Those Who Ride

by Mitch H

Rating: teen
Tags: My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Dark, Alternate Universe, Other, Sex, Game of Thrones, Sunset Shimmer, Adventure, Violence, Crossover, Death, Human
Length: 54065

If Sunset wants to prove her worth, she'll have to show that she wouldn't be ridden. That Sunset Shimmer is someone who... rides.

When the Princess refused Sunset Shimmer the reward which was her right as a pony of talent and excellence, Sunset was determined. She would prove her mentor wrong, she would prove her worth, prove her worth as a pony and as a princess in her own right. The Mirror offered promises. It promised Sunset many things.

The Mirror lied.

The land that laid beyond the Mirror was barbaric beyond all her worst expectations. Ape-like beings strode through this world, arrogant, violent, vicious beyond anything in Sunset's experience. Slavers, savages, brutes, carnivores.

They put her in chains like cattle, and told her she was livestock. Then the brutes tried to give her as a gift to those whom even brutes feared, to the eastern savages. To a people who said there were only two things in this world: those that ride, and those that are ridden.

And so if she has any hope of ever proving herself worthy of being a person again, Sunset Shimmer would have to show that she could be one who rides - that she is...

Dothraki.

Published 2018-05-20 17:40:11 UTC
Last updated 2018-09-03 00:50:15 UTC

The Wedding

The great heaving mass of naked apes surrounded Sunset Shimmer, shouting, singing, dancing, fighting. The smell of the bipeds made her head swim, the constant press of predators in every direction made her heart beat a brutal tattoo, an inner drumming to match the pounding of the great drums. Those drums that the savages beat somewhere beyond the silk screens, silk screens behind which her owner had hidden the terrified unicorn.

Magister Allynio had bought her from those who had bought her from her captors; bought her broken, tamed, coached a bit in the bipeds' guttural language. For all of this strange tribe's apelike stature and resemblance to the diamond dogs of her homeland, Sunset had discovered that their language parsed more like Old Griffish. She had found the ape-people's tongue no more difficult to learn than any other she had encountered in her short life. It had been her quickness as much as her magic that had drawn the Princess'… well, never mind that.

The drumming was now interrupted by some clashing and screaming outside Sunset's little open-skied closet, her refuge in the midst of the vast heaving horde. Somepony – no, someone was fighting out there.

These ape-people were horrifically, unpredictably violent. The brutes who had captured her in her sleep, the slavers those lucky fools had sold her to, the slaves and the servants of the Magister's household – they all quarreled like dogs fighting over a bit of bread thrown from the table, like pigs in the slop. Sunset had learned to be quick with her hooves, and her teeth, and her tail, because the clever apes had somehow figured out how to short out her horn with their damn headdress-harness. She'd tried in moments of inattention and in the dark of night to remove the damned dampening rig they'd approximated, but some clever artisan had built a solid lock into the harness, had crafted its straps so that her head was firmly bound inside of the leather padding. Eventually, her coat adjusted itself to the constant presence of the harness, and although she formed a few sores here and there, it wasn't anything she couldn't survive.

She'd survived worse in the days before Celestia, she'd survive this.

Another series of clashes rang out like bells outside her closet, an almost-charming little concerto in steel and – were those actual bells? Sounded tiny, like brass maybe.

And then there was a splattering noise, and artery-red spots appeared like magic across the surface of her silken cell. The second duel was over, someone had lost. She could hear the groaning of an ape dying just outside the flap of her screen.

The singing and the drumming continued as the sun rose high over Sunset's head, and she sat there on the grass, trying to make out the shouting and the low conversations around her little half-tent. Whoever these new apes were, they didn't speak the local language, they didn't speak Valyrian, these Dothraki. She listened intently as she waited. It was a language nothing at all like Valyrian. Magister Allynio had had no Dothraki in his employ or his slave-quarters, so she had had no opportunity to learn anything of their barbaric tongue.

Well, as far as Sunset was concerned, all these apes were equally savage, but her Pentoshi owner had insisted that the Dothraki were barbarians even by his brutal standards. Not that the Magister had put the matter in those terms; by his standards, he was a man of culture and high standing among his peers. He had said more in front of Sunset than she thought he really ought to have volunteered.

After all, she was to be given to those savages, their ruler and his new bride. Why put such information in the hooves – no, the hands of ruthless outsiders?

The Magister had burbled about his plans to undercut his rival, the illustrious Illyrio. Magister Allynio had no connections with the Dothraki hordes, no sales contacts. His business, Sunset gathered, was mostly in trade with the neighboring counties of the Free City, and to a lesser extent the supply of the fishing fleets, and the occasional crumb stolen off of the plates of the grand magisters who controlled the trade with the Sunset Kingdoms.

Sunset had laughed like a hyena when she'd learned the meaning of that word. Until her overseer had whipped her for her insolence. That was a lesson Sunset had found hard to learn, her innate contempt for those less clever than she; and she'd met so very few people in her life that were her equal in that regard.

She admitted to herself, in the dead of night as she tried to figure out how to pick her harness's locks with bits and pieces of trash she'd picked up over the day before, in between wincing at the day's bruises and pains, that perhaps her habit of open contempt for others was not the most wise of stratagems in a prisoner. Or a slave.

Finally the drums died down, and she saw the shadow of the Magister darken the side of her screen. His flat, beige face appeared through the flaps, and he smiled, happily, as he entered her little enclosure.

"Well, now, my little pony, are you ready to give the performance of a lifetime? This is it, they're lining up with the other bride's-gifts. Come on over here, let me get you rigged up proper." The Magister reached out and began fiddling around with her harness, attaching a set of reins to her symbol and expression of imprisonment. With his own, soft hands – tender appendages which had not done any hard work in years, if not decades.

Sunset thought briefly of reaching out with her still-strong teeth, and taking a bite out of those soft hands, but let it pass. He was about to give her away, and frankly, she was tired of his stink.

She couldn't stand the brutish spices and perfumes with which these apes drenched their stench away. They couldn't be bothered to bathe, but enormously expensive perfumes? That the Magister and his peers could afford.

The fat ape led his captive unicorn out of the silk screen-enclosure within which he had hidden her. Sunset tried not to react to the sudden assault on her senses this abandonment of her little sanctuary brought her. All the tumult, all the vast stench, was suddenly joined to a kaleidoscope of tall figures, of leather clothing, of flashing gold and bronze and brass bangles flitting about all around her. Likewise, the long black braids with which this particular breed of ape decorated their scalps, little brass bells woven into their manes like the fillies of the Princess's court had done with flowers and sprigs of sweetgrass. The savages, the Dothraki, did not look quite like the Pentoshi under their barbaric finery. More of a copper color, slightly different around the eyes, almost uniformly black-maned, far taller and more heavily built than the inhabitants of the Free City.

Not that any of these apes were especially distinctive by pony standards. All subtle shades of beige or bronze, as far as Sunset could see.

The tall savages ceased their chatter as the Magister led his charge out into the crowd. Sunset could feel the black eyes of a hundred, a thousand tall apes upon her hide. She did her best to keep her harnessed head high, as proud as a student of the Princess could possibly be.

The smell of roast meat was overwhelming. She didn't recognize that particular aroma, it wasn't pig or chicken or the beefsteaks she'd seen the Pentoshi eat here in this terrible, terrible world. The savages were greasy, and many were chewing on chunks of roasted meat, even as they stared at her, stared at her horn. Apparently they found her something worth staring at.

The Magister led his gift through the crowd, and up above the crowd onto a rammed-earth ramp. Above the heads of the endless crowd sat a number of personages. Armed men, a scattering of handmaidens, someone dressed like one of Celestia's useless Royal Guard. Above these, a skinny pale ape with long, stringy white hair, his purple eyes bugging out. The Magister's hated rival, Illyrio, whom Sunset had once been shown through a seraglio screen. An impossibly tall and wide brute, the same coloring as the endless horde of Dothraki – that must be their king. He looked like a minotaur!

And, beside the minotaur-like brute, sat a pale filly – no a girl, with the same coloring as the angry little man in black and red, but where his long white hair was stringy, the girl's was lustrous and gorgeous. Where his pale-purple eyes bulged, her eyes gleamed with delight. She looked like a doll, a beautiful, impossible porcelain doll.

The Magister led Sunset Shimmer up to the little princess – and that must be who this little miracle must be, because no one else in this world could possibly compete with her slight frame and beauty – and the Magister stopped, and bowed extravagantly.

"Your Highness, I heard stories of your beauty, your purity, and your noble lineage, and I could only weep to hear of your nuptials. To assuage my heartbreak, I found for you the perfect symbol of my regret, and your future among the horse-tribes, the vast sweet-grassed plains. This, I present to you, a vision, an omen, and an auspice of your bright future. This, the Sunset Unicorn, was found in the grasslands to the south of Pentos. She is a prophecy of the return of the Targaryens to your Sunset Kingdoms, to Westeros."

"How," asked the Magister's rival, that immensely fat ape, Illyrio, "Do you know this is a 'Sunset' unicorn, Allynio? And why in the name of the Lord of Light did you think giving a little painted pony to a Dothraki bride would be welcomed?"

"Faugh! Am I a fool? The Dothraki prize nothing so much as horses, and here we have, a prodigy of horseflesh! One that speaks, and comprehends, and reasons, Illyrio! This is no mere pony, this is a marvel of the age. Say something to the Magister, Sunset!" He tugged at her reins, and Sunset stumbled a bit.

"My Lord Illyrio," began Sunset, and coughed, her voice cracking from recent disuse. "Your Majesty, Khal Drogo, greetings to you, my masters. I am placed in your hooves, er, hands, so that you might put me in the service of your new bride, Your Majesty. Think of me, please, as a hoofmaiden to Your Highness Daenerys, soon to be Khaleesi Daenerys, or so I am told."

Sunset ended this hortation with a slight bow in the direction of the delighted girl to her right, as deep as she could with her reins still held in the fat hand of her Magister, Allyrio.

This was the only reason Sunset's horn was not bisected by the terrible curved sword that cut the air over her bowed head. She hadn't seen the Khal move, but somehow while Sunset's eyes had been on the tiny little feet of her new mistress, the great barbarian-king had disappeared from his seat, and was now half-kneeling on the other side of her Magister, and there was – blood everywhere.

And then the Magister's head bounced off of her flank, soaking her left side in the arterial spray of that object's gory passage.

Sunset fell to her stomach, her muzzle pressed into the rammed earth of the ramp, her hooves crossed over her still-intact horn. She quivered in terror, waiting for the great sword to return, and finish the job it had begun.

But nothing happened, except a slight shadowing of the westering sun's rays over her closed eyes. She opened them, and peered up at the bulk casting that shadow. Illyrio.

He looked down at the butchered remnants of his rival, and sighed, sadly.

"Yes, Allyrio, you were a fool, and worse than a fool. Only the groom at a Dothraki wedding would dare give the bride a horse. We even had a beauty of a filly picked out for the princess, one that matched her colors almost exactly. I can't think of a greater insult to the Khal than to have done this."

The enormous Magister turned away from his idiot of a rival, and looked at the cowering unicorn. "He said you were a thinking beast. Is this true, or are you nothing but a parrot? Say something unexpected."

"OhCelestiapleaseIthoughtIknewwhatIwasdoingwhatamIdoingonthisbenightedtartarusIjustwanttogohome-"

"Well, that wasn't what I expected, but it doesn't sound rehearsed. Can you repeat it in Valyrian?"

"I-I don't want to die, your lordship. I had no idea – I meant no insult to His Majesty –"

"Don't call him that, Khal Drogo isn't an emperor, he's a Khal. That's the proper address. Do you know any Dothraki?"

"None, my lord. My Lord Magister had no Dothraki to instruct me, but I am a very quick study, um – " Sunset grabbed for the clearest bit of the new language she had heard earlier in the day – "jan ave sekke vervan enni m'orvikun, I think it's something about violence and – straps maybe?"

"Close, actually. Hrm. Hold that thought. I might salvage this mess yet."

The fat ape went over to talk to the irate king ape, who was bellowing about something or another. Presumably on the subject of his offended honor and the gall of the dead man's effrontery. If that was what he was actually saying, Sunset suddenly realized that she had to pay absolute attention, and she bent her head to the side, her ears cupping to catch every last syllable the barbarian lord bellowed.

Then another, smaller shadow replaced that of the absent, surviving magister, and Sunset looked up to find a pair of beautiful violet eyes gazing down at her.

"Hello, there. I can see that you're scared, but I think it's over. You aren't the one that offended him, I think. And we can't show them fear, can we? Not when we'll be alone with all of these very big men with very sharp arakhs. I definitely can't be afraid – the blood of the dragon does not fear. But you – can you be brave for me? I think I will need someone to be brave with, if this is my future."

In this sea of copper-hided Dothraki giants, and sly, skittish beige-skinned Pentoshi, Sunset stared up at the little silver-haired Princess, with eyes almost pony-sized and a shade of violet almost exactly like- no. The little biped echo of the Princess looked down at the decapitated body of the late magister, and Daenerys Stormborn sighed at the blood and gore.

"I am told that a Dothraki wedding is a dull affair if any less than three men die in its course. I think this makes today a success. Come on, get up – what did you say your name was again?"

"Sunset Shimmer, Your Highness."

"It is very nice to meet you, Sunset Shimmer. Now, then. We should probably see about getting that harness off of you, it looks like it's galling."

Author's Note

So a user named dragon whisper 243 PM'd me last September asking for a story about Sunset Shimmer and the baby dragons from Game of Thrones. I told them at the time that I was busy working on other things and didn't really do requests as such, but the idea ticked over and turned into this beginning of a story. It's by no means what dragon whisper 243 was asking for, but you put in your bit, and the slot-machine chugs away, and sometimes it hits 'three dragon eggs', and sometimes it hits 'unicorn filly goes through the Mirror and gets enslaved and sold to the Dothraki'.

So, yeah. Dothraki Sunset. I guess it's a thing?

Thanks for editing and pre-reading help to Oliver, Shrink Laureate and the general Company.

And for anyone who wants to read along and make fun of my nonexistent linguistic chops, here's the Dothraki conlang wiki.

Jealousy and Gifts

The wedding returned to its interrupted rhythms, as Sunset was led away from the nuptial-ramp and her late owner's corpse was dragged off to be dumped onto a middens-heap. The dancing had resumed in front of the ramp and its notables, as those notables re-arranged themselves and their intended gifts. A hoof-full of slave-maidens pulled the unicorn's bloodied reins, and half-dragged, half-led the shocked filly off to the back of the celebration, away from the drumming and the thumping of feet and the trilling of ape-voices and the strumming of their instruments, and the roaring of the mob.

The slave-maidens found the scullions' corner, and doused the blood-soaked unicorn in water intended for the washing of platters and plates, the contribution of the civilized Pentoshi to the studied barbary of the Dothraki celebration. As they hosed down the orange mare, the cleaning of dishes and stoneware continued mere feet away from Sunset's shivering nose, the serving-wenches and scullion-slaves working in their eternal, endless, ancient rituals, unheeding of the death of this warrior or that merchant-prince among the celebrants off somewhere beyond their humble sphere.

Sunset Shimmer had left her proper sphere, her proper place, and the universe had punished her, swiftly, brutally, savagely, without warning. She had thought to be a princess, to be a power in the world, a hoof upon the scales, a pony of substance and import. She had taken that chance, taken that door that had opened, beckoning, for her.

She would be suffering the consequences of her pride for a very long time. Very likely, for the rest of her life, however brief or miserable it might be. Look at the late Magister Allynio. He thought he had found his leverage, his opportunity. He thought he had won his place among his peers, right until the blade – the arakh split his collar-bone, and severed the rest of him from him.

Sunset stomped on the remnants of her pride, and remembered the dumb, uncomprehending look upon Magister Allynio's decapitated head, as it landed upon the rammed earth beside her hooves. She let the slave-maidens rinse the Magister's blood from her coat, and vowed to never act again without knowing exactly what she was stepping into, what precisely she was courting with this or that act.

She may have been a slave, but slaves still have choices in how they deal with the whims of their masters. The first thing she needed to discover is who exactly held her reins in this new reality. Was it the beautiful doll, or her bug-eyed brother, or the new Magister – or that great, horrible beast that they were betrothing to the little doll.

She listened to the slave-maidens as they burbled, and quarreled. They spoke something that sort of sounded like the barbaric jabber she'd heard out in the celebrating crowd, but, she thought, maybe not exactly the same? She listened to each phoneme, each exclamation, each cry and squawk as they argued over her pelt.

Sunset was quickly cleansed of the filth she had been coated in, but the slave-maidens continued to milk the assignment, fiddling about like slaves always did. No pony or ape – no person exerted themselves in diligence when they were not free to sell that diligence for their own benefit. The slave always did what was sufficient to avoid the whip, or to ingratiate themselves with a caring master, if such were the opportunity offered. But work for the virtue of the work? Never.

Sunset had not been a slave for long, but she was a brilliant and clever mare, and she had bent all of her considerable wiles upon learning the incentives and the opportunities inherent in being chattel, being property. She would do whatever she could do to free herself from her current condition, but she recognized the difficulties inherent in the prospect. If she were, by the horrifically violent Khal's reckoning, his property, he would not scruple to butcher her upon the spot if she rebelled in any minor or major way. The weight of the magister's head bouncing off of her cutie mark burned in her memory, and every time she thought of it, she could feel it again as if it were happening, right now, in this very moment.

In the final analysis, she was a prey animal among thousands of unpredictable and violent predators. She was always in danger, she could never forget that.

The slave-maidens continued to pick over her ruined fineries, removing this bit or that. Sunset didn't care; her people walked under the skies as naked as they were foaled, excepting only special occasions, or the pompous or pretentious who wore this or that to emphasize their status or their position in society. And those few ponies who required protection against the consequences of their profession or their hobbies.

They'd gotten to the harness which was wrapped around her skull and her horn, locked firmly in place, keeping her massive magical reserves locked pointlessly within her, fruitless, useless. Without her horn, Sunset was weak, defenseless. She was no earth pony, to protect herself with brute strength, no pegasus, to soar high above threat and consequence. She was stuck here, on this earth, surrounded by potential threats, without the strength to contest her bodily integrity.

Speaking of which, the hoof – no, the slave-maidens had bored of fiddling with her harness, and left it in place, and began dragging her off to return to the celebration. She'd picked out a few words and expressions from their babble, and she rather thought that they were gossiping about – oh. Yeah, that was what Sunset thought.

Most of her attendants were apparently thinking about getting laid, some of them, again. She'd heard the noises earlier, and had suspected what they had been about, but at the time she'd been willing to ignore the whole matter, as definitely not her business.

Sunset wasn't sure if it was still not her business, if the slave-maidens who had apparently claimed her, bodily, had decided that she belonged among their number. The servants and slaves of the late Allynio had laughed and joked about the Dothraki's penchant for livestock-buggery, and some had mocked Sunset to her face about her future status as an object for the filthy savages' lusts. At least two servants – or slaves, she had never been quite sure of their status in the infuriatingly vague and contradictory Pentoshi legal regime as regards to slavery – had tried their own hands at livestock-buggery.

Sunset had sent them off with a well-placed hoof in a place they'd be not relishing for a very long time. After that, they'd left her be. She had only been glad that no-one in a position of authority had decided to break her spirit via that method. It had occurred to her in the dark of the solitary night that it was a possibility, and from then on, she had exerted herself to the utmost to do everything that her owners had demanded of her.

She prized every last morsel of bodily autonomy this monstrous world had left her. Including that.

They returned to the heaving mass, and her fellow-slaves dissolved into the dance, and the tumult. She watched as one and the other and the next joined the dancing, and then the thing which was a sort of dance in itself. She backed herself into a safe corner, and watched, wild-eyed, the roaring and the singing and the drinking and the rest of it.

She had been still very young when she'd rejected the Princess's rule, and her refusal to see her worthiness. But she hadn't been that young. She had just been… disinterested. In all the social niceties, and the less-than-niceties that went along with them. She kept her flank pressed up against the side of the ramp, and kept her head lowered, so that none of the celebrants looked too long at her.

Up on the top of the ramp, the gift-giving continued, and she listened to the fragments of Valyrian, and the much more common savages-tongue, trying to keep on top of what was happening up above, away from the chaos that surrounded her on three sides. The little princess was being given fineries, and gold, and gems, and slaves. Sunset heard the names of three hand-maidens given directly to the Princess Daenerys, and committed them to memory. She heard her mistress offered a whip, and a sword, and a great-bow, and she heard the little doll thank her benefactors, and direct them to give these men's tools to her new husband's warriors.

Finally, the groom's gift to his bride was brought forth, and Sunset looked over her shoulder at the handsome young mare her mistress had been given. The horses of this world were not really much like those of Sunset's world. The Saddle Arabians had been not all that different from Equestrian ponies, being cognizant, prideful, and delighting in their silks and their elaborate tack. These Dothraki-horses were more squat than the horses Sunset had known in passing, less elegant, less well-formed, with tiny, brutish eyes. They looked sturdy and swift, as if someone had cross-bred some of the more stout breeds of earth pony with – Sunset didn't know, maybe steer?

She had heard often enough that horses and ponies in this strange world did not speak, did not think, did not reason. She'd encountered so very few of them that she'd taken it mostly on faith. But now, her eyes met those of the gift-filly as she was led past Sunset's place beside the ramp, and she saw there was no spark of intelligence in those limpid eyes. It was a beautiful beast, and nothing else.

She listened, head down, glaring at anyone who approached her in the giddy chaos around the flanks of the nuptial ramp. Her mistress was delighted in this gift, in this beautiful horse who shared her striking colors, whose lines were so lovely, so swift, so perfect.

Sunset's heart froze to hear her mistress's praise for a filly who wasn't her, and she fought herself. This was not the Princess, this was a princess of apes, a nothingness in a dark and terrible world. She was a silly, beautiful filly, and while Sunset's safety depended on the good graces of this new mistress, she could not afford to let this Daenerys be anything other than a benefactor, a protector.

However much the delight on her doll-like face threatened to melt the frozen mush that had replaced Sunset's innards. The little princess lept into the perfectly-sewn saddle on the filly's back, and the two of them raced off, dancing through the crowd as if the rest of the world were frozen in amber or ice. Sunset's astonished eyes followed them as they beat back and forth, running as if they were one animal, a centaur with two sets of violet eyes, two heads with platinum-silver manes streaming behind them, and then – they leapt. And soared over a fire-pit, making a perfect landing on the far side of the flames.

They came back up the ramp at a sedate trot, the gorgeous filly not breathing heavily at all, and the little princess balanced perfectly in the saddle. She said something beautiful and lovely about her gift via translators to her new husband, and the two of them stared at each other as if they weren't as different as a doe and a minotaur, or a dragon and a griffin. Sunset found herself marveling that the bride and the groom were considered the same species, that some mad fool thought to breed the two of them.

And then the Khal's massive horse was brought up from behind of the nuptial ramp, and that enormous nomad-king mounted in a motion like water flowing, and he towered above his new bride once again. And the Khal boomed, in his leathery voice, this: "Ankaan adothrak hatif anni; anha ochilok ma shafkoa vosecchi. Adothrak!"

And with that, the four of them were gone like lightning, the violet-white blur ahead of the bronze-black, and the crowd roared, and roared, and roared. The wedding-feast roared their collective approval of the married couple's first ride, until they disappeared in the distance, and the dancing and the drinking resumed, and Sunset could once again hear herself think.

Eventually the newly-gifted hand-maidens of the little princess found her, huddling beside her rammed-earth half-barricade, and the three of them laughed at her, and they laughed at her reins, and the blue-eyed one grabbed those reins up, and they went to find a saw or a set of picks to get that damnable harness off of Sunset's head.

The princess – no, the khaleesi – she had remembered her promise. Sunset Shimmer would have her soul-cage removed.

And Sunset trembled at the effort as she struggled to fight off that feeling in her chest. Listening to the laughing hand-maidens helped. At last, she had someone to talk to; she had leverage.

Author's Note

Thanks for editing and pre-reading help to Oliver, Shrink Laureate and the general Company.

Lock and Keys

Sunset learned the names of the three handmaidens who were gifted to the princess – no, the khaleesi. They amused themselves in trying to remove her harness as the wedding feast idled into a bloated and exhausted languor. None of the three were smiths, or leather-workers, and all of them were drunker than lords. They fumbled and giggled and laughed, as punch-drunk from the excitement as the mead and wine they had drunk.

Nobody had offered the unicorn a glass or a cup, or horn, or whatever barbarous implements these savages used to take their drink.

They startled when Sunset finally spoke, offering her accented Pentoshi Valyrian opinion on what they were doing wrong, and suggesting they look for the key to the lock which had been on the person of her late master.

The three new handmaidens had not been present when she had been so catastrophically presented to the khal and his bride, so it took some doing before Sunset was able to convince them that there was no ventriloquist hidden under the tables, or behind the cooking-pits, throwing her voice in their direction to make them think that a dumb beast spoke.

"What sort of world is this, that nobody can believe that when a pony's lips move, the voice that comes out of her mouth is, indeed, hers? See?" Sunset opened her mouth wide, showing her teeth and tongue. "No peanut butter, no gum, I am not being manipulated in any way."

"Athmovezar!" exclaimed the shorter of the two Dothraki slave-maidens. "Hrazef movelat movek! Maegi athmovezar!"

"Ahhi vos zigereo tokikhi, Irri!" said the taller of the two Dothraki. Sunset was still struggling with this new language, but the more she heard of it, the simpler it seemed to be. Something about not being a – hrm, context – fool? The Dothraki continued in this vein, rattling off something something isvezhe – beast? And that was definitely about speaking…

" but my mother 'movek astolat', khalakki," Sunset tried to say, guessing that those words meant something about teaching her to speak. It shut the taller Dothraki up, and she stood her full length, the good humor fleeing her wide, flat face.

"Nevar uus this nahme for such as Jhiqui, sivezhe," she said in heavily accented Valyrian. "My haid it would be. Jhiqui ees khaleessiya. No thing else."

"Then don't call me a beast, either, khaleessiya Jhiqui. I think I also am a khaleessiya, now. 'Slave'?"

"No, not zafra. Khaleessiya not vosak, not nobody. But not khalakki, not me."

"It is very good to meet you, khaleessiya Jhiqui. My name is Sunset Shimmer."

The other two khaleessiya watched owlishly as the oldest of the three tried to whinny her way through Sunset's name, and gradually broke into inebriated giggle-fits as the attempts grew wilder and less correct with each reiteration.

"Bwahahah, no, stop." Sunset gave up, "Just call me Sunset Shimmer, it's close enough." She used the Pentoshi equivalents, the ones the late Allyrio had insisted upon using. It was becoming apparent that this world's people's vocal cords weren't nearly as versatile as a pony's.

"Sunset. Pretty. Like you coat." She leaned over to brush at Sunset's cutie mark. "Huh. Paint not come off."

"It isn't paint. It's part of me. Please don't… touch that. It's sensitive."

Jhiqui's hand jerked away from Sunset's flank. The yellow-haired khaleessiya – handmaiden? – laughed lasciviously.

"So our Jhiqui is a horse-lover, such a good thing to know. Sunset, you won't be lonely for long!" She spoke Pentoshi with a thick accent, but much more coherently than the older of the two Dothraki girls. She was neither copperish like a Dothraki, nor the darker-beige of the Pentoshi natives, nor even the shocking paleness of the new khalessi. A sort of lighter beige.

Jhiqui's hand lashed out like a whip, and came back with a tangle of yellow hair, the snickering Doreah's head dragging behind it. The taller Dothraki shoved her face into the struggling girl's, snarling. She half-barked something dangerous-sounding in the horde-tongue, and then cleared her throat.

"You not say things in hearing of khaleesi. Are lies of stone-house rabble. Can get you dragged to say. Then khaleesi – maybe sad, maybe mad, sure mad at us. You behav better, Lysene mezhah, sek?"

Jhiqui shook Doreah again, emphasizing her point. "Erinat, sek?"

"Er-erinat, sek."

Jhiqui let the smaller girl go, smiling. "Verry gud. We ride together. You Dothraki now, you learn. Adothrak niyanqoy khas, dothrakh khasar. Those who ride together, are Dothraki. Andothrak vos, yer vosak. Those who don't ride together, are nobody."

Sunset had pulled into herself a bit, as the khaleessiya, the handmaidens sorted out their dominance positions within the little herd. She knew how these things worked. She'd been strong under the Princess, the hard hoof under a dominant but doting figure. Princess Celestia had been overwhelming, unchallengeable in her strength, but the Princess had never exerted herself in these sorts of petty order-establishing cruelties. It had been beneath the Princess, in a way it hadn't been beneath Sunset. Would it be beneath this new khaleesi? Or the khal?

The memory of blood across her face, that brief terrible weight upon her flank – no, the khal was this herd's Princess, no matter how much his new bride resembled Sunset's last sovereign. And he was no Celestia. And Sunset wasn't even herself, not so long as she still had this damned harness suppressing her magic.

The three handmaidens had burned off their inebriation in the squabble. Sunset thought it was time to redirect matters in her favor.

"Jhiqui, how will this court of the new khaleesi be conducted? Will we pull each other's manes, and screech in each other's ears, and snipe, and tussle, and act the foal in front of our mistress?"

"Truth from tiny horse. Hah. Kirrof, je? Shall we find your magister's corpse, and find kirrof for your gech? I saw body on graddakhsan passed on way to presentation." Jhiqui laughed at something, as she said this, but wouldn't explain what had amused her. The other two handmaidens were too busy quarrelling over something that Sunset couldn't quite understand, and suspected neither of them did, either, since neither really shared a language with each other. It sounded like they were volleying random words back and forth, which was very – no, no time for learning Dothraki grammar. Jhiqui was leaving.

Sunset followed the taller slave. A 'graddhakhsan' proved to be a midden, and Jhiqui had been right. The late Allynio's body was indeed beginning its moulder upon a pile of kitchen-trash and filth, laid over top of the murdered remnants of several other victims of the celebrations. Jhiqui laughed and held up her hands when Sunset tried to guilt her into using her more dexterous hands to search the dead magister for the missing key.

Sunset sighed, and climbed into the midden, nudging at the bloodied mess that had been her master a few hours earlier. She bit and pulled at his soaked clothing, trying to ignore the smells. To be honest, the midden was too new and fresh to be truly disgusting, the unicorn was positive it wouldn't truly begin to go off for another day or two.

There it was! Sunset pulled the key out of the midden with her teeth, her lip curling against the dried blood and the filth its string had been soaked with.

"'ere, pleze, Miss Jhiqui, I can't reach m' own lock frm ths 'ngle. Cld ye' tak-"

The handmaiden smiled, and bent down, and took the jeweled key from the mare's mouth, and reached around the back of the pony's head, fumbling with the lock.

"Beautiful thing, to be wasted on a beast's bridle. Such thing on hrazef, it is not known!"

Sunset guessed that the handmaiden was young, perhaps barely out of late adolescence, by Sunset's admittedly uneducated estimate. Whatever Jhiqui's actual age, Sunset was fairly sure that she was not an ancient servant, blessed with long decades of service to past khaleesi. But if the Dothraki maiden was willing to take this blasted harness from Sunset's galled and throbbing head, she would call her auntie, matron, or lord high mistress of tiny horses, naqis hrazef, if that was what it took.

The sensation when the harness came off was indescribable. It had been Sunset's burden and agony for so long that she'd forgotten what life felt like without a cage of pressure and pain pressing down on her horn, the sides of her muzzle, the base of her ears, her mane above her poll. The pain, if anything, increased with the relief of the pressure.

Sunset, her entire head throbbing, thought through the haze that it was some sort of delayed reaction, or perhaps her nerves turning back on, prematurely. She fell to her stomach, holding her poor, aching head in her hooves.

She felt kind fingers pull her hooves apart, and explore the bridle of fire which had burst into flame from where the leather one had laid across her scalp.

"Such a galling! Jjhiqui has never seen the like! It good that such an owner cut down. Come, we will find the vezkoalak, find if vezkokh enough for sore."

Sunset followed the guiding hand of the handmaiden, through the dull red haze of the terrible pain that had suddenly erupted from her abraded head. She didn't understand how the removal of the bridle had brought this pain so sharply to the surface.

An hour later, the vezkoalak, a masculine horse-doctor – which Jhiqui had somehow, magically found among the utter chaos of the celebrations – tutted over Sunset's head. He exchanged rapid-fire Dothraki with Jhiqui that Sunset absently recorded to memory, her thoughts deadened by the rolling waves of pain. As the discussion continued, her attention was drawn to a commotion on the edge of the wedding-chaos. The khal and his bride returning? The horse-doctor, the 'vezkoalak', rubbed some sort of alchemical salve into the horrible sores that had been hidden by the bridle and harness. It was absolute agony, followed by a cooling numbness, and gradually Sunset's mind-breaking agony receded.

But when the wave of pain ebbed away, it left behind it increasing unease, an existential fear which dwarfed Sunset's inconsequential physical pain. The pain had been masking an absence, an emptiness that now was becoming horribly apparent. The only thing she truly cared about, the only thing that made her somepony important.

Her magic wasn't there. She felt nothing, nothing at all.

And she she felt more naked than ever, a pony alone, among forty-thousand predators.

Author's Note

Thanks for editing and pre-reading help to Oliver, Shrink Laureate and the general Company.

The Killing Herd

The wedding-encampment bustled madly in the wake of the return of the new khaleesi and the great khal. Still-hung-over riders were rousted out of their filth by their betters, who in Sunset's observation may very well have been chosen more for their capacity to work through hangovers than any actual battle-prowess.

But though Sunset hadn't seen the khalasar in action, she certainly saw them in inaction that morning, and the Dothraki in motion were dizzying, especially to a battered young mare dealing with the medicated side-effects of vezkokh, of gall-balm. By late morning, the many slaves of the horde were scurrying here and there like ants over a kicked-over hive, fetching and carrying and generally retrieving all of the many light possessions of the khalasar from where they had been scattered by nomad carelessness and celebration and the chaos that came in the wake of celebration.

Sunset, being one of those new possessions of the khalasar, was initially chivvied along with the wedding-gifts towards a small cluster of carts which must have been the khal's personal train, along with the three new khaleessiya, and the greater swarm of lesser slaves who had been the khal's personal ape-horde.

No, that wasn't a proper description of the khalzafra – among the Dothraki zafra, the khalzafra were of higher status, but they were still zafra, slaves. Sunset's sharp eyes picked out the Khal's actual herd, stomping flat-footed here and there among the chaos. She listened carefully, and caught the word, dothrakhqoyi. Something rider? Sunset asked a scurrying zafra in broken half-Pentoshi, half-Dothraki.

They spat, and pointed at a spray of filth in the mud. Sunset looked closer, and saw it was a half-dried spray of blood, the relic of one of the night's savage quarrels.

Bloodriders. The Khal's herd was composed of dothrakhqoyi, bloodriders.

And as the wedding-gifts were gathered and loaded bit by bit onto the new carts – clearly some merchant's own minor gift to the new khaleesi – Sunset began trying her best to aid the khalzafra and the khaleessiya. When she had first been captured and enslaved, Sunset had found it hard to use her hooves to perform basic tasks, she had been so used to doing everything with her supple and powerful magic.

Six weeks of deprivation had brought back her hoof-dexterity by simple necessity. The other slaves marveled at how clever a horse's hooves could be at the command of a thinking mind.

Sunset pulled her own weight. She knew what she saw, and knew that nopony would be allowed to fall behind in a grand herd like this.

See what they expect, and exceed it. See what they prize, and be it. Discover what they admire – and become it.

This wasn't Sunset's first time among strange ponies, even if it was the first time she had been alone among… this sort of herd.

A killing herd. A horde. A khalasar.

The carts were assembled, and all the khal's precious new possessions were piled carefully and packed down so that they would not destroy each other in the course of travel. Sunset did what she was directed, and it was striking how few words were needed to do what was required. The khalzafra spoke in a dozen accents, and Sunset was fairly certain that at least a quarter of the words used were not Dothraki at all – the khalzafra patois was a crazed mix of at least four languages, only one of which was Pentoshi. Visually, they looked mostly like their Dothraki masters, to Sunset's pony eyes. Perhaps some of them were flatter-faced, eyes more narrow, perhaps some subtle distinctions in their bronze hides. Some few were beige-skinned like Doreah.

None of them were ivory-colored like the new khaleesi.

Sunset absorbed as much as she could, her galled ears as wide as she could open them.

The carts were close to completed, when a pair of leather-vested men leading a string of beasts of burden appeared among the khalzafra's bustle. Sunset eyed her fellow quadrupeds, having rarely gotten this close of a look. Their eyes were tiny, and incurious, their heads big and exaggerated, like some fantasy of cave-ponies. Sunset knew that these things were no more ponies than the rock-monkeys of Canterlot were the Dothraki, but it was nonetheless strange to behold.

An argument broke out between the drogikhmahrazh, the herd-men, and Jhiqui, and they jabbered back and forth, pointing at Sunset where she was working with her teeth and her hooves, tying down the bundles of fine cloth now hidden under oiled hides on the top of one of the carts.

This would be ever so much easier if I just had my magic, damnit.

Sunset was half-distracted by the taste of the leather straps – which she was pretty sure was horse-hide – but she caught a word here or there, and realized that the herd-men wanted to take her away.

They were going to pitch her into the fucking herd? What? No, that wasn't right – the remounts herd. Jhiqui was arguing that Sunset wasn't the Khal's, she was the khaleesi's personal property. The herd-men weren't having any of that, and it sounded like they wanted the khaleesi's new grey, too, while they were at it.

How could they take the grey? The khaleesi was still riding it. Sunset must have misunderstood that one.

More important! Sunset was about to become livestock!

Time to do something about that.

Sunset scurried over to where Irri and Doreah were packing up the fineries into their carrying-cases. Sunset wasn't exactly sure what horse-nomads would do with a full set of silver service, or fine metalworking tools, but they were putting them away into well-worked carrying cases nonetheless.

"Quickly!" whispered Sunset in an urgent half-shout. "I need some reason to stay with the khal's personal caravan. I can't disappear into the drogikh – I can't become drogikhoon!"

"Drogikh – what are you talking about?" muttered Doreah.

Irri rolled her eyes at the non-Dothraki woman, and rattled off something quick and quiet about herds – drogikh – and horses. Good, Sunset had understood that one aright. And Doreah got it from context.

Sunset wasn't the only one here learning on the job.

The handmaidens put together a set of impromptu saddlebags with Sunset and Sunset's set of leather straps she'd been using to tie down the carts. They quickly filled the saddlebags with a pile of precious books on one side, and the silver-service set on the other.

Sunset turned around with a broad grin as the two herd-men came rolling over with Jhiqui scowling behind them. Sunset twitched her flanks side-to-side to make sure her saddlebags weren't going to fall apart in the next thirty seconds, and the two Dothraki men eyed her display.

"Hrazefmoska? Sekke? Anha ajjin tokik?" asked the older of the two herders. Packhorse, thought Sunset, absorbing vocabulary as fast as she could. And there was her old friend, fool, again. Simple negation structure? Hopefully the man was a fool. He waved off the handmaidens and their new pack-horse, muttering something that Sunset suspected was maybe it's too small to ride anyways.

The herd-men untied their placid, dead-eyed horses from the leading-lines, and guided the khalzafra as they strapped them into the cart-traces. Sunset watched carefully, and while the herd-men's backs were turned, came up beside one of the horses waiting her – no, his turn. Wait, no – gelding. Sunset gagged a bit, and then got over her revulsion before she was caught doing something unhorselike.

Sunset had never been a peasant, to haul her own carts or carriages, but she'd seen them every day of her life, even in the palace. It was the pony way of life, after all. And she knew how to un-knot a halter, and pull a harness into place.

The horse she chose didn't seem like it knew what to think of Sunset. Sunset suspected she smelled like something half-human, half-horse to the poor confused thing. She settled its confusion by nipping its ear, and then pushing it forward into the harness she'd chosen for it. The gelding fell into compliance, reassured by Sunset's assertion of dominance, and it moved into place with the practiced habit of a lifetime hauling carts for humans. Sunset fumbled a bit initially with the straps and the buckles, but eventually found the notch in the leather and the latches set in place.

And that was when the younger of the two herd-men yelled behind her, having finally spotted what she was doing.

Sunset spun around, grinning, and said, in what she knew was broken Dothraki, "I think I gots it, but belt she maybe break, can look see please horse-man?"

And then Sunset realized what nonsense she'd just babbled, and it took all of her self-possession to not facehoof right there and then. She kept a desperate smile on her muzzle as the young herder scurried up to her gelding in their harness, yelping about some silly zafra handling his precious livestock.

Good, he's already thinking of me as zafra, not as livestock.

The older herder barked at Sunset and the younger herder, when he found the two of them going over Sunset's awkward and not very successful attempt to harness her gelding, but in the end all he did was drive Sunset off, and finish up the job.

That's as far as I'll be able to push that, for now. Time to back off.

The older of the two was named Ahego, the younger, Alikho. She thought maybe they were related. Subject for later investigation. For now, Sunset got out of their way.

Sunset chose rather to be distracted by a slight commotion coming up the road from the city walls in the hazy distance. The khaleesi's scrawny brother had returned, with the other Pentoshi magister. The arrogant brother was in a heavy buff coat, a sword at his hip, and there was a cart with a local drover driving a pair of donkeys. The cart bumped lightly over the ruts in the road, as if it weren't fully loaded under the tarp tied down over it.

"…not a good idea, Your Majesty. A Dothraki horde in the interior is not a comfortable or safe place for those who were not born to the nomadic life," worried the Magister at the boy Sunset had heard Allyrio deride as 'the Beggar King'.

"Mine dearest magister, I haven't the slightest fear of these horse rabble. They know what I offer them, and the Dragon fears no horse-soldiers, however brash and famous their arms. But I know how easily savages forget their obligations, if reminders of said obligations are not always before them in remembrance. I will stay with my sister and her new husband until he gives unto me his promised arms, and the men to wield them. It is my obligation to my own dignity, my lord magister. And that is that."

"Your Majesty, far be it from me to contradict a King's wisdom. I merely beg you one more time to consider you make your seat here in Pentos, where you can keep current with the reports from Westeros and-" and they were again out of even Sunset's sharp hearing, somewhere beyond the khal's personal train, obscured by the muttering and the clatter of the remounts herd being formed up on that side of the collapsing encampment.

And Sunset noted the human in heavy armor upon a tall, handsome stallion, hurrying to catch up with the Beggar King and the magister. She vaguely remembered the man from the night before-

The white princess and her savage husband chose that moment to distract Sunset from her calculations, pulling up to the prepared carts, their khalzafra, slaves, and the new khaleesi's khaleessiya, handmaidens. The pale little princess was weaving bleary-eyed on the back of her grey filly, only Khal Drogo's strong, ruthless hand on her reins keeping that pony from bolting in panic at the lack of direction from her flagging rider.

Sunset, following some sort of instinct whose origin she didn't understand or recognize, hurried over to the side of the wild-eyed grey filly, who even in her youth and coltishness, was still five or six hooves taller than the orange unicorn. Sunset rubbed up against the shoulder of the skittish filly, and muttered nonsense-words in the general direction of the horse's ear.

Sunset's closeness calmed the horse, and Drogo, his eyebrows high and perplexed at Sunset's sudden display, let go of the reins, and leapt smoothly off of his own stallion, walking around the far side of the grey to pluck his bride from her saddle.

The Khal barked instructions at Irri and Jhiqui, who showed him to the pallet they'd arranged in the middle of the cloth-cart for their new employer-owner. Sunset was impressed by this display of planning and foresight on the part of Jhiqui, and resolved to keep closer to the other handmaiden.

Sunset had much to learn.

The Khal hovered over his sleeping young bride for a second, while the rest of his household watched him carefully. All around the household, the rest of the encampment was disappearing into saddle-bags, carts, and into thin air, as far as Sunset could tell. She took the grey's reins into her teeth, and waited for the two herd-men, Ahego and Alikho, to remember their duty, and take the grey into their care.

Ahego walked up to the two quadrupeds, and looked at Sunset with those leather reins in her teeth.

"Azha yer javrakaan anni, hrazef-maegi," he snarled, and seized the javrath, the grey's reins. Then he spat at Sunset's hooves, and stomped off, the grey following placidly in his wake.

"Sunset," sang Jhiqui, "I tink Ahego, he like you!"

Off in the distance, Sunset could see a scattering of horse-riders moving away from the encampment, and columns of horses, riders, and carts were forming in ranks to the eastward, away from the great walls of Pentos.

The Khal threw himself into the saddle of a new horse, a great-chested roan mare, and he moved off in the direction of the disappearing riders. A half-dozen riders fell in behind him, and then another dozen, and then two of the carts the zafra had prepared, and then the remount herd. More carts, more carts, carts filling up with zafra running to catch their rides, swarming over their low sides.

And then the cart holding the three khaleessiya, and the sleeping khaleesi, and then…

Sunset broke out of her trance, and trotted to catch up with her herd, and her place within it, beside the dull-eyed dray-horses in their traces.

It was still an hour and a half short of noon.

As they left the ruins of the wedding-encampment, Sunset kicked the dust of Pentos from her heels.

Author's Note

Thanks for editing and pre-reading help to Oliver, Shrink Laureate and the general Company.

Getting Under Way

As the khal's train curled through the vast encampment of the greater horde, there was bustling all around them. The handmaidens and a pair of khalzafra hurriedly put up a bonnet over the khaleesi's sleeping head, hiding her in the cart she slept in. Sunset got the impression that they didn't want the khalasar to see their young bride in her current state.

The bonnet hid the handmaidens, and what they did inside the cart, from the curious eyes of the khal's riders. The encampments stretched endlessly, yard after yard, acre after acre, far further than Sunset had noticed over that long, terrifying wedding-day. All but the smallest fraction of Drogo's khalasar had been encamped far from the wedding-field itself.

Sunset brought to memory her mentor's techniques for estimating crowd-size, and revisited in that prodigious memory the actual teeming crowds which had then seemed to her to be an infinite sea of ape hostility. Now that she was calmer, and less terrified in the moment, she came to the realization that she'd only seen a couple of thousand bodies, three thousand at the most.

The collapsing tents dotted the horizon, clustered here and there, as far as the eye could see. Pentos' high brick towers rose over the west side of a flat plain that stretched between that great city and a low series of ridges rising in the east. In between was a rich farmland, flat as a planed board, full of prosperous hamlets and cart-tracks leading up to Pentos' many small but well-guarded eastern gates.

Those hamlets were locked up tight, terrified, not a single head to be seen as the khal's train rolled down a farm-track, outriders spreading out away from the carts and those khalzafra who hadn't been able to inveigle a spot on the carts.

Emptied presentation-ricks stood outside the gates of each hamlet, once full of gifts for the horde, now empty and forlorn. Sunset tried to think of what things the farmers could offer the horse-lords to keep them from busting down their doors, breaking into their desperate little fastnesses, and stealing away their colts and their fillies, murdering their dams and sires, and taking everything they had.

In between the hamlets and their inhabitants hiding desperately from the savages camped around their gates, were the Dothraki camps themselves, and the endless, teeming herds. Herds of horses, herds of goats, herds of cattle. But primarily, and overwhelmingly - horses. And out there, among the endless Dothraki herds, Sunset's sensibilities were overwhelmed by that mass of horseflesh, the sight and the smell of them all. Almost as dully-colored as their owners, the Dothraki horses in aggregate were mostly shades of brown. They looked to Sunset's Equestrian-trained eyes like so many short-eared donkeys, so boring were their coats. No wonder the Dothraki painted abstract designs on their livestock, to tell them from each other. Sunset wondered if dams could even tell their own fillies and colts from each other without some sort of guidance.

As the khal's train rolled past, each modest Dothraki camp collapsed on itself, the last of the tents disappearing into their own carts, the riders on their painted horses forming up in little bands to stretch their mounts' legs, and to remember their own riding-legs.

Or, at least, so Sunset supposed. The experience of watching thinking beings that rode unthinking creatures was still a new one to the flame-haired unicorn. She had read more than once of the semi-mythical centaurs of distant lands, whose ape-like torsos rose high over equine bodies, whose unified wholes capered gracefully through the pages of her mentor's illustrated books.

Sunset wondered if the centaurs had looked like these horse-lord apes on their mindless cattle. The 'hzaref' looked a little like ponies, or rather, like Saddle Arabian horses, but only superficially. Their tiny eyes reflected even tinier minds, as empty as those of some dogs Sunset had known, or chickens, or perhaps a chipmunk. She eyed the placid hrazefmoska which she'd helped harness into the khaleesi's cart's traces, as it pushed forward against those traces, hauling its bumping burden over the rutted track beneath their hooves.

Each camp breaking up into its road-components contributed its own little band of riders into the growing swirl of display and athleticism. Right now, they were performing for each other, and perhaps the few outriders of the khal's personal household. Khal Drogo himself had disappeared somewhere with his elder dothrakhqoyi, bloodriders, and his exhausted khaleesi was still hidden from sight. The only ponies – no, the only people to see the common Dothraki riders and their antics were the hoof-full of younger attendants which the khal's personal entourage had left behind with the train.

Sunset stuck her nose under the bonnet, keeping her balance as she walked beside the cart. She met the gaze of Jhiqui, who sat on her heels over their sleeping beauty, now dressed in new, unstained finery taken from the gifted clothing, but unconscious still.

“They're starting to get demonstrative out here. Is it common to run about with young colts and fillies standing on the backs of moving hrazef?" Sunset asked the elder handmaiden.

“Oh, graddakh! The manin are beginning their displays, are they?" Jhiqui looked down at the sleeping, small face of their mistress. “Khaleesi really does need sleep. She will be darif-mhar enough in the days to come, without proper rest." Saddle-sore, right.

Sunset whinnied a proverb from home, and at Jhiqui's interested perplexity, translated it into Pentoshi. “Present pains bring future stature, they used to say." Satisfactions, actually, was the saying, but somehow Sunset didn't think that would fly, here.

“Bah. We start to wake Khaleesi. But will need hrazef. Go get it, Sunset?"

Sunset rolled her eyes at the handmaiden. “I go Ahego…" Sunset started in Dothraki, and then thought it through, and gave up and finished in Pentoshi, “You think he'll let me return without another damn halter?"

Jhiqui crossed her eyes trying to follow, and then cursed and asked Irri to go in Sunset's stead.

They got the Khaleesi up on her hooves – no, her feet, and into the grey's retrieved saddle. The clots of random young Dothraki riders thickened around the train as the sun in the sky approached the western horizon, and the bravura displays increased in wildness and flair now that they had a proper audience.

The little princess smiled tightly, sitting stiffly in her saddle, looking tiny in her silks and filmy finery. Sunset walked beside the grey, saying nothing, but keeping a close eye on the sleep-deprived young bride. Around them, the horse-riding manic apes leapt about, whirling ropes about, swinging their sharp-bladed strange weapons, and cracking whips.

Both Sunset and the little princess recoiled in surprise as one young maniac got up on his saddle-horn, and flung himself over a second rider, landing sure-hoofed and one-legged in the empty saddle of a third horse, which didn't even flinch at impact.

Sunset had no idea if this sort of thing was common among monkeys who rode. How would she know? She had no measure to judge. The little princess seemed impressed enough, though.

Beyond the crowd of young Dothraki eager to be seen by their khal's new khaleesi, the horde streamed in from every direction, and as the train rolled eastward towards the low hills rising in the distance, tents were no longer anywhere to be seen.

In the west, dust clouds began to obscure the setting sun. Sunset paused once or twice to concentrate, trying to evoke some sort of response from her horn, when she didn't think anypony was watching.

Nothing.

As the sun set, the train was still rolling eastwards, and beginning to climb the tracks into the hills. Sunset's sharp eyes had spotted the khaleesi's lanky brother and his impressive armsman joining the back of the train with the Beggar King's hired drover and cart. She could see the Beggar King scanning the herd of manic youths cavorting around his sister and Sunset, scowling. What was he looking for?

Just as the last light died in the west, Khal Drogo and his bloodriders appeared from where-ever they had gone, and the train pulled off the road, rolling up onto the top of the first height east of the rising. Tents went up quickly as the khal and his young bride sat their mounts, staring westwards at the various elements of the khalasar curled across the farm-dotted plain below, disappearing into the rapidly-gathering darkness.

Torches sprung into life, spreading out like a spiders-web of little flecks of ruddy light across the face of the earth below. Drogo boomed a great deal of Dothraki at the khaleesi, bragging to her of his travels that day, and carefully naming his Vezhak, his followers. Sunset could follow a little of what the khal was saying, but not by any means all of it.

She rather thought that the poor princess couldn't understand a word of it. She could see the filly's eyes twitch back and forth, glued to her hulking husband's eyes and lips as she struggled to pry some meaning from his barbaric speech.

At last, Drogo turned from his uncomprehending bride, and addressed Jhiqui, standing to the side at a respectful distance from his stirrup.

The handmaidens were instructed to take the khaleesi under their tutelage, and – quickly, Sunset thought?

Drogo rode off to do whatever, Sunset didn't know. Supervise the chaos of his horde's many little groupings as they shifted into road-mode, perhaps?

Sunset found herself volunteering as a mounting-block for the wobbly khaleesi, who almost fell out of her saddle. Sunset barely felt the weight of the little princess on her back, and she decided that it was a helpful distraction from the raging hornache which was emerging from the fading of the effects of the long-dried salve on her head's sores.

And still not a twitch from her magic. Damnit.

Once the handmaidens got their stumbling mistress into their shared tent that the khalzafra had erected, the salves came out. The delicate little white thing was as badly galled from a day and a night in the saddle as Sunset's head had been after weeks locked inside of a harness. Sunset looked down at the redness of the girl's thighs, and thanked her dam and sire for birthing her a pony.

Being a monkey-thing looked to be a rather miserable life, if this was how resilient they were to the scuffs and pains of daily life.

The khaleesi met Sunset's eyes, as Irri and Doreah rubbed the salve into her sores, and smiled like the dawn breaking.

Sunset couldn't help but return the smile.

“Their salve is helpful, Mistress," Sunset said to her owner. “I hope it will help you sleep."

The khaleesi's eyes widened at the reminder that the unicorn could speak.

“Thank you," said the girl. “I'm sorry, what was your name?"

“She says her name is Sunset Shimmer, Khaleesi," Doreah said, somewhat rudely.

Sunset kept her self-control, and did not snap at the Lysene handmaiden, turning the impulse instead into a bow, as deep as if it were to Princess Celestia herself.

“Sunset Shimmer, your highness," said Sunset, using the proper form of address from a subject to the immortal sovereign in her native Equish, bowing as she would have to Princess Celestia before her courtiers.

“Your servant, for as long as you will have me," Sunset continued in Pentoshi Valyrian, abasing herself as it had been beat into her by her captors.

"Anha, zhey Sunset, atak jin - anha silak azh, anha qothat azh, khaleesi," Sunset finished in what she desperately hoped was not broken Dothraki, rising to her hooves, and standing as tall as she could. She found that she still had to stare upwards to meet the Khaleesi's eyes. Her purple, intense eyes, so young, but still so very familiar.

Irri beamed at them both, and nudged Jhiqui, whispering something in her ear.

And Jhiqui started explaining to the Khaleesi what Sunset had said to their mistress.

Author's Note

Thanks for editing and pre-reading help to Oliver, Shrink Laureate and the general Company.

Lessons

The next day dawned very early, in the heights east of Pentos. The khaleesi's household was still sorting itself out, but Jhiqui was a steady hoof on the tiller, for all of her youth, and once she'd asserted her dominance over the khalzafra, things had settled down.

Sunset had been very impressed by Jhiqui's methods; they didn't draw blood or leave welts, but certainly got results. She'd noticed some of the side-glances among the zafra, though, and pondered whether interfering in the inevitable retaliations would affect her status in the herd.

She rather liked Jhiqui, but did she want to become the handmaiden's minion, her crony? Or did she want her to become hers instead? She'd have to think about that.

Sunset thought about her magic, and its infuriating refusal to cooperate. She'd dreamed last night of fire, of eyes in fire. Lavender, hypnotic eyes glowing in the heart of a blaze…

They finally got back onto the road well after the rising of the sun, with the khal staring sulfurously at his bride's laggard zafra. The rest of the horde was on the move around them, and they were shaming him before his followers. He hadn't actually lessened his dignity by laying about him with a hrazef-orvik, but the horse-whip certainly creaked with his agitation as he wrung it in his powerful grip.

The khaleesi looked up at her irate husband, clearly not sure how to calm her stallion. Sunset was too far away to hear what her mistress said to her lord - she was busy trying to get the beddings and salves packed away in half-deranged bags pulled partially out of the luggage - but she heard the khal bark his brutish laughter, and relaxed a bit inside.

Sunset would not be easy in the presence of the lord of the Dothraki for a long time, if ever. The memory of that great arakh's passage over her horn, of that spray of life's-blood…

No, not for a long time.

By the time the sun had reached its daily zenith, they were many miles away from that first road-camp, and the slight ripple in the plain which Sunset had thought to be heights were fading in the western distance. The horde passed between two little walled urban outposts - they were too small to be called 'cities', Sunset thought, but a bit too large to be mere towns. She wasn't sure who to talk to about their identities, their stories. The other handmaidens were neither local, nor particularly curious. Irri in particular was contemptuous of talk about okrenegwinn, stone houses.

Sunset eventually gave up her attempts to orient herself in the new, strange geography, and listened to Jhiqui and the khaleesi repeat words at each other. The pale little princess was not a natural at languages like Sunset, but she was stubborn, and patient. She sat on the back of the cart, reciting verb conjugations in a somewhat-systemic manner.

"Zalat, zalessa. Anha zalok, kisha zaloki, yer zalo, yeri zalo, me-"
"Yer zali, khaleesi," corrected Sunset absently from her trailing position behind the cart, staring down at the rutted track the cart was bouncing over.

Jhiqui looked over the edge of the cart from her cross-legged seat inside at the unicorn trudging just behind. "Tiny witch-horse is correct, khaleesi. Yer zali, yeri zali, me zalo, mori zali."

"But it's zalat, isn't it?"

"Not matter, khaleesi. Is still 'at', not lat."

"Oh, fine. Yer zali, yeri zali, me zalo..."

To be honest, Sunset was a little bored. She'd figured this out the night before. Sunset was ready for a new challenge.

Sunset found herself desperately desiring a return to that ironic boredom, as she spun on her rear hooves, darting looks to her left and right as the herd-men surrounded her as the sun kissed the western horizon. Her vision blurred and jumped as adrenaline-fueled panic juiced her reflexes.

Ahego and two other herd-men had sprung the ambush on Sunset as she and Irri had gone down to the creek to fill their water-hides. The khalasar had chosen to settle into camp for the night along a well-watered creek-forks in the middle of a relatively unpopulated stretch along the edges of Pentoshi tributary territory. The handmaiden's water-vessels lay abandoned by the creekside as Ahego and his new cronies closed in around the two of them with lassoes in hand.

Irri shouted irritation at their affrontery. But the Dothraki handmaiden didn't have the gravitas to drive off the young stallions, and they just ignored her outraged shrieks as they separated Sunset from her, and tried to pen the orange unicorn against the creek. They sprinted back and forth, swinging their damned ropes, trying to catch their horned target, herding Sunset against the creek, keeping her from escaping to more firm and higher ground.

Sunset fought through the exhaustion of a dozen hours plodding behind the khaleesi's carts, and coiled her aching body as she looked back and forth between the herdsmen. The smaller one cast again, and she sprung to the left, dodging just enough to avoid the noose.

Her caution served her well, as the larger one grabbed for her outright, dropping his rope. Sunset punched him in his stomach with her left fore-hoof, using his momentum to fling herself backwards, her tail flagging behind her, just barely slipping through his grasp. Her assailant fell flailing into the creek in front of her.

She caught sight of Ahego's lasso dropping down behind her, almost too late. She jerked her head aside, and the rope dropped across her withers instead of her head.

Sunset spun and grabbed the rope in her teeth, and yanked, hard.

Ahego fell into the creek as well, raising a great splash, and prompting a chorus of outraged yells from the other zafra and assorted Dothraki lined up along the creekbed, trying to get their own water-jugs and hides filled.

A bloodrider showed up just about then, and shouted everyone still. Sunset stood warily, her head low, her useless horn aimed at the nearest herdman. She didn't know why she was bothering with the bluff, her magic didn't work, and the apes didn't know to fear her nonexistent magic, anyways.

"Fools! We all must drink from this stream!" the bloodrider swept his whip downstream to indicate the enraged clots of zafra and Dothraki and the churned-up creek-mud.

The herds-men bowed their heads, dripping with river-mud. When did the third one end up in the creek? "If you must tame your horses, do it elsewhere, where we aren't setting up camp!"

"My lord Rahkaro" - had she gotten the bloodrider's name right? Use shafka, not yer - "I am not a horse to be tamed, I am member of khaleesi khalzafra, they have no right to halter me!"

"I do not need to hear from witch-horses! I don't care what you think, you qemmemmo vekhikh! My name is Rakharo, and I shall show you all what a horse-breaker is! You claim to be a wise-horse? Come away with me and we shall show these would-be horse-breakers how it is done!"

Sunset felt her ears lower in dismay, but allowed herself to be chivvied away from the streambed and the waiting water-bearers. She left the water-hides with Irri, and a scattering of curious onlookers followed her and the bloodrider off to the side, up and away from the low piece of land around the creek-bend.

The observers formed a loose circle of flat bronzed faces, losing definition as Sunset's namesake continued. There was still a brilliant blaze of clouds in the west, and she circled to gain the slight advantage of hiding her bright coat in the burning orange in that direction. The bloodrider uncoiled his whip, and trailed it behind him, preparing for the strike.

When it came, the whip-end was invisible in the gathering gloom, but Sunset felt it coming, felt the strike in the movement of the air. She was already springing into the air as the strike threw up a bit of sod under her hooves, and then after it the crack, slower than the whip itself.

A series of whip-cracks ensued, and she bounced back and forth as fast as she was able, only dodging one blow in three, it seemed like. Soon, her lungs were burning, she was covered in the stings of welts. No matter how hard she tried, Sunset was losing this - what was this? A demonstration of her personhood? She was just running - like an animal.

As the orange faded to red, and then dark behind her, Rakharo's whip-strikes slowed a bit. Just enough to - Sunset caught the recoiling whip in her teeth, and yanked with all of her fading might.

It didn't pull him off his feet, but she'd stopped the rain of whip-blows. The two of them pulled back and forth on the whip like a pair of dogs fighting over a rope of jerky. A bark of laughter from the observers in the darkness rang out, and a deep male voice ordered the bloodrider to hold.

"That's enough of that, my boy. Would your father be proud of you for whipping a tiny horse that was not even your property? Jhiqui has claimed this one, you don't want to offend her, unless you want gravel poured into your lamekh!" An older bloodrider - Cohollo was his name, Sunset thought - emerged from the darkness, ironically clapping at their rather shameful performance. "Go on, the lot of you, back to your tents, if you've bothered to set them up yet! The dance is over!"

Sunset slipped away with the audience, leaving the bloodrider Rakharo bow-headed listening to his elder chide him. At some point, the herdsmen had disappeared, but Irri was waiting with their filled water-vessels.

"Did you have fun, Sunset horse? Will we need to use the salves again on you?"

"No, Irri, I will survive. Here, give me some of those, water's always heavier than it looks." She'd already marked Irri down as one who was willing to let others do her work for her, Sunset knew how to get in Irri's good graces.

After they got the khaleesi settled down for the night, and Sunset had retreated to her own pallet to nurse her welts and think over what she had done that day, Sunset thought over the two confrontations.

She went over the moves she had made, the slowness with which she had reacted to the attacks. None of them had been seriously fighting with her, they'd been amusing themselves with the strange witch-horse. If they'd applied themselves, she would be hobbled in the remounts herd like all the other quadrupeds.

Sunset had to do better, find a way to be faster, more clever.

Tomorrow, she would start working on the problem. First thing to do, was stop plodding along behind the carts like a peasant, or a clerk. She needed to break herself down, if she was going to build herself up. She'd need to find that sprint speed in herself.

Then, after that, find Rakharo, for further…

Lessons.

Author's Note

Thanks for editing and pre-reading help to Shrink Laureate and the general Company.

A Wild Horse

Sunset dreamed of darkness, of the deep and deadly night. Cold, bitter cold, and chilling, and closing in; the feeling that there was something terrible in the darkness, some white thing that stalked her in the darkness, darkness so profound that nothing could be seen, no matter how white, no matter how terrible its blue, blue eyes were…

And then fire. Fire like the sun, fire like the furnace, fire like her heart - fire like life.

And the evil, pallid things in the darkness melted like ice in the spring summer sun, and Sunset curled like a foal in the dragon's fiery heart.

Sunset greeted the morning sun with a song in her heart, but somehow, the usual magic didn't spark her heartsong into the usual real-song. Singing was a deliberate and intentional thing in this new world; this world didn't sing you, like it did where she had grown up. All in all, Sunset prefered this world's ways, if only in that regard.

Sunset had never liked to be made to do anything she didn't plan, plot, or intend. If she was going to sing, she would do so in her own time, of her own volition.

She, and Irri, and Jhiqui were escorting the khaleesi to collect her gray, and mounts for the other two handmaidens. The khaleesi tried to get in at least half a day's riding every day on the march, to get her settled in the saddle. She was wearing riding leathers today, partially because Doreah was tied up trying to mend the damage done to her fancy Pentoshi silks, but also perhaps because the little khaleesi thought her brutish husband liked her better in Dothraki hides.

Sunset wasn't sure about that. She didn't really understand the khal, didn't understand his motivations. The khal's people, those she was starting to comprehend - the little people were always simpler in their needs and desires than the great ponies - great people. The lords, as the Pentoshi said it.

The Dothraki didn't really have lords - they had free riders, and they had zafra, and they had khals. But the khals weren't lords as the Pentoshi had them, perfumed and fat and sly. They didn't hire killers to do their will. Sunset's flank burned with the memory of how exactly Khal Drogo did his will, with his own blade, his own hands.

Sunset shook her head, and tried to forget the death of her last master. Her current mistress was almost dancing as they hurried over to the remounts before the herders got their charges unhobbled and moving in a proper herd.

Sunset shrank back behind Irri, trying to not catch the attention of the herdsmen, who she suspected hadn't had enough of -

And there they came. Irri's ass wasn't nearly wide enough to hide a bright-orange unicorn from sight, and two of the herdsmen were coming for Sunset. Again.

She pronked, avoiding the heavy copper-hided hand of the older herdsman as it grasped at her mane, and bounced lightly away from the awkwardly-stumbling man. They didn't have their lassoes in hand, so all Sunset had to do was keep on her hooves, and spring clear every time one of them got close. It was almost like a game - tag, perhaps, or pin the tail on the -

Sunset hadn't been paying attention to the half-freed herd of remounts while she was playing with the idiot herders, and when she looked up and away from the fool collapsed face-first into the churned half-mud at her hooves, she found the herders' charges wild-eyed and nearly on the edge of stampeding.

"Sunset!" she suddenly heard Jhiqui yelling at her. "Cease this at once! You'll spook the horses right over the khaleesi!"

The little Targaryen was more than a little wild-eyed herself, and the horses were shifting dangerously around her.

Sunset stopped dead, and started cooing nonsense-Dothraki at the dumb beasts around her, trying to extrude calm out of her pores. "Get up, you moron," she muttered at the boy at her hooves. "Help them get the herd back under control."

After a ten minutes of the herders doing their actual work, the herd was back under command, and Sunset was bowing her horned head before her mounted mistress, and the other handmaidens looking disapprovingly down at her.

"I recognize that you not think mess, that it the mensfolk fault," said the khaleesi in not-very-good Dothraki. "But still you have duty, Sunset, not encourage fools. Be better horse."

"Yes, your highness," said Sunset, using the Equuish term of address for a princess. "It will not happen again. Will it, gentlecolts?"

The herders gave her the hairy eyeball, not recognizing the term she had used to address them, but not willing to make a fuss in front of the khal's beloved bride.

The ride went much more smoothly, and Sunset enjoyed the stretching exertion of keeping up with the longer-limbed horses that the khaleesi and her other handmaidens rode. They passed through the local fragment of the horde which were breaking camp, and curled around the first few bands moving out into the morning's van.

The clear blue skies of yet another afternoon stretched over Sunset's head as she left the khaleesi resting in her cart, attended by Irri and Jhiqui, deep into the day's chores, with Doreah still fighting over that tattered silk rag which had once been the richest of fineries. The khaleesi had sent her with a message to Khal Drogo - nothing of import, but merely reporting where her household was in the road-column that day, and that the khal's loving bride was at his disposal if he required her for aught.

Sunset did her best to relay this message to the enormous, intimidating khal, but found herself shrinking down a bit for fear of the great man's terrible presence. She wasn't so intimidated, though, that she couldn't clean up the khaleesi's somewhat jumbled Dothraki message into something more grammatically coherent.

However that may be, Sunset's rendition of the message seemed to please the great killer, and he nodded with a half-smile on his brutish, bearded face, dismissing her from his presence. As she left, Sunset's gaze crossed that of one of the youngest blood-riders in the khal's retinue, Rakharo, her new acquaintance. She jerked her head off to the south of the road upon which the khal's khasar traveled, ears quirked in an unspoken question.

Rakharo nodded in acknowledgement, and gestured with his fingers upon his reins, indicating a period of time which Sunset, in the absence of clocks or time-pieces, generally interpreted as 'twenty minutes'.

Rakharo and his mount met her in a meadow just away from the roads and paths that the endless horde streamed along. Sunset looked forward a bit, and judged for herself that they'd be able to meet up again with some part of the khalasar further down the road, if there weren't any fences or hedges in between. Nothing she could see, anyways.

The farmers through whose lands the Dothraki passed either didn't fence their pastures, or had learned to their regret what it meant to put barriers up against the khalasars.

Rakharo shook loose a rope from his saddle-bags, grinning a greeting. "Good afternoon, wildling witch-horse! Are you looking to be broken to the saddle!"

"Big talk from big men! But be careful, coltling! I am not an easy mare to ride! Catch me if you can!"

And they were off, Sunset sprinting in a dead run, trying to make as much headway as she could in the face of the bloodrider's excellent mare and that horse's imposing length of stride.

The bloodrider and his mount settled into a punishing gallop, closing the distance at an alarming rate, and forcing Sunset herself into a straining headlong charge. She couldn't spare the energy or attention to turn her head and follow the progress of Rakharo's pursuit, but a tingle across the back of her withers and up the back of her horn gave her a tangible warning when -

The rope! She stopped dead, and let the lasso fall in front of her, missing her head, but almost tangling up with her flailing left foreleg.

Sunset sprung to the right, and took off perpendicularly from her previous direction, heading for a bit of deep grasses along the center of the meadow. Glimpsing the dampness before she put her hooves into it, she leaped - and landed, squarely, on the far side of the boggy half-stream hidden in the grasses.

Rakharo pulled up reins in front of the obstruction, and she could see his white predator-grin across the streamlet.

"Not bad, hrazef chafi. But we'll break you yet!" He backed his horse up from his side of the muddy wallow, and got her hooves set properly.

Sunset's eyes widened, as she realized what was coming. She broke into another gallop downstream, away from that bit of dry land she had inadvertently revealed to her pursuer. He and his horse easily cleared the negligible obstruction, and turned a wide quarter-circle, following in Sunset's wake.

She tried jumping back and forth across that little creeklet, but found in the end that the larger horse was better at leaping across obstructions than she herself was, and eventually -

The lasso settled around her throat, and dragged her off her hooves, tumbling her across the half-muddy verge of the grass-choked stream, which had been getting wider and wider as the chase had gone on. Sunset ended up with her horn half-buried in the mud, feeling that damn halter around her neck.

Again.

"I think that makes it my point, don't you think, Sunset-horse?" laughed the bloodrider.

"A touch, a fair touch, Mister Rakharo. Can I get up now?"

"Yes, my little wildling. But I demand a forfeit. It's time we got you painted in the khalazar colors. Or did you always want to be khalzafra, Sunset Horse?"

"...What?"

Sunset gave her parole to the smug bloodrider, her promise to not flee, or kick up her heels, or escape, if he agreed to not lead her on a halter into the presence of the khal and his retinue. They caught up to the khasar where they were watering their horses in a creek which their own little tricklet had flown into some distance upstream. The khal himself looked up at his beaming bloodrider, and his heavily bearded face broke into a wide grin, to see Rakharo so smug, and Sunset looking sheepish.

Which is not to say sheeplike, govas fin!

Khal Drogo prodded the one bloodrider who remained mounted, and Haggo reached into his saddlebags and pulled out what looked like a heavy wineskin. The khal tossed the wineskin in the general direction of Sunset and her captor, and Rakharo grabbed it out of the air with a flourish.

A droplet of something heavy and blue and viscous splattered the turf in front of Sunset, and she looked down at it, realizing what the 'penalty' would be.

"Took you long enough, yer yamori. She give you too much of a chase?"

"The Sunset Horse is faster on her hooves than you'd expect, Khal Drogo. But I caught her all the same."

"Good! Good! She looks too much like Khal Rhalko's chattel with that orange pelt of hers. We can't wash it out?"

"I haven't tried, Khal Drogo, and it has been well over a week since Pentos. You there, witch-horse, does the dye come out?"

"No, sir, it is not a dye, it is my natural color."

"Natural!" barked one of the bloodriders - Sunset didn't look, but she thought it sounded like Cohollo. "There's nothing natural about you, witch-horse!"

"Well, that's that, isn't it?" laughed the khal, as he swung himself into the saddle. "Rakharo, that dye is expensive, but we can't have one of my horses running around in Khal Rhalko's foolish ochre colors. Paint her down, yamori, paint her down. I want her Drogo blue!"

"You going to run, Sunset Horse?" asked the young bloodrider, looking down from his horse at his paroled captive. "You promised."

Sunset drew a ragged breath, realizing what was happening. Khal Drogo's own dyed paint job had faded and cracked in the week since the wedding, but he'd left it on his copper hide all that time, never bathing. But then, few Dothraki bothered to bathe, and Sunset herself had grown almost used to her own stink.

"Do it, Mister Rakharo. I have given my word."

"You certainly have," said Rakharo, as he climbed down out of the saddle, and started smearing the goopy dyed paste across his fingers. He kneeled, and laid the dye-skin by Sunset's hooves, and grabbed her muzzle with his free hand.

A quick swipe across her face barely left her enough time to close her left eye to protect it from the dye. Rakharo examined his work, turning her face side to side, and nodded. Then he refreshed the dye in his left hand, and drew parallel streaks across her left shoulder, then again across her right.

Sunset could feel the substance burning cooly across her eyelid and her nose - whatever alchemical process hidden in the dye - as it bonded itself to the hairs of her coat. I think this will not go away quickly, she thought.

Then, strangely, she felt a tingle go up her weeks-dead horn, a thrill, a shock - was it…?

And then it was gone, and all Sunset felt was the dye bonding itself to her coat.

And she supposed that was enough for one day, as the bloodriders mounted their horses, and crowded around the khal's newly-painted property.

Or follower, Sunset thought. Among the Dothraki, she was beginning to understand, property and people were fluid and contingent. Today, she felt like people.

"Good!" laughed the khal. "I can't have my messengers confused for someone else's, can I?"

Tomorrow she'd take when tomorrow came.

Author's Note

Thanks for editing and pre-reading help to Shrink Laureate and the general Company.

Messages

Sunset Shimmer was exhausted. In the daylight, the pounding, relentless, shadeless daylight of the rolling plains of western Essos, she trotted behind the carts of the khalessi's camp, trudging when she absolutely had to, but kicking her heels and sprinting back and forth whenever she could, fetching, carrying, passing messages from this khalzafra to the overseer of that group of common zafra, from one of the khal's bloodriders to an outrider patrol, from the kitchen-camp to the butchers-camp. As the days turned to weeks, Sunset had somehow, accidentally, inexorably, become a messenger.

She swore to herself that it hadn't been intentional, that she wasn't this pony. She had never been so gregarious in the august Heavenly Court of her mentor. She had, in point of fact, been arrogant, heedless of the concerns of others while she had been under the tutelage of the Eternal Princess. But then, she hadn't needed to be in those sun-lit days, basking in the endless benevolent light which was Celestia.

No, Sunset had taken up message-carrying as a way to improve her Dothraki, to perfect her understanding away from the khalessi's stumbling slowness. Even now - humbled as Sunset was by her slavery, her bondage - Sunset's arrogance was infinite. She picked up new grammar and syntax as if it were nothing, like a foal learning to breathe - by mere animal instinct. Sunset's status-arrogance had been shattered like the weak-formed failure of the potter's art it had been - but her intellectual arrogance was a much sturdier vessel, and she couldn't help but pour her ego into that iron-bound amphora like precious water in the desert.

And all the running about helped build her resilience, her endurance. She couldn't coast on simple trudging, putting one hoof in front of the others again and again, following in her new mistress's train. She had to get out and about, to get moving!

So Sunset sprinted, she galloped, she darted about, finding her messages' targets within the endlessly shifting city on the move which was Khal Drogo's khalasar in motion. Minela, the sullen slave-queen of the kitchens and all of her snarling, back-biting vikeesi; Girkaro the one-armed butcher-lord, his axe often strapped in the place of his missing hand, and his swarm of squabbling, blood-splattered apprentices; the lieutenants of the various naqikhasar, the mahrazh-naquikhasar, Kovarro, Malakho, Hralvro, Manikhro, Gulkarro, Lhanho, Nhizo, Qhono - so very many, they were as numerous as the grasses under their hooves, and these only the naquikhasar attached to the khal's own khasar, his attendants' personal followers!

The great horde spread out across the rolling plains between Pentos and Norvos, and as endless as the nomads and their followers were in motion, they were, Sunset was beginning to understand, nothing but small groups gathered together, little bands moving in concert with each other. The Dothraki were not simply a faceless mass of terrifying, horrifically violent apes, but rather, an endlessly articulated series of little bands of jocular, quarrelsome, occasionally charming homicidal apes.

She wouldn't say that she was making friends, but her circle of acquaintances was expanding rapidly.

Today she was running messages from the terrifying Khal Drogo himself to the outriders on the far eastern side of the advance. Those band of outriders were moving in the direction of a walled town that had not so much defied the khalasar's demands, as had been unpardonably slow with their tributes on their travels westward to his wedding. Or, so said the khal, although he couched it in hearty, brutal, bloodthirsty terms that Sunset shrunk from thinking too deeply upon.

The messages Sunset carried to the naquikhasar of the right-hoof advance van were, she understood at some level, very bad news indeed for the city-lords of Gyohan Byka, but that as well, she did not wish to dwell upon. The mahrazh-naquikhasari Gulkarro, Nhizo, Qhono and Adrahko were certainly excessively amused and excited by what Sunset had to say to them, and she left behind her more than one naquikhasar forming itself into a raiding band, each Dothraki gathering up their weapons and yelping in joy at the prospect of mayhem.

As she returned from her town-dooming mission, Sunset felt the burning in her chest and her cannons, the strain that told her she was over-doing it again. These Dothraki rode, she thought, because it was too damn tiresome to run everywhere on your own hooves. They put all the wear and tear on their idiot horses, while Sunset had to rely on her own poor hooves.

At least this was toughening up her once-tender hooves. Sunset had once had the delicate and soft-frogged hooves of a scholar, a student. No longer, and the longer she spent running across the hills and plains of this brutal continent, the more strongly those appendages resembled the hard, horny hooves of the peasantry.

Another virtue of running messages was that it got Sunset out and away from the remount herders, who insisted on continually trying for the wild horse. None of the other Dothraki whose word should have restrained those young idiots seemed to be able to get them to stop pestering Sunset. They just nodded and smiled, and waited until this bloodrider or that elder turned their backs on them. And then they'd regroup for another try.

As Sunset approached where she had been told to expect the khal's khasar, she could see Ahego and one of his cronies on horse-back, trying to hide their presence from her on just the other side of that copse of - were those trees, or bush? Out here on the heavily stream-rutted landscape of the ‘Bearded Plains', the distinction between tree and bush was sometimes, Sunset was discovering, academic.

What wasn't academic was that they were trying for her again - and she running messages for the khal himself! Sunset was sure that if she complained about it, though, the khal would just laugh. The great brute found his rebellious remount herders amusing, as if they were a sort of highly active band of jesters for his amusement.

Which meant that the hunted unicorn had been added to his jesters-court as designated victim. Sunset looked around to see if the khal was lurking somewhere in expectation of a bit of entertainment. She couldn't see him, but that didn't mean the bastard wasn't out there somewhere, sniggering.

So, it was time to give the audience a show.

Sunset turned and charged the two herders and their string of extra horses, getting in among them before they realized that their prey had turned on them. Their lassoes were suddenly useless as she darted between their confused mounts and the others they had behind them, unburdened.

The little rats had been planning on chasing her into the ground, exhausting one set of horses, and re-mounting while their target ran her heart out. Well, Sunset wouldn't play that game, would she now?

She caught the lead-lines of one of the remount braces, and tore it loose from the slack, astonished hand of the second herder, Yallego. She thought he was maybe a cousin or second-cousin of his ape-leader, Ahego. Whoever Yallego was, he was a careless idiot.

Sunset ran for it on the far side of her little counter-ambush, leading two very confused horses behind her, their lead-line flagging behind her, gripped firmly in her teeth. Ahego was too busy berating his idiot cousin to give chase, which was good - Sunset was quick and agile, but not nearly as fast as her mindless not-cousins, the nomad-horses of this world. She didn't think that the fools would have needed remounts to chase her down, if she were ever so foolish as to let it come down to a dead-gallop stern-chase.

And suddenly, in the next copse over, where she hadn't seen it before with the previous copse in the way, was the khal's retinue, and the vast bearded bastard himself, bent over his massive stallion-mount, laughing his brutish head off.

"Now that's what I call counting coup, boys," he bellowed. But then, in Sunset's limited experience, Khal Drogo rarely said anything softly. "Why can't my own blood-riders steal horses like that? Pono, go steal my horses back, I don't know what the Sunset-horse would do with her own remount herd. Sunset-horse, are you plotting a harem among my remounts?"

Sunset wrapped the lead-line around her left foreleg, and spat its well-chewed end out of her mouth. "Of course not, mighty Khal! I would only dilute your breeding-stock with my witchy get! I merely found some of your horses unattended in that thicket over there, and thought to bring them to you!" Sunset looked over her shoulder at the two horses she had stolen on an impulse. "Also, they seem to be mares."

And Sunset almost had the privilege of seeing the mighty Khal fall out of his saddle, laughing.

Author's Note

Thanks for editing and pre-reading help to Shrink Laureate and the general Company.

The Stew-Pot

The khal's mirthful laughter made it somewhat difficult for Sunset to deliver the outrider-mahrazhs' replies to their orders, but she endeavoured, stone-faced. Qortho, one of the khal's favorites, pulled Sunset aside as the khal and his other bloodriders rode on to other matters. Qortho gave her a further assignment, and the now-bone-weary unicorn set off to deliver the khal-khasar's dinner demands to the mobile kitchens, along with instructions on where they would be that evening, and where the food should be delivered.

Sunset found herself wandering within the great moving mass of the khalasar, the khal's court kitchens having somehow disappeared in the blink of an instant. She cast back and forth across the main body of the slow-moving bands and elements which were an entire people on the march, and then, suddenly, she found herself among a band of riders moving against the tide of beast and man.

Hunters, from the look and smell of them, recurve bows strapped across their backs, their horses draped in the murdered corpses of various fowl, small furry things, and in one or two cases, a deer or deer-like creature strapped behind a saddle. Sunset's nostrils were affronted with the stench of fresh blood.

In the middle of the pack of Dothraki hunters, rode the khaleesi's stringy-haired brother, sweltering in chainmail, with a helmet hung behind his sweat-stained head. Beside him rode the other, slightly less-pale man from the Sunset Kingdoms who Sunset had seen at the wedding, and then never again - what was his name?

"Denne," said the Westeroi, in some gutteral tongue, "Your grace er derfor, at ingen i Westeros rent faktisk jager i fuld rustning. Ikke i denne slags vejr, i hvert fald."

"Jeg er ikke uvidende om ordentlig skik, Jorah!" snapped the skinny young man who was, Sunset had been told, king of the distant Andals. If only they'd recognize him as such.

"Do you wish to discuss this in proper Valyrian, Your Grace?" asked the vassal of his liege. Sunset, who had drawn closer to the two Andals in hopes of hearing more of this new language, was disappointed. But a look in the older Andal's eyes told her that perhaps the King of the Andal's accent in his supposed native language was perhaps… not perfect.

"Obviously! I never understood why we let the peasants continue using that barbarous jabber. Yes, as I was saying, all true Westerosi hunt in their armor, cap and pie!"

"Erm, pied en cap, your grace?"

"Yes, that! I saw my brother come back from the hunt, many a time, in chain and greaves, his people bringing his kill behind him."

"Prince Rhaegar was, all men agree, a great warrior. But not, perhaps, much of a hunter?"
"Take that back! My brother was a paragon af mønster-kortalle dyder!"

"Er, were you trying to say ‘paragon af alle dyder, your grace?"

"Oh, yes, something like that. And I would have done better, if it weren't for these blasted Dothraki and their sneaking about with their blasted bows. There were supposed to be beaters, and a stop-line to catch the fleeing prey!"

"The Dothraki do this, it is true. In the true plains to the east. Here, in the broken terrain of the Debatable Lands, they prefer to stalk their prey. It's simpler, and takes fewer men. And to be brutally honest, your grace, it is more the style in the northernmost of your kingdoms, to stalk and creep, than to make a great deal of noise."

"But where is the fun in that? It's boring!"

"Well, we can try again to get them to do things the noble-hunt fashion, your grace…"

The hunters turned off the main road that both they, and Sunset had been following, marching towards what her sensitive nose told her were the butcher's camp carts, pulled aside, where the butchers were clearly waiting in rendezvous for the returning day's hunts.

Sunset thought about exiles, and cultural differences, and the example of the exiled king, trying to hunt in armor and a lance, among the wild plains-nomads with their swift horses and recurve bows. Was there anything like the Beggar King and his clanging awkward foolishness in what she was doing? Was Sunset falling into that very trap?

Eventually, wandering within the strung-out, endlessly sprawling chaos along the network of trails and roads that was the khalasar's central column, Sunset discovered where the mobile kitchens had fetched up. Clues extracted from confused zafra and riders encountered on the main road eventually pointed Sunset in the direction of a water-meadow far down the road. The kitchens had advanced infuriatingly far, the cooking-zafra having almost raced their heavy cooking-baggage ahead of the rest of the khal's entourage. They could now be found not far from what would, in the coming hours, become that night's temporary encampment.

The cooks had run ahead of the front of the main column, to get ahead of the rest of the people they'd have to feed in the evening. The rest of that part of the horde for which they were responsible, would catch up to the kitchen, rather than vice-versa. Some of the camp-captains had cast even further ahead, laying out the encampment the kitchens would feed, in a better-drained series of fields on a rise between the water-meadow and a small river.

The kitchen-zafra had unloaded their stew-pots and grills and set them up on their temporary tripods over piles of near-green brush and hastily-dismembered tree-corpses beside the rather brackish puddle that filled the center of the water-meadow. The once-sickening stench of the meat-heavy staples of the Dothraki diet hung like a miasma over the slightly swampy environ the mobile kitchen had found itself.

Minela the Lhazareen knew her business very well, and her dinner-plans for the scattered and not-quite-countless members of the khal's court were well in hand. The copper-skinned and wrinkly khaljolinaki with her immense sense of gravitas and that forbidding manner merely waved in irritation at Sunset's relayed instructions. She gestured at her platoon of jolinaki-vikeesi re-heating the mutton and the beef and the other savory-jerked meats that so dominated what the apes around Sunset devoured on a day to day basis. Yet more of Minela's harridan-cooking-assistants were spread out around the water-meadow, harvesting the semi-wild barley-like grasses and onions and garlic-greens with small, not-particularly sharp sickles.

The Dothraki were rather lackadaisical about keeping a close eye on their zafra, their slaves, but that didn't extend to giving them access to seriously deadly tools that might be turned against them in their drunkenness. Truly stupid Dothraki generally didn't live to adulthood.

Sunset tried again to echo back at Minela the words she heard from the khaljolinaki's minions.

The Lhazareen rolled her eyes at Sunset. "Speak the masters' words, you sachi-ivezhof. You will never learn the words of the Spawn. Only the Spawn know the words of the Spawn."

"I don't believe that," said Sunset, provocatively. "There is no language which is so secret that only the speakers can know it. Words are for learning, and understanding - how can there be understanding if there is no sharing?"

"Fool ivezho, fool beast! The Dothraki share nothing, and care nothing for understanding! They take, and they steal, and they say go here, do this, or we hang your crones, and rape your girls, and butcher your sons! If you will not leave me be, go help my vikeesi, my crones cut the greens that will make this wasteful broth edible."

And so Sunset went, resting her aching frogs by picking up a sickle from the pile of tools, and following along the line of harvesters, cutting this bit of greenery, and that. Three times, a vikeesi-harridan - who were, by Sunset's very shaky grasp of ape-people's ages, not nearly old enough to be denounced as ‘crones', but whatever - had to correct Sunset's cut, and keep her from including this weed or that noxious plant in the greens-harvest.

Sunset meditated upon the diet of her new herd, and the one she had grown up within. Among the Dothraki, eggs were a delicacy, but milk and cheese were common. There were entire bands within the khalasar which specialized in milch-herding, and cheese-making, their carts hung heavy with treasured cheese-cloth bags. The cooks struggled to get anything else, anything which wasn't meat, into the pots. The Dothraki regarded anything requiring settled cultivation with a cultural disdain that bordered on homicidal fury. To eat grass was to make yourself not-Dothraki, not a mahrazh, but rather a rhoa, an animal.

I may starve to death, in the midst of plenty…

A shadow fell over Sunset where she sat with the sickle in her hooves, idly cutting wild-barley into her bushel. She looked up, to find Jorah-the-Andal looking down at her.

"That, is something I never thought in my life to see. A horse harvesting its own fodder. With a blade, no less!"

Sunset started, sending her basket tumbling, and she scrambled to get out of the reach of the palid not-Dothraki.

"Nemt, nemt let der pige," said the Andal in a soothing voice. "Jeg vil ikke skade dig."

Sunset had set her hooves in preparation, ready to spring away, or to slap back the palid not-Dothraki. Although perhaps that was a mis-characterization? He wasn't in the fancy get-up she remembered from the wedding, and he'd shed the floppy hat and some of the clothing he'd been wearing when she'd seen him earlier on the road with the Beggar King. As he was dressed, he might be mistaken for a slightly sickly Dothraki.

"Keep your distance, Andal!" Sunset snarled in the half-Pentoshi, half-Targaryen mish-mosh into which her Valyrian had degenerated. She knew the man spoke that, at least as well as she did.

"So it is true, I wasn't there for the commotion. You do speak like a man!"

"I speak like a mare, and you shouldn't sneak up on ponies like that."

"Fair enough. What is a mare, and what are ponies?"

Sunset's eyes widened as the Andal said the two Equuish words. In the weeks she had been with the Dothraki, and the months before that among the Pentoshi, she'd not found anyone who could replicate the vowels and aspirations that characterized her native tongue.

"I can teach you those, if in exchange, you can tell me what nemt, jeg, and uvidende mean!"

"Ah, I thought you looked like you were listening to us on the high road. You shouldn't spy on your betters, lille orange hest."

"It's hardly spying when you're yelling at each other in the midst of multitudes, Jorah the Andal! And my name is Sunset Shimmer. Good to meet you."

"I am technically en ridder, you should call me Ser Jorah."

"Are we in the land of the Andals?" Sunset snarked. And saw the ‘en ridder' (what was a en ridder?) finger his long-bladed weapon, hung heavy from his belt, and decided better of her ill-timed humor. "Well enough, then, Ser Jorah."

"You are trainable! Interesting. Yes, Sunset Shimmer, I will teach you Andalese, if you care to talk to me about other matters. Such as where you came from. Are you real? Did some sorcerer turn you into this? Are there more like you?"

"I think, Ser Jorah, that is a tale for another time, because your king is coming towards us with blood in his eyes, and I have to finish what I'm doing if I want Minela to feed me before she sends me off with the khaleesi's dinner."

Sunset gathered up the cut greens into her spilled basket, and barely listened to the irate Beggar King as he berated Ser Jorah for walking off and not telling the king where he was going.

The queen of the cooking slaves gave her Andal-attracting orange pest a bowl of stew with ill will, grabbing the half-empty basket and muttering sulfurously over the quality or lack thereof of Sunset's work.

Afterwards, Sunset sat with her bowl of greens and unidentifiable meat-broth and watched as the rest of the bands, carts, and foot-columns straggled past the kitchen. The great mass of the Dothraki people passed by her and straggled up the rise to the staked-out camp-sites which would become, for a night, the heart of the great khalasar of Khal Drogo - terror of Lhazar! Ibben! and the Free Cities! - the armed might of a continent, fetched up on a nameless low rise in the western middle of nowhere in particular.

Sunset sat, and drank from the crock of stew the Lhazareen witch-cook had given her, chewing on the greens soaking in the meaty broth. It was strange, the flavor. Thankfully, there wasn't much in the way of actual meat chunks in it, just enough to make it not really like an Equestrian soup. But Sunset figured she needed some calories, somewhere, somehow. This was it, this was what she would be getting, unless she wanted to graze with the herds.

Celestia preserve her, she could get used to that taste. But she wasn't sure about the texture...

The assistant-cook balanced the yoke across Sunset's shoulders and withers, supporting the two heavy crocks of stew and steaming, bagged roasts intended for the khaleesi's camp. Sunset had made sure to request a nice, large wheel of mares-milk cheese, and it took up most of a pannier on her left side. The unicorn staggered a bit under the burden before she found her footing, and straightened out, balancing the weight with a rolling shrug.

"Thank you, Fannula. Did I upset your mother too badly?"

"What are you on about, Sunset-horse?" the young girl asked in Dothraki, no more inclined to use her mother's native-tongue than any other member of the khalasar. "Minela loves you. I've never seen her warm to a new zafra that fast. Go with the great Shepherd, Sunset-horse." Fannula, who looked far more Dothraki than like her moon-faced, Lhazareen mother, slapped Sunset companionably across her croup, and sent the unicorn on her way.

Sunset passed the porters carrying the racks of steaming roasts intended for the khal's table as she left the water-meadow, and headed off to the rendezvous-point for the khaleesi's train, the other handmaidens, and the assorted khalzafra. The camp-captains always assigned the khaleesi's carts and tents to a particular stretch of the eastern quadrant of the camp, no matter how the encampment was sited that particular night, or where.

They wouldn't be expecting the khaleesi herself for dinner, not on a night when the khal was in such a good mood, although Sunset wasn't sure if the other handmaidens would be aware of the circumstances. With her expanded assignments as an impromptu messenger, Sunset had been seeing less of the khaleesi's train in recent days.

Sunset wasn't sure what to think about that, honestly. It was all part of her plan to raise her value in the eyes of her mistress and her mistress's husband, but it separated her from the mistress in particular. Was that a good thing?

The rest of the handmaidens greeted Sunset's appearance in the camp with delight and joy, and they rushed to unburden her of her pots of stew and bags of dead, cooked animal-flesh.

Later, long after the cheese-wheel had been devoured right down to the last bit of rind, Sunset fished through the remnants of the stew-pot. Not finding any leftover greens, she eyed the piles of jerked meat laying on one of the platters, and thought about her rumbling stomach.

Maybe she'd go see if there was any fresh grass on the edge of the encampment. In the darkness, where no-one could see her.

Author's Note

Thanks for editing and pre-reading help to Shrink Laureate, Oliver, and the general Company.

The Smoke

Sunset's sleep was troubled by the smell of smoke, of the faintest stench of something other than wood burning. She dreamed of terrible porridge in the mornings at the orphanage, of squabbling foals flinging half-blackened pottage at each other as the matron cried tears of frustration and tried to maintain order. The matron had been a fine mare, but utterly hopeless in the kitchen, and when the bits weren't there, she couldn't afford to pay the cook to come in that early. And the bits often weren't there.

Saddened by the memory, Sunset found herself awakening earlier than was her wont, slipping from the pile of handmaidens, careful to not crush any delicate ape toes with her hooves. Her days in Celestia's court had been largely absent this permeating smell of wood smoke, of other smells of burning things. Princess Celestia and her advisors in haughty Canterlot had aggressively pushed the adoption of non-polluting magic-crystal fireplace heaters in the capital and the nearby provinces in the year or two before Sunset came under in the Princess's mentorship. Even though those expensive, inconvenient ‘conveniences' had proved deeply unpopular among those segments of the population without easy access to handy magic rechargers built into their skulls, Canterlot proper had largely seen the abandonment of wood and coal burning for heat, despite the chill of that mountain city.

In the pre-dawn darkness, Sunset thought absently about how the bureaucracy's tax abatements and unsubtle environmental guilt-tripping had done nothing but reinforce the previously-subtle tribal hostility to the unicorn domination of said bureaucracy. In her rare trips to the provinces and outer suburbs, the smoke of coal and woodburners had remained, and her few earth-pony acquaintances had generally changed the subject or scowled when the subject came up. Thus, the burdens of trying to have nice things.

The smell of roasting porridge grew stronger, as dawn broke along the eastern horizon. For some reason, it was making Sunset unsettled and anxious, an anxiety which only grew stronger as the orange limb of the world grew brighter, more yellow, more white, shading into blue.

A blue stained to the south-east with browns, and traces of black.

There were pillars of faint black smoke rising on the south-eastern horizon.

Now, this world, like her previous world, was full of people, peasants, lords, people of middle circumstance (if rather distinctly fewer of the latter two than the former) - and many if not most of them heated their little worlds-within-worlds by burning stuff, usually coal or plant matter of some sort. And all that touched the skies with unsightly blackened, grey, or brown stains, and Sunset had grown used to it.

But this wasn't in the heart of crowded, filthy-skied Pentos, or some humble pony-suburb from back home, but a rural countryside currently more full of horse-nomads than farmers and terrified locals. And those rising columns of blackened smoke were not the homey traces of hearth-fires and small-scale forge-filth.

Sunset tried to dismiss her unease. She turned to her duties, her obligations to the khaleesi and her fellow handmaidens. Those chores devoured her morning, as all her mornings went these days. But her eye was continually drawn away from the tasks at hoof, and more than once, she found herself staring at those increasingly ominous black stains on the skyline. She could now see that the columns of smoke were extending outwards along yesterday's message-routes, in the direction the naquikhasar had been directed to advance. An armed advance, marked by things burning. Many things burning

And as the sky was rent by those black-smoke calling cards of destruction, Sunset began to feel the stirrings of something like anticipatory guilt. Yesterday, if she'd thought at all about what she had been doing, she'd thought breezily about a feckless town, a little city which had been foolish enough to allegedly disrespect a barbarian king on the way to his nuptials. The little city of Gyohan Byka had been so unwise as to cast some sort of small gesture of contempt or resistance in the face of the great Khal Drogo on the khalasar's westward journey towards Pentos and his nuptials. Oh, nothing direct or aggressive, from what little Sunset had overheard. Perhaps a failure to leave out the proper offerings to the horse-nomads as they passed by. Or perhaps they'd closed their gates against some emissary, or a patrol had clashed with a hunting-party.

Sunset hadn't even been clear on whether the khalasar had passed along this route on the way westwards. Looking at the fecund and lush conditions of the forage and fodder they had encountered so far on their trip east, she had some vague idea that the khal had deliberately chosen to not cross over in his khalasar's own track on the horde's return. It was, after all, a mark of good stewardship to impose one's depredations lightly and evenly across one's domains. Princess Celestia had taught Sunset - well, not exactly that, and not in those words, but the general sense, the general sentiment along those lines. Stewardship.

Gyohan Byka. A town so inconsequential that, Sunset had discovered, it did not appear on any maps in the khaleesi's possession. The illiterate Dothraki themselves didn't use things like maps, butif you talked to the bloodriders and other leaders, you would discover that they kept people around who memorized these sorts of things, a sort of geography of the tongue. But they had people who knew that Gyohan Byka was there, and they remembered certain things. Such as obligations, vassalage, and... slights.

They said that Gyohan Byka was in some way tributary to their nominally sovereign lords in distant, disinterested Pentos. Or perhaps Norvos. The so-called Debatable Lands began somewhere in this general vicinity. The claim-lines meandered here and there throughout this stretch of the interior, and the region was littered with places too obscure and too far from the main river-routes and best grazing-lands for any given member of the Free Cities or their nearest neighbors to exert any strong or jealous claim.

Not that the bloodriders Sunset had quizzed put matters in that bloodless sort of way. As was the practice, she was beginning to realize, of bloodriders.

They talked in terms of blood, and slaughter, and swagger. It was how Dothraki like Haggo and Rakharo showed off, how they demonstrated their qualities, their quality, to each other. She'd noticed that competition among the khal's courtiers, to couch their political acumen in the most brutish and simple-minded faux-barbarian cant. And so the subtle discussion of the exact loyalties, obligations, and alleged sovereignties which held the somewhat isolated country-crossroads Gyohan Byka was couched, to Sunset's humble, but Celestial-court-trained ears, in terms of the stone-house men of feeble Gyohan Byka and the lazy coast-stone-men behind their distant walls' coin from here is bronze and copper, not gold and so forth.

Sunset brought the khaleesi her morning meal, and messages from the other handmaidens and zafra. She found the young Targaryen in bed with the khal, and delivered her burden of food and words. Standing just inside the tent was Rakharo, armed and at a sort of attention. Outside the luxurious tent, the khal's bloodriders and assorted armed hangers-on were sitting within ear-range, sharpening their arakhs, checking the fletchings of their arrows, and having a nice, brusque gossip about the prospects of a good, brutal sacking that day, or perhaps the day after that. But in general, the sentiment seemed to be that the day would be nothing but a lark among the naquikhasari.

Laying with his arm around his wife, the khal, looking rather lazy and smug - like a well-fed cat too full of cream and diced salmon to bother itself with chasing small, orange mice - gestured widely with his arms, but didn't bother to get up.

"Sunset Horse! Light of the morning! It is good that you've brought the moon of my life her breakfast! Rakharo says that it looks like I will need all of my own food to myself. Is that not so?"

"My Khal, we cannot be sure. The horizon is well-blooded, that is all I can tell you."

"Bah! Go and bring me my news, boy! Be swift. Oh, and take the witch-horse with you. She is swift, and I would know the color of my day before it is any older! Go! Find me a slaughter, or find me the capitulation I am owed. I would know if they will bend their heads, or whether I will have to bring their stone roofs down around their ears."

"Look, Sun Horse," Rakharo said to Sunset, tightening the cinch strap on his saddle as he prepared his second-string mount. "You should not speak to the lajakoon today. When the warriors get their blood up, they can be wild, and you are still new."

Today's horse was a narrow-crouped and eager-looking mare that had in the past seemed to regard Sunset as competition rather than another talky-beast. Today, the horse was ignoring her, and was quivering a bit in anticipation. The dumb beast knew what was going to happen…

"I spoke to these warriors only yesterday. I delivered their orders! Would they forget me in only a day?"

"Well," said the bloodrider, looking down at her orange coat. "You are not easily forgotten, this is true. But I meant that that I need you to be ready to carry a message to the khal, on the instant, you understand? No standing about and gossiping like yesisi, yes?"

"Yes, Rakharo," Sunset wasn't willing to argue her case any further. The smoke on the horizon was spreading out, smearing, losing their stark columnar character. Whatever was going on was something she had to see with her own eyes.

"When I tell you, take my report, and run as fast as you can to the khal, OK?

"Yes, Rakharo."

"And don't let anyone or anything stop you until you get to the khal himself."

"Yes, Rakharo."

The camps were breaking down rather lazily this morning. They passed naquikhasar after naquikhasar on their passage out to the columns of smoke, through half-disassembled camps where Dothraki and zafra stirred indifferently, slowly. These were the uninvolved, the incidentals, the many, many little bands whose aggregate represented the whole terrorizing might of Khal Drogo's vast khalasar. It was a dread mass when it was mobilized, focused, and directed as a whole. But in this morning, it was less than impressive, less than organized, not much more than a rambling rabble to Sunset's eyes.

Today, only a scattering of Dothraki bands on the leading edge of the horde were doing - whatever that smoke entailed.

Sunset continued to fume at the condescension she'd been subjected to by her companion, as they rode out in the direction of the fires. The raiding bands had moved quickly, and even a quick canter pace failed to devour the distance at a speed which satisfied Sunset and the bloodrider. As if she'd stoop to gossip! Or let anypony stop her once she'd gotten her hooves under her!

Sunset looked up from the beaten tracks of the warbands in whose hoofprints they followed. The nearest fires were just over the next rise. This was what she had wanted. This was what she had been angling for.

Why did she feel uneasy?

A burst of speed brought them over the crest of the rise, and the fires came into view. Fields of half-ripe winter barley were smoldering, dried enough to catch fire, still wet enough to not build up into a destructive flash-fire or a proper fire-storm. Beyond the fitfully smoking stalks of the ruined, unharvestable small-grain fields, lay a little farmhold, a collection of huts and sheds, likewise fitfully on fire.

One hut, more so than the others. Sunset rather thought it had been the main dwelling, to judge by the butchered remains of the man who had most likely been its owner, a corpse smoldering halfway inside the burning house.

They found this particular naquikhasar in the clearing behind the burning buildings. Sunset did her best to not hear or see exactly what was happening to the farmer's family. At least they weren't dead yet. She kept her distance as she'd been ordered. She had no interest in getting any closer to that.

Rahkaro yelled for this band's mahrazh-naquikhasari, Nhizo, until that older man got up from his oversight of the… chastisement of the farmer's-family, and sauntered over to lackadaisically give his account of his activities. The brutal, blood-splattered Dothraki had nothing valuable to report other than his own outrages. Rahkaro snorted dismissively at the older man's bragging, and led Sunset away from the scene of rape and brutalization.

"That fool will never be a bloodrider, Sunset Horse. I'd say he thinks with his pecker, except that would mean that he thinks at all. Half again my age, and two, three riders among his get - and what does he show for it? Banditry! Hasn't gotten anywhere near the gates of the city. Pfa!"

Sunset nodded as if she agreed, as if she could see the unprofessionalism of the slovenly, careless Nhizo. This was the way of the Dothraki! Except…

Except she couldn't really see the difference between what disapproved-of Nhizo was doing, and the slightly more active rapine of the equally-savage bands they found here and there beyond that first burning homestead. The naquikhasar led by Gulkarro and Qhono, were found in an arc to the southeast, busy sacking other small homesteads, each destroyed farm marked by the now-obvious pillars of black smoke. Perhaps it was the way they'd bound and led away the bruised, bloodied, and terrified captives, rather than debauching them right on the doorsteps of their burning homes?

Sunset didn't understand, but the hollow-eyed despair of one small boy, tied behind his stumbling grand-dame or aunt as they were marched away from their old lives by a pair of Dothraki riders, stayed with her as they passed through the arc of destruction.

You did this, Sunset.

They came up to Adrahko and his warband, cavorting in the open roadway, the wide and clear main road that led to the gates of a low-walled town. Gyohan Byka itself. They had to have a good view of the burning, wrecked farmsteads leading up to their gates. Sunset’s eye was drawn to a bloodied heap laying in the metalled gravel of the roadway a dozen and a half strides away from where they came to a stop.

This particular band of Dothraki were having fun. They waved their arakhs in a wild display, whipping their horses, and chasing each other back and forth in full view of the walls while screaming their heads off. A number of them stood upon horseback, bows out, plinking away at the gates of the city. Their recurved bows had a decent range of fire, Sunset thought, although in school she'd done better with a spell she'd learned from a lieutenant in the Princess's palace guard. She missed her magic, and absently rubbed her horn as she watched the Dothraki at play.

A couple of the archers were trying to light their arrows on fire, but seemed to mostly be scorching themselves. The flaming arrows in flight quickly snuffed themselves by the wind of their own passage, thumping solidly but quite extinguished into the clay cladding of the walls in the distance. Sunset wondered where they’d heard of the idea. She knew a spell to make what they were trying work, but again, the horn...

Rahkaro pulled aside the sweating, grinning Adrahko, who had been leading his men in their athletic display. The warriors left their leader behind, and continued to chase each other around like a bunch of high-spirited colts kicking up their heels in sheer animal joy.

The two Dothraki bent their heads over their horses, discussing the reception of Adrahko's morning of joyful terrorism. Sunset listened to the conversation, and absorbed Adrahko's estimate of the emotional state among the goat-herders of this benighted nowhere. Her attention wandered as the report turned to a rather uninformative series of empty boasts, and she watched the still-cavorting horse-nomads enjoying themselves behind the boastful if diligent Adrahko.

They'd dragged a pair of captured farmers out into the road beyond the corpse, and were playing at capture and release. A pair of riders was charging with lassoes in hand, and - there one of the battered prisoners went, pulled off his feet and dragged towards the gates in the near distance.

I made this happen.

They let the other prisoner go, and he swayed into a stumbling, gasping run, dashing for the safety of the walls. One of the riders, smiling, drew his claws, his arakh, and stood in his stirrups, waiting to give the runner a head start. Poised like a cat, waiting to pounce.

Sunset stared, riveted, waiting for the moment when the Dothraki rider with his arakh would spur his mount, and charge forward, and the wickedly curved blade would slice through the smoke-tainied air and-

Her focus, directed down-road towards the rider, his prey, and the walls walls beyond, meant that she was the first to see, in the corner of her eye, the objects that some unseen men flung over the city walls on either side of the barred gates. It was why, when her vision re-focused in startlement, that she was the one to witness their heavy arc as they fell, kicking, kicking - only to stop, dead, as the ropes tied around them came taunt, and they snapped to a twitching halt.

But the games they were playing all came to a halt, and the now-still Dothraki sat in their saddles to witness what came next, and watched with all solemnity as the broken-necked Gyohani corpses hung by their unnaturally-bent necks, dancing, twitching in the distinctive manner of the just-executed. The bodies swayed pendulum-like, laying like a pair of ghastly holiday-decorations on either side of the barred gate of Gyohan Byka. The gate creaked open, granting entrance to the savages outside the walls.

The Dothraki games were concluded with the hanging, and they returned to their business, gathering up their prisoners, and advancing to take possession of the gates between the two hanged men dangling in the smoky haze.

"Sunset Horse, it is time," said Rakharo as he leaned over his horse. "Go and tell the khal the news! The stone-house people have surrendered to his mercy! Ride!"

And Sunset rode like the smoke-stained wind.

Author's Note

Thanks for editing and pre-reading help to Shrink Laureate, Oliver, and the general Company.

Dothrakian Nights

Sunset found herself experiencing a peculiar blend of delight, shame, and anger as the khalasar left the scorched fields and terrorized citizens of Gyohan Byka behind them in a cloud of ash-flecked dust. Delight that they were leaving this terrible place, shame at how weak she had been in acting without understanding or comprehension, and anger that it had all come to this. The carts of the khaleesi's camp passed in front of the now-closed gates of the city in their course eastward, and the dead bodies continued to sway in the northern breezes, the bloody remains of the once-mayor of the city hanging next to the older of his two victims.

Thankfully, the khaleesi had left earlier to ride with her husband, and wasn't here to see the rotting corpses with her handmaidens. Not that the others seemed to care about the display, not Jhiqui, not Irri, not even soft-handed, foreign Doreah. Sunset felt strangely alone as she stood, staring at the dead.

She hated that man, the dead burgher whose decisions, whose greed, and whose cowardice had led him here, before her, a lesson in disgust and horror. She hated him with a purity which she never thought to find in herself. She hated what he'd shown her of that self. Of what foolishness she was capable of, of what she could tolerate, and for showing her that she could hate. She had never hated before like this.

Most of all she hated what she had found in her heart, because she couldn't help but admire the khal's solution to the problem which the burgher had presented him. The fat man, whom the crows had found, and were now feasting upon, had brought the khalasar to his door. His insults to the great and terrible Khal Drogo had obliged the khal to direct his khalasar out of its intended eastward course, and to ride down this man's farmers, burn their fields, make play in the highway leading to his gates with their terrorized captives.

If anyone in this had deserved to be hung by his steaming entrails as crows-food, it was this man.

Sunset turned away from the carrion, and followed the khaleesi's camp-carts as they rolled eastwards.

The khalasar crossed a wide river two days after the not-sack of Gyohan Byka, seizing the fords downstream from what had once, a great long time ago, been a mighty bridge for some long-lost empire. The great road which the Dothraki horde had been moving along - carts on the highway, naquikhalasari and outriders and bands of assorted riders swarming in the byways and fields for miles around - led up to the footings of that now-obliterated bridge. It must have been a mighty construction in its day, but this day, the carts and the other baggage were led down the new way which had been beaten into the soil by thousands before the Dothraki, and thousands today. It was a natural road, an unintended road, and Sunset found herself blessing the dry weather for the condition of the footing.

It would be muddy enough as it was, from all the thousands of hooves and hundreds of wheels that would be churning the bottom of the fords as they went.

Sunset had never had to ford a river with baggage-carts before, and she found herself struggling, helping push this cart and that through mud-holes with mud-slick hooves, side by side with equally mud-stained zafra. The hot sun in the sky baked the mud on her forelegs almost as soon as she took them out of the water, and she found, strangely, how close in height she was to these apes when she took herself off of four legs and stood to push with them.

She thought about how determinedly four-legged she had been since coming here to this world of primate-bipeds. It was in part a reaction to having lost her magic, if she was going to be honest with herself. She didn't feel quite stable on her back hooves without horn-magic to keep her balance. She knew that earth ponies were fully capable of tottering around two-hooved, almost like these apes, these men, but in general, without her magic, she didn't feel like a horned earth pony, she felt like a crippled unicorn. So it was, so it went, and so she had stuck to her four steady hooves, cautious, careful.

It was impossible to be cautious or careful in the middle of a sullen, stubborn, muddy river-ford like this. So, she got up on two legs, and pushed like the rest of them.

After the khaleesi's baggage was safely on the other side of the river, Sunset went upstream to find someplace with clean water, to try and wash the dirt off of her coat and hooves, out of her frogs, before it all set like concrete. She looked up from the washing, to find the khaleesi kneeling beside her, washing river-mud out of her own leathers.

"Never tell me some fool let you get out and push, Your Highness?" Sunset objected, in mixed Dothraki and Equuish.

"If they can, see them try!" chirped the khaleesi. "Had fun! Why Sunset Horse deny me my moment to play mud!"

Sunset looked at the delicate little white-haired girl, mud in her platinum tresses, dirt staining the riding-leathers she was wearing these days. Had they ever let the little princess make mud-cakes in the back-yards of the magisters' mansions and palaces she'd grown up in?

"Aren't you a little old to be playing in the mud, Your Highness?"

"Oh, hope not, Sunset Horse!" The khaleesi grinned like… like the hoyden she was, Sunset realized. Then the princess-hoyden flung a fistful of mud at Sunset.

Sunset gasped in outrage. And then she dipped her free left frog into the river-bank, and standing on her rear hooves returned volley.

Things degenerated from there, and the other handmaidens descended up on the two of them, choosing sides seemingly at random. A great deal of mud rearranged itself across the khaleesi's retinue, and afterwards, they bathed a bit further upstream from where they'd churned up the river-bank.

All the while, the khalasar continued to cross the wide fords of that great and lazy river that drained the Norvosi highlands to the north and east.

The night after the baths, they curled in the great tent, the handmaidens keeping their mistress's company. Sunset could think of little in her experience like that closeness, that crowded cheerfulness, and she laughed along with the rest as they listened to Doreah and her story of the maid of the Summer Isle and her grand-romance with the river-snake.However salacious and disgusting the story might have been if you sat back and thought about it.

The khaleesi tried and failed to sing some Andalese song about what she'd been told was a bear and a maiden fair, but she'd heard it as a very young child, from a nurse long-gone from her brother's service, and had apparently forgotten most of the words, except that she'd been told it was likely filthy in implication.

"Sunset Horse!" laughed the khaleesi, giving up on her cracked-voice failure to sing. "Spare me from this mortification!"

"Khaleesi!" scolded Jhiqui. "You must only speak in the real tongue, or you will never retain what you have learned. In Dothraki, please."

"Bah, yes, in Dothraki, yes. Sunset Horse! A story, so that I forget that I forget my Andalese!"

"What kind of story should I tell Your Highness? Something dirty, like Doreah's snake? My people have many of these, but they never told me, because my ears were too young and tender for such filth. Of romance, to honor your honeymoon here among the hills and the wild pigs?"

"That sounds nice, Sunset Horse, but the night is dark, and warm, and I would something… wild. My sun and stars, he has given me all I could wish of romance."

"Wild! Wild, she asks. Khaleesi, Your Highness, you ride among the wildest, and most savage of any creatures in these two worlds."

"Two worlds! What, is there more than this?"

"I'm told you grew to marrying age in the stone-house kingdoms of the Free Cities. Further, they say that you were born in storm and thunder in some distant salt-wracked stone on the other side of the Narrow Seas. What are those but two different worlds from this, we lay in tonight? I, like you, have crossed worlds, to lay my hooves in the soil of this new and dangerous world I ride through. And behind me, are many ponies who traveled the far abroad, and worlds I know not, but the tales they told us."

Sunset thought, and rearranged her memories, and drew from them something suitably exotic.

"I met a great bird in the court of the Forever Princess, who came to pay his respects to the monarch of the heavens and sun and moon, for in this world, she who was named after her own heavens controlled all that rose and all that fell, and when she said rise! The sun greeted the dawn, and when she said fall! The moon kissed the horizon and glided away into the jewel-box of the skies."

"A bird! Are all animals alike, where you came from, Sunset Horse, that a horse talks to us, and a bird to you?" asked Jhiqui, drawn in despite herself.

"No, not in the least, but the peoples were many, and their shapes as many as their magics, Jhiqui of the Dothraki. And this great bird was what we called a griffon, for his people were feathered about his head and shoulders, and he had talons upon his forelegs, but the rest of him was furred and clawed and tailed like a great beast, like a leopard or a lion!"

"Like the carvings of the harpies of the Slaver cities down in the Slaver Coast?"

"I do not know these harpies, Irri. What do they look like?"

"They have the heads and busts of women, but the wings of birds of prey, or scavenger-beasts like vultures."

"Interesting! But no, though I have seen griffons with heads so scabrous and naked of feather that one would think their ancestors consorted with turkey-vultures, and that hen was so hideous that I could not think how other griffons could stand to look up on her, let alone romance her. And yet, I'm told she was reckoned a great beauty among her kind!

"But no, this ambassador-bird was a male, and a mighty specimen, with fur like a amber plains-lion, and white feathers like a sharp-eyed eagle. And though the princess rejected his embassy as not properly credentialed, the stories he told were marvelous and, I thought at the time, barbaric and full of splendor." Sunset used the Valyrian words barbaric and splendor, for Dothraki had no such terms, being themselves, unconsciously and reflexively, the very definition of barbaric and splendid.

"He bragged of the ancestry of his noble lord, and of the deeds of those ancestors, their steadfastness in the service of the lost King of Griffonstone, and their right to that monarch's throne."

"Griffoonwhoohun?" tried Irri, failing to replicate Sunset's Equuish.

"It meant ‘Stone of the griffons, and it was the aerie of aeries, a vast tree-like collection of mighty mansions perched upon a peak like a great tree, a tree so enormous that it might very well hold up the sky. And in ancient days, the Griffon-stone was the foundation-stone of an empire of griffons that spread around the shores of the Celestial Sea, which in those days was known as the Griffon Sea. But those are tales of long ago, and the great king of the griffons disappeared, or died, or was done away with - the stories are endless. This ambassador came prepared with one such story, that claimed that enemies of the clan he served had conspired with the wicked Aramaspi to do away with their liege, and the loyal clan, being loyal to the end, had the right to the empty throne."

"So," snarled the khaleesi, looking somehow larger in the half-darkness and the fire-light glowing through their open tent-flap, "these griffons were either perfidious lions, or treacherous wolves, or some sort of useless southern sand-snake colony, useless to their sovereign when it mattered?"

"Your Highness, I think those creatures mean more to you, than to me, or the griffon as he sold his stories. We should talk later, about what they signify, but in this story, the griffon's faction, let us call them the Eagles, they were at war with their enemies, whom we could call the Lions. Now, this was not a noble war of open clashes in the field, but rather murders in the darkness and the back-alleys, and the Forever Princess refused to let her ponies be drawn into the ugliness."

"How wise must a ruler be, if she never dies, and learns forever, piling lesson upon lesson, experience on experience?" asked Daenerys, rolling over on her back, lolling in the sleeping-cushions, staring at the pattern the fire-shadows made on the roof of the tent. "What if Aegon was still with us today, together with his fierce sister-wives? Would the provinces have rebelled? Would he have been driven into exile?"

"The immortality that mattered," observed Sunset, who had picked up some of the story here and there in Pentos, and from the khaleesi herself, "was that of the dragons, was it not?"

The khaleesi looked drawn, and much, much older than such a young girl ought to have. "Enough of that. Continue the story of the eagle-cat lords and their perfidy!"

"As I have told you, the Forever Princess turned away his embassy, and gave them safe passage back to their war-torn lands. But before he left, I heard him tell a story of the first griffon, in the dawn of the world.

"For in the dawn of the world, wild magic stalked the land, and sparks of mystery and miracle struck here, there, everywhere. Thinking beasts rose up out of the soil, and descended from the skies above. And into the great world-tree of which the tree-dwellings of half-splendid Griffon-Stone are a distant memory, climbed a great cat, a lion like the father of all lions, into the lower boughs in search of a meal of eggs.

"That great king of lions climbed, stalked, and on one wide branch, he found a large nest, full of enormous eggs, and he licked his whiskers, and crept closer, to eat his fill. But the king of lions was quick, and he was careful, and he flipped around like a flash, for the queen of the eagles had been keeping a watch over her clutch of eggs from a higher branch, and she stooped like lightning, to destroy the invader with her raptor-talons.

"The two met with a mighty crash there in front of the egg-nest, and though the king was quick, and the queen was swift, and both were savage as the night and bold as the day, they fell from branch to branch, breaking this and that as they fell.

"And as they hit a low, wide branch, their fall was arrested, and the two, battered but furious, resumed their battle in this lower chamber of the world-tree. The queen of the eagles embedded her talons deep in the vital core of the lion-king's guts, tearing them quite out, and the lion-king took the eagle-queen's throat with his mighty jaws, and ripped her throat out with a terrible roar.

"And then, mortally wounded, the two expired in their bloody embrace, talons into innards, fangs into flesh, and that would have been that, and this would be a story for scavengers and the worms, but. But! But this was the morning of creation, and was this not Equestria, land of miracles and second chances?

"And when the dawn came, so did magic. And the dead carrion that had fallen to the very foot of the world-tree stirred, and in the blessing-light of the sun, an egg fell out of its dead mother, and fell to be cupped in the furred legs of its dead father. The world gave those murders a second chance, and the sun warmed that impossible egg, and it cracked, and opened. And that is how the first griffon burst into the world, screaming out his defiance.

"But where that first griffon found his wife, that, that was another story," finished Sunset with a bit of a hoof-flourish, and she looked over to see how her little tale had affected the khaleesi. She looked at Daenerys Stormborn, young bride of a savage brute, of a savage that was his own way as deadly as the doomed lion-king and his murder-wife the raptor-queen had been in their day.

The last princess of the Targaryens looked at Sunset Shimmer with joy in her glittering amethyst eyes, half in darkness, half lit by the flickering firelight.

"Tell me another!"

Author's Note

Thanks for editing and pre-reading help to Shrink Laureate, Oliver, and the general Company.

Tales Of Exile

The white ogre was screaming something at her mistress. Sunset couldn’t understand what the ogre was shouting , there were no words in it, only anger and threat and the promise of harm. The stringy-haired monster was like a cave-pony bellowing, like a diamond dog barking, like a dragon roaring - no sense or meaning beyond the simple operation of vast lungs, like the sound of of boulder-laced landslides rumbling over some defenseless downslope village.

The raging, purple-eyed ogre had the khaleesi by her small, delicate wrist, pulling her out of her saddle. That pretty, dumb, useless grey filly that she rode was panicking under the khaleesi's heels, and it bolted out from under her seat as the ogre wrested Sunset's mistress into the air.

Fury, pure and terrified fury, filled Sunset's veins, and she felt the sloped grass under her hooves flare and steam underhoof as she raced to her pale princess's rescue. She felt a trickle of something burning along her useless, useless horn, and a primal scream forced its way past her rage-tightened lips.

Sunset's vision was full of magic, fire, and fury, and her ears full of handmaidens screaming-

And that screaming woke Sunset. That, and a pail full of brackish, filthy water dumped over her head.

Her hot, over-heated head.

Sunset looked up from the now-soaked sleeping-pallet, and found the rest of her bedmates, the handmaidens who all shared a crowded tent in a promiscuous spooned pile most nights, half-tumbled out of the tent, scrambling away from her, terrified.

All but Jhiqui, who was standing over Sunset, panting wide-eyed, the offending bucket still in her hands.

What the hay, Jhiqui!" Sunset shouted, trying to wipe the wetness out of her eyes. "Tell me that wasn't the chamber-pot!"

"You're damn lucky it was just the wash-bucket, Sunset Horse! You were smoking!" snapped the senior handmaiden.

"No she wasn't," contributed Irri from the safe distance of the tent-flap. "She was glowing like an ember!"

"Swamp-monster-ball!!" contributed Doreah in her strange Lysene Valyrian dialect. Or, at least, that was what she had said sounded like to a somewhat confused Sunset.

"Wait, I was glowing? How was I glowing?" asked Sunset.

"That horn of yours, you weird witch-thing!" spat Jhiqui. "It was hot! And glowing blue!"

"Blue! What color blue? Like a green-blue, or a light blue, or-"

"What it was was hot, it damn near burnt my hand!" Jhiqui said, tossing the empty bucket out of the open tent-flap, over the heads of the other two handmaidens. She sat down on the other side of the pallet, staying out of hoof's-reach of the suspect unicorn.

Sunset looked around her, checking for scorch-marks. "I don't see any burn-marks. But horn-glow! Ha! It's coming back! Come on, you, glow!"

"You could see by the light!" said Irri, her head resting on her folded arms, laying to the left of the tent-entrance.

"You might be able to read by it!" said Doreah, mirroring her on the right.

"What is 'it', Sunset Horse?" demanded Jhiqui, cross-legged.

"My magic!" Sunset said, still tapping at her own horn with her left hoof, cross-eyed and hopeful. "If my horn's glowing, that means it's coming back! Aw, come on, glow, blast it!"

"Maybe it only glows when sleeping, Sunset Horse," said Doreah.

"Ah, that's just a foal thing. It'll come back in stages, as I recover from I don’t know, maybe from the trauma."

"The what?" asked Irri. "Speak the real tongue, Sunset Horse."

"I don't know the word for trauma in Dothraki, Irri. For all I know, you don't have one. It isn't really a Dothraki idea, trauma. You need therapists for that to be a thing." Despite your over-supply of traumatising terrors like the mess we made of Gyohan Byka.

"What language is that, anyways, Sunset?" asked Doreah. "I've heard men from all over the world, from the Summer Seas to the Narrow and the Jade, and I've never heard anything like that. Sounds more like a horse-herd arguing than real words."

"I've told you before, whore-girl, she's a real horse some witch gave speech. She never was a person!"

"Irri, that makes no sense. Who's ever heard of an orange, horned horse that barely comes up to my shoulder-blade! She's a princess under a curse."

"She better not be, curses are catching. Sunset Horse, you and your glowing horn aren't going to give me hooves some morning?"

"I have always been a horse, Doreah. Thank Celestia, I have never been, nor will I ever be, one of you ungainly ape-things."

"Aw, Sunset, it wouldn't be that bad." Doreah raised her long, shapely hand, and waved her freakish fingers at the unicorn. "Don't you want to pick things up with something other than your teeth? Stroke a lover, finger his-"

"Shut up, whore-girl! We don't need to hear your filth this early in the morning!"

"Shut up, the lot of you," said Jhiqui. "Sunset Horse, if this is going to keep happening, we can't have you sleeping in here with us. I won't be burned to death by you catching the tent or the bedding on fire. You've got a coat, you can sleep outside from now on."

Sunset wasn't able to talk Jhiqui out of exiling her from the handmaidens’ tent, and trying got her assigned oversight of the scullions for the day. There were more boring tasks in the camp, but none quite so demeaning, at least to Sunset. Who, if she wasn't actually a transformed princess of some mythical Equuish-speaking back-country, was still the former student of the Forever Princess.

Sunset thought of Celestia, and home. Was anything more unlike Canterlot than this scrubby, brown hill country? She knew that Celestia had been effective empress of half a continent, but Sunset had seen only a few narrow slices of that great country, and every bit she had seen had been green and cultivated, carefully kept. The Equestria Sunset had known had been a nation of gardens and manicured lawns. Even the orphanage had been neat and well-maintained. But all of that was gone, possibly gone forever as far as she was concerned. That damnable mirror! There hadn’t even been another side to it, no mirror to confront. Just an olive tree in a grove of other olive trees, in a land that she’d thought was wild and barbaric.

Sunset looked up at the hills above the khaleesi’s part of the camp, and laughed at the thought that those olive-groves had seen wild to her in that first look at Essos.

The terrain had grown scrubbier and drier as they had rode east and south of east, although they’d crossed two enormous rivers in as many weeks as they went, rivers fed by what Sunset had no idea, for there had been very little rain. The khal had chosen to direct his khalasar far to the south of the rumored walls of Norvos, and the priestly masters of that Free City had sent their regards and thanks for his restraint and notable absence in the form of numerous heavily-laden supply-carts in a compact, well-ordered convoy. The goods and food so supplied had been taken by a grateful khalasar, and the emptied carts had been blessed in their northward return by a naquikhalasar in escort.

The current camp was sprawled across an arid, dry highland, nominally the possession of the distant ‘bearded priests’ of Norvos. The camp’s nearest water-source was a half-dried-out mudhole. A mudhole that had been a small stream-fed lake before the entire khalasar had emptied it out for their various sub-camp needs. If the horde had been forced to stay in this camp one more night, they'd all be filthy and thirsty the next morning.

Thankfully, the camp-captains, and by extension the khal and his immediate followers, were not complete idiots, and the Dothraki were packing up to leave. As they had done every morning, weeks on end, months even - Sunset did the sums in her her head, and realised suddenly that they'd been on the road for over two months. The khaleesi’s part of the camp was upslope from the rest, and Sunset could look down, and out over the bustling chaos, to the distances beyond. Such a vast place the mirror sent me. Was Equestria this large, and I never noticed it on the other side of the windows of the princess’s royal train-car, or beneath the wheels of her guards’ air-chariots? Too absorbed in my own consequence, too wrapped up in whatever project she’d given me, whatever quest she’d given me, to see the land under my hooves?

Sunset packed the last of the dinner-gear into the cart, and swatted the dray-horse on its flank, nodding at the zafra sitting behind the reins. The rest of the camp was still packing up, but it was generally better to get some of the carts going, than to try and push the whole of the gear in a single, congested clot. The naquikhasari knew better than to steal from the khalzafra, not if they didn't want to be horse-whipped and given over to the head zafra themselves by irate blood-riders for a sweating term under the lash.

Sunset looked around for more work, and found herself unoccupied for the moment, her hooves idled. She knew she had ground to make up with the others, to get them to forget about the morning's fright. She was about to look to see if Irri needed help with the tents, when Jorah the Andal suddenly appeared on horse-back from behind a cart. The cart which had hidden the Andal and his horse kept going, rolling up the hill-track and kicking up a cloud of dust that threatened to make her sneeze. It was going to be one of those days, Sunset could tell already.

"Sunset Shimmer, khaleessiya of Her Highness Daenerys Stormborn, messenger of Khal Drogo! You're a hard person to find. I've been trying for two weeks now to get back to that discussion you promised me!"

Sunset looked around the camp for an excuse to put off the Andal, but found herself empty-hooved.

"Fine, just let me tell Jhiqui where I'm going."

Sunset had hoped to learn Andalese from Jorah, but he was more clever than he looked, and kept derailing their conversations onto matters which weren't declensions or grammar. She really didn't care to talk about horde politics, or about the khaleesi's food preferences, and definitely didn't care to talk about such things with Jorah. In the half-dozen talks they'd had before Sunset started avoiding him, she'd found that the only way to get him off the topic of camp-gossip and the khaleesi was to indulge his curiosity about her origins.

Not that she'd told him anything true about that. Each time they talked, she'd spun a new tale about where she'd come from, and the magic which had put her into the hands of Pentoshi slavers. She'd just had a couple of her imaginary constructs thrown back at her this very morning, filtered through the anxieties and fears of her fellow handmaidens. Which said something to Sunset about who else Jorah had been speaking to in the khalasar.

She was curious to see how far Jorah's circle of gossips had extended into the horde, and was planning on keeping an ear out for the more outlandish theories now. Since she'd refused to talk to anypony else about the subject, and only given Jorah himself the lies, it helped draw out for her benefit the peregrinations of Jorah the Andal.

"So, you came looking for another origin-story of the Sunset Horse, unicorn-slave of the great Khal Drogo and his beautiful khaleesi, Jorah the Andal?"

"I came looking for a true tale, Sunset Shimmer." Sunset was beginning to regret having offered her true name to this tall, rough looking man in Dothraki leathers. He looked today like a Dothraki, but Jorah Mormont, of Bear Island, son of Jeor and Hannah, did not think like a Dothraki. He thought like… Sunset was not at all sure that Jorah the Andal was typical of Westerosi. He was being notably unhelpful in educating her in that regard.

"And how do you know that one of those stories I've told you is not the truth?"

"What, that you were the daughter of great magicians, transformed and banished by the evil, imprisoned sister of your eternal monarch to this exile? Or was it that you were kidnapped by goblins, and stolen away from your loving sister to the Goblin Courts, and warped into this horse-like shape? Or that a secretive organization used their magics to turn you into a horse, to spy on the horse-kingdoms, and your ship went astray on the coasts south of Pentos?"

"Don't forget the one where I was a useless functionary attending a conference, where an evil merchant sold me a piece of costume-jewelry, which banished me to this distant land, in this foolish semblance of a legendary creature of literature!"

"Yes, of course, that one too! Do you have another?"

"Always." Sunset shifted from the Dothraki they had been speaking, to the khaleesi's High Valyrian. "But I have to tell you, Ser Jorah, it was a sad tale. My mother was once a proud daughter of a noble family of Crystal Ponies, of crystalline horses, who lived in the far frozen north, in a vast fortress-city known as The Crystal Empire, the crystalline imperium."

"It sounds like Valyria!"

"It was, from the tales I've heard. A vast, endlessly tall palace-spire, in which the queens of old dwelled, and kept away the screaming storms and snows with the Crystal Heart. But an ambitious unicorn came to his majority in the great fortress-city, and felt himself oppressed, and ill-used. And all the love and grace and good intentions of my virtuous mother failed to keep my wicked, wicked father from tearing the last foolish queen from her high throne, and smashing her into petrified shards, never to be put back together again. He enslaved my poor mother and the rest of the Crystal Ponies. He impregnated my poor mother, and took me away from her to raise me to be his heir. But his wickedness drew the attention of the Forever Princess, the Sovereign of the Heavens, and her dark sister, the Mare of Night. And they tore down our walls, and cracked open the great palace-spire, and defeated my mighty but evil father. The last I saw of my home, the Crystal Empire, was of a great wave of magic washing over the city, erasing it from sight, until it came to me, and then all was blackness.

"Until I opened my eyes again, and I was in that grove in the back-country of Pentos, with the slavers and their horn-harness and their halters."

Sunset wound down to a stop, breathing a little heavily. She'd put more into that one than she'd intended. She'd always loved that story, and those books. And Celestia had tolerated Sunset's taste for lurid romances of the lost Crystal Empire, encouraged it, in fact. Sunset suspected that Celestia thought it somehow character-building, or that it counteracted her occasional temperamental outbursts to calm herself with millennia-old fantasies of dark kings and virtuous maids.

"Yes, I think I've had enough of your tale-spinning, Sunset Shimmer." Jorah the Andal looked a little sad, and disappointed. "You've worn me down, I won't waste either of our time any further. I'll say it baldly, and cast myself on your pity: what does the princess love, what should I say to her, to gain her ear?"

And there it was, the tall, sandy-grey-haired Andal's desire, laid bare. Should she give him what he wanted?

"Jorah, I've been telling you what the khaleesi loves, all this time we've been talking. She loves strange stories of exotic lands and peculiar beasts. I told her once, a story I had been told, myself, a tale of the fall of the Dragon Queen. How she was trapped by a petrifying monster, and the mighty Dragon Guard died to a drake in futile defense of their liege. I told her how the Eternal Princess of the Heavens found nothing in the wastes left behind by that titanic battle, but the last and least of the Dragon Queen's petrified eggs. I told her how the Eternal Princess herself showed me the petrified egg in her court, and told me of the prophecy. The prophecy that states that there is, somewhere in the depths of time, one unicorn who is destined to awaken the last scion of the Dragon Kings, and raise that child whose destiny in turn is to revive the power of the dragons, to rebuild a kingdom once more from the rack and ruin of that long-ago desolation.

"She liked that one."

He nodded, and walked away.

They were, Sunset had heard, a day or two from the Dothraki Sea. The long trek across the hills of Norvos was almost at an end.

Author's Note

Thanks for editing and pre-reading help to Shrink Laureate, Oliver, and the general Company.

The Choke-point

Someone had lied to Sunset. The two days' ride a bloodrider had told her laid between them and the Dothraki home ranges, stretched into three days' journey, then four, then another week and a half. And at the end of all that, she found herself looking out of the end of a long, meandering canyon at not the vast Dothraki grasslands but rather endless golden tree-tops swaying in the breeze.

A line of sandstone bluffs rose over the heads of the carts and remount herds of the main body of the khalasar, and they were by necessity crowded together flank-to-nose as the rearmost elements pressed forward on the foremost. These were, for such a great host, very tight quarters indeed.

Just beyond the shelf of level ground in front of the bluffs was a steep drop-off and, at the foot of that rocky slope, a racing river like a flood in miniature. This harsh, wild little river and the bluffs overhead marked the frontier in a quite emphatic fashion, drawing a sharp border between the Norvos confederacy and their neighboring city-state, the easternmost of the Free Cities, sinister, mysterious Qohor and her dependencies.

This river was as dangerous and narrow as the previous three had been wide and fat. The boulder-strewn slopes below the shelf upon which the horde crowded and milled, were barely anchored on their upper slope by the typical scrub of the Norvosi highlands. Down among the rocks and racing waters, greener vegetation grew lush and wild. Beyond the white-water demarcation of nature’s fury, though, was a slight rise, drained into the water-shed of the rushing river. Growing on that slight rise and spreading eastward in an impressive vista as the land slowly fell away into the distance, were endless stands of amber-leaved deciduous trees, their canopies closing together until they formed a single, golden horizon of forest. A forest that, for all of its golden highlights, still looked to Sunset like any other a dark forest she had seen in her short life. Memories of home.

The river was unfordable by any beast born of equine dam, and the negotiations to cross the trade-bridges were tense and full of threat and bluster, or so Sunset heard. The khal and his khas chose to keep Sunset away from the Qohorik border-fortresses and their whip-thin slave-captains and the guards those mercenaries led. Sunset and the other handmaidens peered from a distance at the black-armored Unsullied in their stone-walled posts above the high bridges that crossed the unfordable waters below.

"They say," said Jhoqui with a sneer, "the Qohorik purchase their soldiers from the Astapori training-colleges because they cannot trust their own men with the interests of each others' family fortunes. The Qohorik are all witches, and sneak-thieves, and are treacherous like the changeable moon. They hire coaster sell-swords as well, but the Unsullied, they're owned by the people as a whole, not the individual merchants, not the families, not the witches' covens, or their priestly cults. The sell-swords fall too easily into alliance with this ambitious man, or that pestilent priest, or that sly old witch, and become their patrons' horse-tail, to be twitched and whipped for the sake of the horse's ass, and not the horse itself."

Sometimes, Sunset thought, Jhoqui's past rose up out of her conversation like hidden ruins rising out of a flooded plain. The brusque handmaiden had once been the pampered daughter of a great khal, not quite as mighty and all-conquering as the unassailable Khal Drogo, but once in his time a leader of a respectable khalasar. He had fallen to old age, or perhaps treachery - Sunset was not sure - and the bloodriders and lesser Dothraki she'd asked had not been as interested in the subject as she had been. But Jhoqui was a font of information on the politics of the road, if you could get her going.

"Their slave-trainers, the Astapori, they carefully time the cutting of their trainees. Just old enough that it doesn't make them run to fat. There's nothing so lean and wiry as an Unsullied. Look at them. Harder than any of ours, except perhaps the bloodriders. And the khal, of course."

"Cut?" asked Sunset, confused. "Cut how?"

Doreah, who was struggling through her still-poor grasp of Dothraki to learn from Jhoqui's wisdom, laughed to hear the unicorn fail to understand something so basic. "The horse has not heard of castrated slaves! There is something Sunset Horse does not know!"

"Gelding!" exclaimed Sunset. "They actually cut the peckers off of their Guard! Why, it destroys their aggression, their ambition, does it not? Everypony knows that you tame a stallion by cutting off his balls."

The angriest she'd ever seen Celestia had been that time they'd overheard some nobles chortling about the old rumor that the princess had her personal guards gelded. Sunset had gotten an earful of fury from the usually unflappable Celestia, an impassioned litany of every reason why gelding was an abomination, an evil practice. The princess had ranted about the six attempts in the last five centuries she'd made to have the practice banned, only to fail in her attempts to convince the Stables that gelding wasn't the natural punishment for certain great outrages against the moral order, certain terrible crimes. Crimes! Celestia had raged, punish one atrocity with another? Fools!

"The Astapori say, that ambition is a curse in soldiers, and that training and brutal discipline provides what balls take away with them," said Jhoqui.

"The Unsullied can't have children, can't build up families, have no interests of their own," sighed Doreah. "The Lysene magisters' council hires a lot of them. More of them come into the houses than you'd think."

"What!" exclaimed Irri, drawn in despite herself. "What use does an eunuch have for a prostitute!"

"What use does a woman have for a prostitute, Irri? More than you'd think, more than you'd think. I like the Unsullied, they can be fun, even sweet. More than the other type of sellsword. Those can be mean. You never wanted to be caught alone with one of the Brave Companions, those bastards tore a bloody furrow through the pleasure-houses, just before I… left." Speaking of pasts lurking under flood-waters - Doreah refused to say how she had ended up enslaved and in the possession of a khalasar.

The carts and the herds of the vast khalasar queued in the narrow open spaces that curled around the last foot-hills of the Norvosi highlands. The rear of the horde was hidden, no doubt curling this way and that, waiting in the deep hollows and draws they'd come down in that last descent. The fighting naquikhalasars stood their horses in clots here and there on the heights overlooking the stalled horde, armed and watchful. Rakharo, who was up there with half of the other bloodriders and the picked men, had told Sunset that this was the most deadly dangerous spot they'd been in for seasons, perhaps years. Other, lesser khalasars had been trapped and destroyed by vengeful western armies here or in similar terrain to the northeast or southwest, caught fat and full of stolen valuables, burdened with captive slaves, and careless in the tight quarters.

Khal Drogo was too wide-awake to be taken here like that. His men were prepared to smash through the small contingent of Unsullied and seize the passage if the Qohorik thought to betray another Dothraki khalasar.

Sunset sat beside the khaleesi and the handmaidens, and they watched the endless parade of the wealth of a nation across the high bridge, and she thought of how she would have destroyed it all, if she were a sly and ruthless Free City warlord. Pegasi outposts in the clouds above - Sunset looked up at the brutal blue sky, free of any blemish or scrap of vapor. Perhaps not. Unicorn choruses to seal off the upriver and downriver passages on the western bank of the river? She supposed that humans without thaumic resources could wrest some sort of sealing magic from earth and stone and constructed works. Like earth ponies. Although she'd need the earth ponies to hold the bridge, or bring it down, trapping the khalasar half on one bank, half on the other. Or entirely behind the unfordable river - to cast about, uncertain, thirsty, exposed, in hill country where their horses had limited forage and the fresh water was dear. Was that how the warlords of old had tamed past Dothraki hordes?

"I can see you thinking, Sunset Horse.You have your plotting face on," laughed Jhoqui. "What are you planning?"

"This makes me nervous, Jhoqui. I can see too many ways this ends badly for us all if the Qohorik want to betray the khal."

The khaleesi turned, her attention caught by the turn in the conversation and she listened to Jhoqui lecture her other handmaidens.

"And they could, if they cared to, Sunset Horse. It has happened before. They say that there are groves deep in the Forests of Qohor, that no living Dothraki has ever seen, where in the old days, the Qohorik rangers dragged their half-starved, helpless prisoners, never to be heard from again. For it takes starvation, and great thirst, to weaken Dothraki enough for these weak stone-house woods-men to take in battle, that or ambush and treachery. They say that there is a grove deep in the hidden heart of the forests where every tree has the flayed skin of some fallen khal's bloodrider wrapped around it, nailed in place as a spell, as a ritual. And there was a time that the Qohorik set out to expand that grove, and waged war against the khalasars as they passed through their lands.

"But every time a khalasar was ambushed, every time they pulled down this lesser khal or that, or trapped some handful of naquikhalasari away from their brothers, it drew the attention of the rest of us. And they say Qohor burned every season, for seven years. Outlying stone-house fortresses, every farmer, every ranger who couldn't hide from the vengeance of the Dothraki - Qohor burned, and as much of their forests as we could burn, that burned too.

"Eventually, they stopped setting out to take their Dothraki hides. Out here in the open, at any rate. Don't get caught away from the horde, Sunset Horse. I think the Qohorik would greatly prize an orange-furred hide they could wrap around some sacred tree in the depths of the unknown forest."

And the horde continued to creep through the narrows, and that high bridge over the unfordable river.

Author's Note

Thanks for editing and pre-reading help to Shrink Laureate, Oliver, and the general Company.

Razors and Chamber-pots

The forest did not begin in a single slash across the road, but in dribs and drabs. Little copses of scrubby golden-leaved brush grew wider, thicker, and taller as the terrain rolled away from the border-river and the Norvosi river-bluffs beyond the river. Modest meadows alternated with narrow farmed fields, with no farm-houses or buildings to be seen anywhere near the highway. As the khalasar swarmed along the road, they made what was in any objective analysis a wide and capacious highway seem like a badly overcrowded Canterlot alley.

Sunset looked down at the cut-stone pavement of the road under her hooves. This was the same highway that had come down the centralmost of the canyon draws that the khalasar had squeezed through on the Norvosi side of the border, but in Norvosi territory the pavement had been left hidden under what must have been decades or even centuries of dust and dirt. Here in Qohorik country, someone had set out to maintain the old Valyrian road with a fanaticism that spoke to… a peculiar, even alien set of priorities, at least to her mind. She imagined that her hooves would have clopped loudly on those ancient stones - still so closely fitted that she couldn't see a single weed anywhere in sight - but for the fact that she was surrounded on every side by rolling carts, and trotting horses, and chattering Dothraki and zafra and all the chaos of a city on hooves and wheels.

Hooves and wheels that drew out of those cut-stone pavers a veritable, echoing world of ear-ringing noise. Sunset thought she could understand why the Norvosi let the roads grow their coats of sound-deadening dirt. She looked around at the near and distant yellow-leaved foliage, and wondered how deep the mounds of fallen leaves must get after the Running of the Leaves.

Then Sunsect considered that pony tradition, and mentally smacked herself for thinking such a thing might have arisen here in this new world, this world without ponies to regulate the seasons. It looked like autumn was almost upon them - what did these people do to clear the limbs, bring down the leaves? Did they even try to control the seasons like civilized ponies?

Sunset looked up at the baking late-afternoon sun, still shining hotly upon the crowded Dothraki, bunched up after the long crossing, and preparing to go into camp in this relatively open terrain. They had no princesses here; who told the sun to rise, the moon to set? To listen to the khal and his love-talk about his pale bride, he did, and his Daenerys was that moon, reflective of his glory. Sunset thought it safe to assume this was simply swagger, poetry - metaphor. For one, she'd never seen the khal do anything that even remotely looked like her former mentor's routine, her twice-daily ritual regulation of the heavenly spheres. Even great prodigies of ineffable, world-shaking power had to use some sort of ritual or preparatory act to move the heavens by will alone.

The Dothraki talked of a Great Stallion, and occasionally spoke of the sun in the sky as that self-same Stallion. Sunset was not sure this was metaphor, or religion, or actual literal truth. Looking at her fellow equines, so dead between the ears, so very much not-people, she could not imagine a god in this world walking on four hooves, however fiery those hooves, however bright the mane. She pondered the irony of the world she had come from, where an immortal pony with a mane like the auroras of the northern skies directed the sun in the sky like her own personal spotlight, and compared that bedrock fact of pony existence with this ape-world and its fever-dreams of figurative sun-stallions. Celestia had loathed it when the nobles made fun of her and called her the cake-goddess, or hinted at ironic worship of her alleged divinity, but she was real, she was tangible - you could reach out with a hoof, and slap her on her monumental flanks. If one was so inclined.

Celestia had been the closest thing Sunset had ever met to a god, and yet - no mare is a god to the pony who empties her chamber-pot.

Sunset looked up as the khaleesi kneed her grey back against the flow of traffic, and thought about the chamber-pot packed away in one of the carts. The little princess had used it extensively in the first several weeks, and it had been one of Sunset's jobs to clean it, had been her self-selected duty, if only to emphasize Sunset's personhood in the display of hoof dexterity. Then one day, Sunset had seen the khal squat at one of the public latrines, with his delicate flower of a khaleesi in plain view. She'd seen the little platinum-haired bride blink, and get an evil look in her eye. Then Sunset had seen her mistress, her little ape-echo of her all-but-goddess-in-this-world mentor, pull down her drawers, squat like a barbarian by the side of her savage husband, and made water while he voided his bowels, with all the world to watch.

From then on, the khaleesi used the very-public latrines like everyone else, and the fancy porcelain chamber-pot found a spot at the very back of the baggage, beneath the worn-to-rags silks and fine clothes which had lasted so very briefly in the saddle and on the road.

As they went into camp, they passed a detail of zafra digging away at the night's latrines under the bored eyes of a very junior camp-captain.

The khalasar was accompanied and somewhat preceded by a detachment of Unsullied infantry, long-speared and on foot. Sunset, accompanying the khaleesi in an expansive mood, eyed the strange not-men as they moved ahead of the slow-moving horde, and passed the slave-soldiers marching in the van. The archers from the khaleesi's khas parted around the Unsullied jogging in tight order, a half-dozen light-riding Dothraki enveloping on either side of the column of the armored eunuchs arrayed four to a row, ten deep. Sunset and the khaleesi rode to the left of the column, and Sunset got a close look at the gelded warriors with their spears and their round shields.

Their armor was made of thick, boiled leather, and they wore heavy caps with tails that protected their necks on both sides and the rear. The long spears - which were of a length longer than those used by Celestia's Royal Guard, and shorter than the pike she'd seen in an EUP museum once - looked like serious business, but she noticed a strange decoration hanging from each - what looked like braided hair, hanging long and tightly bound, from each weapon.

As they passed the detachment, Sunset kept herself between the khaleesi and Rahkaro, who had been assigned the command of the khaleesi's protective khas. Once they were out of ear-shot of the eunuchs Sunset slowed down a hair, and turned to ask the bloodrider a question.

"Yes, those were braids!" Rahkaro snarled, interrupting that question before she could even voice it. "Dothraki braids! Insolent worms.They'll never let us forget that, not as long as they can bind one true hair in a hundred, in a thousand plucked from some woman's wig. Slaves! I've met khals with less arrogance."

"When a Dothraki is defeated, they cut off their braids, right?" asked Sunset, trying to catch up to the rationale underlying Rakharo's ire.

"Yes, it is why Khal Drogo is so famed - he has never lost a fight, never been humbled, never felt the razor's-edge part his long hair." Rakharo felt at the base of his scalp, looking dark. "The elders say a bit of humbleness is good for a warrior. Makes him cautious, makes him keen to never lose a braid again. But every rider reveres and follows the long-braided ones, don't they? And then the damn Unsullied, they throw it in our faces."

"The braids they have on their spears - they're trophies? Are they real?" asked the khaleesi, who had fallen back to listen to their conversation.

"Yes, and sort of, khaleesi. They were once true trophies, from a day that is so long ago that it is only remembered in dirges and warning-songs. The reason that the Qohorik buy so many Unsullied. A fool of a khal, thought to run over a column of prepared Unsullied. Again and again, right in the face of their long sticks. Those Unsullied, those that survived - they're the reason there is a Qohor. And ever since, the gelded worms wave the braids they harvested from that field in our faces. Every time the Astapori deliver another batch of Unsullied, they break up a number of braids, and multiply them by mixing one hair into each new braid, one for each new Unsullied."

"It's a mockery. And damn them for being dangerous enough to not ride them down for that insult."

Sunset eyed the deflated demeanor of her young mistress, who had just wanted a nice gallop out in front of the day's advance. It was to have been a simple, joyous gallop along this beautiful highway, under the eaves of the forest closing canopy overhead. There were no leaves laying on the fitted cut-stones underneath their hooves for her to spook at, but the khaleesi's grey was even so starting to pick up their mutual mistress's dismay, and tossed her beautiful, empty head in agitation.

"Aw, Rakharo, those aren't your braids the geldings are brandishing! Don't be so down-mouthed. You know, I once heard a noblepony with a magnificent mustache tell a crowd of admiring colts how he grew such a glorious lip full of facial hair. He told them that when he was very young, a tiny colt no bigger than those that listened, he began shaving every morning. He stood up on a stool beside his father, and looked into the mirror with his sire. They shared the shaving-cream, and as his father trimmed his own whiskers, the then-colt scraped his naked lip, trying his best to cut what was at first not there at all. He did this from the day he first saw his father shave before the mirror, until the day he got his cutie mark. That noblepony said it was the razor that made the mustache, that cutting it fine is how you make it grow."

"What! A horse with a mustache!" laughed the khaleesi, diverted, and even Rakharo smiled, rubbing at his bare face, where a few straggling hairs struggled to suggest the fierce beards that graced the khal and his other bloodriders. "I cannot imagine such a wonder. Was it very long?"

"Very much so, Khaleesi. Almost as long as Khal Drogo's, and perhaps longer for having been cut so very many times in his youth."

And the khaleesi, cheered by the comic notion of little bearded horses, kicked her heels into the sides of her grey, and led Sunset and the riders of her khas on a merry chase down the long Valyrian highway under the spreading boughs of the tall golden trees closing in overhead.

Author's Note

Thanks for editing and pre-reading help to Shrink Laureate and the general Company.

Another Orphan

Sunset awoke suddenly to the sight of great purple eyes, fire-lit and staring at her out of the rich darkness of the khaleesi's tent.

Sunset was laying curled in front of the tent's entrance, as she had most nights since the other handmaidens had kicked her out of their shared tent, afraid that she'd catch their bedding on fire with some magical night-time emission. So, instead, she'd taken to sleeping like a guard-dog in front of the khaleesi's own tent, whether it contained a sleeping mistress or not on a given night. Oh, not close enough to catch it on fire if her horn did somehow spark off, but… it was somewhere to be, somewhere people could know where to find her if they needed to find her.

The khaleesi was not with her khal, as she was most nights. And as a sleep-grogged Sunset could see, looking into the evidence of the little princess's eyes, she was awake late into the darkness. The unicorn looked up into that darkness and tried to judge the hour through what little sky she could see through the leaf-heavy boughs of the trees that surrounded their fragment of camp. Difficult to say, without the open sky to provide its usual evidence of the wheel of the heavens.

"You were burning again, Sunset-horse. A blue like… robin's-eggs, I think? I've never seen a fire that color, nor flame so - soft? Did it hurt?"

Sunset tried to not react to news of her horn acting up while she was insensate. Tried not to show how frustrating it was to have something so core to oneself caper and cavort for all the world to watch in fascination, while you yourself was - not. It was like dreaming for the benefit of others.

You'll shine for anyone but me, you traitor-self, you.

"No, Khaleesi. Horn-glow does not burn to the touch. It can be touch in itself. It is in a way, another limb, or an expression of one. The things your people do with your clever fingers, your finger-tip touches, your fine needle-work - we do that with the horn-glow, the fire you saw. Or to light our way in the darkness. Or, if you are clever, to weave the more subtle effects, layer on layer, and make the magics that move the world."

"What were you doing with your fire, that you were burning like that?"

"If I only knew, Khaleesi, I would be more useful to you. As you saw, it only burns when I sleep these days. Something about this world, something about me, I don't know. At least it burns when I dream, now. That's something, isn't it?"

"What were you dreaming, Sunset-horse?"

Sunset fought a sudden jealousy, strangely protective of her dreams. You have taken everything else…

But the khaleesi had not taken anything of Sunset's, not her, not the little princess. Those who had taken everything from Sunset had given it to the khaleesi, but the girl wasn't the thief, she was only…

The fence? The receiver of stolen goods? No, that doesn't scan, that's a theme for a wretched writer of doggerel, not a true poet.

The purple eyes in the darkness watched, waiting, and Sunset blushed, hopefully not so brightly that it could be seen from the rich bedding inside the tent. This, I can give freely. It can be real.

"I was dreaming of the forever princess, Khaleesi," Sunset said, quietly into the darkness of the tent. "Nothing more serious than silly night-fancies at first, that she flew into the heavens with a razor to shave the mare in the moon. That she labored in the skies, and pushed the stars into new positions, like a struggling cart-driver with their cart stuck in the mud of a ford-crossing.

"Then, I saw the princess in a dark room." The restricted archives, the artifact treasury, the one Sunset had broken into, night after night in those last bitter, acrimonious days before she took the mirror's lure. "She was looking into a great magical mirror, and something… looked back at her." As Sunset's winged self had looked back at her, once upon a time, whispering promises of power and princesshood. "Not the princess, but something, something twisted." The princess on fire, the princess that was fire.

"It was as if the princess had combusted, all the power that burned deep behind her eyes - had consumed her, and the physical her had burnt away, wicking this living flame into life. Orange and yellow flaring where her mane had always been a flow like the northern lights, soft pastels replaced by all the eye-straining colors of the furnace. And furious, bitter, mean - nothing like the Celestia I knew.

"She said terrible, cruel things to the princess, to herself, that burning reflection of herself. The reflection repeated everything mean or cutting I'd ever said to Princess Celestia. Or - I think? You know how dreams were. Said other terrible things I don't understand, not really."

Oh, don't worry, Celestia, they'll do what you always have them do when one of your ponies doesn't do what you want, starts getting ideas. The easiest way to deal with a rebellious pony, isn't it - to lure them into becoming a monster for you? Once they make themselves monstrous for you, well, monsters. Monsters can be dealt with. Disposed of. What tomb will they imprison us within when you become me? Or you could just… follow the angry little filly. See what wonders I actually contain, Princess. Explore, if you dare.

"The dream turned bad, and then I got mad. And then - I think I felt you watching me, and I woke up?"

"I dream of fire," said the little platinum-blonde girl with the purple eyes. "I dream of it all the time now."

Daenerys reached out to the little stand that they used to display her favored gifts from the wedding-feast. On it laid a dragon's egg like ebony chased in crimson lacquer. She took it into her arms, and cuddled it like a doll, or a fitful, sleeping baby.

"Fire, and dragons. Viserys tracked me down again today, demanded I talk to my husband about the bride-price. His promised army. 'They will wake the dragon!' He always says that, my brother."

Sunset listened to her mistress's distress, her sibling-woe. At least she had a brother to make her life troublesome.

"I don't know if Viserys and his yelling made me dream of it, but I did, again. The dragon and the fire. The dragon breathes on me, and it burns away - everything. All my fears and worries. And then I feel like I can be anything at all. And then… and then I can be fierce, and brave. Like you."

"Brave! When have I ever been brave in your presence, Khaleesi? I just… go along with things. Do what they expect. Do I look fierce to you? I'm… scared. All the time."

"If you are, it never shows. I want that. I want to be fierce." She stroked the dragon's egg, pensive. "I was afraid of my sun-and-stars when we first met, you know? And the wedding… oh, seven hells, the wedding-feast. When he lopped off your magister's head like he was wiping something off his boot. There's nothing quite like watching your bridegroom murder a man at your feet in a fit of pique to really set a precedent for the marriage, you know?"

"I may have taken some notice, your highness."

"I don't think I fear my husband these days. He's been… kind. Calls me the moon of his life. Who knew such a man could be so romantic? But my brother…" The little princess caressed her dragon's egg, looking troubled.

"My brother's been pestering my husband about my bride-price, as if he were a banker, or a merchant to be dunned for an overdue bill. The khas Viserys expects as his right, what he sold me for; I think he thinks the khal will just hand them over like a string of remounts and they'll ride off to conquer King's Landing for him."

Bride's-price? Was that like a dower, a bride's settlement in the marriage contract? Sunset was learning more Andalese from her mistress's incidental use of it, embedded in her Dothraki along with the occasional Valyrian relict, than she'd managed to pry in alleged language-lessons from the slippery Ser Jorah.

"Ah, well, nothing to do about it tonight. So you dream of home, and your forever princess. What was home like, Sunset-horse?"

"I'm not sure I could call Vaes Chetirat home, Khaleesi," Sunset said. When did she start translating even the little things like that? Should she start calling Celestia 'Asavvalame'? "But that was the city I lived in for many years. In Celestia's palace. High on the Canterhorn, a great mountain, in a range of tall, rugged mountains. A city built upon the side of the mountain, where springs pour entire rivers over her cliffs, and the palace hangs over empty air that only a pegasus could love. They say unicorns love heights, but I always liked my hooves firmly placed upon the ground."

"It sounds like stories I've read about the Aerie, stories I've been told. Viserys says that it can only be approached by climbing, perilous narrow tracks, from fortress to fortress, into the clouds themselves. It is the holdfast of that traitor Jon Arryn, that man who thought to make a king of the stag-lord, and built the alliance of rebels that stole our lands, drove us out of our home." The khaleesi's brief wonder soured, as she parroted her brother's angry words, and her face folded in worry she dwelled upon that familiar story of betrayal and exile. Sunset could hear the echo of the Beggar King's whining in the khaleesi's sweet voice.

"And that sounds like Cloudsdale, Vaes Fas," said Sunset, trying to distract Daenerys from… whatever this was. "If someone had tried to build a road there, instead of taking a chariot like a rational pony. Vaes Fas is a pegasus city, built upon the air itself, cloud and mist and rainbows..."

"I'm not sure I believe all I've read about my country, not really," interrupted the khaleesi, not taking up Sunset's offered fancy of cloud-cities and wonder, her brow still heavy with storm-clouds of her own. "I hear Viserys talk about it, and I read about it in the books… I see the words on the page, and it is sworn to be true by those reputable magisters who have written the books that Ser Jorah gave me on my wedding day. But when I think about it, a city like the Aerie seems unlikely, imaginary, physically impossible. How can a city live so high above the world, fed only through narrow and steep paths a goat would find difficult and inconvenient?"

The khaleesi looked up from her dragon's egg. "I've never seen my country, you know."

Sunset blinked at this sudden left turn, and tried to follow the khaleesi's lead.

"Can a country be yours," Sunset asked, "if you've never been there?"

"Oh, Sunset-horse, I've been there! I was born in the Targaryen heartland, you know, on Dragonstone. In the midst of a tempest so terrible they say entire islands washed away… Daenerys Stormborn, birthed in blood. Sometimes I think Viserys hates me because my birth killed my mother."

Daenerys stopped speaking at this confession. Sunset was afraid to break that silence, to touch... that.

"My brother always says," Daenerys finally continued, breaking her own silences, "that we left Dragonstone not long after the funeral, to look for allies. I don't remember it - I was too young. I have no image of Dragonstone, no memory of it. All I've ever known are these houses, these apartments our supporters loan us here in Essos. Borrowed servants, borrowed fineries, borrowed houses…"

Sunset had heard stories about the Beggar King and his little sister, but Daenerys herself had never talked about it before this. Sunset was afraid to speak, and didn't know how to ask without spooking the khaleesi or angering her even further.

"You have no-one else other than your brother?" And yet there she was, asking questions again. Perhaps the khaleesi was right about Sunset.

"Oh, endless supporters," continued the khaleesi. "Plotters, people happy to plan with Viserys. All left behind in Pentos, or Braavos, or one of the other cities… I've always been the petted-one, the one they smiled and cooed at. Then they would go into other rooms to talk to my brother. But no, everyone else is dead. They killed us all, our loving subjects. The hawk, the lion, the wolf, the stag. Say what you will of the Dothraki, but they seem to like the fact that I'm still alive, and are inclined to keep me that way."

Daenerys was winding herself up, and Sunset thought that might be a bad idea. The khaleesi needed her rest, needed to sleep, as much as Sunset did, or more…

"You know, we're both orphans, Khaleesi?" Sunset tried once again, as a deflection. "At least you know who your parents were. Me, they found me in a basket on the stoop of the Hoofington town hall one fine morning. I was lucky some timberwolf didn't come out of the Everfree to snap up a free snack before the bailiff found me. Laying there in front of the main doors, exposed to the elements. I'm told he came in early, to open up the court ahead of the circuit judge, and there I was, squalling my outrage against an uncaring world."

"But, you said you were the student of a great immortal princess?"

"That is what I became, Khaleesi. I have no idea how I began, before that basket. Did my mother throw me away? Were they killed by something, and some relative disposed of the headache by leaving me to the authorities? They say that no unicorn family in the area was missing a foal, or a mare of foaling age. It's possible somepony travelled some distance to get rid of the evidence, far from where my actual parents lived.

"But no, it was the orphanage for me. I was just another orphan. Until the princess came on some sort of inspection tour, and I managed to show off at exactly the right time, a real big light show. Impressed her, showed I had potential. Celestia liked to push the idea of meritocracy. I think she loved having a student who came from literally nothing, some nameless bastard with no blood. She never said a word about it, of course, but she loved to march me around at Court, and encouraged me when I mouthed off at the nobles.

"It all went to my head, of course. I thought I was being groomed for great things. I could say anything to anypony! But when I look back at it, I wonder if I wasn't just her jester, there to deflate the aristocrats and shame the courtiers. I was too busy with my magic studies, and showing off for the Princess to think about why she let me do the things I did."

"Sunset-horse, tell me more of your Vaes Chetirat. They tell me that our capital is a great crimson-walled fortress they call the Red Keep…"

Sunset let the little Targaryen, distracted by her own dreams of home, chatter on about that city, that home she'd never seen with her own eyes. The burble faded into a whisper, until Daenerys, her eyes closed upon more private dreams, subsided into a muttering sleep. The little princess slept once more, curled around her dragon's egg.

Sunset laid in the entrance to the khaleesi's tent, and watched her mistress's sleeping face in the dying light of the campfires. She looked at her exiled princess, and thought about the drawn and sad and furious dream-face of the princess she'd left behind.

Sleep did not come for Sunset before the dawn. When the sun greeted her, she knew she should forget the princess she had thrown away, because it was time to wake the princess that she had been given.

Author's Note

Thanks for editing and pre-reading help to Shrink Laureate, Oliver, and the general Company.

Shadow and Sunset

Sunset returned from the khal's select herd, the grey's reins in her teeth. The khaleesi's big filly was as placid and empty-headed as always, looking like nothing so much as a slightly smaller-eyed version of one particularly smug and imbecilic student a few years ahead of Sunset in the school for gifted unicorns. She thought that the grey's narrow-muzzled empty exoticism might have turned the heads of certain colts she'd known, the ones for whom the animal's total lack of sapience would have been a selling point. Sunset looked at the grey's expensive, fine-stitched saddle, and wondered if they were still the style for the fast and the fashionable back home.

She hadn't seen Ahego or any of his cousins, of course. Their prestige had yet to have recovered enough for them to be allowed to handle the khal's prized beasts. As long as they kept trying to put a rope on Sunset, and failing, they would be relegated to tending the cart-horses and the remounts, and should count themselves lucky that the herd-masters didn't send them even further back into the depths of the khalasar.

Sunset found Khaleesi Daenerys beside the mounting-block outside of her rapidly-collapsing tent, and the khaleesi dismissed the other handmaidens she had been talking with in her rapidly-improving Dothraki.

Daenerys looked cheerful and enthusiastic in her new leathers and her tied-back hair. As she got up on the block and threw herself into the grey's saddle, she stared eastwards into the glowing boughs in the distance that diffused and hid the rising dawn.

"Today, Sunset-horse, I am determined that we will see one of these elk I hear so much about. We saw nothing yesterday, or the day before, but today, we're far enough ahead of the main body, don't you think?"

"Your highness, we saw plenty yesterday. Every other branch held one of those ill-tempered black squirrels."

"Sunset-horse, they're squirrels. Who cares if they disapprove of you?"

"You've never been cornered by an angry pack of exotic tree-critters. They can be vindictive." The princess's deceptively idyllic gardens had been full of small mammals with evil minds, who lurked in wait for unsuspecting fillies who just wanted to pet a cute furry thing. Sunset had gotten in so much trouble after she'd burned the fur off of that mob of rare Somnambulan ground-squirrels…

"Maybe if you didn't glare at every movement, Sunset-horse. One of our supporters in Braavos had the most marvelous menagerie, with a tiger, and a bear, and these flightless pink birds taller than I am…"

Sunset looked up at the girl, towering over her on her grey-coated mount.

Daenerys blushed. "Well, I was probably six at the time. I may have grown a bit since then. But they were so tame!"

"You never can tell with private animal collections. I think it depends on the collector. My mentor prefered her pets to be wild and not too eager to run to an outstretched hoof. The ones that did, you could be sure were up to no good. We've been lucky that these spotted tigers have kept their distance so far."

"Oh, yes, those! I suppose we did see something yesterday, I had forgotten!"

How could one forget the steady glare of such a predator? Sunset remembered that mane-raising existential dread that had come over her when she'd spotted the great cat staring out of a bit of brush, its gaze trained upon Daenerys' beautiful grey mare. Sunset had picked up a rock and shied it at the beast, yelling for the archers of the khas to defend her mistress. Slovenly, foolish young stallions! They'd been larking about too far from the khaleesi to protect their charge. What if the spotted tiger had decided to pounce, or had been stalking with company?

Sunset remembered vaguely that some big predators liked to hunt together, and couldn't recall if it included that particular type of predator or not.

"But I've seen tigers before, Maester Florio had a matched pair in his menagerie, they'd eat meat right from your hand. I want to see one of these elk!"

The two of them left the khalzafra and the other handmaidens breaking down the camp, and raced out ahead of the advancing van along with Daenerys' khas. They would, as the khaleesi had vowed, move ahead of the grand bustle and noise of the khalasar, looking for the wary great elk who were rumored to hide deeper in the depths of the dark woods through which they passed.

Sunset was somewhat nervous to be so far from the rest of the herd. The stories she'd heard of sorcerers and ill-intentioned foresters didn't fill her with confidence in the beneficence of the Qohorik, who were almost as difficult to catch in the wild as their elusive great-antlered ruminants. But the khal had given his moon-of-his-life a large escort of young archers and enthusiastic riders to keep away the tigers and ill-intentioned locals.

Assuming they weren't all off chasing squirrels or the prospect of a nice spotted-fur hide to add to their tents.

The khalasar was passing out of the lesser woods which lined the western marches of the great forests of Qohor, into the heartwood itself, or so Sunset thought. Actual Qohorik were rare and hard to talk to, when you were orange-coated and too exotic to go casually mixing among hunters and long-knived stonehousemen who were known to prize pretty furs and rugs.

So Sunset had to make do with the Dothraki's incomplete knowledge of the geography of the Qohor ranges, but what she'd heard from those who knew matched what she was seeing. The great-boughed trees here towered above them, vast and almost as ancient as Celestia herself. This was old forest, climax forest. The evil little black squirrels lurked higher here than those of previous days, and she could barely hear their chittering and fury, they were so far off of the ground.

The brush was likewise much thinner here, under such a canopy, and in most places, was barely present at all, having been gnawed almost to the loam by herds of - something. There was precious little fodder for the horses of the khalasar here, and the baggage-carts full of scythed sweet grasses trundling along at the back of the horde would empty themselves quickly, for as long as the Dothraki were foolish enough to linger under these vast golden-leaved boughs.

So, today was a day for running, and racing, and charging about in dead gallops under the sound-deadening wooden skies above. No stone-arched hall or chamber in Sunset's mentor's great palace was half so well-built for silences and stillness as this endless natural cathedral, its tree-buttresses holding up great arches far overhead the roadway and the firm footing of the nearly-clear forest floors.

Sunset felt her lungs bellow, breathe in, breathe out, as she raced to keep up with the khaleesi's longer-limbed grey, and the archers and the lancers of the khas spread out in the slower, less firm dirt away from the well-preserved metalled surface of the road under their charge's privileged hooves.

Daenerys was still determined to find her elk, and the elk continued to remain stubbornly elusive. One might have thought, here in the great open spaces in the heart of the forest under the high limbs, that it would be easier to spot the great black beasts. But the shadows shifted, and remained, though the distant sun somewhere far over the shading canopy glared hard through the leaves. Even noon failed to dispel shadows under the trees, and the stray beams of sunlight only chased them about, as the remount herders might chase Sunset herself in the mornings or the twilight evenings after their work was done.

The exertion and the memory of her repeated humiliation of the remount herders distracted Sunset from her usual vigilance, and when the more distant dappled darkness began to engulf the khaleesi's outer khas, she failed to notice their little racing herd as it disappeared around them.

And then, just as Daenerys was crying hallo at the sight of a distant horned head in an obscuring sunlight-lanced shadow far ahead on the roadway itself, Sunset glanced sideways, and realized suddenly she couldn't see anyone else, couldn't hear the hoofbeats of the other horses.

"Khaleesi, stop! We've outrun the khas!"

Daenerys barely heard Sunset, but her grey was more responsive than her mistress, and dropped down into a walk. The grey's ears twitched, having noticed the same sudden loss of the rest of her herd, and caught anxiety from Sunset like a sickness, shuddering and twitching.

"But, but - elk!" sulked the khaleesi, not catching the mood that had suddenly swept over her horse-folk.

"Khaleesi, when was the last time you saw Rahkaro?" asked Sunset, her head swiveling around, looking desperately for any sign of horses, any glint of arakh or stirrup. "I haven't seen an archer or any other member of the khas in at least five minutes. This isn't right. We need to head back, and see if we can't touch hooves with someone else. Anyone else."

"We were all moving fast, Sunset Horse. They're out there somewhere, and probably ahead of us now, that we're standing in the middle of the road. Oh, blast, look at that - the elk is gone."

"Are you sure it was an elk? They say the Qohorik foresters are tricky, and sly. We should go back. Now. Quickly. There should be someone else a half-hour's ride back, even if we can't find your riders."

"Well, of course. We're within galloping range of tens of thousands of the greatest warriors in Essos. We can't be in any sort of danger, can we?"

"Khaleesi, we left the outriders behind an hour ago, and it was safe because Rahkaro and the riders were with us. Do you see Rahkaro and the riders? I don't."

Wait. What was that, that she saw over to the right? Was that movement? Sunset peered, backing up out of reflex, standing between the khaleesi on her grey and whatever that had been.

It hadn't looked like a Dothraki rider.

Was that another great cat, stalking them?

Sunset looked back, scanning the shadows between the trees for spotted tigers. Had they said if the tigers hunted alone, or in packs?

She went cautiously back to the grey, and nosed her back west, in the direction of the too-distant horde. The grey obeyed her herd-mate rather than her now-confused rider, and hesitantly started walking in the indicated direction.

The other riders failed to materialize around them in the rising darkness, as some unseen cloud passed between them and the sun hidden beyond the canopy overhead. What had been a glorious golden-glowing wooded cathedral of light, turned by moments darker, as they slowly walked back across the road pavement they had flown across on the way out into this now-threatening… emptiness.

And so it was, that when the rising shadows suddenly gained definition, Sunset wasn't surprised in the least. As soon as she'd realized that the Dothraki had disappeared, she had somehow expected something like this. It was too much like that one terrible day in the Everfree, when the wild storm broke in the midst of one of her little errands for Celestia, and the rain seemed to summon timberwolves from the depths of the forest.

There were no animate deadwood monstrosities, here under the boughs of the Forest of Qohor. No manticores, or chimerae. No, that would have been familiar to the orange unicorn. A promise of magic and home. Here? In Qohor?

The shadows formed blades of ebon and ice, and slashed at her head.

Adrenaline fueled Sunset's retreat, and her legs carried her rapidly away from the black horror, dancing away from the swirling sharpness, all edge with no weapon behind it.

Daenerys! Sunset spared a precious glance behind her, to spot the khaleesi, and saw the grey fleeing into the forest, off of the road as two more shadows emerged from other side of the road, and oozed to her left and right, moving to surround them both.

Sunset dodged one last swipe by the hostile shadow, and raced to keep up with the runaway grey, slipping under the tendril of darkness from another shadow as it tried and failed to summon its own cutting-edge.

They were panic-galloping, away from the road, away from any signpost or landmark, not that the Qohorik bothered with such things here in the heart of the forest. Sunset wanted to shout at the khaleesi to get control of her beast, but she couldn't spare the breath. Like a drowning pony too short of air to cry for help, she needed every precious lungful, she needed to keep going - because the shadows weren't letting them get away.

They were following them, following Sunset and her mistress.

And the magic wouldn't come! All Sunset had ever given her magic, all those months and years of careful cultivation, of feeding her voracious talent - wasted. Wasted if it would not come forth when called. Why was she born a unicorn? Why had she spent so many years under the tutelage of the mistress of the Sun, only to die here, in this dark wood, without magic, without power - without -

No.

No.

No.

Sunset turned at bay, and remembered.

She wouldn't die here. She wasn't a victim. She wouldn't be ridden by fear.

She looked into the emptiness of magic, of dark miracle. It moved. It threatened. If this world could birth intangible horrors like this, then it had magic, and magic to burn at that.

They existed, therefore they were possible. If they were possible, then her magic was just - it just needed to be found. She set her hooves.

"If you exist, then you can be burnt," growled Sunset, and her words fell into the unnatural silence like stones into empty wells.

"If you can be burnt, then I can burn you." There, something.

"I see you. Can you see me?" She heard the echo.

Sunset Shimmer pushed against the silence, and felt something like a membrane, a thickness in the air. There, beyond the thinning skin of the world, something warm, hot - scalding.

Sunset Shimmer pushed.

And the blue fire poured out of the hole she tore into the burning alchemical heart of the world, poured down her horn, burning. The fire roared like dragons, and sprayed in every direction, cutting through shadows. The darkness was lit like cerulean daylight brought to the forest floor, and the phantom enemy was carried away like so many surprised ponies caught in a draw, swept away by the sudden flash-flood.

"Ha! Take that, you sad shades! You thought to seize a horse of fire with hooves of shadow? I don't need a brand in the darkness - I have myself! Princess, are you back there? Can you see this?"

Sunset turned with a triumphant grin, and found an empty glade, with no sign of Daenerys or grey. Nothing but the slightest cloud of dust raised by the passage of the grey filly, and the faint sound of galloping hooves receding into the distance.

"Ponyfeathers!"

Sunset ran to catch up with her mistress's panicky mount, and cursed the thoughtlessness of this world's horses.

Magic! Her magic was back!

It almost made up for being attacked by - whatever the hay that had been.

Magic!

Author's Note

Thanks for editing and pre-reading help to Shrink Laureate, Oliver, and the general Company.

Sorry for the wait. Between one thing and the other, I let this sit for too long. Manfully resisting 'back in the saddle' puns...

Spooked

The world still looked the same. Trees, loam underhoof, light and shadow, stuff and air. But Sunset could feel the magic again.

It wasn't her magic. Not really. That was why she'd not been able to grasp it, been able to command it, impose her will upon existence as she had since she had been a hot-eyed orphanage filly. The magic here wasn't Equestrian magic. It wasn't obedient, compliant. It wasn't… tame.

And it didn't listen to her.

As Sunset searched for the grey and their mutual mistress, she was distracted by trails of… not-sight, not-seen things.There was a world beneath the world, and she didn't have eyes to see it properly. Nor did it come into focus like proper cantrip-sight or second-sight ought. Her lessons - well. The techniques weren't working.

She could work with it. No spells, then... It was just a matter of experimenting.

And that was the moment she caught up to the fleeing fool filly and her cargo. Glowing like the distant promise of the dawn.

Oh, not a halo, not a glory or a blazing fire. But Daenerys Stormborn had a certain... glitter about her as she sawed at the recalcitrant mare's reins, trying to get her horse under control.

Sunset charged forward and got just ahead of the twitching horse. The khaleesi's brilliant eyes lit up as Sunset threw her horned head against that big grey-coated chest, helping turn the half-cantering, half-bucking runaway, and the two of them got the horse to turn around in a tight circle instead of breaking out into another dead run.

That was how the first two members of the khaleesi's khas found them, as two riders passed around either side of a nearby tree-trunk and into view. Suddenly, there they were, shouting. More distantly, the high boughs overhead half-muffled the hallos and casting cries of the rest of the scattered khas, scurrying about in search of their lost charge, and the magic faded, lost in the crush of horse-riding apes and their foam-specked, sweating, wild-eyed mounts.

It was a good thing that they found them after Daenerys had gotten her grey under control, for Sunset didn't care for the strike against her mistress's reputation for horsewomanship if the Dothraki had seen the runaway at its peak. By the time the young riders caught up to the khaleesi, she was no longer a helpless girl clinging to the back of a wild horse, but a regal figure roughly handling an agitated beast.

Perception was not all, Celestia had always said, but it was a great deal. Or so Sunset thought, watching her new mistress sit taller in her saddle, doing her best to look like she was in control of a situation Sunset doubted she understood in the least. The glowing around Daenerys was fading, and the rest of the Dothraki barely shone at all.

If Sunset didn't know what was going on, how could Daenerys? Sunset had so many questions, and almost all of them could get her- get her-

What did the Dothraki do with witches? Sunset looked around at the milling riders as they collapsed upon their khaleesi, their arakhs drawn, their horses almost as agitated as the blasted dim-witted grey.

"We attacked, something in the not-light," barked the khaleesi in very bad Dothraki. "Ice spear. Got dark. Cut at Sunset Horse. She - keep me from them. Didn't see what was - what it was. Shadows, damn it. Shades rising up out of the forest floor - blast! Sunset Horse! What word for shades?"

"Zanishkikh, princess. Shadows. They were cast by no thing, and moved like armed men. Not skilled armed men, or I would be dead."

Sunset looked around herself, reminded of the dispelled threat - was it gone? All around her in the glade they had found the khaleesi, the Dothraki milled about, arguing, as wild-eyed as their beasts. Nobody was listening to each other.

Whatever cloud had hidden the day's sun had passed away, and the forest glade was dappled with diffused beams of brightness. There was shade, here under the heavy canopies, but the shadows were slight, and unthreatening, and - tame? Sunset couldn't see anything more, no movement-which-could-not-be-movement or the - coldness that had filled those animate shades. What she could feel was the fire behind her horn, a little reservoir whose mighty pressure had faded. It had been strong, terribly strong, that pressure when she's first poked her horn into the bottom of some vast magic-dam, and when she had pulled her horn out, the magic had come spraying out with all the weight of those countless tons pressing down.

Sunset knew control, she knew how to restrain great power. If nothing else, studying under the Princess of the Sun had taught her that much. She could have handled that. But now - perhaps her images, her metaphors of how it worked weren't right, weren't accurate. Had the shadows been something else? Was there fire and light underlying those - no, they were shadows.

But surely fires cast shadows?

Would the shadows return? Was this a single attempt? The beginning of a campaign? Why hadn't Sunset ever heard about these things, if they existed in this world? Why didn't she know?

Distracted by her internal barrage of questions, Sunset barely noticed it when Rahkaro finally showed up to take charge of the chaos. He'd been furthest away, and -

"Qohorik shadow-sorcerers," Rahkaro spat. "Has to have been. I was following something that looked like the khaleesi, two pale flickering things. They lured us away, decoys. I was wondering what happened to Sunset-horse when there was that big noise and that flash, and suddenly the khaleesi and her mount were gone. They had us following a fake!"

You could see the other Dothraki embracing the new story, elaborating on it, making sure that they all saw exactly the same thing, did the same right-things. Sunset wondered if Rahkaro had actually seen such a thing, or if he was just offering the rest of the khas an out, a way to save their pride, salvage their honor.

Impossible to tell. And difficult to question without questioning that honor.

All the pride of having gotten her magic back was washed away as she watched the riders re-write the day's events, to justify themselves in their own eyes, and those of the khaleesi. And, Sunset realized, as she followed behind the gathering herd, the khal and his bloodriders. We all will have to justify ourselves in the eyes of the khal.

Rahkaro fell back from the troop of Dothraki, who were working themselves up into a demonstrative display of combative swagger, riding through every patch of darkened brush, slashing at what little growth there was between the great tree-trunks. He looked down from horseback at the little unicorn, and eyed Sunset.

"You've been quiet, Sunset Horse. The khaleesi wasn't the only one that escaped the shadows. What did you see? Why did they just - go away? Shadow assassins don't stop until they kill everybody."

"I've never heard of such a thing!" snapped Sunset, scared of what he was asking. "Why haven't I heard of this before? Your world has magic! Dark magic! I thought you all just had… it all sounded like donkey-superstitions, the way you talked about it. Everypony talks about donkey-magic, but it's all cons and-" Sunset suddenly realized she didn't have words in Dothraki for grifting or the con which weren't basically 'stonehousemen's lies'.

"That wasn't horseshit," she went on. "That was real. And ugly. And frightening!" She tried to lay it on thick, but couldn't tell if...

"What, killing shadows?" said Rahkaro, looking more than a little spooked himself. "They say that the stonehousemen, some of them, they make deals. With devils, with gods.I don't know what. The Great Stallion doesn't make deals. The Dothraki don't deal. We take what we want, our gods do the same. If the Great Stallion wants to give you a gift, he'll toss it into your tent, when you least expect it. No bargains, no this for that. Gift, free given. Or nothing. And don't ever expect anything.

"The Qohorik stonehousemen, they in particular - nobody pushes them too hard. When it comes time for gifts, the khals give them extra consideration, you know? Not like the other stonehousemen, not so - it isn't just because they have all these blasted, trackless trees. Or those fortified bridges, either, because that's only on the west side of the Qohorik ranges. If we wanted, we could raid them forever from the east. Never know if you piss on the wrong Qohorik, your own shadow might rise up when you sit down to your dinner and eat you instead."

"Is this common? Does everybody have to worry about their own shadow coming alive and strangling them where they stand?"

"Sunset Horse, they're stories. No, I've never personally heard of anyone getting it like that, no one I knew, or anyone that knew someone who had . But a wise rider, he pay attention to stories."

Rahkaro sat back in his saddle, and thought.

"No, nobody. Not in my time, or my father's time. Nor- well, back in the day, they say some things happened when the khals waged war to the hilt with the Qohorik, and certain Dothraki, named in the stories. Long ago, maybe? But it is known, Qohor is full of witches and sorcerers. It only does not happen because they're too busy with their quarrels, or so it is said. And, of course, if they did - we would sack them once again. Nobody does this to the Dothraki, and lives!"

"Mutually assured slaughter?"

"Something like that. We need to get the khaleesi back to the khal and the bloodriders."

"On that, we are agreed, Rakharo."

Sunset looked back at her mistress, surrounded by young archers and arakh-men, trying to look hard and tough. Daenerys was looking back at her, and her violet eyes were gleaming with -

She knew. Had she seen? Was Sunset's magic a secret, or just something that hadn't been spoken yet?

Rakharo got the khaleesi's tumbled, confused khas moving, and they cast about until an outrider found the abandoned roadway. The khas moved back westwards, searching out the main body of the khalasar, and Khal Drogo.

Fifteen minutes after they found the road, they encountered some outriders of the Dothraki van, and Rakharo had words for the leader of the scouts, who sent riders into the forest on either side of the road, searching for a few missing members of the khaleesi's khas. Two messengers raced westward with messages of the incident, as the khas followed more slowly in their wake, surrounding their affronted mistress. Another fifteen minutes brought the sight of gleaming spear-heads bobbing along in the half-lit distance. It was the Unsullied escort, marching in front of the forward elements of the horde, almost like a pilot-fish leading a ship into shoal-ridden waters.

Sunset and the rest of the Dothraki eyed the castrated warriors in their serried ranks as they passed around the column of dark-skinned war-slaves. They were led by one of their own, a hard-eyed sergeant-type Sunset had noted before, but never gotten the name of; at the rear of the column was a lanky man who was obviously not one of the Unsullied, with a complexion halfway between that of the Pentoshi stonehousemen Sunset had known, and the Dothraki themselves. He shouted out something as Daenerys and her escort approached, and the Unsullied sergeant barked out something that Sunset barely recognized as a close cousin of the coastal-Valyrian word for 'stop'.

Daenerys rode placidly by the Qohorik delegation that escorted the khalasar in its passage through the forests, and as she passed, her own furious, glaring escort stared down at the enemy, and stroked their weapons.

Fury wafted in their wake as the warriors of the khas returned to the khalasar. This wasn't over.

Author's Note

Thanks for editing and pre-reading help to Shrink Laureate, Oliver, and the general Company.

Council, Interrupted

The world rippled like water as Sunset followed the khaleesi as they rejoined the main body of the horde. The shock of her reacquaintance with magic had faded, and Sunset was beginning to distinguish reality and the reality-underlying-reality from each other, the hard packed roadbed from the unplumbed ocean of magic.

The roadbed itself was full of carts, and carriages, and the many wheeled conveniences that groaned under the weight of the khalasar’s physical possessions, their supplies, and their stuff. The horde was a creature that carried her world upon her back, and in the Forests of Qohor, that world was trapped within a narrow ribbon of highway, strung out over miles and miles. The riders themselves spread out into the firm-footing of the floors under the high canopies there, in the heart of the forests, and they boiled about as much as their individual mahrazh-naquikhasar let them, as restrained as custom and forage demanded.

That was the second constraint of the khalasar under the canopy of the forests - the lack of grass, the lack of fodder. Sunset didn’t have to worry about that, because she wasn’t a dumb beast, nor was she accustomed to graze her dinner off of the grass of the commons like a penniless hick. But the free-ranging Dothraki on their favored mounts, accustomed to roaming at will hither and yon, could easily ride their beasts right off of their stomachs, here where the grass never saw the full light of day, and the brush was that tough and resilient breed which could survive the depredations of the seldom-seen great elk. The Dothraki had to feed their horses from the cartloads of fodder and grain they’d carried east out of Norvos, if they cared to keep them hearty and wild.

And so, the conservatism of nomads in open-fielded but heavily wooded country. They could ride wherever they pleased, if they cared to starve for the privilege.

Even so, as the khaleesi and her affronted khas returned into the bosom of their horde, the riders of the khalasar boiled and buzzed about, like a well-kicked bees’-nest just starting to register the insult. Sunset watched the news spread like a contagion.

Behind them, the Qohorik 'escort' had been surrounded on the roadbed, and brought to bay. No violence had been done - yet. But the company of Unsullied were not being allowed to continue their march in front of the khalasar, and they had turtled up in a hedgehog of outward-pointing spears, their sergeant and their Qohorik commander safely inside the spearmen’s square. All around them, riders from three different naquikhasars stood to their mounts, bows out and strung, axes and arakhs close to hand.

The wheeled portion of the horde were wheeling off of the road into the firmer-footed verge in a sort of impromptu herringbone formation, coming off the pavement and to a stand-still as the ceaseless daytime advance stilled, the zafra and their charges concentrating in an almost-camp in a very badly-sited place.

If things went poorly, it would be a very dry camp indeed. The nearest stream lay ten minutes west of where the Unsullied hedgehog bristled in the road.

Khaleesi Daenerys and Sunset and the khas met the khal’s personal khalzafra and his camp chattel about three minutes ride back along the side of the accumulating cart-park, and the khaleesi looked around, awkwardly. Khal Drogo wasn’t here, nor were any of his bloodriders. Who would command the khalzafra to set up the great-tent?

Daenerys’ hand was forced when Ser Jorah and her brother appeared out of the forest, looking around themselves in confusion. While her charmless brother barked Valyrian questions at the khaleesi, she began ordering the khalzafra in rapid-fire but still-rather-broken Dothraki to do what needed to be done to hold the inevitable meetings under a proper set of tents, with proper supplies available.

Sunset did her part, and brushed forward to distract the khaleesi’s brother while her mistress did what had to be done. She strode up to the two Andals, and cleared her throat.

“My lord king!” Sunset greeted the overgrown boy in her Pentoshi-flavored Valyrian. “It is well that a great warrior like yourself is here, to give counsel to your brother-by-marriage. Your sister has been accosted by dark magics in the deep forest, and there is-”

“Jorah!” snapped the peevish ‘king’. “Why is this beast addressing me? You know it, get it out of my face, and leave me in peace so that I may deal with my fool of a sister, who will not give me my proper attention!” Spittle flew in Sunset’s general direction as Viserys visibly attempted to work himself up into a tantrum. He was strangely dull today, despite his pale complexion, violet eyes, and hair so close in color to her brilliant mistress’s. Sandy-dark Jorah was brighter than his sputtering lord.

Thankfully, at this moment, there was a commotion to the northwards, and the khal’s bloodriders appeared in a cloud of lesser riders, lajaki, all of them hallooing and yelling. From his retainers, the great khal himself emerged like the giant among men that he was.

“Moon of my life!” he bellowed. “Reflection of my light! What is this I have heard? Are you hurt?”

“My sun and my stars, no, I am not, as you can see. Only insulted, by thing disappeared as soon as light chased them from fielding. But the zafra are putting up tent - we should not here open talk?”

Sunset did her best to not cringe at the khaleesi’s still-weak grasp of Dothraki grammar. No one in earshot twitched an eye at her shaky syntax, though. They made allowances for their young not-queen.

The khalzafra bustled about the now-erected tents, bringing in furnishings and supplies from the rear of the construction, as the khal and his entourage dismounted at the front, and gathered to confer. A great deal of cross-talk ensued, and Sunset’s head spun trying to keep track of who was saying what. The bloodriders and the greater lajaki competed to have uninformed opinions about things they had not seen, and could only have heard about by lightning-fast camp-rumor. And no one seemed inclined to listen to Rakharo, who had been closest of the lajaki, and commander of the assaulted khaleesi’s escort.

No one even asked Sunset what had happened. By this point, she thought it just as well. Emotions were high, and she didn’t like the look in Qotho’s eye. She’d heard the bloodrider say terribly blood-thirsty things about ‘witches’ in the past, and at the moment, he was barely resisting the urge to draw his arakh in the presence of his khal.

None of the leaders of the Dothraki were as brilliant in Sunset’s new sight as the khaleesi herself, and even she, trapped in the midst of these angry, quarreling men looking for an excuse to break something, was fading and turning a bit dull under the avalanche of words. Nobody, not even the khal, was letting her speak.

Sunset turned her eyes upon the great khal, and looked for his glow, the display of his inherent royalty. It was… complex. The man himself was as dark and dull as Viserys the supposed-king, for all of his animal vitality and hidden cleverness. Whatever the brilliance meant, it wasn’t nobility, or power, or kingliness. Khal Drogo’s copper bells were the only spots of brightness about his person, and the little tinkling grace-notes woven into his long braids glowed with some sort of magic, now that Sunset eyes could see them. Is the zafra who makes those bells some sort of hedge-witch?

Now that Sunset looked, every Dothraki with bells had a slight glow to them, like twinkling fireflies lurking in their tresses. Or lit slow-matches, woven into a cannoneer’s beard and mane - she was reminded of what she had once seen during one of Celestia’s periodic inspection-tours of the standing army, as they had been observing the ponies of an artillery park as they demonstrated their ordnance for the visiting monarch. A particularly flamboyant battery-sergeant had chosen to keep his slow-matches thus woven through his magnificent and barbaric beard and untrimmed mane.

The khaleesi had gotten the zafra to set up the tents, but none of the riders were going inside, and the khal was holding court while perched upon a camp stool in front of the tent entrance. Was it just that they needed a tent to gather in front of? Sunset didn’t know, and she was getting antsy. The Dothraki didn’t seem inclined to ask the relevant questions of the actual witnesses. They mostly seemed to be waiting to give their speeches, prepared-sounding for all that they had to have been composed on the fly.

Nobody had expected a crisis here, in the middle of the afternoon on a sort-of-sunny day in the wooded Qohorik middle of nowhere. The khal was listening to arguments in favor of storming Qohor, of sacking the farmland around Qohor, of sitting still and waiting for developments, of packing everything up and forcing the march eastwards until they found the open grasslands to the east. None of them sounded like great ideas to Sunset, but she favored what they were doing right now - sitting around and arguing - least.

The Forests of Qohor might as well be a desert for all they could subsist here, she thought. But perhaps she was exaggerating the logistical challenges? Her lessons under the princess had not been… heavy on logistics and organization. Celestia had discouraged her from tagging along on her inspection-tours, but Sunset had been curious…

In the midst of what seemed like the dozenth speech by a proud-chested greater-lajaki, another commotion emerged out of the woods. Still standing about in front of the tent, the gathered lajaki and bloodriders turned as one, as mounted rangers broke into view, dragging bound prisoners behind them, stumbling behind their horses. The missing Cohollo led the scouting party, and at his horse’s heels was one of the two prisoners.

Their hands were bound, and they were both gagged. The elder of the two looked unfocussed, glassy-eyed, and perhaps concussed. The younger just looked mad and scared.

"Great Khal! These two men were found north and east of the highway, fleeing! I have riders following their back-trail, but look at them - are they not witches?"

The two battered men certainly looked exotic to Sunset, but all apes were at least a little exotic in her equine eyes. The gleaming mystical light they emitted, on the other hoof, was another story. The both of them gleamed in Sunset’s eyes like an oil slick, shiny and darkly iridescent, if you could picture in your mind’s eye a rainbow like all colors of the darkness, shot through with veins of fire and light.

Sunset blinked, and they were merely filthy apes once more.

Another argument broke out, with riders arguing for an immediate interrogation, and others insisting that the witches were far too dangerous to be allowed to speak in the presence of - and here the cautious Qotho eyed the insulted-looking khal, and edited whatever he’d been about to say, and ended with 'the khaleesi'.

In the midst of this argument, some dismounted Dothraki approached the open-air council with the leader of the khalasar’s Qohorik escort, accompanied by his sergeant. They led the thin man with the big goiter and the over-long nose to the khal, and he bowed in that typical stonehouseman way that both reminded Sunset of the court manners of her homeland, and repulsed her as something somehow obsequious and not-

When had she started thinking like a Dothraki?

The weight of this self-realization had made Sunset neglect the vitally important matters which were unfolding in front of her, and by the time she had collected herself, matters had moved on.

And the Qohorik lieutenant or captain or whatever he was was yelling something half Dothraki and half whatever the hay they spoke in Qohor. It sounded sort of like Pentoshi or Norvosi Valyrian if you replaced every third word with Dothraki or some other unfamiliar bit of grammar.

Which is to say, all Sunset made out of the nervy Qohorik’s objection was something that sounded like the Valyrian for ‘Sons of the mumble Buck’. An obscenity? Sunset couldn’t be sure, and to be honest, her suppositions about all of this was rather post-facto, because the objections of the Qohorik were essentially simultaneous with a series of rapid-fire events which made linguistic speculation a moot point until much later.

Specifically, one of the Dothraki guarding the two prisoners ungagged the younger prisoner so that he could be interrogated. The first thing the younger prisoner did was begin warbling something strange and hypnotic, but it was what the second, elder prisoner did at this prompting was that truly put the hydra among the diamond dogs. The still-bound and gagged prisoner threw himself forward against the unsheathed arakh held by one of his guards, and he efficiently and swiftly sliced his own throat open, dying almost instantly, and spraying both of his guards with his life’s blood.

It happened faster than anyone could react.

The living prisoner was engulfed by the cloud of black that boiled off of the dying prisoner, and Sunset later swore that she had seen the man’s arterial blood turning to that black as it sprayed. But, it must be said, that may have been only imaginative reconstruction in play.

The chanting of the Qohorik warlock was drowned out by the astonished shouts and screams of the startled Dothraki. No one moved fast enough to catch the still-bound warlock before he was hidden in his own darkness.

Sunset had moved three hoof-steps closer to the khaleesi and in between her and the unfolding disaster in the second or two that it took for the situation to truly spiral out of control. By the time she had turned to face the warlocks and set her hooves, a scythe of ice had formed within the roil of blackness, and was already lancing out to stab one of the erstwhile guards stumbling away from the chaos that had erupted beside them.

Sunset was still reaching for the burning source of magic when the growing darkness sprouted yet more bone-like ice-spurs. As she drew upon the magic, and pulled at the plug which had formed in the hole she had torn in that wall, the ice-bone spurs began to spin around the circumference of the growing cloud of smoke-black wrongness, and another lajaki was knocked off his feet.

The unarmed Unsullied was springing forward, and reached forward to grab at one of the ice spurs as they ripped past him. He got purchase on it, and was ripped off his own feet, flying in front of Sunset.

That second of delay was Sunset’s salvation, and she was able to summon just enough fire in that precious second to to blast the second spur that flew in the khaleesi’s direction, deflecting it overhead and to the right. The third spur caught Sunset in her upper left withers, and it burned like the heart of winter, pulling all of her feeling from the impact site.

It wasn’t Celestia’s mentoring that saved Sunset at this moment, but rather the meditational training of a disfavored functionary in Celestia’s court.

The princess had been eternally dubious of the various cults and minor religions which had escaped the baleful eye of her Bureau of Counterdogmatism, but the Harmonists were generally an exception, if a carefully-regulated and heavily surveilled exception. Dreaming Turtle had been a sort of envoy from the largest sect of Harmonists not then under the ban of the BoC, and Celestia had required that Sunset trained twice a week under his rattan-stick-enforced idea of meditation harmonization.

The sense-memory of those ceaseless sharp blows in the midst of meditation was such that a mere glancing near-death-blow wasn’t nearly enough to break her adrenaline-fueled concentration. Sunset was better than that.

She focused her fire like a laser, and the remaining spurs melted like ice in a furnace, and she stopped the attack - against herself, her mistress, and whoever else was behind them - dead.

Having bought time at the price of others’ lives and a stinging, terrifyingly numb wound, Sunset looked up, her eyes burning like amethysts on fire. The archers had swung into action, and a stutter of arrows was ripping into the swirling darkness, so many that the archers were in peril of shooting each other - and bystanders - with the storm of flying projectiles.

Worse, the arrows were going right through the cloud as if it had no substance, was nothing but the cloud of smoke that it might have appeared to be, if not for the animated, sentient motion which the swirl was increasingly settling into.

It was forming a new crop of ice-bone spears and tendrils when Sunset drew more from her reservoir of fire, and forced that blaze of burning blue light into a brute-force bludgeon, directly against the terrible blackness.

The cloud blew away from that fire like smoke in the face of a fierce gust-front wind, and the blue-eyed figure at the center of the monstrous cloud was revealed.

The archers, given a target, riddled the warlock with one, two, five - and then so many arrows that he was more fletching than flesh.

And then the glow of those briefly revealed ice-blue eyes winked out, deep inside the arrow-riddled mass, and the warlock fell over. The ice and the smoke and the terrible pressure of death-magic all disappeared with the will that had been directing it.

And the last prisoner was dead, in the shattered chaos which had been an unremarkable stretch of forest floor in front of the khal’s half-wrecked great tent. Sunset looked around herself, her shoulder aching just above where the spur had struck her, and saw every eye upon her, and her burning horn.

"Gr-great Khal," Sunset stuttered shockily, "I was going to explain when- when- I- I-"

And the khal’s surviving lajaki roared their accolades as they stomped upon the forest floor.

Author's Note

Thanks for editing and pre-reading help to Shrink Laureate, Oliver, and the general Company.

Triage

The cheering might have gone to Sunset's head if she wasn't riding the shocky edge of unconsciousness. The trembling in her hooves told her that if she moved the wrong way, she might fall. It was alarming how much of her shoulder just wasn't there - and how much of the rest was a brand of fire in her nerves.

Luckily, the fracas meant that she didn't have to continue whatever lame excuse she'd just begun to her mistress's husband. He was smiling, that was good. And the khaleesi was - looking at her like Sunset was a silly little foal? What did that mean?

The khaleesi gestured for Sunset to come to her side, and as the khal began to extract order out of the shambles which had been his meeting a scant minute before, Daenerys crouched and pressed on Sunset's side until the unicorn understood and sat on her haunches. Then she laid down, as that position woke more of her shoulder to agony.

Zafra appeared from nowhere, poking their heads out of whatever cover they'd found during the brief fight. Daenerys sent one off, and they returned with water and medical supplies. The wound the warlock had inflicted upon Sunset hadn't looked bad in the moment, but as time found its hooves and began moving again, the fur at the impact-site was beginning to look strange, washed-out. Sunset closed her eyes, and tried to feel around the edges of the burn, trying to assess whether it was growing, or - oh, there was another twinge, and another. Was that new bits of her flesh catching the freeze-burn, or stunned parts coming back to life?

Sunset was distracted by her self-triage, she barely registered what was going on around her. The personal attentions of the khaleesi herself was like balm, moreso than the actual balm the zafra the khaleesi had summoned was trying to apply. After a few tentative dabs, Daenerys swatted away the confused slave, and began working the burn-medicine into Sunset's coat with her own hands.

"No! Princess!" Sunset said, her eyes shooting open. "You shouldn't touch that with your naked hooves - er, your fingers! Here, let me see them!"

Sunset almost reached for the khaleesi's hand with her magic, before she remembered that it wasn't her magic, not really. Sunset saw the flickering flame that had become her field, and it winked out as soon as she realized she'd touched her mistress's flesh with living fire.

"Oh, Harmony, I'm sorry, your highness, did that burn you? Did the - let me see your hands?"

Khaleesi Daenerys held up her unblemished, unburnt, unfrozen hands with a half-smile, rotating them for Sunset's benefit.

"Lay down, Sunset Horse, and calm yourself. I haven't hurt myself, and neither have you. What was that? It felt like… a hand in the flames. Is this your magic?"

"Not - not exactly. It's not supposed to flicker like that, or burn. It's just - it used to be just this light, this - this glow. Technically, a deresonant aura effect, one common to all unicorns. Usually - usually one color-keyed to the individual. Like - like a signature. Unique to the unicorn. This new magic, it looks like mine."

Sunset thought the new magic into being, and looked at it, floating in front of her and the khaleesi, burning like fox-fire, or a will o' the wisp. It should have been a light-spell globe, the most basic of foal-cantrips. Instead, it burnt the air, pulsing, flickering.

"It isn't my magic, but it glows like it. I don't understand at all."

A shadow cast itself over the burning ball of fire and light, and Sunset put away the magic as she and the khaleesi looked up, to see the khal's bearded face smiling down at them.

"Moon of my light, Sunset-horse, can you rejoin us? There are others who were hurt. Qotho could use some help figuring out what to do with the- what are these? Burns?"

"Frost-burns, I think," guessed Sunset. She felt around the edges of her own burn, and decided the flesh was awakening, not dying. The unfeeling center of the burn was melting away, pulsing new pain as it did. Her magic flickered on her own hide, little flecks of blue fire dancing on her coat like candle-flames wicking from each hair. She let the magic go, surprised by the effect, and it went away.

"I think I can get up, let me see what I can do."

Sunset struggled to her hooves, and once she was firmly upon them, she looked around, orienting herself. The two Qohorik corpses laid by themselves, the healthy having dragged the wounded away from the heart of the confrontation. They were working on the survivors in a rough ring of groaning Dothraki lying in a semi-circle, wherever they'd been dragged from where they fell, like a human-sloped crater.

There were more of them than Sunset had thought there would be. She limped to the nearest victim, an older lajak with two younger riders crouched over him, one holding him down and trying to put a stick into his teeth, the other grabbing at the trembling, afflicted arm. The copper-skinned Dothraki's hand and lower arm was pale white, and the paleness was creeping up his limb as Sunset watched.

Then it reached the restraining rider's hand on his elder's arm - and the paleness passed to the younger Dothraki. He yelped in alarm.

Sunset's magic sprung to life with a thought, and licked out to brush off the would-be nurse's grip. Instead of gripping and moving the young man's hand, she only managed to cause a little detonation, and there was a slight smell of scorching hair over Sunset, the khaleesi, and the wounded lajak and his attendants.

"Hold that hand up, let me look at it," Sunset commanded, unmindful of her masterful tone of voice.

The whiteness was still creeping away from the rider's affected fingers, taking his palm bit by bit, and threatening the other fingers. Sunset's eyes narrowed.

"Khaleesi, I need to see your hand, the one you were using with that salve - quickly!"

Daenerys held up her hand - her pale, natural-toned hand. Unblemished - that was her natural skin tone. Sunset frowned in perplexity.

"Here, you - what's your name?"

"Geleo, Sunset-maegi. Ah, it stings!"

"Yeah, I know, hold it still, and don't flinch."

Sunset took a wild guess, and hoped she wasn't about to burn the boy's fingers right off his hand. She conjured the fox-fire, and impaled it on the whitened finger, dipping the hand into magical flame.

He yelped in surprise and alarm. More burnt-hair smell, as the hairs on the back of his fingers curled and blackened. But…

The whiteness was going away, healthy if somewhat sun-burnt skin tone displacing the alarming whiteness.

"Your highness, order everyone to stop handling the wounds, they're contagious. Quickly!"

The other retainer of the afflicted lajak looked down, alarmed, at his sweating, twitching patron, around whom his arms still wrapped.

"No, don't let him go, you. I think it's direct contact. Just don't touch the whiteness. I need to try something…"

The impromptu flame-cure seemed like it worked, given a light enough hoof. She burnt the first two or three victims more than she'd intended, and her fix left them with actual burns in the place of their frost-burns, but Sunset's burning touch didn't spread, wasn't catching.

Sunset was aware vaguely that the khal was sitting nearby, on his camp-stool, watching her, but she was too busy fixing the mess, stopping what might have been a - she wasn't sure, exactly. A contagion? A magical epidemic? Had this been a patient-zero sort of deal?

Sunset hadn't really spent much time in medical magic under Celestia's tutelage. It wasn't her strong suit, and medicine was the sort of thing you spent years learning in the post-graduate medical college attached to the School. She'd observed a few times in the medical school's surgery, and listened to a few lectures, but healing had never really appealed to Sunset Shimmer, student of the Princess and prodigy of evocation, abjuration, and enchantment. It just hadn't been flashy enough to satisfy her - her what? Ego, she supposed.

The fire poured out of the reservoir she'd cut into, and it showed no signs of slowing down, or running out. She'd been wrong - this wasn't a low-magic world. There was - almost more than she could control. The improvised cauterization cantrip she'd come up with kept threatening to run away from her, threatened to turn from a frog-sized ball of flame into an out-of-control pillar of fiery fury. Sunset could almost hear it whispering to her, asking to be let into the world.

She hoped that was just her exhaustion messing with her.

Sunset only lost one patient, a young lajak she'd met once before, the entire side of his body frosted from boot to braid. He was already shivering when she got to him, and she saw the light of life passing out of his eyes as she began burning the contagion from the side of his whitened head.

Then his eyes turned blue.

Sunset jerked back, and fired off a blast of pure flame into the face of that suddenly unfamiliar gaze. The whitened arm reached out for her, the nails blackened. The rest of the copper-skinned lajak's body lay prone, dead - but that arm, those eyes -

Sunset didn't stop until the body was burning, wicking its own fat reserves. As she kept pouring on the magical fire, she raised her voice to whomever was standing behind her, the rest having scrambled away once the 'patient' had started thrashing about.

"That's it, burn the bodies! Anything dead needs to go on a bonfire, now!"

The Dothraki around her were shouting in outrage and alarm. Several were edging forward and reaching out with blankets they'd been bringing for the wounded. They were trying to put out the burning, thrashing dead thing!

"No, no, stop that! It's infectious! Damn it, you're going to-" Sunset's fire flared, and drove back the two idiots with their now-smoldering fist-fulls of rags. "STAND BACK!"

Sunset bent her head low, liquid flame dripping off of her horn and pooling on the forest loam under her hooves. "That's not a living man, that's a corpse, you fools. I'd tell you to feel the cooling flesh, but I'm afraid you'd catch the contagion yourselves, and then I'd have to burn you. I've never seen this before, but I've seen things like it, and read of worse. At least, I think there's worse. I don't want to know if they start breathing contagion next. Do you?"

"BURN THE DEAD! NOW!" shouted Sunset.

And then suddenly there was a figure between her and the riders, as the Qohorik officer strode into the middle of the confrontation. He spoke calmly to the crowd, in perfect if somewhat eccentric Dothraki.

"I say, rather, the horned lady has the right notion, what? I know it sounds a bit extreme, but the Sons of the Buck have been making a right pest of themselves, a proper name, don't you know. And the dead walkin' is the second syllable of that name, if you would. Smashing, the lot of them, aside from the murderin' and th' abominations. Infectious abominations, what? Last year, the town council had to burn the whole of the Lyseni ghetto, with everybody locked inside."

He looked down at Sunset, and grimaced at her horrified look. "Oh, what, you were just arguin' for it, weren't you? And the Lyseni ghetto was only about two and a half blocks. Not many Lyseni in Qohor, what? A lot less after one of ‘em got the wind up a Ramson sorcerer, though, never a great idea, tweaking the Ramsons. Damn good show of cleaning the mess the priests made of it, though. Let's hear it for walled quarters!"

He stuck out his hand, as if they were at a luncheon at the Palace. Sunset stared at his hand. "Oh, right, no hands. Hello, there, Ruper Volk. I'd say it were nice to meet you, Miss Horse, but I'd rather never have laid eyes on you. Oh, by the way, your revenant is trying to get away."

Sunset spun around, and returned her attention to burning the twitching dead thing. Behind her, she heard Volk's voice raised in argument with the dubious riders around them, but Sunset was determined to finish the job before some other idiot interrupted her again. She didn't take her eyes off the burning corpse until the flame turned natural and orange. She looked at the burning body, and tried to remember what its name had been. Ylao? Kitho? No, Yathro.

Sunset looked up from her failure, and recalled there were more victims. Time to get on with it. Luckily, that had been the worst afflicted Dothraki, and she got to the rest before anyone else - before the contagion got as far as it had in that one lajak. Arguments swirled around her, but she kept her head down, and her mind on her magic.

It was dark before Sunset was satisfied that she'd killed every bit of witchcraft the Qohorik warlocks had gifted their victims. The zafra had set up torch-stands all around her triage, and between those lights and the bonfires now merrily consuming the victims and the perpetrators, the night's accidental camp was a blaze of fire-light under the high-boughed forest.

Sunset had plenty of time to think over what had happened while watching over the row of weakened patients wrapped up in blankets and hides, carefully bundled to ward against shock and opportunistic infections. She thought she'd gotten all of it, but the cure was only slightly better than the affliction, and it was all too easy, she thought, for something like that to lurk, hidden under a nail, around the bottom of a foot, in an arm-pit…

What had they been planning? Why had they let themselves be captured? It was clear they could have escaped at any time. They were powerful, those warlocks. They had access to something dangerous, deadly. Was it possible that they only had that one thing? That it only worked with blood and death?

Magic, that only was birthed in murder. Sunset couldn't even imagine it. What use could it be, outside of - well, murder? An assassin's tool, but worthless for any other task. It was, when she thought about it, very much murder-ape magic. Damnable predatory monkeys.

Sunset heard her mistress walk up behind her, the khaleesi's graceful stride distinctive in this horde full of lumpy zafra and brutish riders.

"Sunset Horse, they've been interrogating the surviving Qohorik."

"What survivor? Oh, the officer. You really think he had anything to do with it?"

"Well, he lived, there is that. And no-one else knows anything about the dead Qohorik."

"Knowledge is magic, this is true. What about his sergeant, the Unsullied man - no, gelding?"

"Burning on one of the bonfires. Don't you remember? You looked at his body."

"Did I? I'm getting tired, princess. Are they going to put me on the bonfires, too?"

"What? No! Why would you ask that?" The khaleesi put her hand on Sunset's shoulder, the unwounded one, not that the other was doing more than sting, now. Whatever it had held, whatever the curse had been, it was burnt away now. She'd be fine. If only -

"Witchcraft. That one rider called me maegi. Again. These sav-" Sunset stopped herself, shut her overtired mouth. She started again. "The Dothraki hate witches, remember?"

"Sunset, it isn't as if we didn't know. You've been lighting up the night in your sleep. Remember? Do you think that Irri and Doreah could resist gossiping?" The khaleesi was leaning against Sunset now, her platinum-tressed head laying across the unicorn's withers, her hands stroking Sunset like an oversized cat.

Sunset closed her eyes for a moment, disappointed in herself. Of course they knew.

"Handmaidens can gossip," Sunset said, finally, leaning into the khaleesi's touch. "But did the khal know?"

"As far as my husband is concerned, you saved the moon of his light, twice, and shielded him from dark magics, then… this. This is good, Sunset Horse. You did well today."

"Thank you, princess."

Sunset listened to the quiet, and the faint groaning of her charges, her eyes half-lidded from the khaleesi's attentions. She'd never touched Sunset before like this. It was really quite distracting, Sunset was trying to stay awake and alert, not -

Someone had to watch over them, in the darkness, to listen for the sharp cries that might come if the ice-contagion broke out again in one of them. The khaleesi seemed disinclined to go find her husband, or the handmaidens. She just kept… what was this? Petting?

Then Sunset felt her mistress's hands twine in her mane, and blinked, confused, as Daenerys began - playing with her mane?

"Princess, wh-what are you doing?"

"Braiding your hair, Sunset Horse. You fought a battle today. Two, actually, perhaps three if you count this, which I think I do."

The khaleesi's clever fingers picked apart the not-especially-long hairs of Sunset's yellow and red mane as she leaned against her handmaiden as one might against a divan. Daenerys began to weave the strands of mane together in a horsey approximation of a Dothraki braid, interleaving red and yellow in a deliberate interlacing pattern.

"A victorious rider ought to have a proper braid. And my husband says that the zafra should have a bell or two, when you're ready for them. When you're ready to leave my husband's men, here.

"My husband and his advisers," continued the khaleesi, "would like to talk to you about all of this, what you've done, and what's to be done next. Very much so, Sunset Horse. I think that, even for the Dothraki, we're in uncharted territory tonight."

Author's Note

Thanks for editing and pre-reading help to Shrink Laureate, Oliver, and the general Company.

Two Islands

Sunset stared at the scorched stave, and concentrated. She let a little trickle of fire form just over the surface of what had once been a dew-soaked deadfall, avoiding contact with the now-dried-out stick. Her five previous attempts to pick it up had left the stick a discolored mottled grey and black, but at least it wasn't smoldering anymore.

Sunset couldn't even blame the distraction of an endless stream of Dothraki moving down the ancient Valyrian highway behind her. The riders and their chattel moved, ceaselessly. Wheeled, hoofed, and on foot, the chattel moved rapidly eastwards down the ancient roadway, carts rolling over that peculiar, sometimes seamless stonework, while the riders themselves flitted through the surrounding forest, darting here and there, like sheep-dogs harrying the flock home. The heavy limbs of the trees overhead deadened the sound of the rolling, rolling, rolling wheels, taking what would have been a cacophony in the open air, and rendering that great sound into a nearly subsonic rumbling non-silence. She could hear it in her haunches and her cannons, like distant thunder felt in the horn rather than the ear. This was the sound of the main body of the khalasar in motion, and it was leaving.

That had been the main theme of the khal's council, the impossibility of the khalasar remaining for any long period of time inside the great forests, sitting still, devouring their fodder. Well, that, and the thumping drum of vengeance which beat a constant rhythm in the hearts of the khal's lajaki, but you could not feed horses vengeance, nor would reputation and blood keep the meat on their steeds' haunches.

The khalasar was separating, splitting into two bodies: the larger, more heavily burdened 'herding khalasar', and a leaner, smaller 'fighting khalasar'. A fighting khalasar, the true khalasar - this was what they needed if Khal Drogo wished to reply to the insult given him by these Ramsons, these deadly-dangerous Qohorik sorcerer-cultists. The Qohorik hostage had a great deal to say about these Ramsons, but Sunset thought they had nothing to prove that these villains existed, aside from Ruper Volk's voluble protestations of general Qohorik innocence, and the rebellious and treacherous nature of these people.

Sunset turned to thinking about the Qohorik, and their place in the world of the Dothraki, as she gained a grip on her burnt stick, barely scorching it at all, now.

Sunset knew far too little about the Qohorik, and this was because the riders of Khal Drogo’s khalasar and their dependants knew too little about that strange people, too. The Black Goat's favored city-state lay at the crossroads of the east, across most of the trade routes that ran through the territories under Dothraki domination, down the Qhoyne into the heart of the continent, northwards towards Norvos and the other northern Free Cities, south into the Ghiscari marches, all those exotic cities and nations eastward beyond the vast Dothraki Sea… Qohor was at the same time hidden deep in this forest, and straddled the inland trade of a continent. Almost by default, they seem to have fallen into a sort of trade mastership, for the Dothraki's idea of trade was devoid of anything resembling system or profit, and left such matters to those enterprising and cautiously obsequious tributaries who dared travel in the lands under their control.

From what Sunset was beginning to understand, Khal Drogo's khalasar was not at all typical of the average khalasar in this regard. Jhiqui had let something drop today, which explained so many things to the unicorn. There were hordes barely worth the name, independent little groupings barely greater than a herd, scattered across the length and breadth of this 'Dothraki Sea' which Sunset had yet to have laid eyes upon. And these pocket khalasar did nothing but move restlessly back and forth across the length of the Dothraki Sea, glorying in the freedom of the open grasslands, while they lent their protection to convoys of stonehousemen traders hither and yon. Convoys who lavished ‘gifts’ and supplies upon their protectors and escorts. These riders who spent their time herding men, lived well by this practice, and their non-employers who gave these convoy-Dothraki so much for their non-service protection, profited greatly from the symbiosis. These mixed hordlets of Dothraki riders and Qohorik traders hauled the trade of a continent across the vast empty interior, carrying glasswork and finished goods out of the western Valyrian cities eastward, silks out of Yi Ti, spices out of Qarth, furs from Qohor and the Ibbenese north.

But these herding Dothraki were held in some contempt by the fighting khalasari, the lajaki, the hard-riders and that breed of ruthless killer who naturally flocked to leaders like Khal Drogo, the merciless, the victorious, the undefeated. Sunset played with her scorched stick, and watched the khalasar break itself in two, and saw a glimpse of the khalasar within the khalasar, the sharp-clawed thing hidden within the vast bulk of the unwieldy beast. Like a hermit-crab emerging from her shell to do battle in the open sea.

Ruper Volk had, indeed, much to say about the villains whose ashes mixed with those of their Dothraki victims. That they had been exiled from the city, that they were some some sort of heretical cult, or a disfavored religious order, or - Sunset wasn't exactly sure. The Qohorik religion struck her as barbarous even for carnivorous hominids, a melange of blood sacrifice, worship of what sounded like a standard forest-monster, and more sacrifice.

Volk had seemed oddly proud of his descent from a long line of self-sacrificers, of having a - was it a great-great-uncle or a great-uncle? An ancestor, at any rate, voluntarily given to the smoking altar. A peculiar point of pride, the possibility that you might have been murdered for your god in your youth, that your own children in their turn subject to the priests' knives and flensing-hooks.

Sunset thought about the dead Qohorik, and the living one, as traffic streamed beside her down that crowded Valyrian highway. Was he trustworthy, this Lieutenant Volk?

And as Sunset twirled her blackened stick in her mostly-restrained new field, thinking of Ruper Volk, it was as if she’d conjured him from the thin air, for here he was, right in front of her again, How had he gotten away from his minders?

"Ah, Milady Sunset, there you are," the Qohorik said cheerfully as he picked his way through a bit of brush between Sunset and the traffic on the highway. "I would talk further with you. The more I think of what happened before the khal and his court, the more questions I have!"

"Lieutenant Volk, you are a prisoner of the khal, you have no right to answers. Where are the riders who are supposed to have you under guard?"

"Oh, they're around here… somewhere." The Qohorik stroked his thin, spotty mustachios and chin-tuft, half-grown like the man himself. Did he think it make him look wise or imposing? "An impressive mess, isn't it? Much bigger fuss than anything I've ever had experience with, you know! Oh, we've got lots of Unsullied, but they're not big on large-unit parading, the Unsullied. They have nothing to prove in Qohor, everyone knows they're the lethal best. They're not like the clan militias, gathering together in their useless fineries and long flashy blades, swaggering before the gates of the city or in their respective clan-holds for the children and the women and the crofters. And there's no clan in all of Qohor that can raise a rabble anything like this, a true khalasar on the march! Enormous and terrible - I love it! I almost wish I could ride east with you, and see a bit of the continent in Khal Drogo's train. Observe as he sacks some woggy towns. I hear talk of Lhazar, maybe, or perhaps something out beyond the Krazaaj Zasqa?"

Sunset looked at the lieutenant-hostage, and lidded her eyes in disgust. "You wish to see murder, and rape, and pillage? Is there something wrong with you, Ruper Volk?"

"Well, yes, and why not? Just another word for 'glory', is it not?" The Qohorik hesitated, and then crouched down beside the unicorn, getting on her level. "I wasn't sure what to think of the reports when I heard them as we got ready to escort this khalasar. The captains were so busy, it almost fell into the gaps and was forgotten about, but our witchy friends at the council show that somebody didn't forget about it."

"Forget about what, Ruper Volk?"

"The sacred animal! The one-horned goat that the Dothraki were bringing back to the Sea. Fiery like the fire, glorious like the sun! A messenger from the Black Goat, or some sort of satire by R'hllor, a blasphemy by the light-bringers. A Skagosi unicorn painted orange by some prankster? You, Milady Sunset."

Wait, what?

"A what unicorn? What's 'Skagosi'?"

"Oh, some barbaric race from the other side of the Shivering Sea, cannibals or somesuch. They're always described as riding about on shaggy, horrible horses, ill-tempered with a single horn. Heretics sometimes travel far overseas, to search for these legendary beasts, just because some say they're not horses, but deformed goats. There's a few skulls hung in some of the clan mansions in the city, and some of the clans have supposed unicorn-hides tied to their trees. Not generally pride of place, because as far as I've ever seen, they just look like sheep pelts. Blasted large sheep pelts, mind you, but nothing godlike or too odd."

Volk paused to eye Sunset, and Sunset's horn.

"You know, your head looks nothing like the unicorn skull I saw in the Hoat hall. The Skagosi unicorn horn looks more like someone crafted a Dothraki arakh from bone and gristle. Your protuberance barely looks savage at all, like my pinkie finger."

Sunset dropped her stick, and set the ends of his mustachios on fire.

Just a bit, only to teach the Qohorik some manners. She waited patiently while he danced around in a panic, spasming as he batted at the smoking ends of his facial hair. Eventually, he extinguished his burning whiskers, and turned, apprehensively, back to the orange unicorn.

"Lieutenant Volk, do I have your attention now? I have questions for you, now. Firstly, do they say these Skagosi unicorns speak?"

"N-no, milady. As far as I've ever heard, they're just beasts, and beasts of burden at that."

"So, not magical?"

"Oh, what's not magical, if you have a sorcerer on hand to make something of it? I hear stories about ground unicorn horn being a reagent for this, or a material component for that. I think the magesmiths might have a use for it? Not sure of the details, they tend to be close-mouthed about how exactly they do their magic. A killing secret, smith's guild forging magic, don't you know."

Sunset frowned in thought. "And you've never been to this Skagosa?"

"Skagos, milady, and no, of course not. Do I look like an Ibbenese rover to you? They're a set of winter-blasted rocks far out to the west, off the northern coast of Westeros. I thought I saw an Andal wandering around earlier, why don't you ask him? He had a northern look about him."

Ser Jorah. Yes, Sunset would definitely do that.

Sunset's eyes were drawn to a confrontation on the road, a rider screaming at some zafra with a rattle-trap cart threatening to drop a wheel on the road. When she had a moment. They were, after all, in the middle of something.

"A distraction. I should be concentrating on your… what did you call them?"

"Ramsons! The heretical Ramsons! Not true Qohorik at all, I told the khal all about it!"

"Lieutenant Volk, what 'true Qohorik' consists of, and does not, is a matter entirely for you Qohorik. Who or what exactly is a Ramson?"

"Brethren of the Scion of the True Lord's Get, as they name themselves. Sons of the Black Goat, if you're being polite in their presence. Ramsons to everyone else. They claim to be the true and original faith, but everybody else hates them. They were always insulting, and weird, and disrupted the sacrificial ceremonies more times than I care to think about. But they were still basically a part of the faith.

"Until about - hrm, maybe a generation or two ago? They started getting peculiar and shadowy. I believe that the rumor was… something along the lines of some of them returning from Asshai and brought dark heresies with them? I don't know, I haven't made a study of the weirder schismatics."

Sunset pondered what a practitioner of a religion that sacrificed their children to something that sounded like Grogar the Undying crossed with the Nightmare would consider 'weird.' And then she thought of the dead Dothraki reaching out with his icy grip, and shuddered.

Fair enough.

"OK, so, they're weird Qohorik." Sunset couldn't resist just one eye-roll at the idea. "And they're probably forted up at this island to the south of us?"

"After the business with the Lyseni, the Ramsons were forced out of the city. I think I heard that they retreated to the Jokor clanhold, this island on the middle Qhoyne, about halfway to the ruins of Ar Noy."

"And Khal Drogo's advisors are sending the fighting naquikhasar off to the south on a witch-hunt on the basis of what you think you remember is the hiding-place where these sorcerers you think are our ice-and-bone-casting magical murderers came from? Maybe?" Sunset felt the fire of her new-found magic burning like fury behind her horn, and had to consciously restrain herself from letting it out into the world again to scorch the hide of this cheeky ape.

"Yes, yes! Positive! Fairly positive! I'm mostly positive that the Ramsons are on Jokosh Island! That's the only clan that every really bought into their doctrine, and most of the Ramsons come from those families. It's this strange rambling complex, built on the ruins of an old Rhoynish temple or something like that. I've never been there - the Volk never had any traffic with those Jokor lunatics!"

"And what have the Volk had traffic with, Ruper Volk? What kind of clan do you come from, that you're being so helpful and open with the barbarians of the Dothraki Sea?"

"Ah, Milady Sunset, I am a Volk of the Clan Volk, a proud lineage who have mastered the eastern hunting ranges of the upper Vol since the days of the founding! We control all the forests around the great Road eastwards into the Sea, which is why I know my Dothraki, and probably why the captains of the western gates assigned me and my Unsullied to be your escorts on your sojourn through Qohor. It's a beautiful country, the Upper Vol Ranges! The song of the lemurs echoes through woods, and the elk give good hunting, and the sunlight glows in the upper boughs like the Goat's promise of heaven on-"

Sunset stopped the Qohorik's paean to home with a raised hoof. She regretted asking.

"OK, fine. Jokosh Island?"

"I don't know, Milady Sunset. It's an island, it's in the main channel of the Qhoyne. Well, I suppose, it divides a side-channel from the main, but I'm not river Qohorik, don't ask me about navigation and the river-trade."

Sunset looked at a knot of five Dothraki as they rushed by, low in the saddle. The riders of the east might have made their life upon something called a Sea, but from what Sunset had heard, there was nothing of the ocean or sea-water to be found in the Dothraki Sea, and everyone said that the riders were almost allergic to open water.

"How wide are these channels? How do you get to and from this island?"

"Oh, Milady Sunset, the khal's men have been talking of nothing else! Please, I'm tired of the subject. Be assured, they're fully aware of the problem. And I came to you to talk about something else, or else I'll go mad! Please, where did you come from?"

And so Sunset, her mind boiling with questions about magic and Westerosi unicorns and Ramson sorcerers, absent-mindedly lied to the Qohorik about where she'd come from. She dusted off one of the stories about transformed princesses and legendary creatures of magic and wonder, and let her mouth run on autopilot while she thought about the little clues and facts the callow Lieutenant had gifted her.

Are there more like me here? Did the hunters who captured me know to bind my horn because they had experience with these unicorns of Skagos? Is there a colony of ponies like me out there somewhere?

Author's Note

Thanks for editing and pre-reading help to Shrink Laureate, Oliver, Georg, and the general Company.

The Quarrel

The khaleesi and her husband were quarrelling. 'Arguing' would imply that they were speaking to each other, but the khaleesi had chosen to respond to her Sun-and-Stars' ultimatum with deliberate avoidance.

Drogo had insisted that his wife's place was with the main body of the khalasar, and that she would be 'commanding' the horde's main body in his absence. The khal's bloodrider Haggo would be doing all of the actual leading and commanding, of course, or at least, that was what Sunset had gathered from her mistress's furious diatribe on the subject.

So, as the khal led his warriors on their strike southwards against the witches who had tried to kill her, Daenerys was expected to play the good wife and be carried off into safety along with the rest of the khalasar's goods, chattel and spare horses, the whole lot of them hurrying east into the Dothraki Sea and its plentiful fodder. Fodder which would keep the remount herds and the rest alive and mobile.

Daenerys had other plans. Instead of allowing Drogo to shuffle her off with the rest of his dependents and possessions, she'd send her other handmaidens to take her own possessions and zafra with the main body, while she would quietly try to slip into the khal's fighting-camp and attempt to follow the lajakhalasar, the fighting bands.

Mostly, this meant that she was following Sunset. And Sunset didn't know what to make of the reversal in… dynamics? Because the little khaleesi was not really accustomed to doing for herself. Daenerys Stormborn had been the pampered possession of her family's fortunes for all of her short life, and her wedding had mostly meant that she was now the somewhat-cosseted possession of a barbarian prince, instead. This meant something much broader and wilder than what it had in Braavos or Pentos or even Dragonstone, or so Sunset gathered. But it still meant that there were a multitude of limbs raised in the new khaleesi's aid, and support, and care.

Now it was just her own two pale white hands, and Sunset's… whatever. Strong back? She wasn't an earth pony, Celestia damn it!

Sunset had been obliged to inform the khaleesi that if they were going to follow the khal's camp, they couldn't haul all of her belongings with them. No, not even those odd colored stones, those alleged dragons'-eggs that Daenerys loved so much, although Sunset's train of thought had almost been derailed by how different said stone eggs looked now that she'd tapped this world's magic.

Trains. What Sunset wouldn't have given for a train car, and the carrying capacity of - No!

So Sunset Shimmer, once-student of the Princess of the Sun and Moon, bane of monsters and conqueror of the Canterlot Archives, found herself instructing a hominid barbarian princess in the black arts of logistics, packing lightly, and roughing it in the wild. And why portable food and a bit of canvas to keep off the night air were far more important than books on the history of Westeros and the Seven Kingdoms for their continued well-being.

Because Sunset would have to be carrying most of that on her own back. The khaleesi's other horse - that beautiful, stupid grey - was many things, but a pack-horse was not one of them. And neither she nor Sunset could be laced into the traces of a baggage-cart - not and still avoid the irate attentions of the khal's lajaki.

Meanwhile those lajaki were busy themselves at the same exact task that occupied Sunset, but on a vastly greater scale.

One horse in four, dedicated to light baggage carts weighed heavy with grain, gifted from the Norvosi or those few inhabitants of Qohor the Dothraki supply-masters had been able to find and extort in the journey through the forests up to this moment. One horse in seven, packing food for the riders - hard cheeses, dried meats, trail rations - and necessaries to keep the lajaki from dying of idiot causes like a lack of basic medical attention, or of exposure if the weather turned. A spare horse for every rider, and the one that carried them in the saddle. This was the lightest, swiftest, smallest hoof-print the fighting khalasar could present to the world and still travel, without being a herd of victims awaiting the headsmare's axe.

It was still an enormous, confused crowd, an apparent mob that was more chaotic and confused than anyone other than a soldier could possibly picture unaided, without prior experience to enhance and supplant the naked imagination. It required that you had, at least once in your sorry past, observed a mass of armed sapients heave and stumble and scurry about in front of your repulsed, fascinated eyes to truly inform your understanding of just how much well-intentioned imbecility lurks hidden within an army. The school of ponykind, as Celestia had described it to her once-student, is example.

Sunset, the great Princess had said to her, as they watched the soldierly ponies of the EUP stumble through their fall evolutions not-quite-in-the-field-yet, In war everything is simple, but even the simplest things are difficult. Friction is the bane of the soldier, and every army, however simple, orderly, or well-structured, is built of nothing but a multitude of surfaces rubbing against each other - every joint, every cart, every weapon, every soldier another failure-point in the transition from plan through execution into failure. Because every plan ends in failure, every single one. The best you can hope from your plans are fruitful failure.

To quietly move a pale white princess in leathers and a brightly-coated unicorn through herds of rough and proud lajaki would seem to be an impossible task. But for the most part the fighting khas were fixated on their own purposes, their own urgent logistical needs. For a while, the two of them avoided the khal's attention, his wrath and the inevitable forcible return to the main body that wrath would entail.

A while sufficient enough, in the end, that the khaleesi avoided said forcible return. It was no longer a simple task to shuffle her off into the distance by the time men serving one of the khal's more eminent lajaki finally noticed Daenerys lurking in their midst, somehow hiding in plain sight beside the flamboyantly-coated unicorn. The two of them found themselves surrounded by irate Dothraki, under a sort of guard, although one mildly restrained by their baffled respect for the khaleesi's somewhat confused status. What was she doing there?

Sunset thought back, while they waited for the lajaki who must have ridden off to fetch instructions from the khal. She gathered from Daenerys' rage that the substance of the quarrel between the khal and the khaleesi had been over Khal Drogo's requisition of herself from Daenerys' service. At least her temporary re-designation as 'court witch' for the duration of the campaign was an improvement over 'opinionated oddly-colored horse'. Well, camp-witch, Sunset supposed. Khals not exactly having anything so stone-house-man-like as a 'court.'

Sunset Horse, the khaleesi had raged, I will not tolerate gifts to be given and taken-back like this! It is dishonorable! It will not stand! You were given to me - on my wedding day! - and no one else, not even my beloved Sun and Stars, can make that not true!

Sunset had held her peace on the subject of who had given what - because by her estimation of Dothraki gifting culture, the khal's murder of the would-be gifter had terminated the exchange prematurely, and his tolerance of Sunset in Daenerys' possession had constituted a lending of his battle-prize to his bride. Daenerys' other nominal possessions, the weapons gifted her not long after Sunset herself, were in use even now by the khal's bloodriders. But it wasn't Sunset's place to gainsay her mistress, not when she was as wroth as she was.

It occurred to Sunset that the plan as laid out was a half-measure, a half-rebellion. Never give small offenses, Sunset, Celestia had half-quoted to her. Ponies ought either to be well treated or crushed, because they can avenge themselves of small insults, but when you drive them out entirely, you take away their capacity to do you harm in turn.

Sunset had never seen Celestia give any pony any offense, small or large. She had always simply - maneuvered her problem ponies so that their wishes did not come true. Celestia had taken that pre-classical cynic's advice and chose to never insult anypony, ever. Not even Sunset herself.

...I will not sit, isolated, unprotected and worrying among the supplies and the zafra to twiddle my thumbs and be nagged to death by my dear, dear brother and his endless complaints...

And Sunset worried that her new mistress was making a mistake, was giving her mistress's lord and husband a very sharp, small offense indeed.

...The only reason I am alive today is because you were beside me to break those death-curses! I will not be separated from my-

Sunset had been curious to see what word the khaleesi would choose to describe her handmaiden's ambiguous new status, but they had been interrupted by a sudden rush of riders tumbling by, and the 'conversation' had ended there, without conclusion.

The khaleesi had wrapped her imposing platinum hair in a cloth, to keep from standing out in the herd, and hid the distinctive rest of her in a heavy, hot cloak. This must have been the only reason why it had taken so long for her to be noticed among the naquikhasar. Well, that and the lajaki's general tendency to not mess with members of the other bands until it came to quarreling.

And in all of the fighting-khalasar, only the khal and the khaleesi were quarreling.

Sunset didn't see when the messenger rode off to notify the khal that his wife was with the flying column, but she certainly noticed it when the khal himself and his personal khas arrived amid a wave of disorder and purposeful chaos. The riders of the mahrazh-naquikhasari who had discovered Daenerys shook loose their half-guard over their wayward khaleesi, that protective, restrictive huddle which kept her and her quadruped attendant from slipping away again. And so, when the khal arrived, his wife was still to be found.

"Moon of my light! Why do I find you here, eclipsing my purpose, when I had told you to take yourself off to the grasslands, and feed my horses and my zafra where they can be fed!"

"My Sun and my Stars, how can I reflect your light if you put me away from your glory! Did you marry a wife, or a stable-master? If you must take my handmaidens, you take me as well!"

The angry ape, high up on his enormous red stallion glared around in a mockery of confusion. "Your handmaidens! Qotho, have I a passel of maidens packed away in your saddle-bags? Have I taken with me my zafra, or your wives, to peel fruit for our smacking lips as we ride into empty-stomached war with warlocks and witches?"

The bloodrider muttered something, wary of getting pulled into his khal's domestic dispute.

"See! I don't let my bloodriders haul their sheaths around with them. How can I set a standard, without embodying it myself? No sheath! Only arakh!"

The khaleesi gasped in astonishment. Her Dothraki was still a little shaky, but even she could tell when she was being slighted.

"Perhaps the khal's mighty arakh can stand a season exposed to the elements, if he is so proud to bear it about naked to all the world! Or perhaps you can sheath it in the next goat you find by the side of the road!"

Sunset's ears burned, and she wanted to back up, out of what was rapidly turning into an increasingly explicit and profane argument. She found herself bumping into the horse of - ack, Cohollo.

He reached down with his coiled whip, and brushed Sunset's new braid-bell, making it tinkle as the newlyweds yelled at each other. "Hello, maegi-Sunset. You helped your mistress escape her khas? What do you have against poor Rahkaro, that you have again undercut his authority, made him look like a fool?"

"Lord Cohollo, good morning," said Sunset, evenly, as she turned to give the bloodrider her attention, without putting her back to her mistress and her mistress's irate husband. "I did nothing to insult my good friend Rahkaro, nor diminish him in the eyes of his lajaki, or the khaleesi's khas. The khaleesi merely chose to put her personal safety in the ho- the hands of her husband's full war-band, and to leave the security of the khal's household in the capable hands of her now-blooded khas."

The balding, leathery bloodrider snorted at Sunset's evasion, leaning one elbow on his saddle-pommel. "Call it whatever you please, but it won't do Rahkaro's name any good to be put aside like this after a failure like the other day."

"The might of many a lajaki's arm was no help against the ice and shadow of the sorcerers we go to face, Lord Cohollo."

"I remember many a lajaki arrow which struck that Qohorik witch, maegi-Sunset, so many that he was more fletching than man. Don't think because you have one bell to your name and a little bit of braiding, that you can fight all the world by your lonesome. Even a witch can fall to an arrowhead well-shot."

Sunset couldn't see an answer to that which wasn't rank foolishness, and kept her peace, once again.

The khaleesi continued to argue with her husband in front of his entire following, and the two of them kept at it until their choler finally bled away, and their embarrassment at the spectacle they were presenting their people overcame their wrath.

Daenerys was a very young bride, and allowances had to be made. But Drogo? He was a man, and a full-grown one, and a leader of tens of thousands. He'd done his own name no good in letting his woman challenge him in front of the world like a common fishwife. He didn't so much give in to her demands, as he simply - refused to acknowledge her further presence.

He rode his great red stallion right past the wife which he was now ignoring, and looked down at Sunset.

"Sunset Horse. I will be needing your talents for the next while. At least until we pull this temple-stone-house down around these Qohorik witch-men's ears. Follow my khas, do what I tell you to do. Take yourself and whatever comes with you, and keep them from burdening my lajaki. Can you do that?"

Sunset nodded, silently, not trusting herself to re-open the wound.

Khal Drogo returned the nod, wrenched his steed's head around like a teamster pulling a carriage-wheel out of a mud-bog, and kicked his heels into the stallion's sides. His two remaining blood-riders followed their steaming khal. They hurried south, joining the swarming thousands of Dothraki warriors as they spread out into the open forests of central Qohor, racing like a leather-clad tide of vengeance through glade and meadow and brush.

And the khal's wife, demoted to baggage, sat incandescent with fury as Sunset looked worriedly up at her mistress. It wasn't the first time she'd been reminded of something the late Magister Allynio had mentioned in passing as he'd groomed Sunset for her future in service to 'the Targaryen princess'.

One must, the fat ape had said to her, keep in mind when dealing with the Targaryens that they are all quite mad. They breed themselves too closely, brother to sister, half-brother to half-sister, generation after generation, until their family trees look more like ladders. She looks like a doll, a porcelain doll - but she's a Targaryen, and her father had men burned alive for his own amusement. Step lightly while the dragon sleeps, because awakened dragons burn little ponies like you.

Author's Note

Thanks for editing and pre-reading help to Shrink Laureate, Oliver, Georg, and the general Company.

The Wisdom Of Khals

Sunset had never run as fast as she did in that sprint from the gates of the surrendered city. The sound of her own hooves thudding into the gravel of the road, then the packed dirt, echoed in syncopation with the percussive thumping of her struggling heart, and the rising thunder of both drowned out every thought, every quibble, every feeling that was not run, run, faster, faster, faster.

The world was throbbing behind her eyes when he found the khal's cavalcade. They were a leisurely hour's walk from the previous night's encampment, and his bloodriders surrounded him in full panoply. A corps of axe-men trailed behind them, a host of archers rode ahead. The whole gave an impression of force, of aggression coiled and ready for the leap.

The khaleesi was nowhere to be seen, nor any of the women of the camp.

Sunset came up behind the khal's fighting khas, running at a dead gallop in a cloud of ash-tainted dust. The khal himself was not painted in his colors, but his eyes were sharp and his arakh was ready to hand in a sheath strapped along the saddle of his best horse, the great chestnut stallion with the vast chest and the powerful shoulders.

She gathered her remaining wind, and slowed to a stop within five strides of the now-still horse-lord on his mount.

"What news have you, Sunset Horse?" The words were aimed at her, but he turned from side to side, projecting them across the attentive crowd of lajaki, of warriors. "Am I today to break my betrothal peace, and sally with my blood and my lajasar to tear down another pile of unnatural stone and mud raised over the earth in rejection of the Stallion and his ordering of the galloping plain? Shall my arakh drink deep of the blood of stone-men fit for naught but the slaughter-herd and the collar?"

"No, my liege, my khal," Sunset forced out of her aching lungs, her coat twitching with all of the blood-thirsty eyes upon her. "They have given you their gates. Gyohan Byka surrenders to your, to your might!"

The adrenaline had been burned out of her by the long gallop, and she felt that rider's high that comes after the second wind, the third wind - a sort of floating grace, entirely physical in essence. She didn’t think of the sacking of the farms, the rapes, the riders playing with prisoners like cats teasing at captured mice. She didn’t even think of that meaty thunk and the weight of the weeks-dead magister’s head as it landed on her back for that brief, terrifying instant. All she did was await a gap in the predatory roar of the assembled lajaki as they shook their weapons at her.

Then she continued.

"They have opened their gates wide to your naquikhasari! There are two hanged men greeting us, one on each side of the main gate. As I left, Adrahko and Rakharo were taking command of the town."

The khal half bowed, smiling beneficently, "Then today is a day of peace. My men, think you today is a good day for a gentle ride? Let us go down to the stone houses, and gather our due from the stone-men who bend their heads to those that ride!"

And the lajasar roared with approval, and dissolved into its component clots, Dothraki cheerfully trotting past the still unicorn as they broke away from the road, and swarmed around her, heading for the town which had given itself to them.

Riders spread out from the self-disassembling war-host, searching out the components of the greater khalasar in motion, to apprise them all of the changes occasioned by the surrender of the little city. There had been two plans for the next night's encampment, and one had been for a war-footing sited so that the khal and his lajaki could be supported in what had been expected to be a brief but vigorous siege.

They would be moving into camp, instead, around the surrendered city, taking their due from the subjugated Gyohani, but otherwise an encampment as any other Sunset had seen in her brief time with the Dothraki. She had expected to be sent out as one of the messengers, as she had on previous occasions, but the khal, rolling loosely on his great war-mount as the beast moved along, waved his khaleesi's witch-horse to his side instead.

"Stay, stay, Sunset Horse. These stone-men, they still speak the coastal-tongue, and I would have someone to speak my words for me. It will confuse them! That will be jolly. And I find I am in a jolly mood. They sound fearful enough for today, I do not need them shitting themselves before me, I do not think."

Sunset moved at a slightly faster pace than a trot, to keep up with the vast strides of the khal's great beast, gathering her thoughts from the morass of her morning and her ride, slowly coming back to herself, and coming down from the hypnotic effects of that mad gallop.

"You do not wish them terrified, Great Khal?"

"Ha! Of course I want them scared! Fear! Fear is the sinews of command, Sunset Horse. Fear drives men. Fear breaks men! But fear breaks them into pieces that can't be picked up, if you put too much fear in them. If they're hanging men to calm me, then that, my strange little horse, is scared enough for today."

"What about… respect?” What in Tartarus was coming out of her mouth? “Loyalty?” Was she mad? “...Love?"

"Listen to you! Where did you learn to speak the real tongue, so quickly, so well? Is it witchery, or did that fat fool I cut down teach you more than I'm told he claimed? He didn't speak the real tongue himself, did he?"

"No, Great Khal,” said the madpony, thinking of that meaty impact, the splater… “I am… a very quick study. Faster than I thought myself to be, it turns out. I don't think it is magic, or if it is, it's nothing I do… consciously. Uh, 'mindfully'?"

"Ha! You are certainly faster to pick it up than the moon of my life." The great bipedal beast upon his enormous steed leaned down, whispering theatrically. "Tell no one, but you are both much faster than I. I will always be quicker in knowing how to gut a man, than how to speak his degenerate words!"

The khal swayed back in his saddle, and continued, loudly. "If men conquered with their tongue, and with their words, then this khalasar would ride to another's command."

Sunset looked up, screaming inside, and yet… She narrowed her eyes. "And yet it rides to your command, Great Khal, and not at the edge of your arakh."

Mad!

"Ha! True enough, Sunset Horse! But my command is to Dothraki warriors, in Dothraki words, to Dothraki deeds! If I could only command stone-house men in stone-house words, I would only be able to extract from them stone-house deeds! No, no. Look at my light of the moon, her weedy little brother, who thinks to command me like a seller of sold stone-house steel! To cross his poison water and sack his distant lands… I will figure him out, some other day. But he would command me in stone house words, to his poison-water deeds. Harumph!"

"You do not,” Her long mentorship under the gentle Princess had utterly unfitted her for interacting with the great and powerful. Her instincts! Her lunatic instincts! “You do no intend to give King Viserys his promised…"

"No! Never that! I have promised him! I have given my word! A khal's promises are like the packed earth beneath your horses' hooves! If they are not firm, the herd struggles, falls, fails! No, a khal's words must be solid footing, that much is true. And I have given him my words. If he understands them. And it is his problem if he does not understand exactly what I have said, exactly what I have promised. And nothing more! But enough of the foolish steel-shirt khalakka. This is not a day for him. Today is a day for managing the fear of terrified stone-house men!"

The khal sat back in his saddle, thinking over what he had said. Then he said something else, quietly, almost as much to himself as to the little orange unicorn riding by his side, as if he didn't think what he had said was quite all there was to it.

"Reputation, Sunset Horse, is an arakh," said the khal, stroking the sheathed weapon beside his saddle. "Fear is a blade, a sharpened piece of steel. You can cut with it, kill with it, but if you take a sharpened blade by the naked tang, you cut yourself as well. Bleed out, die of blood poisoning, look the fool. Only fools fight with naked steel. Honor, honor is the haft - your word. Your word is the handle, the thing that lets you grip the blade without gashing open your own palm with your fear.

"And once you've mastered your arakh, you've mastered your enemy. You can kill his heart, before your blade ever touches his skin. Open doors, with the promise of the arakh alone. Tear down cities, with the weight of your word. When you master their fear with your words, you have made yourself an arakh. An arakh that can cut through walls, cut through stone houses, cut through worlds."

The khal and his men were greeted by Rakharo inside the gates of Gyohan Byka and a pair of riders, who stood watch over a crowd of bare-headed Gyohani. The crowd laid down in the dirt of the square behind the gates, laid prone as the great khal passed between the two hanging corpses, his attention on the dead rather than the living.

The cavalcade came to a stop beside the young bloodrider, and Khal Drogo turned to his man.

"Have they been compliant, Rakharo?"

"Yes, Great Khal. They do not speak the real tongue, so it has been slow riding, but they've started bringing out the gifts owed, and I think I got across to them that they owe much more on top of that, for making us come to them."

"They speak the tongue of the coastal stone house men, do they not?"

"Sort of, Great Khal? In a sense."

"Then you should not have sent your magic horse away, with her talent for words! Sunset Horse, come forward, we would have words with these cowards!"

Sunset trotted forward, obedient. The fires in the countryside had died away, and they had not returned along the back-trail upon which all the destruction and death had been; if not for the smoke, it would have been a blue-skied day of perfect, sunny weather. But the hanging offal outside of the gate had gotten her back up again, and she was struggling to, as the khal had put it, manage her fear. And her guilt.

"Speak my Dothraki words to these stone-house zafra in stone-house words!"

"The Great Khal speaks! Listen, you slaves!"

"Good! Good! Tell them that it is good that zafra know their zafra places. And I see from the bloody curds they've hung on their stone walls, that they know how to put me in a good mood. Who speaks for them?"

"It is good that slaves know that they are slaves. Khal Drogo sees the men you have hanged from your walls, and is pleased. Who speaks for the town?"

A well-fed man, grey-pelted and almost as tall as he was wide, got creakingly to his knees, looking up like a clever pony trying to be humble. Sunset could see the confusion in his eyes when he looked up to find before him not a woman, but herself. He held a rich cloth in his hands, wringing the fabric - Sunset thought it was perhaps some sort of hat. She could see him gathering his wits, and dismissing the orange specter before him. He offered up his speech to the khal:

"Greetings, Great Drogo, and we welcome your benevolence to our humble city. We were led astray by evil men, who told us false things, and led us into wicked disobedience to your commands. When your men came to our lands, we realized our errors, and as you see, we punished them for their wickedness, that led us to disrespect you and your commands!"

Khal Drogo turned to Sunset, his eyebrow arched questioningly.

"Ah, he says that the dead men beside the gate are those that led the city to disobey your commands, Great Khal. They killed them to show remorse."

"Hmph. They would murder their own khals, simply to avoid our wrath? Are we that frightening, Rakharo?"

"It seems to be the case, my khal. What else could it be?"

"I know what I would do, if I were a worm, and a stone-house man, and a terrible khalasar came to my gates with blood in their eyes and fire at their heels. And it would not be to let my little stone-house children overthrow me and hang me by my heels or my neck from my own walls!"

The khal thought, looking down at the man who was almost as huge as he, himself, although the bulk of the kneeling man was more in fat than the khal's sleek muscle. This tableau of thought and obedience was brief in duration, as a shriek of fury cut the air, startling both the Dothraki in their saddles, and the Gyohani upon the dirty cobblestones.

A woman emerged from a building to Sunset's right, her face warped with rage and grief, tears streaking her dark cheeks under burning eyes. Two younger women pulled at her arms, tugging ineffectually at their elder, who was both much larger than them, and apparently, stronger as well.

"Liar! Coward! Monster! Fools, that you let him do this! Fools, that you let the savages into our city! Doom! Doom! You've killed us all! Damn you, damn you, damn you!"

With each damnation, she pulled her attendants forward, striding like a farmer cutting new sod for the first time, jerking left and right, as if pulling a plow through stony ground. Shaking them off with one last 'damn you!', she moved quickly forward to the riders and the crowd.

Two of the khal's men brought their horses around, keeping the shrieking woman from approaching Khal Drogo.

"Sunset Horse! What does the vikeesi want?"

Sunset listened to the shrieking woman, and feared to translate the profanities, the incoherent obscenities - wait, was that right? The woman's accent, but she had to say something - "My khal, she disapproves. She thinks you'll kill them all."

"Well, it is an option, if I am to be screamed at by vikeesi. Find out what has made her so willing to court my arakh."

The fat man on his knees had half-risen, screaming imprecations at the almost-as-fat woman in that same bastardization of proper Pentoshi Valyrian, and Sunset had difficulty making out their mutual accusations through the thick local accent. No, not an accent - a different dialect? The khal was waiting!

"My khal, I think she's the leader of - no, the mother of the local opposition party, the, uh, er. The fat man's enemies, I think? She's accusing him of judicial murder of, er, using you, Great Khal."

"USING ME? Rakharo, silence that vikeesi! Someone, shut up that stone-house worm on the ground!"

The two apes were beaten to the ground, whip-ends used to interrupt the semi-suicidal argument that had broken out between the Gyohani.

"Now," continued the khal. "More calmly, before I really do lose my patience and kill every stone-house imbecile here. What does she say?"

"Uh, my khal, I think she's saying that the dead by the gate are her sons or - I think a son and a husband? - Son and husband?"

The fat woman shook her head, furiously, eyes burning. She jabbered something in ever-more-incoherent not-really-Valyrian.

"She says that they were not the party who denied you your gifts and your respect, but were -" Sunset turned to the fat woman, and prompted her again, getting a rush of rapid-fire hill-Valyrian that she mostly understood. "Vulnerable and on the outs with the town council. My khal, the leaders of the city hanged someone at random to appease your fury. I think? This man, he used their fear of you to rid him of enemies. She says he was the one who disrespected you."

The khal kicked his horse forward, looming over the fat man who was being held to the ground, an arakh against the back of his neck by a silent Dothraki. He stared down at the quivering fat man, as if he could kill the man with nothing but a look.

"No, Sunset Horse, I think you're right. Leader, not leaders. This is the sort of thing a man who has control over his people would do, could do. Kill intimate enemies, to stave off distant ones? Clever man. Wise man. To use another's reputation as his blade. To make fear of me his ally."

The khal sat tall in his saddle. "Dangerous man. Rakharo, have the fat man hung beside his victims. Use his entrails. Make sure he lives while he hangs."

Khal Drogo rode away from the screaming fat man as Rakharo and two others dragged him away, no doubt to look for - Sunset stopped that thought-process before it led to imagining what the khal had ordered. She watched the khal instead, as he kneed his horse over to where the two riders were restraining the angry widow. He summoned her to join him.

"Sunset Horse, ask her how she thought this would end."

Sunset relayed the question.

"Great Khal, she thinks you will kill them both. Expects it."

"Ha! I like her. Is she my enemy?"

Sunset asked her.

"Not if you kill the fat man, my khal."

"Ha! Another dangerous one. If she were any younger, and I were not a married man, I'd steal her away. Those two - her daughters?"

"So it appears, Great Khal."

"Qotho, take them. If this is what the women of that family are like, I want to see what brats they'll give us, if I give them to my bloodriders. Cohollo, Haggo, take the town, get our offerings." The khal looked down at the older woman. "Don't sack the town. Sunset Horse, tell her we're taking her daughters. Does she have a problem with that?"

"She says… she can have more. Can she?"

"I don't know, Sunset Horse. She's fat enough. But good enough for today. I'm feeling generous! Like the Lamb-Men, we'll only shear the sheep! We'll take just one."

And the Dothraki set out throughout the town. To harvest the fleece.

Author's Note

Thanks for editing and pre-reading help to Shrink Laureate, Oliver, and the general Company.