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Chapter 34: Lessons for the Dragon
🕑 Added 2025-09-08 08:53:18 +0000 UTCIn the evening, as the blistering heat of the day began to fade, the Dothraki resumed their work, clearing the ash from the pit where the Valyrian rider had been cremated. At first, there was nothing but charred bone and blackened sand. Then, a warrior let out a shout.
He held up his soot-covered arms, carefully cradling a palm-sized black iron plate. "Khaleesi! I found a piece of iron! It must be a relic of the Dragonlord!"
Jorah took it first, scrubbing it clean with sand before handing it to Daenerys. "It is Valyrian steel," he said, his voice filled with reverence. "These are the runes of the Old Tongue, and this, a dragon. It must have been a badge of office, like the brooch of the Hand of the King."
The plate was cool and slightly heavy in her hand, the dark metal seeming to drink the light. The front was exquisitely carved: a dragon, wings spread for flight, its claws clutching a greatsword set with a single, deep red gemstone. Around it was a ring of runes she could not decipher. The back was different, a cruder carving of a single mountain peak, with what looked like plumes of smoke rising from its summit.
"If the dragon holds a sword," she said, her heart beginning to beat faster, "then there must be a Valyrian steel sword buried in the sand! Search everywhere!"
But it was not to be. They dug all night, deep enough that the pits began to seep with groundwater, but they found nothing.
"A man fleeing the Doom of Valyria would not have had time to retrieve his ancestral greatsword," Jorah sighed, shaking his head. "If the sword on the badge is to scale, it would have been a weapon as large as Lord Stark's Ice." He described the legendary blade: as wide as a man’s hand, with a dark, smoky cast to the steel, and so long it would stand a head taller than she.
"How can a man even wield such a weapon?" she asked, amazed.
A bitter, sarcastic edge entered Jorah’s voice. "Eddard Stark had decades of practice, taking the heads of dozens of men a year. I nearly added to his count."
In the end, Dany had to agree with his logic. Before midnight, they had unearthed more than twenty black, broken pieces of dragonbone, the longest over ten meters. She clapped the sand from her hands. "That is enough. We have enough for every warrior to have a dragonbone hilt for his arakh."
"Your Grace," Jorah reminded her, "dragonbone cannot be forged into a blade. It is wasted on common steel."
"But it is still valuable, is it not?" she countered. "Who would complain of having too much wealth?"
Before they left, she had them re-bury the colossal dragon skull, covering it completely, hoping to hide the great treasure from any who might pass this way again. In the vast, featureless plain, it would be nearly impossible to find.
"Dahei, you will remember this place, won't you?" she asked her black dragon, who was perched on her shoulder. The creature had a powerful, almost supernatural sense of direction, like a bird navigating by the magnetic fields of the earth. After a few tests, she was reasonably certain he could guide her back.
On the ride back to the city, she complained to Jorah. "My dragons are so stubborn. So stupid. The black one, Dahei, listens to me, but the other two… it is a struggle. Did the Targaryens of old have ways to increase a dragon's wisdom?"
"I do not know, Your Grace," the big bear shook his head. "Bear Island is far from the centers of power."
"But you were married to a Hightower," she prodded. "They control the Citadel. Surely you met some of the maesters?"
"At that time," he said, his voice flat, "I had no interest in maesters or their books. I have no interest in them now."
Two days later, they returned to White Cloud City. In the days that followed, Dany’s life fell into a new routine. In the cool of the morning and evening, she took her dragons out to train. During the scorching midday heat, she gave them their lessons.
They were growing at an astonishing rate. What had been a thin, cat-like creature was now the size of a large dog, and their appetites had grown with them. The sand lizards and scorpions of the plains were no longer enough. So, she began to tempt them to learn with food.
The process was brutally difficult. She tried to teach Dahei simple concepts through the Dragon Dream, a frustrating exercise in conveying abstract thought to an animal mind. She would hit their scales with a wooden stick to toughen them. At first, the delicate scales would crack like eggshells, and a thin line of blood, so hot it smoked in the air, would well up. Dahei, connected to her mind, would endure it with angry hisses.
The white and green dragons were not so cooperative. Her bond with them had faded as her connection with the black one deepened. They were now almost completely out of her reach. One day in physical training, after she struck the white dragon’s back and drew blood, the little beast ignored her commands, spun around, and blasted her wrist with a jet of dragonfire.
The pain was shocking. Dragonflame was far hotter than any wood fire. For the first time, she was truly burned. A ring of angry, painful blisters erupted on her skin. It took four days for them to fade, but to her relief, they left no scar.
Her body was changing. The scar from her own crude surgery was a testament to that. For the first half-month, to hide what she had done, she had forbidden bathing, instituting a camp-wide rule of using sand to scrub the skin clean. But one night, she had been shocked to find the ugly, raised line on her belly had become fainter. Now, it was gone completely, the skin as smooth and pale as it had ever been. It seemed that fire, and the dragon’s magic, had the power to heal her. Just as a single Dragon Dream had once healed her predecessor’s broken body after her first agonizing days on horseback.
