Sunset Shimmer was exhausted. In the daylight, the pounding, relentless, shadeless daylight of the rolling plains of western Essos, she trotted behind the carts of the khalessi's camp, trudging when she absolutely had to, but kicking her heels and sprinting back and forth whenever she could, fetching, carrying, passing messages from this khalzafra to the overseer of that group of common zafra, from one of the khal's bloodriders to an outrider patrol, from the kitchen-camp to the butchers-camp. As the days turned to weeks, Sunset had somehow, accidentally, inexorably, become a messenger.
She swore to herself that it hadn't been intentional, that she wasn't this pony. She had never been so gregarious in the august Heavenly Court of her mentor. She had, in point of fact, been arrogant, heedless of the concerns of others while she had been under the tutelage of the Eternal Princess. But then, she hadn't needed to be in those sun-lit days, basking in the endless benevolent light which was Celestia.
No, Sunset had taken up message-carrying as a way to improve her Dothraki, to perfect her understanding away from the khalessi's stumbling slowness. Even now - humbled as Sunset was by her slavery, her bondage - Sunset's arrogance was infinite. She picked up new grammar and syntax as if it were nothing, like a foal learning to breathe - by mere animal instinct. Sunset's status-arrogance had been shattered like the weak-formed failure of the potter's art it had been - but her intellectual arrogance was a much sturdier vessel, and she couldn't help but pour her ego into that iron-bound amphora like precious water in the desert.
And all the running about helped build her resilience, her endurance. She couldn't coast on simple trudging, putting one hoof in front of the others again and again, following in her new mistress's train. She had to get out and about, to get moving!
So Sunset sprinted, she galloped, she darted about, finding her messages' targets within the endlessly shifting city on the move which was Khal Drogo's khalasar in motion. Minela, the sullen slave-queen of the kitchens and all of her snarling, back-biting vikeesi; Girkaro the one-armed butcher-lord, his axe often strapped in the place of his missing hand, and his swarm of squabbling, blood-splattered apprentices; the lieutenants of the various naqikhasar, the mahrazh-naquikhasar, Kovarro, Malakho, Hralvro, Manikhro, Gulkarro, Lhanho, Nhizo, Qhono - so very many, they were as numerous as the grasses under their hooves, and these only the naquikhasar attached to the khal's own khasar, his attendants' personal followers!
The great horde spread out across the rolling plains between Pentos and Norvos, and as endless as the nomads and their followers were in motion, they were, Sunset was beginning to understand, nothing but small groups gathered together, little bands moving in concert with each other. The Dothraki were not simply a faceless mass of terrifying, horrifically violent apes, but rather, an endlessly articulated series of little bands of jocular, quarrelsome, occasionally charming homicidal apes.
She wouldn't say that she was making friends, but her circle of acquaintances was expanding rapidly.
Today she was running messages from the terrifying Khal Drogo himself to the outriders on the far eastern side of the advance. Those band of outriders were moving in the direction of a walled town that had not so much defied the khalasar's demands, as had been unpardonably slow with their tributes on their travels westward to his wedding. Or, so said the khal, although he couched it in hearty, brutal, bloodthirsty terms that Sunset shrunk from thinking too deeply upon.
The messages Sunset carried to the naquikhasar of the right-hoof advance van were, she understood at some level, very bad news indeed for the city-lords of Gyohan Byka, but that as well, she did not wish to dwell upon. The mahrazh-naquikhasari Gulkarro, Nhizo, Qhono and Adrahko were certainly excessively amused and excited by what Sunset had to say to them, and she left behind her more than one naquikhasar forming itself into a raiding band, each Dothraki gathering up their weapons and yelping in joy at the prospect of mayhem.
As she returned from her town-dooming mission, Sunset felt the burning in her chest and her cannons, the strain that told her she was over-doing it again. These Dothraki rode, she thought, because it was too damn tiresome to run everywhere on your own hooves. They put all the wear and tear on their idiot horses, while Sunset had to rely on her own poor hooves.
At least this was toughening up her once-tender hooves. Sunset had once had the delicate and soft-frogged hooves of a scholar, a student. No longer, and the longer she spent running across the hills and plains of this brutal continent, the more strongly those appendages resembled the hard, horny hooves of the peasantry.
Another virtue of running messages was that it got Sunset out and away from the remount herders, who insisted on continually trying for the wild horse. None of the other Dothraki whose word should have restrained those young idiots seemed to be able to get them to stop pestering Sunset. They just nodded and smiled, and waited until this bloodrider or that elder turned their backs on them. And then they'd regroup for another try.
As Sunset approached where she had been told to expect the khal's khasar, she could see Ahego and one of his cronies on horse-back, trying to hide their presence from her on just the other side of that copse of - were those trees, or bush? Out here on the heavily stream-rutted landscape of the ‘Bearded Plains', the distinction between tree and bush was sometimes, Sunset was discovering, academic.
What wasn't academic was that they were trying for her again - and she running messages for the khal himself! Sunset was sure that if she complained about it, though, the khal would just laugh. The great brute found his rebellious remount herders amusing, as if they were a sort of highly active band of jesters for his amusement.
Which meant that the hunted unicorn had been added to his jesters-court as designated victim. Sunset looked around to see if the khal was lurking somewhere in expectation of a bit of entertainment. She couldn't see him, but that didn't mean the bastard wasn't out there somewhere, sniggering.
So, it was time to give the audience a show.
Sunset turned and charged the two herders and their string of extra horses, getting in among them before they realized that their prey had turned on them. Their lassoes were suddenly useless as she darted between their confused mounts and the others they had behind them, unburdened.
The little rats had been planning on chasing her into the ground, exhausting one set of horses, and re-mounting while their target ran her heart out. Well, Sunset wouldn't play that game, would she now?
She caught the lead-lines of one of the remount braces, and tore it loose from the slack, astonished hand of the second herder, Yallego. She thought he was maybe a cousin or second-cousin of his ape-leader, Ahego. Whoever Yallego was, he was a careless idiot.
Sunset ran for it on the far side of her little counter-ambush, leading two very confused horses behind her, their lead-line flagging behind her, gripped firmly in her teeth. Ahego was too busy berating his idiot cousin to give chase, which was good - Sunset was quick and agile, but not nearly as fast as her mindless not-cousins, the nomad-horses of this world. She didn't think that the fools would have needed remounts to chase her down, if she were ever so foolish as to let it come down to a dead-gallop stern-chase.
And suddenly, in the next copse over, where she hadn't seen it before with the previous copse in the way, was the khal's retinue, and the vast bearded bastard himself, bent over his massive stallion-mount, laughing his brutish head off.
"Now that's what I call counting coup, boys," he bellowed. But then, in Sunset's limited experience, Khal Drogo rarely said anything softly. "Why can't my own blood-riders steal horses like that? Pono, go steal my horses back, I don't know what the Sunset-horse would do with her own remount herd. Sunset-horse, are you plotting a harem among my remounts?"
Sunset wrapped the lead-line around her left foreleg, and spat its well-chewed end out of her mouth. "Of course not, mighty Khal! I would only dilute your breeding-stock with my witchy get! I merely found some of your horses unattended in that thicket over there, and thought to bring them to you!" Sunset looked over her shoulder at the two horses she had stolen on an impulse. "Also, they seem to be mares."
And Sunset almost had the privilege of seeing the mighty Khal fall out of his saddle, laughing.