A Game of Thrones — Daenerys II
Daenerys is wed to Drogo under the open sky: three dragon eggs for a gift, a silver mare, and one gentle word of Common Tongue — “no.”
The chapter retold
Daenerys is married to Khal Drogo under the open Dothraki sky in a ceremony with no roof and no walls, since the Dothraki hold that important things should happen beneath the stars where the horse god can see them. Illyrio's wedding gifts to her are a trio of ancient, petrified dragon eggs — beautiful, useless curiosities as far as anyone in the tale believes — and a silver mare to match her hair. Drogo, terrifying and silent through most of the day, offers her one word of the Common Tongue that night, gently: no — permission, not command, the first mercy she's been shown by anyone in the whole arrangement.
The wedding is staged as spectacle — the khalasar's arena games, the ritualized violence Dothraki men perform to impress a new khaleesi — but the emotional center is that single syllable, which starts, unexpectedly, to turn a forced marriage into something Daenerys might actually survive on her own terms. It's the first sign that Drogo will not simply be another man doing something to her, and it plants the eggs that the whole shape of Daenerys's story will eventually hatch out of.
This movement: The Road South
- A catspaw with a Valyrian dagger comes for the sleeping Bran; Catelyn's hands and Summer's teeth stop him.
- On the kingsroad, Joffrey's cruelty costs Mycah his life, Sansa her wolf, and Arya her innocence.
- Jon takes the black and finds the Watch is boys and broken men; Tyrion goes along to piss off the edge of the world.
- Catelyn rides south in secret with the dagger — and in a crossroads inn, arrests Tyrion Lannister.