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Grey Worm had a vivid memory, for as far back as he allowed himself to remember. No Unsullied could be said to have much of an imagination; their commander could not have guessed what dragonfire might look like before the day he was set free, but for all his life Grey Worm would describe the exact shade of grey-black the walls of Astapor turned behind the smoke of Drogon’s breath. The cloying smell of the slave masters’ bodies was a common, vague detail heard in war stories from the East after that day, but Grey Worm’s version would sour any taste in your mouth, the way he told it.
He did not remember the day he was cut, nor the first twilit morning he took a spear in his chubby fists, but the commander had found his words to speak stories of sounds and tastes from decades gone, if his queen or her wards thought to ask. The details he chose to use in his storytelling made all the difference, just as his perceptions of battle made him first choice amongst peers for commander.
He had, for as long as his memory went, been a plump young slave. Decades of training, and the foregoing of pleasures, had cast his musculature into that of a soldier in his prime by the time Mother came to set him against his adoptors, but his youth had seen the mold of his bones wrapped in soft skin.
Grey Worm had made up for it with his mind.
***
“This one has the honor,” the vermin boy said, stepping forward into the port-city square. An Astapori slave-herder had led the trainees in a rare beast-hunt the day before, foregoing formation training and calling for the boys to go off on their own for a day and a night. The phalanx of survivors stood in front of one of the Good Masters, now.
“This one?” the Master growled. She turned to the slave-herder, named Rope, a surprised frown forming under her eyes. “Fat and gilded, but possessed of enough skill to kill a plainshunter before the rest of your vermin?”
Rope drooped a little. A slave himself, the Astapori guided the Unsullied-in-training, and sometimes answered for their failures as much as the boys did. He wanted little part of this story; if the Good Master decided the phalanx deserved a lashing, better the boy took responsibility. “Explain yourself, Stink Rat,” Rope said.
“This one knows beasts smell the hunt,” the boy said without hesitation. He gestured to some of the boys near him, their skin dark and crisp in the heat. “These ones are strong, but loud. Sunlight on skin, running, gives these strong ones smells. Beasts hide from these ones, or they fight with other beasts, as an army,” he took a breath. “This one walks in the shade, quiet with the wind, and beasts come hungry, alone.”
Rope was only half listening. He was thinking that he wanted some of the beast’s meat, but he was scared. A Good Master could punish the not-yet-Unsullied as severely as she liked. Rope thought a Good Master had every right to whip all of them like they were her own slaves, but Rope was dull; the vermin boy, today named Stink Rat, knew the Good Master could have had them all flayed, right there in the grass.
Rope wanted to leave this part of the city, to take his little bowl of stringy meat and half a cup of milk back to his two daughters. He had no idea what the Good Master was thinking. That day, though, she was not upset. Her frown faded as she barked, “Half a hundred days of brawn may win as many battles. An Unsullied, though, is a warrior.” The Good Master addressed the boys directly, now. The phalanx stood motionless, their stares focused straight forward, while Rope stood off to the side, eyeing the beast’s carcass, already forgotten.
“Your spear and your strength may kill a thousand men, but it is your shield and your mind that will protect your masters from the man that comes next.” She looked back to the slave-herder. Rope, snapping back into the moment and now fearing being left out of the Master’s praise, looked up expectantly. He started to bumble forward, toward the hunt’s prize, but floundered when no one moved. The Master paused for a moment, before turning to leave. “Bring the beast to my hall, slave,” she yapped.
***
When Grey Worm told the story of that hunt to Missandei, he could remember the smell of the Good Master’s oils. The Unsullied described, in beautiful Valyrian, the yellows and blues of the Master’s robes, the dirt-green and milk-stink of Rope’s rags, the distant sound of water. He spoke simply, using the speech of a slave, yet his ideas about the nature of beasts did not spare details of aesthetic. When he described killing the plainshunter, his reverence for its danger was not lost on the girl. Even with nineteen languages, she was not sure she could have retold the story to her Mother with the same respect.
In the Plaza of Punishment, in the moments after Daenerys’ order, the Unsullied who was Grey Worm killed with spear and discipline, like his phalanx. He did not waste time eyeing a dragon kill with its fire, nor did his other senses stray from his blades. He felled Astapor as one with the rest of the Unsullied, and his strong arms were only two of thousands that dealt death in the day’s heat. His mind did not wander while the sun beat down on his shoulders, sweat running down his broad back, against the wind from the sea. The Good Masters howled as they died to the strong arms and sharp teeth of their vermin boys.
That night, like every evening since his youth, Grey Worm drilled with his short sword, and shed the name he had been given that morning. He was a vermin boy again by nightfall, no longer round and soft, nor a slave. Unsullied. That was what he was. He could remember what it meant to him, that word.
Unsullied. Honored. A warrior, strong and skilled, shielded from enemies and the shield of his master.
What does that mean, he wondered? He was a slave no longer, and had no master but Daenerys, Khaleesi Mother of freedmen. Just as with the dragon’s fire before, he did not yet have words to describe the experience.
The next morning, no slave-herder or Good Master remained to give him a name. The Dothraki were not awake; they slept with the sun next to the fires of Daenerys Stormborn. He was some vermin no more, no longer a grey worm mewling in the corpse of Astapor, rotting sweetly in the early hours of the day. Another thought he couldn’t explain. The Unsullied with no name trained with the dawn, and with his shield.
***
When Daenerys asked her freedmen to choose their own commanders, they met within their phalanxes. In battle, and sometimes during hunts, the Unsullied and the vermin boys-in-training would need leaders to communicate with each other. Eight thousand voices, even when split into a phalanx, or broken further into mere dozens guarding a Master’s temple, was hardly the way to organize, and even the Unsullied were not new to the idea of heralds or sergeants.
But to pick a general? Which one to lead them all, unbroken and now free, for more than just a day? Some battles favored the quick, and so the enslaved Unsullied would be commanded to follow the swiftest vermin amongst them. Some days, the largest or best with a spear, or the ones who had earned honor, or the most cunning, were tasked. The one who had been Grey Worm had commanded phalanxes before, but only for a time, and never for longer than any of his peers.
“How can we serve the Mother?” many of the Unsullied asked. There was honor in leading, but this was about serving their masters. None stepped forward within their phalanxes to claim worth. A few volunteered others from outside their own units. The discussion went on through the day, debating honor, strength, and temperance.
They still had been given no names. Eight thousand freedmen, cut and gilded, vermin youth-turned-warriors with no names trying to pick their own leaders to best serve a Queen none had yet guarded? If any Good Master had survived, the one who had been Grey Worm wondered, what would she think of the Unsullied today? What lesson was there to learn, now that they were free?
“This one walks in the shade,” he said, slowly. “Beasts come for Mother, against the wind, against horsemen and Dragons. Let those in the sunlight hunt, and be strong in numbers. Let grey worms in the dark of cold earth be hunted, commanders, shields in front of the Queen.”
Most of the freedmen chose strong, large Unsullied to speak for their phalanx. Most of these speakers did not volunteer themselves, instead bringing nominations from within their ranks, or sometimes outside, to suggest. Some of the Unsullied had taken new names for themselves; variations of Iron-Link Breaker, or Grass Runner, were common. Some kept no names at all, which further complicated the decision they all had to make, and half the night had burned away before a small group gathered in agreement.
Grey Worm, his name solemnly restored by the freedmen around him, was chosen before the hour of ghosts as General of the Unsullied in service of Daenerys Targaryen. The phalanxes, at Grey Worm’s recommendation, took unit commanders of great strength or skill-at-arms, but eight commanders were chosen to serve directly underneath him, all of similar mind and cunning. All eight could tell a story by firelight in such a way that the Unsullied, as unfeeling as they are, were moved to hear it.
They were the ones who could explain battleplans in the same way as describing the dances they once had seen in the chambers of their Good Masters. The smells they described were from perfumed feasts in Lys; the sounds of faraway lands they had traveled to in their times of service on the decks of ships, or in the forest halls of Qohor, were the sounds of battle, and hunting. All these senses were important to develop – another way to serve in combat, if you lost your eyes or your ears or your feet. The stories were ways to teach the Unsullied how to be Her shield, and eight thousand freedmen were strongest with these storytellers as their leaders.
***
When Daenerys spoke of names to Grey Worm, he answered that he was proud to serve, free. He thought of his training, and all the sounds and sights and smells of each day that he was just a vermin boy. He could remember hearing the lash as it stripped flesh from Rope, or from a boy, and he remembered the Good Masters, and their yelps, and the dragonfire. He kept his name and his shield, as did his eight commanders, and some of the Unsullied in their phalanxes. He held them both high from that day on, alongside the Queen’s other advisors, and he was proud, a vermin-made-warrior.
“It is a lucky name,” he said to his Khaleesi. He did not lie.
The honor was his to be chosen from amongst peers, to be the shield for his master. The honor was his to be bait for the beasts that wanted her blood, and he would walk slowly in the shade, and let them come.