Sack of Astapor

Astapor's real defense was never its walls — old, cracked, unmanned — but the Unsullied the city bred and sold; no one there seems to have feared handing control of that army to a buyer as determined as Daenerys. She arrives after weeks at sea looking for soldiers, and what she finds disgusts her: hundreds of slaves raised for war since childhood, traded like cargo by their masters.

She negotiates anyway, and buys all of them: eight thousand fully trained Unsullied, six hundred more serving as the city's guard, and five thousand still in training, two thousand of those close to earning the spiked cap that ends their instruction. In exchange she hands over her ships, everything they carry, and — a throw-in Kraznys mo Nakloz takes for a worthless whim — one of her three dragons: Drogon.

The exchange closes the next morning in the square that gives this act its name. Kraznys hands Daenerys the harpy's fingers, the nine-lashed whip used to command the Unsullied, and in the same motion of taking it she sets Drogon loose on the Good Masters still standing in the plaza.

One word in the masters' own tongue turns the whip — and the army behind it — against the men who just sold it to her. The Unsullied kill Kraznys mo Nakloz and the slavers who don't run in time; the rest of the city, its walls unguarded, falls with barely a fight. Daenerys orders every remaining slave in Astapor freed, not only the soldiers she has just bought.

Before marching on Yunkai, Daenerys leaves Astapor in the hands of a council of three: a healer, a scholar, and a priest. The regency doesn't last. A former butcher named Cleon convinces the city the three mean to hand power back to the Good Masters, has them deposed and then executed, and crowns himself.

Cleon takes the city's remaining highborn children hostage to train them as new Unsullied. Astapor's pyramids turn into armed camps, corpses pile up in the streets, and the markets run out of both food and slaves to sell.