She spent the first morning walking the city.
It took three hours to cover the main streets and the central district, and by the end of it she was revising several of her assumptions in an optimistic direction. The wells were the first surprise — not one or two, but one per block in the residential districts, one per courtyard in the larger buildings, each one still holding water. The same underground source that was feeding the orchard had been feeding the entire city, and a hundred years of disuse had left it undisturbed.
The devil grass was the second surprise. She had been thinking of it as an obstacle — scraping it from the paving stones to get at the soil beneath. Looking at the courtyard gardens, she revised this. The grass was tough, drought-resistant, and apparently capable of surviving on almost nothing. As horse forage it was better than nothing. As a soil amendment, burned and turned under, it would add material to the thin red clay.
She walked back to the palace courtyard where her people were waking up and began giving orders.
The old women went to the orchard.
The able-bodied women went with Jorah to the palace, to assess what could be made habitable and what had collapsed past repair. The palace itself was mostly intact — the roof of the great hall had come down in one corner, but the residential wings were sound, the thick walls having done exactly what thick walls were designed to do.
The old men went to the horses.
The warriors, Daenerys took herself.
She led them to the slum districts — the low-built crowded housing that ringed the inner city, single-story structures that had already half-collapsed under the weight of time. The ones that were still standing, she put them to work pulling down. The stone went into piles, sorted by size, to be used for repairs elsewhere. The wood — what there was of it, dry and brittle — was set aside for burning.
When the structures were down, she had the horses brought in.
The horses did not understand ploughing. The Dothraki had never ploughed anything in their history. The concept of using a horse to drag something through the ground ran counter to every instinct both the horses and their riders had developed over a lifetime. There was a period of significant disagreement.
By mid-morning, the first furrows were turning.
The blacksmith problem required a different approach.
She had four candidates: Dothraki warriors who were — she had assessed them herself, with Aggo's quietly ruthless input — the least militarily useful people in her fighting force. All four of them knew this, on some level, which was part of why the reassignment felt like an insult.
"Warriors," she said, in front of the assembled group, "carry weapons. The quality of those weapons determines whether the warrior lives or dies. The man who makes the weapon—" she paused— "the man who makes the weapon determines the fate of every person who carries it."
"We are not slaves," one of the four said. Not angrily — this was a statement of position.
"I know what you are," she said. "Let me tell you what you apparently don't know about the man who killed my brother."
She had their attention.
"His name was Robert Baratheon. He was the lord of a castle called Storm's End, which is one of the greatest fortresses in Westeros. He was one of the most powerful fighters alive. He brought down Rhaegar Targaryen — my brother, a trained knight in full battle plate, a man who had won more tournaments than I have fingers — in single combat at the Ruby Ford." She paused. "What weapon did he use?"
She looked at Jorah.
Jorah, to his credit, understood exactly what was being asked of him. He cleared his throat.
"A warhammer," he said.
"A warhammer," she repeated. "Robert Baratheon crushed the rubies from my brother's breastplate into the shallows of the Trident with an iron hammer. There are people who still find those rubies in the river gravel. The place is called the Ruby Ford because of them." She let this sit. "A man who makes iron weapons for other men to use is a man who can shape the outcomes of battles he never fights. Is that slave's work?"
The four warriors looked at each other.
"The man who put that iron in Robert Baratheon's hands," she continued, "changed the history of an entire continent."
This was slightly more credit than any anonymous Stormlands blacksmith deserved, but the argument was not wrong in principle.
"I will learn," said the tallest of them, after a pause. "If there is iron."
"The children have been finding iron all morning," she said. "Rusted, but iron. Go with the master smiths and do what they tell you."
She was halfway to the next task when she heard, behind her, the enthusiastic voice of Jhogo expressing his desire to also become a blacksmith.
She kept walking.
The library room was found by the children.
A stone building at the back of the palace compound, its door sealed by a fallen timber that two of the older boys had managed to shift. Inside: scroll cases, most of them empty or containing only fragmentary remains. Time and heat and the sealing of the room had done their work. The children brought her the ones that still looked intact.
She sat cross-legged on the floor and went through them with the care of someone who knows they cannot rush this and cannot afford to miss anything.
Most fell apart in her hands. The outer layer of each scroll had survived; everything beneath it had fused into a solid block that crumbled when she pressed it.
One map survived.
It was sheepskin rather than paper, and sheepskin lasts. The markings had faded to the edge of legibility, but she could read the centre clearly enough: the city she was sitting in, rendered in the confident lines of someone mapping their own home. Around it, the waste — rendered as empty, which was accurate. To the west, a mountain range. Beyond the mountains, three cities marked with names. She worked through the faded script slowly.
Meereen.
She stopped.
She read the name again.
She looked at the other two city names on the western side of the mountains. They were harder to make out, but the shape of one of them resolved, after a moment, into something she recognised from Vhaeson's journal.
Astapor. Yunkai. Meereen.
The three cities of Slaver's Bay.
She was sitting in a dead city that had once been connected, by a river valley and a road, to the slave-trading civilisation of the eastern coast. The river had run from the Lhazar in the north through this valley and down to the sea, feeding three cities on the way. When it failed — for whatever reason volcanically heated ground can cause a river to fail — everything north of the surviving coast had died.
She traced the southern route with her finger.
The map had no scale markings. But she had been travelling for five days, covering roughly a hundred miles per day on a good day, less on bad ones. Call it five hundred miles from the Lhazar. The map showed the river running roughly equal distance from the northern source to the southern sea.
Another five hundred miles south.
Perhaps less, if they moved well.
She folded the map — carefully, along existing creases — and put it in her robe.
Then she went to find Jorah.
Two more cities.
The southwest direction Vhaeson's journal had suggested was accurate: within a hundred miles, two more white-walled cities marked on the old map. She sent Aggo and Rakharo each with a small group to investigate, while the khalasar settled into its second night in Vaes Ledan with the specific exhausted contentment of people who have been given enough water and fruit and shade and have fallen into the first genuine rest they've had in a week.
Rakharo came back the next morning with news of the second city: smaller than Vaes Ledan, the same construction, wells intact.
Jhogo came back from the third city with a different report.
"The walls are fine," he said. "The buildings are mostly standing. But—" he produced something from his belt, a ring of dark iron with a fire-red opal set in the centre— "there are spears driven into the ground outside every gate. Every spear has a skull on it." He held out the ring. "I found this inside. I didn't go far in."
"The wind moves the skulls," Daenerys said.
He looked at her.
"The skulls have gaps," she said. "Wind moves through gaps. It makes sounds."
He thought about this.
"Very specific sounds," he said.
"Yes," she said. "That's what skulls do." She took the ring and looked at the opal. The stone was a deep red-orange, uncut, sitting in its original iron setting with the straightforward beauty of something that doesn't know it's supposed to be more refined. "This is worth something."
"Five gold pieces at minimum," Jorah said, appearing at her elbow. He took the ring, turned it over, assessed the stone with the practised eye of someone who has spent time around luxury goods. "More if it's properly set." He went quiet for a moment. His voice, when he continued, had something different in it. "My wife had one. Not as large as this. She saw it in a market in Lannisport and I—"
He stopped.
Around them, a ring of Dothraki were watching him with open curiosity. He cleared his throat.
"How do you know so much about women's jewellery?" Daenerys asked, with the tone of someone who wants to know but is also aware this is not the moment.
He looked at the watching riders. "Another time."
She let it go.
She gave Rakharo and Aggo their orders: each to take a ranging party south from the third city, spreading in three directions — south, southeast, southwest — covering a day's hard ride. Record what they found. Animals, ruins, any sign of people. Come back in two days.
She gave Jhogo the gate repair assignment.
The gates of Vaes Ledan were down — not destroyed, just off their hinges, lying flat in the entry passage. The wood was beyond saving. What she wanted was a stone barrier: narrow the entry to the width of a single cart, leave the passage defensible from above.
She described the basic concept of a barbican.
Jhogo looked at her with the expression of a man to whom architecture is not a native language.
"A small stone box," she said. "Behind the gate. Anyone who gets through the gate is inside the box. We kill them from the walls above."
"I understand killing from walls," he said, visibly relieved.
When he had gone, Jorah came to stand beside her in the late afternoon light, looking at the palace walls and the cooking fires and the children running between the columns with the dragons chasing them, and her people, her actual people, alive and not dying and loud.
"What are you planning?" he asked. "Long-term."
She looked south.
"We rest here," she said. "We plant. We build up the strength to move. And when the dragons are large enough to be dangerous—" she paused— "we go south."
"To Slaver's Bay."
"To what used to be Slaver's Bay," she said. "Yes."