A Game of Thrones ÔÇö Daenerys VI

Drogo turns the khalasar against the Lhazareen towns for slaves to buy ships; Daenerys claims the women, and a wound opens the khal's chest.

The chapter retold

Drogo, honoring his fury over the wineseller's poison and the promise it provoked, turns his khalasar against the Lhazareen ÔÇö the peaceful sheep-herding people of the grass sea ÔÇö raiding their villages for the slaves he needs to trade for the ships that will carry his army across the narrow sea. Daenerys, horrified by the scale of what her husband's wrath has unleashed on people who did nothing to earn it, claims the surviving women for herself rather than let them be parceled out as spoils, using her authority as khaleesi in a way that startles Drogo's own bloodriders. In the chaos of the raid, a wound opens across Drogo's chest ÔÇö small, seemingly minor, the kind of scratch that wouldn't trouble most men.

Daenerys's intervention on behalf of the Lhazareen women is the clearest statement yet of the moral compass that will define her entire later reign ÔÇö an instinct to protect the powerless even when it costs her standing with the powerful, exercised here for the first time on a scale large enough to matter. The wound in Drogo's chest, mentioned almost in passing amid the larger drama of the raid, is the kind of detail this book plants without emphasis and lets the reader worry over on their own ÔÇö small enough to ignore, in exactly the way that gets ignored until it's too late.

This movement: The Wolf Calls the Banners

• The Stark household is slaughtered; Arya escapes through the Red Keep's cellars with Needle; Sansa pleads for her father's life.
• Robb calls the banners; the Greatjon learns about direwolves and fingers; the host marches for the Neck.
• Catelyn wins the Twins' bridge from Walder Frey at the price of marriage promises.
• Beyond the Wall, dead men rise in Castle Black itself; Jon's torch and Ghost save the Old Bear.