“Yes,” Dany said. “But it was ships and soldiers I wanted.”

“Did I not give you an army, sweetest of women? A thousand knights, each in shining armor.”

The armor had been made of silver and gold, the knights of jade and beryl and onyx and tourmaline, of amber and opal and amethyst, each as tall as her little finger. “A thousand lovely knights,” she said, “but not the sort my enemies need fear. And my bullocks cannot carry me across the water, I—why are we stopping?” The oxen had slowed notably.

“Khaleesi ,” Aggo called through the drapes as the palanquin jerked to a sudden halt. Dany rolled onto an elbow to lean out. They were on the fringes of the bazaar, the way ahead blocked by a solid wall of people. “What are they looking at?”

Jhogo rode back to her. “A firemage, Khaleesi .”

“I want to see.”

“Then you must.” The Dothraki offered a hand down. When she took it, he pulled her up onto his horse and sat her in front of him, where she could see over the heads of the crowd. The firemage had conjured a ladder in the air, a crackling orange ladder of swirling flame that rose unsupported from the floor of the bazaar, reaching toward the high latticed roof.

Most of the spectators, she noticed, were not of the city: she saw sailors off trading ships, merchants come by caravan, dusty men out of the red waste, wandering soldiers, craftsmen, slavers. Jhogo slid one hand about her waist and leaned close. “The Milk Men shun him. Khaleesi , do you see the girl in the felt hat? There, behind the fat priest. She is a—”

“—cutpurse,” finished Dany. She was no pampered lady, blind to such things. She had seen cutpurses aplenty in the streets of the Free Cities, during the years she’d spent with her brother, running from the Usurper’s hired knives.

The mage was gesturing, urging the flames higher and higher with broad sweeps of his arms. As the watchers craned their necks upward, the cutpurses squirmed through the press, small blades hidden in their palms. They relieved the prosperous of their coin with one hand while pointing upward with the other.

When the fiery ladder stood forty feet high, the mage leapt forward and began to climb it, scrambling up hand over hand as quick as a monkey. Each rung he touched dissolved behind him, leaving no more than a wisp of silver smoke. When he reached the top, the ladder was gone and so was he.

“A fine trick,” announced Jhogo with admiration.

“No trick,” a woman said in the Common Tongue.

Dany had not noticed Quaithe in the crowd, yet there she stood, eyes wet and shiny behind the implacable red lacquer mask. “What mean you, my lady?”

“Half a year gone, that man could scarcely wake fire from dragonglass. He had some small skill with powders and wildfire, sufficient to entrance a crowd while his cutpurses did their work. He could walk across hot coals and make burning roses bloom in the air, but he could no more aspire to climb the fiery ladder than a common fisherman could hope to catch a kraken in his nets.”

Dany looked uneasily at where the ladder had stood. Even the smoke was gone now, and the crowd was breaking up, each man going about his business. In a moment more than a few would find their purses flat and empty. “And now?”

“And now his powers grow, Khaleesi . And you are the cause of it.”

“Me?” She laughed. “How could that be?”

The woman stepped closer and lay two fingers on Dany’s wrist. “You are the Mother of Dragons, are you not?”

“She is, and no spawn of shadows may touch her.” Jhogo brushed Quaithe’s fingers away with the handle of his whip.

The woman took a step backward. “You must leave this city soon, Daenerys Targaryen, or you will never be permitted to leave it at all.”

Dany’s wrist still tingled where Quaithe had touched her. “Where would you have me go?” she asked.

“To go north, you must journey south. To reach the west, you must go east. To go forward you must go back, and to touch the light you must pass beneath the shadow.”

Asshai , Dany thought. She would have me go to Asshai. “Will the Asshai’i give me an army?” she demanded. “Will there be gold for me in Asshai? Will there be ships? What is there in Asshai that I will not find in Qarth?”

“Truth,” said the woman in the mask. And bowing, she faded back into the crowd.

Rakharo snorted contempt through his drooping black mustachios. “Khaleesi , better a man should swallow scorpions than trust in the spawn of shadows, who dare not show their face beneath the sun. It is known.”

“It is known,” Aggo agreed.

Xaro Xhoan Daxos had watched the whole exchange from his cushions. When Dany climbed back into the palanquin beside him, he said, “Your savages are wiser than they know. Such truths as the Asshai’i hoard are not like to make you smile.” Then he pressed another cup of wine on her, and spoke of love and lust and other trifles all the way back to his manse.

In the quiet of her chambers, Dany stripped off her finery and donned a loose robe of purple silk. Her dragons were hungry, so she chopped up a snake and charred the pieces over a brazier. They are growing , she realized as she watched them snap and squabble over the blackened flesh. They must weigh twice what they had in Vaes Tolorro. Even so, it would be years before they were large enough to take to war. And they must be trained as well, or they will lay my kingdom waste. For all her Targaryen blood, Dany had not the least idea of how to train a dragon.

Ser Jorah Mormont came to her as the sun was going down. “The Pureborn refused you?”

“As you said they would. Come, sit, give me your counsel.” Dany drew him down to the cushions beside her, and Jhiqui brought them a bowl of purple olives and onions drowned in wine.

“You will get no help in this city, Khaleesi .” Ser Jorah took an onion between thumb and forefinger. “Each day I am more convinced of that than the day before. The Pureborn see no farther than the walls of Qarth, and Xaro . . .”

“He asked me to marry him again.”

“Yes, and I know why.” When the knight frowned, his heavy black brows joined together above his deep-set eyes.

“He dreams of me, day and night.” She laughed.

“Forgive me, my queen, but it is your dragons he dreams of.”

“Xaro assures me that in Qarth, man and woman each retain their own property after they are wed. The dragons are mine.” She smiled as Drogon came hopping and flapping across the marble floor to crawl up on the cushion beside her.

“He tells it true as far as it goes, but there’s one thing he failed to mention. The Qartheen have a curious wedding custom, my queen. On the day of their union, a wife may ask a token of love from her husband. Whatsoever she desires of his worldly goods, he must grant. And he may ask the same of her. One thing only may be asked, but whatever is named may not be denied.”

“One thing,” she repeated. “And it may not be denied?”

“With one dragon, Xaro Xhoan Daxos would rule this city, but one ship will further our cause but little.”

Dany nibbled at an onion and reflected ruefully on the faithlessness of men. “We passed through the bazaar on our way back from the Hall of a Thousand Thrones,” she told Ser Jorah. “Quaithe was there.” She told him of the firemage and the fiery ladder, and what the woman in the red mask had told her.

“I would be glad to leave this city, if truth be told,” the knight said when she was done. “But not for Asshai.”

“Where, then?”

“East,” he said.

“I am half a world away from my kingdom even here. If I go any farther east I may never find my way home to Westeros.”

“If you go west, you risk your life.”

“House Targaryen has friends in the Free Cities,” she reminded him. “Truer friends than Xaro or the Pureborn.”