had been thinking the same thing. "The Avenue of the Gods."
"The Horse Gate road is lined with statues for miles," he agreed. "Every city they've raided, every god they've deposed. Whoever lived here—" he gestured at the pedestal— "their god is in Vaes Dothrak now, probably halfway to the Horse Gate."
She looked at the empty pedestal.
"Which means there was a river here when the raid happened," she said. "You can't bring a Dothraki army through the waste without water. They came when this was still a valley city." She looked at the burn marks on the nearest wall, faded to pale grey but unmistakable. "And they burned it when they left."
"A hundred years ago," Jorah said. "Give or take."
"Which means the city died from fire and from the river failing afterward. Not from plague."
He saw where she was going. "The cisterns and wells would have accumulated clean water for decades since then. Nothing to infect them."
"Exactly." She looked at the pedestal one more time. "Whatever god lived here — they're gone now. But the city is still here." She placed her hand on the marble. "And now it has a new owner."
The riders settled along the walls of the central palace, the canvas tents going up against the stone in the preference of people who did not trust a roof they had not personally inspected. Daenerys allowed this. The palace walls provided shade on three sides from mid-afternoon onward, which was all she needed the building to do.
The fruit arrived.
It came in the arms and saddlebags of the advance riders — undersized figs, slightly underripe grapes, small hard peaches, apples no bigger than a child's fist. None of it was what the fruit might have been with adequate water and tending. None of it mattered.
Two hundred people reached for it simultaneously.
She stood back and watched her riders push each other gently for access to a basket of half-ripe grapes, watched an elderly woman from the rear column accept a fig from one of the young warriors with the precise careful movements of someone handling something precious, watched Doreah bite into a peach and make a sound of pure involuntary pleasure.
She felt something she hadn't felt since before Drogo died.
We might actually make it.
The mood shifted after dark.
The comet sat low in the south, throwing its red light across the white stone so that the buildings took on the colours of dried blood. The wind moved through the broken streets and the empty doorways and produced, as wind through ruins always does, sounds that resembled voices if you listened for voices.
Jhiqui had been listening for voices.
"The gods have left," she said, with the careful tone of someone who knows she is outvoted but feels the matter is too important to let pass. "When gods leave, other things come in. We shouldn't—"
"The place was raided," Daenerys said. "The Dothraki took the statue. The gods didn't leave — they were stolen." She paused, allowing this to settle. "Which means the Dothraki already defiled this place. Whatever might have objected has already had its confrontation, a hundred years ago."
"What's dead here has been dead for a very long time," Jorah said helpfully. Then, looking around at the white walls in the red light, the shadows of broken towers, the wind-sound through the empty streets: "Bone City, I'd call it."
He meant it as dark humour. Both serving women turned to look at him with expressions that were several steps past frightened.
"Vaes Ledan," Daenerys said, firmly and loudly enough for the nearest thirty people to hear. "The White City. I am its lord. This is my city." She looked at Drogon, who was on her shoulder. "Drogon."
The black dragon opened his mouth. A column of fire eight inches in diameter and nearly a foot long emerged, red-white at the core, trailing black smoke, accompanied by a sharp chemical smell and a sound like tearing cloth.
He was getting better at this too.
The serving women stopped talking.
Jorah looked at the fire. He looked at Daenerys. He had the expression of a man who has learned to choose his moments, and who recognised that this was not a moment to pursue the Bone City line of argument.
"Vaes Ledan," he agreed.