Chapter 13: Viserys Targarrow Makes His Final Social Error

The morning Viserys Targarrow made his final social error began, as many of his mornings had recently begun, with a grievance.

Daenerys heard him before she saw him. The Dothraki camp was not a quiet place at any hour — it hummed and rang with the particular industry of people who made their home in motion — but Viserys's voice carried above its ambient noise with the special penetration of a man who had never in his life been required to modulate himself for his surroundings. She was at her language work, the reed pen moving steadily across the wax tablet, when the sound reached her: first the raised pitch of it, then, with the practised attention of a woman who had spent seventeen years cataloguing her brother's registers of displeasure, the specific quality that told her this was not a complaint seeking relief but one seeking an audience.

She set down her pen. She straightened her back. She waited.