If Kurt had thought that talking about military strategies was the most tiresome thing in the world, it was only because he had never held court back then. Sitting on the most comfortable set of cushions he had ever experienced, he found himself remembering the mat of furs he used to sleep on in the Dothraki Sea, inside a tent that was never cool enough, when the sand always managed to clung to his sweaty skin and Blaine was with him and life was simple.

He zoned out easily these days. Dozens of solicitors came to court every day, some of them kind and courteous and reverent, others barely hiding their resentment towards him and what he'd done. Abolishing something that had been in place for centuries was not something that could be done in a day, and the consequences would be bad before they turned out good. He wished that day would come soon.

When his mind wandered off, it was usually to think about Blaine. Man after man bowed and spoke before him, their voices unheard as Kurt wondered what Blaine would say, if he would chuckle, if he would get angry or be merciful when people asked for too much. Quinn was smart enough to notice when he wasn't paying attention, so thankfully she always stepped closer to him to whisper in his ear a quick summary of what had just been said.

He had taken residence inside the Great Pyramid, where Meereenese kings used to live back when the city contemplated having them. It took almost an hour to climb from base to top, but Kurt rarely got out of it. He'd wanted to take a walk through the city and see for himself how things were, but holding court took him occupied for most of his day and it was not safe to wander around at night. His chambers were nestled in the top, with beautiful terraces all around them; they had trees and huge water pools where he liked to bathe as the sun set over his city, painting the water in orange and red and reflecting the various shades of the pyramid's bricks over it.

"Physa, we need your help" the sixth freedman of the day told him as he straightened back from his bow.

Still?, Kurt found himself thinking, immediately swallowing down his guilt and shame.

Get a hold of yourself. You're a king now.

"Tell me what bothers you" he replied then.

Finn and Rachel stood on one side of his wooden bench (he'd refused to sit on the huge and way too presumptuous dragon-shaped throne he'd been offered), Quinn and Puck on the other; they whispered things at each other when something amused them – a nobleman with his hair styled as a dear's horns, an almost toothless woman whose request had been impossible to understand, a fat man who had stumbled on his own feet as he got in and managed to fall face down to the purple floor of the huge pillared court.
Kurt was pretty sure something had already happened between them. In another time, he would have inquired, but he had more important things to think about now. The time for silly chitchat and gossip was over.

As is my youth, he couldn't help but think, feeling like a bitter old man full of regrets.

"No one wants to hire us" the man in front of him complained. "We are fine builders, but now that we're not slaves anymore, clients only hire those who are members of the builders' registered company. Free men. They are doing all the work we used to do, and we are starving."

It was the same problem presented to him in different shapes every day. Either no one hired the former slaves in some sort of silent revenge towards Kurt, or they were put to work at humiliating prices, since the free men knew they couldn't say no under the circumstances. Kurt had established the minimum decent wage with a law, but he couldn't force people to hire other people if they didn't want to.

He tried to tell that to the man, but he shook his head desperately before Kurt could finish.

"Please, Physa, we don't know what to do!" he begged, falling to his knees again. "Please, please, do something!"

It wasn't even midday yet, and Kurt was tired.

It's too hard. Too hard without you.

The pleading man was making him uncomfortable. He shifted restlessly on the bench, his skin itching. He didn't know what to do. What did that make him if not a terrible king? He had given them freedom, and now they were starving in the streets, with no money to buy houses for them to live in since they couldn't live under their masters' roofs anymore. He hadn't thought about any of that, because freeing them was what was right. But as the days went by, as desperate man after desperate man came to him for help, right and wrong grew harder to distinguish.

"What would you have me do?" he asked, massaging his temples. It was stupid of him to ask; he was the king, he should take the decisions.

I'm no king today, it seems.

The man lifted his head from the ground and blinked in surprise. He seemed to realize that it was time to recompose himself, because he got to his feet and brushed the dust away from his knees before speaking.

"You... you could get them to admit us into the company. We asked, and they said we have to pay, but we don't have any money. You could get us in and then they would have to treat us equally."

"Done" Kurt said dismissively, only barely stopping himself from heaving a relieved breath.

Even so, it was enough for the former slave to be grateful.

"Thank you Physa, thank you so much, may the Old Gods of Ghis bless you!"

The Old Gods of Ghis laugh at me from above, Kurt thought as he forced a smile and watched him go.

"How many more?" he asked Rachel, closing his eyes tiredly.

"Ten, khalees" she replied cautiously, as if expecting him to burst in a fit of angry yells. Kurt groaned in frustration.

"Send them away. I'll hear them tomorrow."

He could hear her shifting awkwardly where she stood.

"Even... him?" she asked. Kurt opened his eyes and turned to look at her.

"Again?!"

"I'm afraid so. He won't like to be sent away without you hearing him."

Kurt sighed and rolled his eyes.

"As if that would make a difference. He says the same thing every time" he complained, before waving his hand in the air towards her. "Fine. But only him. The rest, tomorrow."

Rachel nodded solemnly. She went off to speak with the two Unsullied guarding the entrance of the court, beyond which the solicitors awaited in a straight line that sometimes was so long that it descended down half the steps of the pyramid. As soon as she was back at his side, the man appeared, clad in a smoky grey tokar. He made his way across the hall while the Unsullied closed the door behind him.

"Your Radiance" he greeted as he did every time in his thick Ghiscari accent, giving Kurt a smile and a half-bow. "I'm here to-"

"I know exactly why you're here, Adam Crawford" Kurt cut him off, way too sharply than intended. "It's the fourth time."

The nobleman seemed amused by that. His was one of the most powerful families in Meereen – former slavers, but not belonging to the Great Masters, who kept staying huddled inside their brick prisons. As many other families, they had given up slavery willingly in hope of being accepted into his court and favor.

So far, Kurt thought he had slightly disappointed them; he didn't trust them to be so close to him all the time, so he had only taken in little boys and girls to serve as pages and cupbearers. The former slavers didn't get that completely; it was almost like kidnapping to them. It was a Westerosi custom to take in children from other noble families as a sign of allegiance towards one another. Kurt had tried to explain that to them, but he feared they still considered it a slight.

Be that as it may, that was not what Adam Crawford was there for.

"Four is a very small number" the blonde Meereenese said. "Let me try at least ten times."

"You could try one hundred times for all I care" Kurt snapped, hoping the man wouldn't take him literally. "My answer would still be no."

Adam Crawford remained calm. He always did.

"Magnificence, you come from far away. Sometimes it's difficult to understand other people's customs. Let me show them to you, I'm sure you will change your mind afterwards."

Kurt sat up straighter.

"I will not reopen the fighting pits" he said sharply. "And I will most certainly not watch people fight and die for the amusement of others."

"But isn't that what your shiny knights in Westeros do? They fight and die, and then your maesters write books about them. It's the same for pit fighters here. They die as heroes on the sand, to be remembered forever."

Kurt could almost feel Finn's glare directed towards the solicitor. The knight hated when someone questioned his category.

"It's not the same at all" he answered with narrowed eyes. "Knights want to fight, for their honor and for the sake of the realm. You would make people fight, and I imagine you've heard that slavery is forbidden now."

For a moment, it showed on Adam's face how much that displeased him, and his next words were all courteous lies wrapped up in condescendence.

"And we're all happy to hear that, Your Radiance. We were all stuck in this awful system, this degrading social division, too blind to realize how far we'd come. You came and woke us, and now we know how wrong we were."

It's just a mummer's farce. They don't want me here. They hate me.

"But the fighting pits are tradition. History. The Meereenese would come to love you sooner if you opened them again. Plus, you would be surprised to see how many people want to fight in them. Former slaves, most of all. I will even pay them, if you wish. The nobles of Meereen pay, too, to see them fight, so that would not be a problem. They want glory? They shall have it. They want money? They shall have it, too. What more could you wish for them?"

Life, Kurt replied in his head.

He knew that what Adam was saying was true; in their desperation, many freedmen had asked to be allowed to the fighting pits. But Kurt had said no anyway; even if they would get paid now, it was wrong and awful and barbarian, and he would not allow it. It saddened him, though, to think that they were willing to. It made him question himself more than he already did.

"They are starving because none of you would hire them now" he said accusingly. "As soon as I fix this thing, they won't be asking anymore."

Adam stared at him curiously, cocking his head to the side.

"How do you know?" he asked, but his tone was not one of mockery – it was a real question. "You made them free, and now you won't give them what they ask for. Where is the freedom in that?"

Kurt bristled from the bench. He gripped the silk of his white tokar where it crinkled along his thighs, but when he had to think about something to reply, he realized that he didn't know what to say.

"My answer is still no" he concluded lamely. "You have my leave to go now."

"As Your Radiance wishes" Adam replied, only slightly disappointed. Kurt knew he would see him again soon.

He left the others to the task of clearing out the court and went to the terrace. Every day, when he had a moment to spare, he went to the balcony of the northern side to stare at the horizon, a blurred, shifting line under the heat of the sun. He imagined seeing a huge black cloud moving over the desert, getting closer and closer, until he would be able to make out carts and horses and people, until he would be able to recognize the broad-shouldered Khal riding up front.

He would wave at him, but his sun-and-stars would not be able to see him from below, so he would climb on one of his dragons' back and fly to him, landing in a cloud of smoke and dust before burying himself in his embrace. And Blaine would be happy now that he had a new khalasar and he wouldn't mind staying in Meereen a bit longer than intended, because Kurt had things to fix, things he'd caused, things he couldn't leave unfinished. Blaine would understand.

But that was just a fantasy; the reality was that Kurt was alone, Blaine was still off somewhere - alive, because the other possibility was not one Kurt contemplated – and his dragons were still too small to bear someone's weight. All he had to do was wait, both for Blaine to return and for them to grow some more. For the latter, he was sure it wouldn't take long.

They couldn't stay inside anymore; they were too restless, always on edge, breaking precious vases with their wings and tails when they moved, bumping into walls and pillars when they flew. People were scared of them, too. The little pages and cupbearers, but also the sellswords, the Unsullied, and most importantly, the solicitors and those who attended court. Whenever a roar echoed through the walls of the pyramid, Kurt could feel the atmosphere changing, see them straighten their backs and swallow silently, hoping he didn't notice. But he did.

He'd been scared to let them fly around freely, but it was the only thing he could do to make everyone happy, dragons included. When they were not off hunting in the desert, Kurt found them in the terrace, drinking from the pools. Drogon, the most difficult of them, stayed away for days before returning, making Kurt sick with worry; but in the end, he always came back.

Kurt had tried to tell him to come back sooner, but the dragon never did, and the implication of that simple fact terrified him.

He felt as if he was losing his grasp on reality, as if everything was slipping away from his fingers like water. He needed an anchor, something to remind him of who he was, and he knew perfectly well what that may be.

Blaine.

But then again, it had been Blaine's idea of him to push him to conquer the city. That among many reasons, it was true, but deep down Kurt knew that a good part of it had been to prove to Blaine that he could do it without him. And he had.

Are you happy now?

He'd rather not know the answer.

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A couple of days later, the murders began.

The first didn't look like one, so it took him some days to worry. A former slave had fallen from a wall he was helping to build, breaking his spine in the collision. An accident. But then it was a fight for bread in the streets, a dagger in the wrong hands, another dead freedman as a result. The third died with his head smashed against the bricks of an alley wall. The fourth drowned in the Skahazadhan. The fifth got run over by a skittish horse.

That was when Kurt decided to do something about it, sending Finn and Puck to inquire; Finn with his good manners and trustworthy face, Puck with his intimidating fists (even though Kurt had commanded him to make threats and nothing more).

He didn't like what they found out.

"They call themselves the Sons of the Harpy" Puck told him. "That's all they talk about in inns and brothels these days. A sect of some sort, spreading death among the freedmen to take revenge for the slavers."

Kurt didn't remember being that angry in his entire life.

"Arrest them, all of them!" he almost shouted, restraining himself from jumping up from the bench. "I'll have my dragons roast them to death!"

Puck looked at him apologetically, then down at the marble floor.

"No one knows who they are" he admitted quietly. "All we can do is keep looking."

"Then do it better" Kurt urged, too angry to care about his tone. Not only his people were suffering and struggling to make a decent life out of the freedom he had given them, now they were not even safe. He had to protect them. He couldn't sit idly by and go about his business while they died inside his own walls.

Before Puck could bow and leave, Grey Worm entered, his pace faster than usual. Kurt had never seen him run, unless it was during battle; normally, the soldier walked as if considering every single step he took. He had grown more silent, too, since the Dothraki's departure. Kurt didn't know if it was because he was worried about his companions off in the desert, or about Tina. Maybe both.

The man stopped in front of Kurt's bench and heaved a nervous breath, his forehead sweaty and his eyes sad and haunted.

Something's wrong.

"What? What is it?" Kurt demanded nervously, shifting on the cushions.

"There was another murder" Grey Worm announced, his voice flat and dull. It wasn't the first murder he reported, but it was the first time Kurt was seeing him truly sad.

"Who?" he asked in anguish. Grey Worm gritted his teeth before answering.

"One of us."

That was why, then. Kurt felt a surge of pity towards him. The Unsullied were a sort of family, a twisted, weird, fucked up version of one, but a family nonetheless. Kurt was fond of them, too.

"How did it happen?"

It was one thing to kill a common freedman; another to kill an Unsullied. These Sons of the Harpy were more dangerous than he'd initially thought.

The question made Grey Worm look even sadder, and apart from that, slightly embarrassed. Kurt raised an eyebrow in curiosity.

"He... he'd gone to a brothel and fell asleep there, and when the... the girl woke up, she found him dead, with his throat cut."

When Kurt recovered from the horrible imagery the sentence evoked in his mind, he couldn't shake off the feeling that there was something extremely odd in what he'd just heard. Brothels had been impossible to abolish, as much as he'd tried, because many girls were not even forced and men would take it out on innocent, unwilling women if he closed them; but it wasn't that. There was something that didn't sound right. Something...

"Wait" Kurt spoke up suddenly. "What was an Unsullied doing in a brothel in the first place?"

He hoped he didn't sound offensive, but it was weird. Once, he'd thought that Unsullied weren't able to feel anything, but he was slowly starting to reconsider that assumption. Sex was another matter, though. They were eunuchs, and nothing in the world would make them be anything different. What would they pay whores for?

Grey Worm stared at him for a long moment, until Kurt almost spoke again to apologize for being rude. But then the soldier answered.

"The girl said he had visited her many times and paid her so they could talk. This time, he gave her one more silver coin so she would hold him."

Kurt felt his eyes burning, tears threatening to escape.

The blood of the dragon never cries, Sebastian would have said.

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It only got worse.

Almost every day a murder was reported, but they were as far from the truth as they had always been. Kurt had established that the Unsullied should patrol the streets by couples, never alone, and that had seemed to work; but common people kept dying in hidden corners, dirty alleys, along the river banks.

With the squadron of Unsullied left in Yunkai to help the council and half of them away with Blaine, the ones in Meereen were not enough to cover every street, guard the city gates, and protect Kurt's court at the same time. To face the problem, Kurt decided to create a new guard with the exclusive task of patrolling the streets day and night. That would also solve the problem of the freedmen asking to fight in the pits; if they wanted to hold a spear and risk their life so badly, they could at least do it to be useful to the community.

Grey Worm and Finn set to work to enroll and train the new men, whose identity during patrols would be hidden behind brazen animal-shaped masks, in order to avoid repercussions on their families from the Sons of the Harpy. There were crocodiles, cows, lions, eagles, tigers, lizards, horses, snakes. Kurt found them quite intimidating, so he hoped the masks could have a scaring purpose too. From the metal used to forge the masks, he'd decided to call them the Brazen Beasts.

When their service in the streets began, the murders seemed to diminish. The Sons of the Harpy, whoever they were, always managed to find ways to act without being caught, but less often. Puck had proposed to question the Great Masters and the slaver families to see if they were behind all that, but Kurt preferred to leave them where they were; they would never tell him anyway. When Puck had pointed out that he could threaten to kill the pages and cupbearers he had at court to make them talk, Kurt had almost slapped him across the face for his insolence.

He wasn't a murderer. He wasn't a monster. And he wasn't going to let anything make him one.

That unpleasant episode aside, Kurt's mood was getting better. His people were safer, even though they weren't completely safe yet. But they would get there, somehow. Stubborn freedmen in search of glory still asked to join the fighting pits, and Adam Crawford still came to court every single day to ask for them to be reopened; former slaves were still discriminated in new, creative ways from their former masters; Blaine was still in the Dothraki Sea and Kurt was lonely. But he had hope. Hope the sun would rise again over the dark world he was stuck in.

The dragons were making things a bit difficult, but not unmanageable. It seemed like the game was scarce in the desert – it was like that in general, so Kurt could only imagine how scarce it must be now with how hungry they constantly were, as they grew bigger and bigger every day – so they had started to feed on the Meereneese cattle.
That meant angry men complaining at court every day, and Kurt having to repay them in coins or new animals, but after a while the angry shouts of the farmers subsided and people simply knew that he would compensate for what they lost. At the end of every hearing, they queued up with heaps of charred bones wrapped up in worn-out cloths to provide him with proof of what had happened.

It was after repaying a man who'd lost two milk goats that Kurt noticed another one standing silent in a corner, with a similar wrapped up cloth held securely in his arms, his eyes cast on the ground. The rest was filing away silently, but he wouldn't come forward. Maybe he hadn't noticed it was his turn.

"You can come closer now" he told him gently from the cushioned bench.

The man startled at the sound of his voice; he was old, with wisps of grey hair on his head, and he walked slowly with his back slightly hunched. When he stopped a few feet from where Kurt was sitting, he lowered his gaze again and clutched the heap more tightly to his chest. Kurt waited, then waited some more, but he wouldn't speak.

"What is it you lost?" he prompted then, growing impatient. Night would be there soon, and he had been holding court from early in the morning.

The man looked up, his brown eyes incredibly sad. He opened his mouth to speak, but whatever he wanted to say got stuck in his throat. Or maybe he was a mute – Kurt hadn't thought about that. But before he could find out, the man lowered the heap to the floor gently, almost reverently, and opened the cloth to reveal it to him.

Kurt heard someone gasp, but didn't pay it any mind; some people were just more sensitive than others.

"I'm sorry, but I can't recognize what kind of animal that was" he told the man apologetically. He wasn't that close to the blackened bones, but even if he had been, he wouldn't have been able to tell the difference between the skeleton of a sheep and that of a goat.

"Khalees" Finn whispered to him, and when Kurt turned towards him, he saw Rachel with her hand over her mouth.

"What's wrong?" he asked, but Rachel had her eyes fixed on the bones, her frame shaking. So he stared at them, too, craning his neck to have a better view.

Then he saw the human skull.