The Unsullied did not break.

Eight thousand spears stood motionless in the burning plaza while their masters screamed and died around them, and when Aelya turned to them — her face smudged with ash, Ēdrugon hissing on her shoulder, Morghon still incinerating Good Masters behind her with the unhurried air of a man doing the dishes — she spoke to them in the Ghiscari they had been beaten in and the Common they had been sold in.

"You are free men," she said. "I have bought your chains with a trick and I have burned the men who forged them, and now I give the chains back to you to do with as you will. If you wish to go home, go. I will not stop you. If you wish to follow me, follow me. I am marching on Yunkai within the month, and on Meereen after, and I do not intend to leave a single slave-collar in Slaver's Bay when I am done. Choose."

She did not wait for a choice. She turned and walked out of the plaza with Dany on one side and Missandei on the other, and behind her every Unsullied in the square grounded his spear.

Not one of them left.

By morning another three thousand had come down from the barracks to join them, and by the end of the week the count stood at twelve thousand — every trained Unsullied in Astapor, and every half-trained boy, and every eunuch-in-making still bleeding from the knife.

Aelya freed the boys. She fed them. She put them under the care of the older Unsullied, whose chosen captain — a tall scarred man who took the name Grey Worm, because he said his birth-name had died with his chains — turned out to be exactly as capable as Aelya's memory had promised.

She also freed, in the chaos of that first night, every other slave in the city. Astapor had perhaps two hundred thousand slaves. She did not have the ships to take them, the food to feed them, or the time to govern them. She knew — remembered — what had happened in the stories when Daenerys had tried to hold Slaver's Bay by herself.

She did not try.

"We leave them a council," Aelya told Dany, in the commandeered manse of a dead Good Master, over a cup of wine neither of them was drinking. "Freedmen and Unsullied veterans. We give them arms. We give them the grain stores. We tell them we will return within the year to see how they have fared, and that if any man has tried to make himself a king in our absence, we will feed him to Morghon. Then we march."

"They will fight each other," Dany said.

"They will. Some of them will die. Many of them will die. I cannot fix Astapor in a week, Dany, and if we stay to try, we will be here for ten years and we will fail. We give them the chance. That is what we give them. The rest is theirs."

Dany was quiet. Then she reached across the table and took Aelya's hand.

"You have thought about this a long time," she said.

"Since we were children."

"You are colder than I am."

"Yes."

"I am glad of it," Dany said. "Someone has to be. I could not be."

Aelya looked at her sister across the wine cups, and her throat did a small tight thing that had been happening more and more often of late.

"Dany," she said. "You are the warm one and I am the cold one and that is why this works. Do you understand? You are — you are the sun. People will follow you across deserts. I am the shadow you cast. Between us we can do a thing neither of us could do alone."

Dany's fingers tightened on hers.

"Sun and shadow," she whispered.

"Sun and shadow."

Dany looked at her for a long moment. Her eyes were very dark in the candlelight, and there was a question behind them that had been there, unspoken, since the night in the tower on Dragonstone — the night Dany had said ask me again in three years and then fallen asleep against Aelya's shoulder.

They were seventeen now. Nearly eighteen.

Dany did not ask the question.

She lifted Aelya's hand and pressed her mouth, very briefly, to the inside of Aelya's wrist — where the pulse was — and then she let go and stood up and went to bed, and Aelya sat at the table with her heart going like a hammer until the candles guttered out.

Yunkai fell without a siege.

Aelya sent Missandei ahead under flag of parley with an offer: free every slave, disband the slaver guild, submit to a council of freedmen, and the city would stand. Refuse, and Morghon would come over the wall the next morning.

The Wise Masters of Yunkai laughed.

Morghon came over the wall the next morning.

He did not burn the city. Aelya had been very specific. He burned the Wise Masters, picked out of the crowd of defenders by Aelya riding on his back — the first time she had ever ridden him, and she had done it with her heart in her throat and her knees shaking, and Morghon had carried her with the long-suffering patience of a nursemaid taking a child for a walk. He burned the Wise Masters and he burned their pleasure-houses and he burned their auction-blocks, and when he was done the city had no ruling class left and no further objection to freedom.

Aelya installed another council. She marched on.

Meereen took a month. Meereen was larger, older, meaner; Meereen had walls like a mountain range and a pyramid at its heart the size of a small city. Aelya took it the way the stories said — with the sewers, with an Unsullied infiltration, with the slaves rising inside the walls — but she took it faster, because she knew what was coming, and because she did not make the mistake of trying to rule it herself afterward.

She nailed one hundred and sixty-three Great Masters to one hundred and sixty-three mileposts along the coast road, as a message.

Dany, who had wept the first time, did not weep this time.

"They crucified children," Dany said, looking at the road. Her face was white and still. "A hundred and sixty-three children, on a hundred and sixty-three posts, to mark our way here."

"Yes."

"Then this is justice."

"Yes."

"Will I dream of them?" Dany asked, quieter. "The Great Masters. Will I see their faces when I sleep?"

Aelya took her sister's hand.

"Perhaps," she said. "I do. I see all of them. Viserys too. They come, sometimes. It is the price, Dany. It is what we pay to be what we are."

Dany nodded. She did not let go of Aelya's hand.

They rode into Meereen together, six dragons wheeling overhead, and the freed slaves of three cities threw flowers into the dust beneath their horses' hooves.

Six months later, the twins turned eighteen.