Chapter 25: Daenerys Walks Into the Fire

The narrator will confess, at the outset of this chapter, to a certain strain in maintaining the composure that polite reportage demands. Events have a way, in the Dothraki plain's dry season, of declining to arrange themselves within the categories that Verentshire's educational tradition has furnished for their reception, and what follows is offered to the reader with every assurance of accuracy and a corresponding admission that accuracy, on this occasion, is not quite the same thing as adequacy.

Khal Drogo died on the fourteenth day of the month the Dothraki call the Burning, in a tent that smelled of salt grass and the particular astringent preparation that Mirri Maz Duur, healer of the Lamb People, had been applying with an unhurried competence that Daenerys had found, in the first days, reassuring. She found it less reassuring now.

The wound had not killed him directly. This was, the narrator notes, a distinction without much practical comfort. The wound — acquired in the casual skirmish that Daenerys had watched with the blank-faced serenity she had been cultivating since the first week of her marriage, when she had learned that the Dothraki did not prize visible distress in a khaleesi any more than they prized it in a horse — had been the occasion, rather than the cause. The cause was what Mirri Maz Duur had placed inside the wound in place of healing, working with the quiet efficiency of a woman who had been given permission to do precisely as much as she intended.