Chapter Text

Misplaced

Incense. Old stone. The particular silence of a place that had been listening for centuries.

Stephen Strange stood alone in the training hall with sleeves rolled to the elbow, jaw set, and a thin sheen of frustration on his brow. He was not yet Sorcerer Supreme. He was, at present, a man who had been a surgeon and was now—stubbornly, painstakingly—becoming something else. The distinction still stung.

He lifted his hands, fingers snapping into the forms he'd drilled until his wrists ached. Orange light sparked at his palms, flared, and traced a circle in the air like a blade of molten metal carving reality. The ring widened; the world shivered; and a portal blossomed into being—an oval of whirling ember-light that showed a sliver of somewhere else.

Somewhere sun-warm and bright, with pale stone and banners.

Strange's eyes narrowed. "That's not right."

He held the spell a heartbeat longer, trying to stabilise the rim—trying, as he had been taught, to choose his destination rather than let his mind's stray thoughts pick it for him. He imagined the courtyard outside. He imagined the familiar.

The portal's view jerked as if offended. The image blurred, then snapped into something entirely different: a wide sky, impossibly blue, and below it the suggestion of a lavish courtyard thrumming with music.

His hands shifted to close it.

Behind him, a second ring of sparks—smaller, sloppier, a ghost of the first—crackled into existence as though the original portal's instability had echoed outward and found somewhere new to go. Strange didn't even notice. He was staring at the first, fighting it like a surgeon fighting a slip of the scalpel.

Two things happened that Strange did not see:

A young woman—brown curls, determined face—dropped out of the first portal as though reality had casually misplaced her.

Another young woman—dark hair, sharp eyes, the posture of someone trained to survive—fell through the second with a strangled, instinctive oath.

Both portals snapped shut with a hiss like extinguished coals.

The training hall went quiet.

Strange exhaled slowly, forcing his hands to still. "Okay," he told himself. "That was… a wobble. Just a wobble."

He looked down at his palms as if the fault might be visible in the lines.

He did not look at the floor where no one remained.

He did not realise his mistake.

Wong entered the training hall. He moved with the certainty of a man who had seen too much to be impressed by sparks and arrogance, and he stopped dead three steps in.

Something was wrong — he felt it before he could name it, a wrongness in the geometry of the room, like a bone set slightly crooked. It had a faint metallic quality to it, the specific residue of space that had been torn and not quite healed. Wong's gaze sharpened as he stepped forward. He raised one palm, hovering it inches above the floor as though he could feel the residue with his skin.

He could.

"Stephen," he said, voice even. "What were you doing?"

Strange looked up too quickly, with the expression of a student caught scribbling in the margins of a forbidden text. "Practising," he said. Defensive. "I'm getting better."

"You opened portals."

"Obviously."

Wong moved further into the room, fingers still tracing the invisible geometry of what remained. "How many?"

Strange blinked. "One."

A pause. Wong's hand moved to a second spot in the air—a different scar, faint and overlapping, stitched into the space where the second portal had been. His fingers paused.

"Two," Wong corrected, very quietly.

Strange's bravado faltered. "That's not—that's not possible. I only—"

"It is possible," Wong said. "Because it happened." He turned to look at Strange properly, and his voice went careful. "Did anything come through?"

Strange frowned. Genuinely confused. "No. I closed them. Both of them, if there were two." A beat. "There weren't two."

Wong turned back to the air, to the lingering wrongness. He stood very still.

Strange watched him. The chill started at the base of his spine and moved upward. "Wong. What kind of something?"

Wong was quiet for a moment—listening, in the way that sorcerers listen, to things that had no sound.

"I don't know," he admitted.

He could feel the shape of an absence. Something that should be here and wasn't. Displaced, not destroyed—he would have felt destruction differently. This was more like a misplaced book. Like opening a drawer and finding it unexpectedly empty, with no memory of having moved anything.

Two somethings had passed through Strange's portals.

And they were no longer in this world.

"Stop practising alone," Wong said.

Strange opened his mouth.

Wong turned to look at him, and the look was enough.

"Now," Wong said. "We are going to find out what you've misplaced."

Strange's easy confidence drained away, leaving something colder in its place.

Heat hit Hermione Granger first — dry, relentless, the kind that radiated back from stone and had nowhere to go.

The rush of air roared in her ears as she dropped through open sky, stomach lurching hard enough to make her vision glitter at the edges. Stone rushed up beneath her: a bright courtyard, banners snapping, tables laden with food, music faltering into a ragged pause as dozens of faces tipped upward in shock.

Hermione's hand flew to her wand on instinct.

"Arresto Momentum!"

The spell caught her like an invisible net. The plunge softened into a glide; the air stopped trying to tear her apart. She floated down the last few feet and landed on sun-warmed stone, knees bending to absorb the remainder.

Her heart was still hammering when the air beside her thummed.

A second figure fell out of nothing — dark-haired, athletic, already assessing on the way down. She hit in a crouch, one hand slapping the ground, the space around her body vibrating with a controlled tremor that turned a potentially fatal drop into something survivable. She rose in a single, fluid motion.

They stared at each other.

"You slowed yourself down," the stranger said, eyes flicking to Hermione's wand. "With that."

"Yes. I'm Hermione Granger. That was a spell. You're not going to scream or faint, are you?"

The stranger's expression suggested she found the question insulting. "Daisy Johnson. And I vibrated the air molecules around me to decelerate my fall, so I think we're past screaming." A beat. "Also, I once got possessed by an Inhuman ghost and woke up with no memory of three days, so my threshold for impossible is pretty high."

Hermione blinked. "Right," she said. "Okay."

"Where are we?"

"I don't—" Hermione broke off. Took in the courtyard properly for the first time: silk robes, curved blades at hips and belts, the architecture half-familiar and half-foreign, a heavy eastern luxury that felt like wealth and threat in equal measure.

The wrongness of it settled in her chest. Not the wrongness of danger—the wrongness of displacement. The world itself had the wrong weight.

"I don't know," Hermione admitted, hating the wobble in her voice.

Daisy's gaze swept the crowd with the practised speed of someone who had spent years assessing threats. "Weapons count: a lot. Silk robes on the wealthy, not much on the guards. Climate is hot and dry. Architecture—" Her eyes narrowed. "Not modern. Not any modern I recognise."

"No," Hermione agreed.

"We came through a portal."

"I believe so, yes."

"Do you know who sent us through?"

Hermione's grip tightened on her wand. The crowd was beginning to move—she could feel it, that low collective shift that preceded a surge. "Someone incompetent, I suspect. It felt like an accident."

Daisy's jaw tightened. "Great. Accidental kidnapping. Love that." She stepped half a pace forward, positioning herself between Hermione and the nearest armed man without appearing to notice she'd done it—a reflex, Hermione realised, not a decision. The movement of someone trained to put themselves between danger and whoever happened to be standing beside them.

Hermione noticed. She filed it away.

"They're mobilising," Daisy said quietly. "Tell me you've got more than that stick."

"It's a wand," Hermione hissed automatically—

—and then stopped, because at the centre of the courtyard stood a girl.

Silver-gold hair. Bridal finery. Small hands folded in her lap with the particular stillness of a child trained to occupy as little space as possible.

Hermione's stomach turned over.

Daisy followed her stare. Something shifted in her expression—subtle but unmistakable. "How old is she."

Hermione looked at the child's hands. At the line of her jaw, still soft with youth. At the way she held herself: not calm, but carefully contained, the way a person holds themselves when they have learned that any reaction will be used against them.

"Thirteen," Hermione said. "Maybe."

"And this is a wedding."

Hermione's mind was moving fast—scrambling through everything she was seeing, pulling at fragments, trying to assemble a picture. The heat. The eastern luxury. The feel of a port city. The specific quality of the crowd—half wealthy merchant, half dangerous warlord, all armed. The language she was only beginning to understand, as if the rules of this world were being written into her as she stood here.

She didn't know. Not properly. Not yet.

Until she saw the pale-haired man near the girl.

Young. Sharp-faced. The posture of someone born to entitlement who had never once been told no and had grown crooked around that absence. He was scanning the crowd with the eyes of a man tracking everything that might be taken from him, which was also the expression of a man who had once had everything and now had very little, and hated the world for it.

Recognition didn't strike like lightning.

It seeped in, cold and dreadful.

No, Hermione thought. That's not—that can't be—

A servant spat a name in the commotion—Viserys—and Hermione's blood went cold with it.

"Hermione." Daisy's voice was low and sharp. "You know him."

"I—" Hermione swallowed. "Not at first. I thought—I kept telling myself it was impossible." She stared harder, desperate for certainty, and found it in the line of his jaw, the colour of his hair, the particular quality of the fear in his eyes that looked like rage. "That's Viserys Targaryen."

A pause.

"A what," Daisy said.

"Targaryen. He's her brother. The girl is Daenerys."

Daisy stared at her as if Hermione had begun speaking in code. "I need you to understand that I have never heard either of those names in my life. There's no file, no record, no anything from where I'm from."

Hermione's stomach dropped. Of course. Different universe. Daisy had no reason to know any of this.

"Right," Hermione said. "Then you have no context for why that's—"

"Context," Daisy said, voice flat, "is that a child is about to be sold to a grown man. I don't need a briefing for that."

Hermione exhaled. "Yes."

"We stop it."

It wasn't a question.

"We stop it," Hermione agreed, and then—because Daisy deserved to understand what she was agreeing to—she spoke quickly, low and urgent. "I've read the books. This is a fictional world. A story. George R.R. Martin, A Song of Ice and Fire—I spent months in the books as a teenager, practically memorised them." She swallowed. "Which means I know what happens if we do nothing. And I know—I think—what happens if we change it."

Daisy studied her. "You think because it's fiction, we can rewrite the ending."

"Yes." Hermione's jaw set. "I know it sounds—"

"It sounds like the most dangerous kind of confidence," Daisy said. "But it's also the only information we've got." A beat. "What happens if we do nothing?"

Hermione told her. Quickly. Clinically. The marriage. The khalasar. The years of cruelty dressed as necessity.

Daisy was very quiet when she finished.

"And we get her out," Daisy said.

Hermione's gaze snagged on a servant approaching the ceremonial area with a covered tray, guarded too closely for mere food. Three heavy shapes sat beneath the cloth—scaled, dark, humming with old magic that Hermione could feel like pressure behind her sternum.

"There's something else," Hermione said.

Daisy clocked the tray. "What is that."

"Dragon eggs." Hermione's voice came out thin. "Three of them. They're—they're her birthright. They matter enormously. In the story they become—" She stopped. "We need to take them."

Daisy turned to look at her fully. "Dragon eggs."

"I know how that sounds."

"We take the eggs," Daisy said.

Illyrio Mopatis—jewelled, reddening—pointed straight at them. "Seize them!"

Guards surged.

Daisy shifted her stance. "Non-lethal?"

Hermione raised her wand. "As much as possible."

It happened fast after that—fast and messy, because a crowd panics like a single animal and there is no elegant way to stop a wedding by force.

"Expelliarmus!"

A guard's sword flew from his hand, clattering across the stones. Another lunged; Hermione's next spell tangled his legs and he went down hard without cracking his skull.

Daisy lifted her palm and made the air thump.

A contained shockwave rippled outward like a battering ram made of sound. Men staggered, fell, scrambled back. Goblets toppled; people screamed; the careful choreography of a wedding feast dissolved into chaos.

And then Khal Drogo moved.

He rose with the unhurried menace of a man who was used to the world making room for him. He stepped into the open as if the courtyard belonged to him—because it did, or near enough—the Dothraki parting instinctively like water around a stone. His gaze fixed on Hermione and Daisy and assessed them not as women, not as intruders, but as problems. Problems to be solved with the particular efficiency he reserved for things that had made the mistake of existing in his way.

He said something in Dothraki—short, cutting.

His riders answered with a bark of approval.

Drogo drew his arakh.

The blade caught the sun.

Daisy went very still beside Hermione. "That man," she said quietly, "looks like he wants to kill us for sport."

"He might," Hermione said, equally quiet. "He doesn't negotiate."

Drogo didn't charge blindly. He approached with deliberate speed, his riders drifting in a loose arc to pen them away from the centre—away from Daenerys. Herding them like prey, with the patience of a hunter who had never once needed to hurry.

Hermione's eyes snapped to Daenerys.

She stood frozen—caught between terror and something else, something she didn't yet have words for: the sudden, dizzying possibility that there was a door in a wall she had been told was solid.

Then Viserys grabbed her arm.

Hard. Hard enough to make her wince—hard enough that the sound of it, barely audible over the chaos, cut through Hermione like a blade.

"You will do as you are told," he hissed. "You will not embarrass me."

Hermione's vision went white at the edges.

"Stupefy!"

Red light struck Viserys square in the chest. He dropped like a puppet with cut strings, hand releasing Daenerys as he fell.

The courtyard paused—half a heartbeat of collective recalibration.

Daisy used it.

She darted forward, snatched a fallen cloak from a fleeing noblewoman, and swung it around Daenerys's shoulders in one smooth motion. "Hood up," Daisy said—not a shout, not a plea, just a calm, clear directive. "Stay close. No matter what happens, stay between us."

Daenerys's eyes were wide, enormous in her pale face. But beneath the terror, Hermione could see it: the steel. Thin and young and not yet certain of itself, but there.

Daenerys pulled the hood up with shaking fingers. She lifted her chin.

"I won't run," she said, very quietly.

Daisy looked at her for exactly one second. "Good," she said. "Don't."

Hermione was already moving for the tray—

—and Drogo's arakh cut through the air where her head had been.

Hermione recoiled, heart slamming against her ribs. The blade had passed close enough to stir her hair. Drogo's eyes were flat and faintly curious, as if he were deciding whether she'd beg or whether she'd be interesting.

Daisy stepped in front of her.

Two fingers. A sharp, dismissive flick. A pinpoint vibration through the air around Drogo's wrist—not enough to hurt, not enough to break, just enough to make his grip misfire at the precise moment his muscles expected it to hold.

The arakh didn't fly dramatically away.

It simply slipped, the edge turning wrong in his hand.

The arakh clattered onto the stone.

There was a stunned silence from the nearest Dothraki. An instant—half a breath—of collective disbelief that their khal had dropped his weapon in front of foreigners, in front of women, in front of everyone.

Drogo's head turned slowly towards Daisy.

His expression was not anger. Not yet. Assessment. The recalibration of a predator who had encountered unexpected resistance.

Daisy's mouth quirked. "Well," she said, loud enough for those closest to hear. "That's embarrassing."

Hermione's eyes widened. Daisy—

Drogo surged forward bare-handed.

He was faster than he looked—faster than anything that size had any right to be. He grabbed for Daisy's throat.

Daisy didn't retreat.

She stepped in, twisting her shoulder under his arm and letting him overcommit his weight. At the same moment she sent a low-frequency pulse through the stone directly beneath his feet—not an earthquake, not destruction, just a perfectly timed betrayal of balance. A subtle reminder that the ground only stayed solid because it agreed to.

The ground didn't crack.

It simply became not quite where his body expected it to be.

Drogo's boots skidded.

The Khal—Khal Drogo, undisputed ruler of forty thousand Dothraki—went down hard on one knee. His palm slapped the stone to catch himself.

The silence that followed was total.

Then: a Dothraki rider barked a laugh. Choked it off immediately, as if startled by his own voice.

Another rider turned his face away.

Daisy leaned down slightly—not far, not taunting, just enough for her voice to carry clearly and publicly to the men around them. "You're strong," she said. Her tone was almost conversational. "But you're not faster than me."

Drogo snarled and surged upright—grabbing for her again, faster now, furious—only for Daisy to clap once, sharply, and send a compact shockwave into his chest like a punch delivered by the air itself.

Drogo stumbled back two full steps.

Not wounded.

Humiliated.

The courtyard watched their khal give ground.

Hermione felt the moment crack open beneath them: Drogo's pride, the crowd's stunned silence, the Dothraki's uncertainty. It was dangerous—more dangerous than she could fully calculate, because pride among the Dothraki was not a personal thing but a political one, and she had just watched Daisy Johnson dismantle it in front of forty witnesses.

But it was also the only window they were going to get.

Daisy didn't gloat. She had no need to.

She turned her head slightly—not enough to take her eyes off Drogo. "Hermione," she said, steady as a metronome. "Do the thing."

Hermione's mind snapped back into motion.

She reached the tray. Yanked the cloth back.

The dragon eggs lay there—three heavy ovals, scaled and darkly beautiful, like pieces of night that had been carved into shapes. One black as obsidian. One pale green-gold. One deep red-brown, the colour of old blood and old fire.

Hermione could feel them. Not with her hands—with something else. Old magic, sleeping. Patient. Like a storm waiting behind a closed door.

She didn't try to levitate them in the middle of a melee. Too visible. Too easy to interrupt.

She went for what she trusted.

Her beaded handbag swung against her wrist. She flipped it open with shaking fingers. One egg—both arms around it, the weight sinking into her bones in a way that felt like significance—went in. The bag accepted it as if it were an apple.

Second egg.

Third.

The bag remained light in her hand, because the Extension Charm didn't care about physics, only rules.

A guard saw the motion and shouted, eyes going wide. Hermione snapped her wand up.

"Protego!"

A blade rang off the shimmering shield. Hermione pivoted, grabbed Daenerys's sleeve, and hauled her close.

Daisy was still holding Drogo at bay.

Drogo had recovered his arakh. He came in again—more cautious now, his pride sharpened to something lethal. Daisy sidestepped and sent a quick vibration down the flat of the blade.

The arakh sang.

Drogo's hand spasmed. The weapon leapt from his grip again, skittering across the stone.

The ripple through the Dothraki was audible—half outrage, half something that might, in a different context, have been wonder.

Drogo's face darkened.

Daisy lifted her chin and met his gaze. Her voice was calm, and she spoke to be heard. "Tell your men to move," she said. "Or I'll make you dance for them again."

Hermione almost choked.

Drogo did not understand her words. But he understood her tone, and he understood the sound of men trying not to laugh at their own khal, and he understood that he was standing in an equation he had never been part of before.

For a heartbeat—one long, brittle heartbeat—Drogo was still.

Not from fear. Never that. From the unbearable arithmetic of pride versus consequence.

"Now!" Daisy called, not looking away.

Hermione seized Daisy's shoulder with her wand hand, fingers locking tight. "Hold on," she snapped, not a request.

Daenerys gripped Hermione's other arm—hard, determined, the grip of someone who had decided.

Hermione turned on the spot—

—and the world twisted.

They landed in scrub grass and dry earth under a wide, indifferent sky.

Hermione stumbled, nausea rolling up her throat. Daisy bent at the waist, bracing herself on her knees for three seconds, then straightened with stubborn control. Daenerys sagged, and Hermione caught her before she hit the ground.

The city of Pentos glowed in the distance—far enough that no shout could reach them, close enough that pursuit was possible.

"We're outside the city," Hermione gasped. "Just outside Pentos."

Daisy looked up sharply. "You're sure."

"Yes."

Daenerys pushed herself upright, rejecting the support after a moment. She stood on her own feet and looked at them—at Hermione's wand, at Daisy's steady stance, at the beaded bag that had swallowed three dragon eggs without complaint. Her expression was complicated: terror, certainly. But also something underneath it, raw and new, that didn't yet have a name.

"Who are you?" she asked. Her voice was quiet—not fragile. Careful. The voice of a girl who had learned to measure her words before she spent them. "Why did you—" She stopped. Looked at the bag. "My eggs."

"Safe," Hermione said immediately. "I promise."

Daenerys was still for a moment. Then, with the peculiar deliberateness of someone making a very careful decision: "You stopped it."

"Yes."

"You didn't—you didn't know me. You had no reason to—"

"We chose to," Daisy said. Her voice was direct, without ceremony. "That's reason enough."

Daenerys looked at her for a long moment. Something shifted in her expression—something Hermione suspected wasn't gratitude, exactly, because gratitude required a certain distance between giver and receiver, and what was moving across Daenerys's face was more like recognition. As if she were filing away, very carefully, what it looked like when someone chose to act without being compelled to.

She nodded once.

Daisy scanned the horizon, already moving. "We need cover. They'll search."

Hermione reached into the beaded bag and drew out a folded bundle of canvas that unfolded and unfolded and kept unfolding, and when it was done it was a tent. Plain on the outside. Impossible on the inside.

Daisy stared at it. Then at the bag. "That came out of that."

"Extension Charm," Hermione said. "Inside. Quickly."

Warm lamplight greeted them, and clean linen, and the faint scent of lavender that Hermione had charmed into the fabric during their months on the run from Voldemort, because she had needed something small to make the nights bearable. Daenerys walked in and stopped dead—taking in the space that was so much larger than its container, the shelves of books, the small kitchen, the two bunks and the sitting area with its oil lamp casting amber circles on the floor.

She said nothing. Her expression said everything.

Daisy lowered herself into a chair, blew out a long breath, and looked at Hermione. "Right," she said. "Talk to me."

Hermione set the beaded bag on the table—gently, as if it contained fragile things, which it did. She sat opposite Daisy. Daenerys settled on the edge of a bunk and said nothing, but her attention was total.

Hermione thought about where to begin.

"There's a version of this I need to explain to both of you," she said. "And parts of it will sound—" She stopped. "Parts of it are strange."

"Hermione," Daisy said. "I vibrate matter with my hands. You do magic with a stick. We're sitting in a tent that is larger on the inside than the outside, and we currently have three dragon eggs in your handbag. Your threshold for 'strange' has moved."

Hermione almost smiled. "Fair. All right." She folded her hands. "Where I'm from—my world—there's a series of books. A Song of Ice and Fire. Seven books, one author, this world he built over decades. I read them when I was sixteen, seventeen, eighteen. I practically memorised them." She paused. "This is that world."

Daisy was very still. "You're saying we're inside a book."

"The world that a book described, yes. Every political structure, every city, every character—I know them. Not from having lived here. From having read them." She let that settle. "Which means I know what was supposed to happen today. And I know what happens next. And I know—" She swallowed. "I know which things can be changed. Because they haven't happened yet."

Daisy leaned forward slightly. "Or because we just changed the first one."

"Yes." Hermione's jaw tightened. "I've been telling myself it was just a story. That none of it was real. But—" She looked at Daenerys. "She's real. Those eggs are real. The world has weight." A beat. "So I have to stop treating it like fiction I can close."

"But you still have the knowledge," Daisy said.

"Yes. All of it. The wars, the politics, the tragedies. I know where things go wrong." She met Daisy's eyes. "I know where we could intervene."

Daisy absorbed this. "Give me the outline."

Hermione gave her the outline. The Seven Kingdoms. The Iron Throne. The war that would tear the continent apart. The players, the powers, the things that had been set in motion long before they arrived. And further east—the slave cities, the Unsullied, the possibility of an army built on chains that could be broken.

Daisy listened without interrupting, which Hermione was beginning to recognise as one of her particular qualities.

"Freeing enslaved soldiers," Daisy said, when Hermione finished. "I can get behind that."

"And the war—" Hermione exhaled. "I don't know if we can stop it. But I can't do nothing."

Daisy's gaze moved to Daenerys, who had been silent throughout, taking in everything with those wide, careful eyes.

"You said she's important," Daisy said to Hermione—quietly enough that it was almost private.

"Yes," Hermione said. "In ways she doesn't know yet."

Daenerys spoke then, and her voice was steadier than Hermione expected. "I'm in the room," she said. "And I understand most of what you're saying."

A beat.

"Sorry," Hermione said, genuinely.

Daenerys looked at her with something that might have been the very early beginning of trust, or might have been its possibility. "You said you know what happens. In your book." She hesitated. "What was supposed to happen to me?"

Hermione met her eyes and did not look away. "You were supposed to be sold," she said. "To Drogo. And you were supposed to survive it, and build something from it, and become—" She paused. "Someone extraordinary. But at great cost." A beat. "We're trying to see if you can have the extraordinary part without the cost."

Daenerys was quiet for a long moment.

"Is it possible?" she asked.

Hermione's honest answer was: I don't know. She was rewriting a story whose ending she'd thought she knew, with variables she couldn't predict.

"I don't know," she said. "But I think it's worth finding out."

They made Daenerys sleep.

She resisted, briefly—with the particular pride of someone who has never been allowed to show weakness and has come to confuse endurance with dignity. But she was thirteen and she had been running on fear-fuel for years, and when Hermione held out the small vial of Dreamless Sleep and explained—patiently, precisely—what it was and why it was safe, Daenerys accepted it with the quiet resolution of someone who had decided to trust this, specifically, because she had to trust something or she would break.

She was asleep before her breathing had steadied three times.

Hermione sat opposite Daisy at the small table.

Outside, the tent's canvas creaked in the wind.

Daisy spoke first. "She's tougher than she looks."

"She's been surviving since she was old enough to walk," Hermione said. "She doesn't know any other way."

A pause. Daisy turned her cup between her palms. "When this world's story—the original one—when was Viserys supposed to die?"

Hermione looked up. "Tonight, most likely."

"Did he—" Daisy stopped. "Was it the khal?"

"Yes." Hermione's voice came out level. "Drogo—in the original story, eventually. Not immediately. But Viserys pushed, and pushed, and Drogo—" She paused. "Drogo gave him what he'd always demanded. A crown." A beat. "Molten gold."

Daisy was quiet.

"You knew that was coming," she said. It wasn't quite a question.

"Yes," Hermione said. "I've been sitting with that since we landed. Knowing and—deciding whether to interfere." She folded her hands on the table. "He was terrible to her. He hurt her, controlled her, sold her—treated her as currency his entire life." She swallowed. "But he was also her only family, and he was frightened, and he was twenty years old and had been raised to believe he was owed the world." She looked at her hands. "I don't know if I could have saved him. I'm not sure he would have let me. And I'm not sure—"

She stopped.

Daisy waited.

"I'm not sure that's the same as choosing not to try," Hermione finished, very quietly.

Daisy exhaled slowly. "You're not responsible for every death in a story you didn't write."

"No," Hermione agreed. "But I'm responsible for the ones I could see coming and did nothing about."

Daisy looked at her for a moment. "You're going to spend this entire journey in moral agony, aren't you."

"Probably," Hermione admitted.

Something shifted in Daisy's expression—wry, reluctant. "Good," she said. "That means you're the right person for it."

The canvas creaked.

Somewhere in the distance, Pentos flickered with torchlight.

Hermione's fingers found the strap of her beaded bag and closed around it—feeling, through the enchanted fabric, the weight of three dragon eggs and whatever futures they carried.

"We move at first light," she said.

Daisy nodded. "Where?"

Hermione thought of Meereen. Of chains in the dust. Of soldiers who had been made into weapons and could be freed to become something else.

"East," she said. "For now."

Daisy nodded once.

"And whatever this world thinks it's owed—" Hermione looked towards the bunk where Daenerys slept, small and certain under the borrowed blankets.

She didn't finish the sentence.

She didn't need to.

Back in Kamar-Taj, Wong stood in the empty training hall and stared at the faint scars in the air for a long time.

Strange was beside him—silent, for once, the arrogance burned off by the first cold draughts of genuine alarm.

"Two displacements," Wong said, almost to himself. "Two separate individuals, neither of them sorcerers, neither of them capable of returning on their own."

Strange swallowed. "How do we find them?"

Wong turned to look at him—at the man who was becoming, slowly and painfully and with great resistance, someone worth being.

"That," Wong said, "is what we are going to learn."