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and their faces showed so little they might have been cast of bronze as well. They laid the corpse down at her feet. Ser Barristan pulled back the blood-stained shroud. Grey Worm lowered the torch, so she might see.
    The dead man’s face was smooth and hairless, though his cheeks had been slashed open almost ear to ear. He had been a tall man, blue-eyed and fair of face.
Some child of Lys or old Volantis, snatched off a ship by corsairs and sold into bondage in red Astapor.
Though his eyes were open, it was his wounds that wept. There were more wounds than she could count.
    â€œYour Grace,” Ser Barristan said, “there was a harpy drawn on the bricks in the alley where he was found . . .”
    â€œ. . . drawn in his own blood.” Daenerys knew the way of it by now. The Sons of the Harpy did their butchery by night, and over each kill they left their mark. “Grey Worm, why was this man alone? Had he no partner?” When the Unsullied walked the streets of Meereen by night, they always walked in pairs.
    â€œMy queen,” replied the captain, “your servant Stalwart Shield had no duty last night. He had gone to a . . . a certain place . . . to drink, and have companionship.”
    â€œA certain place? What do you mean?”
    â€œA house of pleasure, Your Grace.” Beneath the spiked bronze cap, Grey Worm’s face might have been made of stone.
    A brothel.
Half of her freedmen were from Yunkai, where the Wise Masters had been famed for training bed slaves.
The way of the seven sighs.
Brothels had sprouted up like mushrooms all over Meereen.
It is all they know. They need to survive.
Food grew more costly every day, whilst the pleasures of the flesh got cheaper. In the poorer districts between the stepped pyramids of Meereen’s slaver nobility, there were brothels catering to every conceivable erotic taste, she knew.
Even so . . .
    â€œWhat could a eunuch hope to find in a brothel?” she asked.
    â€œEven those who lack a man’s parts may still have a man’s heart, Your Grace,” said Grey Worm. “This one has been told that your servant Stalwart Shield sometimes gave coin to the women of the brothels, to lay with him and hold him.”
    The blood of the dragon does not weep.
“Stalwart Shield,” she said, dry-eyed. “That was his name?”
    â€œIf it please Your Grace.”
    â€œIt is a fine name.” The Good Masters of Astapor had not allowed their slave soldiers even names. Some of her Unsullied reclaimed their birth names after she had freed them; others chose new names for themselves. “Is it known how many attackers fell upon Stalwart Shield?”
    â€œThis one does not know. Many.”
    â€œSix or more,” said Ser Barristan. “From the look of his wounds, they swarmed him from all sides. He was found with an empty scabbard. It may be that he wounded some of his attackers.”
    Dany said a silent prayer that somewhere one of them was dying even now, clutching at his belly and writhing in pain. “Why did they cut open his cheeks like that?”
    â€œGracious queen,” said Grey Worm, “his killers had forced the genitals of a goat down the throat of your servant Stalwart Shield. This one removed them before bringing him here.”
    They could not feed him his own genitals. The Astapori left him neither root nor stem.
“The Sons grow bolder,” Dany observed. Until now, they had limited their attacks to unarmed freedmen, cutting them down in the streets or breaking into their homes under the cover of darkness to murder them in their beds. “This is the first of my soldiers they have slain.”
    â€œThe first,” Ser Barristan warned, “but not the last.”
    I am still at war,
Dany realized,
only now I am fighting shadows.
She had hoped to have a respite from the killing, some time to build and heal. Shrugging off the lion pelt, she knelt beside the corpse and closed the dead man’s eyes, ignoring Jhiqui’s gasp. “Stalwart Shield shall not be forgotten. Have him washed and dressed for battle, and bury him with cap and shield and spears.”
    â€œIt shall be as Your Grace commands,” said Grey Worm.
    She stood. “Send a dozen men to the Temple of the Graces, and ask the Blue Graces if any man has come to them seeking treatment for a sword wound. And spread the word that we will pay good gold for the short sword of Stalwart Shield. Inquire of