— Arianne —

The first thing the Princess of Dorne noticed about the silver queens, when they came up the water-stair at Sunspear in the late afternoon, was that they were holding hands.

Not decoratively. Not ceremonially. Holding hands — fingers properly laced, the way girls did at thirteen when they were giggling over a secret, the way her own mother had held her father's hand when they walked in the water gardens before her mother had died. The taller of the two — Aelya, the one in the red riding leathers — kept her sister's hand tucked against her hip as though she had simply forgotten it was there, and the shorter — Daenerys, in pale gold — leaned into her sister's side at every pause like a woman whose weight had found its proper place.

Oh, thought Arianne Martell, so that is how it is.

She had heard the rumours out of Meereen. Every court in Essos had. She had dismissed them as the usual sort of thing said about women who held power without husbands. Evidently she had been wrong to dismiss them. She tucked the correction away with the small professional pleasure of a woman who enjoyed being correctly informed.

Her father, in his wheeled chair beside her on the terrace, murmured without turning his head: "Well, daughter?"

"They are in love, Father. Plainly."

"Mm."

"Is that a problem for us?"

"Targaryens," Doran Martell said, in the very dry voice he used when he was amused, "have been marrying their sisters for four hundred years. It would be a strange time to take offense."

Arianne smiled.

She watched the queens come up the last of the stairs. Behind them came a small dark woman in scribe's robes whose eyes missed nothing, and behind her an Unsullied captain who walked as though every flagstone between here and the throne might hide an enemy, and behind him — and this Arianne had to bite the inside of her cheek not to laugh at — behind him came a green-and-bronze dragon roughly the size of a large warhorse, being led on a silk rope by a small freedwoman with the patient expression of a nursemaid taking a reluctant toddler to bed.

"Father."

"I see it, daughter."

"That is the laziest dragon I have ever seen."

"That," Doran said, "is the only dragon you have ever seen."

"Then I am well-calibrated."

The dragon — Morghon, she had been told his name was, the queen's own — reached the top of the stair, looked around at Sunspear's terraces, and lay down immediately on the first warm flagstone he came to. He put his chin on his forefeet. He closed his eyes.

The freedwoman, without breaking stride, drove a stake into the crack between two flags, tied the silk rope to it, and curtsied to Prince Doran as though nothing unusual had occurred.

"Your Grace," she said, in accented Common, "forgive. He will not move now until sunset. Possibly tomorrow."

Aelya Targaryen, turning, said over her shoulder in High Valyrian: "Morghon. Behave."

The dragon, without opening his eyes, produced a small puff of grey smoke.

"I said behave."

A slightly larger puff.

The queen laughed — an unguarded laugh, shockingly young — and Arianne found herself, quite against her will, liking her.

— Aelya —

The Dornish welcome was everything she had remembered it being in the books and more.

Doran Martell received them in the Old Palace, in a shaded hall where the wind came in off the water gardens smelling of blood oranges and salt. He did not rise from his chair. He did not need to. He simply inclined his head, said cousins, you are welcome, and gestured them to cushions beside his own, and Aelya — who had been prepared to be patient with a careful man — found instead that Doran Martell was the most restful conversationalist she had met in ten years. He listened. He did not interrupt. When he spoke, it was to ask a single question that cut to the exact centre of whatever Aelya had been circling, and then to listen again.

His daughter Arianne was a different animal: quick, warm, openly interested, with a mouth that kept wanting to smile. She sat at her father's left hand and watched the queens with the appreciative attention of a woman at a horse fair evaluating very expensive bloodstock. Aelya, who had been watched like this before in Qarth and in Pentos and in Meereen, did not mind; Arianne's interest was not a predator's. It was a courtier's. There was a difference.

Dany, she noticed with private amusement, noticed neither of these things. Dany was looking out the window at the water gardens, where small children were splashing in the pools, and her face had gone soft.

Aelya reached under the table and squeezed her sister's knee.

Later, she thought at Dany, in the wordless way they had been speaking to each other since they were in a cradle. I know. Later.

Dany squeezed back.

They talked for two hours. Doran laid out the shape of his network: the lords of the Stormlands who had no love for either Lannister or Baratheon, the septons of the Reach who remembered Rhaegar with unexpected fondness, the Tyrell girl newly wed to the child-king Joffrey and already, Doran's spies reported, regretting it. He laid out the Lannisters' weaknesses: Jaime still prisoner of the Young Wolf in the riverlands, Tyrion somewhere in the west and out of favour, Cersei exposed.

"You have planned a long time, Prince," Aelya said.

"I have had a long time to plan, cousin."

"And your terms?"

Doran smiled. It was a small, tired, genuine smile.

"No terms," he said. "A dragon queen is come home. Dorne does not bargain with its queens. Dorne rides with them."

Aelya looked at him.

Doran Martell looked back, placid and patient and utterly unreadable, and she understood with a small clean shock that he meant it, and that he had meant it for eleven years, and that he had been waiting — in the way men with bad gout and better patience waited — for this exact afternoon.

She stood up. She walked around the table. She knelt at the old man's chair and took his hand and kissed the ring on it.

Doran made a small startled sound.

"Cousin," he said. "This is not necessary."

"It is necessary to me," Aelya said. "I will not forget it, Prince. House Targaryen will not forget it. When I am in the Red Keep, Dorne sits at my right hand. My word on it. In salt and fire."

Arianne, behind them, made a small sound that she disguised as a cough.

When Aelya rose, the princess of Dorne was smiling behind her fan — a real smile, not a courtier's — and Aelya thought: I am going to like her very much, and I am going to have to be careful.

— Drogon —

Drogon had decided he hated the walls.

The walls were everywhere. The walls penned the sky into small stupid squares. The walls had edges on them where he could not perch without knocking loose the red clay tiles, which was satisfying the first three times and then boring. The walls had people on them — small meat-shaped people who pointed and squeaked when he flew over, and did not run fast enough to be interesting, and did not hold still enough to be caught.

He wanted the sea. The sea had no walls. The sea had fish that jumped when he skimmed the surface, and the wind over the sea had a texture he could lean against with his wings, and his mother — the small silver one, his proper mother, the one who smelled of fire — had taken him flying over the sea for whole days when they were on the ship.

Now she was inside walls, talking to the old man in the chair.

Drogon flew to her window. He landed on the sill. He was getting, he had noticed, a little big for sills. He folded his wings and stuck his head through the arch and shrieked at her — the come out shriek, the one he had been practising — and his mother, without looking up from her conversation, said in the sharp-mother voice: "Drogon. Out."

He shrieked again.

"Drogon."

He did not want to go. He wanted her to come with him. He opened his mouth to shriek a third time and she stood up from her cushion and pointed — not at the window, at the floor — and said in the cold voice, the voice that was not his mother but the other one, the one underneath her:

"Down. Now."

Drogon hesitated.

He was nearly grown. He was nearly as long as a horse. He was Drogon — and something in him, hot and new and bad-tempered, wanted to test whether the cold voice still worked on him. He fluffed his crest. He hissed. He took a step into the room, not out of it, and he flared his wings for the threat-display the way the older male in the pack — the big lazy green one, the one who never did anything — had flared his once at a horse that had come too close.

There was a long silence.

The small silver mother's face did not change. She did not raise her voice. She simply turned her head toward the archway that led to the terrace, and she said —

"Morghon. In here, please."

— Arianne —

Arianne, who had been watching this entire exchange with the delight of a woman at the theatre, saw the door to the terrace darken.

It darkened because a green-and-bronze dragon the size of a warhorse had lifted his head off his flagstone, opened his molten-copper eyes, and with the enormous put-upon sigh of a man being asked to deal with his nephew at a family dinner, hauled himself to his feet and walked — walked, Arianne had not previously been certain the creature was capable of movement — into the hall.

Morghon did not roar. Morghon did not fly. Morghon simply filled the doorway, entirely, and looked at Drogon, and huffed one single ember-laden breath in the black dragon's general direction.

Drogon stopped flaring.

Drogon, in fact, folded himself up very small and very quickly, and reversed course out the window, and was gone.

Morghon watched him go. Morghon turned his great head to Aelya, as if to say satisfied?, and Aelya reached up and scratched him under the jaw, and said:

"Thank you, my darling. Back to your rock."

Morghon sighed, and went.

In the silence afterward, Arianne Martell said — very carefully, very politely:

"Cousin. Forgive me. How many dragons did you say you had?"

Aelya Targaryen turned to her with a smile that was not entirely human.

"Six, princess."

"Six."

"Six, and growing."

Arianne looked at her father.

Her father was smiling — the small placid smile he wore when a particularly satisfying piece of a very long plan had just clicked into place — and he said, without looking at her:

"Daughter. Tell the cooks. Tonight we feast."