Daenerys Targaryen is woken by Missandei and rushed to the throne room. Her bedchambers are located in the lofty apex of the Great Pyramid of Meereen, eight hundred feet in the sky. Irri and Jhiqui warn Daenerys that it is bad luck to touch a dead person you haven’t killed yourself. In the throne room Daenerys covers herself with a lion pelt, made from the head and hide of a hrakkar, the white lion of the Dothraki sea, given to her by Khal Drogo. Grey Worm enters the room wearing a bronze cap with three spikes, followed by four of the Unsullied bearing a dead man on their shoulders. Barristan Selmy, lord commander of the Queensguard, pulls back the bloodstained shroud covering the dead man’s body: a tall man, blue-eyed and fair of face; his cheeks are slashed open from ear to ear and his body covered in wounds.
The dead man is one of the Unsullied named Stalwart Shield. He had visited a brothel to pay a woman to lie with him and hold him. When he emerged from the brothel and into the alley, he was set upon by six or more attacker swarming him from all sides. On the alley’s brick walls was a harpy drawn in blood – the insignia of the suspected killers, the Sons of the Harpy. Down the victim’s throat, the killers had forced the genitals of a goat. In the past the Son have attacked unarmed freedmen, but this is the first time one of Daenerys’s soldiers has been slain. Daenerys commands the Unsullied to wash and dress the dead man and bury him with cap, shield, and spear. She sends men to the Temple of the Graces to inquire if any man has come to the Blue Graces with a sword wound, as it is suspected Stalwart wounded his attackers. Men are also sent to inquire of the butchers and the herdsmen who has been gelding goats recently. Lastly, she commands that none of her soldiers are permitted to walk alone at night. After the Unsullied have left the throne room, Barristan Selmy counsels Daenerys that the Unsullied, although fine soldiers, are ill suited to undertake investigative tasks – to unravel secrets and ask questions. Selmy has been training knights, teaching the freed slaves to fight with lance and long sword in the Westerosi fashion.
Conditions in Slaver’s Bay have worsened. Daenerys has dispatched her Khalasar to subdue the hinterlands, under the command of her three bloodriders. Brown Ben Plumm and the Second Sons are traveling south to guard against Yunkish incursions. Daario Naharis and the Stormcrows travel east to Lhazar, through the Khyai Pass, to convince the Lhazarene to reopen overland trade routes. In Meereen brothels are sprouting up, food prices are rising, storehouses are dwindling, and many of the freed slaves have been hired back as servants for meager wages. The Wise Masters of Yunkai have returned to slaving and are raising levies, hiring sellswords, and making alliances against Daenerys. King Cleon of Astapor has also restored slavery – the former slaves are now the masters and the formers masters the slaves.
Daenerys returns to her bedchamber to dress. She walks out onto the terrace where Viserion lays coiled around a pear tree. Dragons are fire made flesh, Daenerys thinks to herself, recalling the line from a book Ser Jorah had given her as a wedding gift. Viserion’s tail lashes the truck of the tree causing a pear to fall and land at Daenerys’s feet; the dragon flies off the terrace. Inside the bedchamber Irri and Jhiqui brush the tangles from Daenerys’s hair and garb her in a Ghiscari tokar – a loose shapeless sheet wound around the hips, under an arm, and over a shoulder, requiring its wearer to hold it in place with their left hand. Daenerys had wanted to ban the tokar after taking Meereen, but her advisors convince her otherwise – the Green Grace, Galazza Galare, counsels Daenerys that wearing the tokar will gain her acceptance in Meereen.
On her way to the throne room, Daenerys is joined by Reznak mo Reznak, her seneschal, and Skahaz mo Kandaq, called Shavepate. Reznak is small damp man who speaks a bastard form of High Valyrian; Skahaz has a shaved head, a beetled brow, small eyes with heavy bags, a big nose dark with blackheads, and oily yellow skin. Skahaz suggests Daenerys takes one man from each of the slaving families and kill them in retribution for Stalwart’s death, and if another is slain, to take two from each family to kill, and so on. Zhak, Hazkar, Ghazeen, Merreq, Loraq and Pahl are old Meereen slaving families who hold a grudge against Daenerys. The Pahls hold the strongest grudge: Oznak zo Pahl was slain by Strong Belwas in single combat; his father, commander of Meereen’s city watch, died defending the city gates; three of his uncles were Great Masters who were nailed up to posts by Daenerys. Daenerys declines Skahaz’s suggestion and instead increases the reward for information concerning the Sons of the Harpy from one hundred honors to one thousand.
In the throne room Missandei announces Daenerys arrival. Daenerys’s throne is an ebon bench, where she hears petitions. The Astapori envoy Lord Ghael speaks first: he has a mouth of brown and rotten teeth and the pointed yellow face of a weasel. He presents Daenerys with a gift from King Cleon the Great – slippers made of gilded leather, decorated with green freshwater pearls. On behalf of King Cleon, Lord Ghael proposes that Astapor and Meereen march on Yunkai, but Daenerys declines. The second petitioner is Hizdahr zo Loraq: a tall slender man, with flawless amber skin, wings of wiry red-black hair sprouting from his temples, and a long beard bound with rings of gold. He is a wealthy and well-connected merchant. When Daenerys had closed the city’s fighting pits, Hizdahr had purchased up most of them at low prices. For the sixth time, he petitions Daenerys to reopen the pits, but she declines. The next petitioner is Grazdan zo Galare. Grazdan is a cousin of the Green Grace. He had once owned a slave woman who was a very fine weaver. When the woman grew old, Grazdan had purchased half a dozen young girls and commanded the old weaver to instruct them in her craft. The young girls, now free, run a shop by the harbor where they sell their weavings – Grazdan petitions for a portion of their earnings. Daenerys, upset that Grazdan cannot remember the name of the old weaver, denies his petition and commands him to purchase the young girls an expensive new loom.
Daenerys listens to more petitioners. A rich woman who fled to her brother’s house during the sack of the city returned home to discover that her house had been seized and converted into a brothel. Daenerys grants the woman her jewels, which were stolen by the whores, but not the house – Daenerys rules that the house was lost when she abandoned it. A former slave accuses a noble of the Zhak of rape and wants him gelded. The former slave’s wife had served the noble as a bed-warmer before being freed – she lost her virginity to and was impregnated by the noble. Daenerys grants the man gold for raising the bastard child, but denies the gelding. A boy whose father, elder brother, and mother were killed by two household slaves during the sack demands that the perpetrators be hanged. Daenerys denies his petition – she had declared a blanket pardon for all crimes committed during the sack. The boy rushes at Daenerys, but trips in his tokar before he reaches her. Strong Belwas lifts the boy off the ground and shakes him violently, before Daenerys commands him to release the boy.
Later in the afternoon, a sculptor arrives and proposes to replace the head of the great bronze harpy in the Plaza of Purification with one cast in Daenerys’s image – she declines. A pike of unprecedented size is presented to Daenerys’s as a gift from a fisherman and a coppersmith gives her a suit of burnished rings to wear to war. Twenty-three farmers claim compensation for livestock eaten by Daenerys’s dragons. The compensation is granted, but henceforth claimants must present themselves at the Temple of the Graces and swear a holy oath before the gods of Ghis. The final petitioner is a shabbily dressed squat man carrying a cloth sack. Beckoned by Daenerys, the man shuffles forward nervously and empties the contents of his sack on to the marble floor: the burnt bones of a child spill forth.
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