The first thing Aelya remembered of her second life was the smell of salt and stone, and the sound of a woman screaming.

She came into the world moments after her sister, on a storm-wracked night at the end of a dynasty. The maester's hands caught her, slick and shaking, and through the haze of a newborn's blurred sight she understood — impossibly, completely — where she was. Dragonstone. The storm. Mother is dying. The knowledge sat in her infant mind like a stone dropped into still water, rippling outward in waves of memory that did not belong to this small body.

She had been someone else, once. A woman in a world of glass towers and glowing screens, who had loved a story about dragons and fallen asleep reading it. She remembered the shape of the tale the way one remembers a dream upon waking — clearer in some places, fog in others — but she remembered enough.

She remembered her sister's name before anyone spoke it.

Daenerys.

They laid the two silver-haired babes side by side in a single cradle, because there was only one cradle left on Dragonstone, and because their mother — poor, brave Rhaella — was already going cold. Aelya turned her head on the linen, the effort enormous, and found her twin's face. Violet eyes, unfocused, searching. A small pink mouth working soundlessly.

I know you, Aelya thought, and something in her that was older than this body cracked open. I know you and I will not let them hurt you.

Daenerys's tiny hand found hers in the dark.

Ser Willem Darry spirited them across the Narrow Sea before the week was out, and the House with the Red Door in Braavos became the only home Aelya's new self would remember with any real warmth. The lemon tree grew outside the window, exactly as the stories had said. The red door faced the street. Viserys, nine years old and already sharp as broken glass, paced the halls and muttered about thrones.

Aelya learned to walk beside her sister. They learned words together, in High Valyrian first because Willem insisted, and then Braavosi, and then the common tongue of Westeros. By three they were inseparable. By four they slept curled like kittens in the same bed, Dany's small fist tangled in Aelya's hair.

"You are quieter than her," Willem observed once, watching them play in the garden. "And you watch things. Like your father did, before the sickness took him."

Aelya smiled up at the old knight and said nothing. She was four years old and she was calculating how many years remained before Willem died, before the gold ran out, before Viserys dragged them into the dirt of a dozen free cities begging for scraps.

Seven years, she thought. I have seven years to prepare.

She began with the egg.

She was six when she first slipped into the cellar beneath the house — a place Willem had forbidden because the stones were loose — and began searching in earnest. She had remembered, in flashes over the previous year, a fragment of lore: that Targaryen loyalists had hidden caches across Essos in the years of exile, small fortunes meant for princes who never came. The house in Braavos had been one such safe place, bought with Targaryen gold, kept ready.

It took her three months of searching, candle-lit and coughing on dust, before she found the loose flagstone in the back corner behind the wine tun. Beneath it, wrapped in oiled silk gone brittle with age, lay a lockbox of black iron.

Inside the box was a single egg.

It was smaller than she remembered dragon eggs being described — the size of a large pear — and the scales were a deep oilslick green, shifting to bronze where the candlelight touched them. She touched it with one shaking finger and felt, impossibly, a warmth. Not the warmth of something alive. The warmth of something waiting.

She wrapped it in her own cloak and hid it beneath a loose board under her side of the bed she shared with Dany, and she told no one. Not yet. Not even her sister. Dany was six and could not keep a secret from Viserys, and Viserys would sell it before the moon turned.

One, Aelya thought, heart hammering. Two more, at least. And then we will see what the world does to girls with dragons.

Willem Darry died when they were seven.

Aelya had known it was coming and still it broke something in her to watch it — the old knight thinning, coughing red into his linen, his hand trembling on her hair as he whispered that she must be strong for her brother and sister. She held his hand until it went cold and then she went and found Dany in the garden under the lemon tree, and they sat with their foreheads pressed together and wept without sound.

"Don't leave me," Dany whispered. She was seven and already she said it like a prayer. "Aelya. Promise me."

"Never," Aelya said. The word came out of her like a vow carved in stone. "Not in this life. Not in any life. Do you hear me, Dany? Never."

Daenerys nodded against her forehead, and in the lemon-scented dark the two silver girls held each other while the servants began, already, to steal the silver from the sideboards.

By week's end the red door would close behind them for the last time. Viserys would drag them into the dust of the Free Cities, raving of crowns.

But Aelya had an egg beneath her cloak, and a map of the future in her head, and her sister's hand in hers.

It would be enough. She would make it enough.