A Blog of Ice and Fire (Chapter 61) Daenerys VII: It’s Just A Flesh Wound

Previously on A Blog of Thrones, we wondered What Would Ned Do? Because this is a question worth asking, apparently. Well, buckle your seatbelts, dumplings. We're going for a ride.



There has been a battle. Dany rides through the ruin while the men of the khas joke amongst themselves. George RR Martin engages in his second-favorite pastime, after describing food: describing the desolate ruin of a war-torn locale. There is a feral pack of dogs trailing the khalasar because hey, they never run out of fresh meat that way. There are specific people - jaqqa rahn - who just carry axes through the battlefield and decapitate those too far gone to save, and also those who just look at them funny. But the show didn't have the budget for this, so we got a few more titty shots elsewhere instead.

Drogo's khalasar has defeated another khal's group, as well as some villagers. It looks like the other khalasar attacked the village first, and then Drogo swept in and defeated both. (Martin goes and tells us precisely this a few pages later, but he's kind enough to give us all the relevant details ahead of time.) The battle might have gone better if the other khalasar hadn't wasted some of their arrows on the sheep. (No, really, that happened.)

The locals are the Lhazareen, and "once Dany might have taken them for Dothraki... now they looked alien to her, squad and flat-faced, their black hair cropped unnaturally short." Well, that's a neat way of both describing them and showing once again how much Dany has internalized her barbarism.

One of the captives, a small boy, tries to run. He gets killed for his trouble, but not before the Dothraki play with their food a bit. Ser Jorah killed a Dothraki - apparently a member of Drogo's khalasar - for looking at him funny when he put his armor on. One of the victors is casually raping a girl Dany's age. Details, people - the horsemen are savage people.

Hilariously, Jorah told the khal to go to Meereen to sell the slaves there. Man, if only he'd done that, he could have bogged down this storyline two whole books early!

Anyway Daenerys doesn't like the raping (best not show her Seasons 4 or 5, then) and decides to claim the victims - all of them - as her own personal slaves. Oddly, a few savages are not fond of this foreign princess/whore taking away their prizes. Qotho bitches about Daenerys to her husband, which goes over about as well as you'd expect. Naturally, Drogo assumes Dany's character development is entirely due to his son growing in her belly, but he does tell Qotho to go find someone else to rape. So Dany didn't manage to save everyone, I guess.

Then she gets a good look at his wounds. "Dany could see the muscles in his chest where the skin had been cut away." What, was there a Bolton in Khal Ogo's khalasar? Anyway, Drogo wants to show off what a father to his men he is - these would be the same men from which Jorah killed one earlier for looking at him funny - by letting them be healed first, but Dany's not having any of that. Fortunately, the maegi Mirri Maz Duur is here. "A maegi was a woman who lay with demons and practiced the blackest of sorceries, a vile thing, evil and soulless, who came to men in the dark of night and sucked life and strength from their bodies." Ohai Melisandre.

By the way, some people seem to think that Jon and Daenerys might end up together - ignoring the fact that she's his aunt - and also, by the time that happens, Jon's going to be an undead abomination. Given Dany's past experiences in that area...

What would Ned do? Ned has his own medic tend to Selmy's wounds at the Trident, didn't he?
And he is a trusting idiot, isn't he?

Well.