— Dany —

The Reach surrendered without a battle.

Not all of it. Not at once. But the central spine of it — the long fertile heart of the Mander valley, from the Prince's Pass northward to Highgarden itself — folded in front of the Dornish host the way a man folds when a knife is held to his ribs and he has been thinking, privately, for some time, that he might prefer not to be on this particular side of the war.

It happened in stages, and the first stage was Old Oak.

Old Oak was the seat of House Oakheart, and Lord Arwyn Oakheart had four sons in the field with the Tyrell host at King's Landing and one daughter, Arwyn the younger, holding the castle. They had been told to expect a Dornish raid. They had been preparing, with the determined competence of small castles that knew large armies were coming, for a six-month siege.

What they got, on a hot afternoon in the eighth moon of the year, was Daenerys Targaryen riding up to the front gate alone on a white mare, with a green-and-silver dragon the size of a draft horse perched on the saddlebow behind her, and a single rider at her shoulder — Khorane Sathmantes, the Summer Islander, in plain travelling leathers, carrying a green branch.

The Dornish host was three miles back, drawn up in plain view but plainly not advancing.

Dany rode up to within fifty yards of the gatehouse and stopped, and waited.

It took the Oakhearts twenty minutes to send anyone down to talk to her. The man they sent was a captain of the household guard, a grey-haired knight named Ser Robar, and he came out the postern on foot with a pair of bowmen behind him, and he stopped at twenty yards and called up:

"Your Grace. Are you Your Grace? We were not given to expect — that is — what are you doing, Your Grace?"

Dany smiled at him. It was the smile she had been practicing, a small warm tired smile.

"I am offering you a chance, Ser, not to be besieged. Will you ride back and fetch your lady? I would speak with her. Just her and me. The dragon will stay here. He is very tired today."

Viserion, on her saddlebow, yawned enormously and settled his head along the mare's neck. The mare, who had been carefully selected by Khorane for nerves of iron and a previous career carrying a Dornish slaughterhouse owner's wife to market, did not so much as twitch.

Ser Robar looked at the dragon.

"Aye," he said. "Aye, Your Grace. I will fetch her."

Lady Arwyn Oakheart was sixteen years old. She had been holding Old Oak for a moon and a half. She came down on a brown palfrey with two bannermen behind her and her knuckles white on her reins, and she stopped at twenty yards and said, in a steady young voice that Dany had to admire:

"Your Grace. I will not open the gates of Old Oak to a foreign army."

"Lady Arwyn. I would not ask you to."

The girl blinked.

"You would not?"

"No. I am not asking for the castle. I am asking for an hour of your time. Will you ride a little way with me — in sight of your gate, in sight of my host, with your bannermen beside you and Ser Khorane beside me — and let me say a thing to you? If at the end of the hour you wish to ride back inside and bar the gate, you may do so, with my word in salt and fire that no Dornish spear will follow you. If at the end of the hour you wish to do something else, we may discuss it. Will you ride with me?"

Arwyn Oakheart looked at her for a long moment.

She was a clever girl. That was the first thing Dany had been told about her, by Doran's spies, and it was the thing Dany had decided to gamble on. A clever young chatelaine, holding a small castle for absent men, with a dragon at her gate and a Targaryen who had not threatened her, was a girl who could be reasoned with.

"I will ride with you," Arwyn said. "An hour. No more."

They rode along the line of the road, in plain view of both walls and host. Dany did not raise her voice. She let Khorane fall a little behind, so that the two of them could speak almost privately, and she said:

"Lady Arwyn. Your father is at King's Landing. Your brothers also."

"They are."

"They are sworn to House Tyrell."

"They are."

"House Tyrell is sworn to House Lannister. Through the marriage of Margaery Tyrell to King Joffrey."

"They are."

"Lady Arwyn. Do you know who killed Renly Baratheon?"

A pause.

"There were — there were rumours."

"There were rumours because the rumours were true. I am not going to ask you to take my word for that. I am going to ask you to think about a thing. Renly Baratheon was your liege Lord Tyrell's son-in-law. Renly Baratheon was the husband of Margaery, who is now the queen-consort. Renly Baratheon was killed by his own brother Stannis through means I will not describe in front of a young lady but which were, I am told, unnatural, and Mace Tyrell knows this, and Mace Tyrell has nevertheless married his daughter to the boy whose family arranged for his other son-in-law to be — discarded. Because Mace Tyrell is a man who counts coin, my lady, and the coin was on the Lannister side, and so he made the trade."

She paused.

"Your father is a good man, I am told. Your father did what he was bid. That is what bannermen do when their lord is cheerful and the harvest is in. But the harvest, Lady Arwyn, is not in this year. The harvest is going to be very bad this year. I have ridden up the Boneway and through the Pass and across half your Reach already and I have eyes, and the fields are not what they should be. Two more bad years like this one and the Reach will be hungry. And when the Reach is hungry, my lady, and the Lannisters in the Red Keep are not, the Reach will remember which side it bled on, and it will remember who took its grain to feed Lannister horses."

"You are telling me this."

"I am telling you this because I want you to write a letter."

"To my father."

"To your father. Today. This afternoon. With my courier, who is Khorane Sathmantes behind me, who will ride to King's Landing under a green branch and put it directly into your father's hand. The letter will say that I came to your gate alone. That I did not raid. That I asked an hour of you and gave you back your hour. That the Dornish host is moving north in good order and is not burning villages. That a Targaryen queen with a dragon spent an afternoon on your road and behaved like a queen. You will write that letter, my lady, in your own hand, and you will sign it, and your father will read it, and he will read it again, and he will think for a long time, and then he will perhaps — perhaps — do a useful thing. That is all I am asking of you."

Arwyn rode for a while in silence. The hot wind moved through the hedgerows along the road. Somewhere a meadowlark was singing.

"And in exchange?" she said.

"In exchange, when I am on the Iron Throne, I will remember which young chatelaine of the Reach kept her head in a bad season and bought her father his life with a single afternoon's writing. And I will not, my lady, be a queen who forgets."

Arwyn Oakheart looked at her sidelong.

"You are not what I expected, Your Grace."

Dany smiled. It was the small tired smile again.

"I have been told that recently, my lady. By several people. I am beginning to think it is going to be a useful habit."

Arwyn Oakheart wrote the letter that afternoon. Khorane rode out with it under a green branch the next morning. The Dornish host did not so much as touch a fence-post on Oakheart land. They moved north.

Three weeks later, at Goldengrove, the doors opened without a parley — Lord Rowan had received a private letter through routes Dany did not need to know about, and had decided that the better part of valor was to be ill in his bed for the duration of the Dornish passage. Three weeks after that, at Cider Hall, Lord Fossoway came out personally with a cask of cider and an extremely careful smile and offered the host hospitality for a night. By the time they came in sight of Highgarden itself the pattern was clear: half the bannermen of the Reach were going to fight for Mace Tyrell because they had to, and the other half were going to spend the war being inconveniently absent, and the second half were getting larger every week.

Mace Tyrell, in King's Landing, learned of all this through letters that went to him via his own daughter, Queen Margaery, who was — Doran's spies reported with quiet delight — reading every one and showing him exactly the parts she wanted him to see.

Margaery Tyrell, Dany was beginning to suspect, had been doing some thinking of her own.

Highgarden's gates were closed when the Dornish host arrived, and Mace's eldest son Willas was holding the castle in his father's absence. Dany did not ride alone to those gates. Willas was a grown man and a shrewd one, and the trick that worked on a sixteen-year-old chatelaine would not work on him. Instead she sent Doran in his wheeled chair, with Arianne behind him and a small honor guard of Dornish knights, and the Martells and the Tyrells parleyed for two days inside a striped pavilion on the Mander road, and at the end of the second day Willas Tyrell came out and rode, alone, the half-mile across the meadow to where Daenerys Targaryen was waiting on her white mare.

He was a tall man with a kind tired face and a stiff bad leg from an old tourney injury, and he dismounted with care and stood looking up at her in the late afternoon light.

"Your Grace."

"Lord Willas."

"My father is not here."

"I know."

"I cannot, in his absence, deliver Highgarden to you. I will not. He is my father. I will not be the son who hands a Tyrell castle to a Targaryen while the lord of it is alive."

"Lord Willas, I would not respect you if you would."

He blinked.

"Your Grace?"

"I would not, my lord. A son who folds a father's house behind the father's back is not a man any queen wants on her council. You are doing the right thing. Hold Highgarden for your father. Do not open the gates. Do not strike my colors. Do not declare for me."

"Then — what are we discussing, Your Grace?"

Dany leaned forward in her saddle.

"We are discussing," she said, "whether you will let us pass."

Willas was silent.

"I will not march on King's Landing through the Reach," she went on, "with Highgarden at my back ready to cut my supply lines. I will not. And I will not assault Highgarden, because the cost in lives of taking this castle would be ruinous and because the cost in Reach lives would be a wound my reign would not heal from in a generation. So I am asking for a different thing, my lord. I am asking you to declare neutrality. Not for me. Not for the Lannisters. Not for anyone. Tyrell holds Highgarden for the Tyrells, and lets the war go around it. You sit. You feed your people. You take no field. When the war is over, whoever wins, you bend the knee to the new throne, and you do so honorably, because you have not bled for the loser. That is the offer."

"My father —"

"Will accuse you of cowardice. Yes. He will get over it. Or he will not, and you will be the next Lord of Highgarden, and the Reach will be the better for it. Lord Willas. Sit. Sit and feed your people. That is all I ask."

Willas Tyrell looked at her for a very long moment.

Then he said, slowly: "I will need to think on this, Your Grace."

"Take three days. Take a week. I will be camped down the road. Send a rider when you have decided."

He nodded, once. He mounted, with care, and rode back to his castle.

He sent the rider on the fourth day.

Highgarden declared neutrality. The Tyrell banners stayed up. The gates stayed shut. The Dornish host moved north past them along the Roseroad with not a single arrow loosed, and behind them, in twos and threes, the bannermen of the Reach who had been waiting for permission began, very quietly, to send their own riders to Dany's camp at night with messages that began, almost without exception, Your Grace, my lord regrets that he cannot in good conscience continue to support —

Khorane Sathmantes, sorting these letters in the command tent, looked up at Dany one evening and said, with the dry delight of a woman watching a perfectly executed sleight of hand:

"Your Grace. The Reach is yours. Without a battle. Without a death. You realize this is going to make your sister jealous?"

Dany laughed.

It was the first proper laugh she had laughed in two moons, and it was a good one, and Missandei, hearing it from outside the tent, came in just to see Dany's face for a moment before going back to her letters.

"Yes," Dany said, when she had her breath back. "Yes, Khorane, I know. I am going to write to her about it tonight, and I am going to gloat, and she is going to hate it, and I am going to enjoy that very much. Pass me the Florent letter again. I think Lord Alester wants something specific and is afraid to say so."