— Sansa —

The news came to King's Landing on a grey afternoon in the seventh moon of the year, and Sansa Stark heard it the way she heard most news now — through the wall.

She had learned, in the fourteen moons since her father's head had come off on the steps of the Great Sept, that the stone between her chamber and the servants' passage was thinner in one particular corner behind the wardrobe. A girl who pressed her ear to that corner at the right hour of the afternoon could hear the washerwomen gossiping as they folded linen in the next room, and the washerwomen — Sansa had learned with a slow cold gratitude — knew everything. They knew it first. They knew it unvarnished. They knew it before the Small Council did, because the Small Council heard its news from maesters and maesters wrote things down, but washerwomen heard things from stableboys who heard things from sailors, and the chain was faster.

On that grey afternoon the washerwomen were saying three sails.

"— three sails, Meg, I'm telling you, Brenna's boy saw them himself from the Mud Gate —"

"Three sails off Dragonstone, yes, I heard —"

"Not off Dragonstone, Meg. At Dragonstone. They've landed. Silver hair, the both of them, and an old knight in a white cloak, and foreign soldiers in bronze caps that don't talk, and a — a thing, Meg, a great green thing in the sky —"

"Hush, woman —"

"— a great green thing in the sky the size of a house, and they're saying Targaryens, Meg, they're saying the lost princesses, they're saying —"

Someone — a senior washerwoman, by the crispness of the voice — hissed enough, and the gossip dropped to a whisper Sansa could not follow, and Sansa sat back from the wall with her hand pressed over her mouth and her heart going so hard she thought she might be sick.

The lost princesses.

She did not know any songs about lost princesses. She knew songs about princes — Rhaegar with his silver harp, Aemon the Dragonknight, Daeron the Young Dragon — but princesses in songs were always the ones being rescued, not the ones arriving with bronze-capped soldiers and a green thing in the sky. She did not know what to do with the idea of two princesses arriving.

She thought of Joffrey.

She thought of Joffrey's small white hands at dinner, of the way he laughed when his mother told him to laugh, of the way he had made her look at her father's head.

She closed her eyes.

Please, she thought, to whatever was listening. Please. Please let it be true.

— Cersei —

Cersei Lannister heard the news an hour later, in the Small Council chamber, from a Varys who was being so carefully neutral about it that Cersei wanted, very badly, to throw her wine in his face.

"Dragonstone," she said.

"Yes, Your Grace."

"Taken."

"Yes, Your Grace. The garrison, it would seem, welcomed them."

"Welcomed them."

"They opened the gates, Your Grace. There was no assault. The castellan came down to the harbour to meet them and was seen, according to one account, to kneel in the surf."

Cersei set down her cup. Very carefully. Not because she was calm — she was not calm — but because if she did not set it down carefully she was going to throw it, and the council table already had a stain on it from the last time she had thrown a cup at Pycelle, and she was trying, in this particular season of her regency, to be dignified.

"How many ships."

"A great many, Your Grace. Our informants disagree. The lowest count is forty. The highest is over a hundred. They have been arriving in waves for five days."

"Five days. And we learn of it now."

"The maester of Dragonstone, Your Grace, is an old man who has been loyal to House Targaryen since before the Rebellion. He did not send ravens. The ravens come from Gulltown and from Duskendale, second-hand."

Cersei breathed through her nose.

"Varys. How many dragons."

A pause.

"One confirmed, Your Grace. Green and bronze, of great size. Several witnesses report seeing it in the sky over the island. The — the other reports are less reliable, but there are reports of smaller dragons, perhaps four or five, which may be the same creature seen at different distances, or may be —"

"Spit it out, eunuch."

"Or may be," Varys said carefully, "a brood of six."

Silence.

"Six," Cersei said.

"It is unconfirmed, Your Grace."

"Six dragons."

"Unconfirmed."

Cersei stood up. She walked to the window. She looked out over the Blackwater, where the charred hulks of Stannis's fleet still poked above the waterline in places, unsalvageable, a monument to a victory that had already, with this news, begun to curdle.

"Where," she said, "is my father."

"Lord Tywin is at Harrenhal, Your Grace. I have already sent the raven."

"And my brother."

"Ser Jaime remains —"

"The other one. The useful one."

Varys blinked.

"Lord Tyrion, Your Grace, is —"

"Send for him. Now. From wherever you have hidden him. I want him in this city within the moon."

"Your Grace, Lord Tyrion is —"

"Now, Varys."

Varys inclined his head, and did not say what he had been about to say, which was that Tyrion Lannister was in Casterly Rock in semi-exile and would not come south for his sister on any request short of a direct royal summons. Cersei did not need to hear it. She was already past the point of hearing things.

She stared out the window at the Blackwater and she thought — for the first time with real, sincere, unromantic clarity — I am going to lose this.

And then, a heartbeat later, the second thought, which was the thought that would shape the rest of her regency:

I will take as many of them down with me as I can.

— Aelya —

Dragonstone was exactly as she remembered it, and she was, this time, not going to weep about it.

She had wept the first time. She had wept on the beach where they had hatched the dragons, and she had wept in the chamber where their mother had died, and she had wept at various other points around the island at various other sentimental provocations, and Dany had wept with her, and between the two of them they had got most of the weeping out of their system in the brief happy months before Ser Arryk Connington had come sailing in with his letter from the late King Robert. She had no tears left for Dragonstone. Dragonstone was hers, now, in a way it had not been the first time; it was a castle she had taken.

She had landed openly. She had raised the dragon banner from the highest tower. She had sat in the painted hall with Ser Barristan at her right and the Lord Captain at her left, and she had received the small delegation of nervous Crownlands lords who had come to see what manner of creature had installed herself on their doorstep.

She had charmed them. She had charmed them deliberately, and with care, and with the calculated deployment of her sister — Dany at her elbow being gracious and interested and lovely, drawing the first and warmest response from every lord in turn while Aelya watched from a half-step behind and noted which of them looked Dany in the eye and which let their gaze drop, and marked each one accordingly in a small private ledger she kept in her head.

Three of them she judged would be hers within the month.

Two she judged she could buy.

One — a greying knight of a minor house called Celtigar who had smiled too much and asked too many questions about the number and location of her dragons — she judged she would have to kill. She marked him in the ledger for Missandei's attention.

She did not announce herself queen. Not yet. That was Dany's coronation to give, and it would be given in the Red Keep or not at all.

She announced herself, instead, as the Lady of Dragonstone, and she sent a single raven to King's Landing with a single sentence.

To the usurper and the regent who squats in my sister's hall: Dragonstone is ours again. Come and contest it, or send better terms. — A. Targaryen.

She did not expect a reply.

She did not need one.

She and Dany climbed to the top of the Stone Drum at sunset, alone, because Aelya had wanted — just once, just for an hour — to stand on the battlements of their mother's castle with her sister and no one else and watch the sea.

The wind was cold. Dany pulled her cloak tighter. Aelya opened her own cloak and wrapped it around the both of them, the way she had done when they were children in a dozen drafty rented rooms across the Free Cities, and Dany settled against her side with a small contented sigh.

Morghon was on the roof above them, asleep. Drogon and Rhaegal were wheeling somewhere out over the bay, hunting fish. Ēdrugon was curled around Aelya's throat under her collar like a very warm scarf. Sōvegon and Viserion were — gods knew where. Aelya had stopped trying to keep track of the two fastest ones. They would turn up at supper.

"It's strange," Dany said quietly.

"What is, my love."

"Standing here. I keep thinking of Mother. I never knew her. But I keep thinking of her up here pregnant with us, with Father gone mad in the Red Keep, and the realm burning, and the storm coming in. She must have been so frightened."

Aelya's arm tightened around her sister.

"She must have been."

"I do not want to be frightened," Dany said. "When we sail north. When you go to the Wall and I go — wherever I go. I do not want to be frightened the way she was."

"You will be frightened sometimes," Aelya said. "I cannot promise you that you won't be. I can promise you that you will not be alone. I am not our father. I am not going mad. I am not going to leave you pregnant in a tower with a storm coming in. Where I go, I come back. Do you understand me, Dany? I come back."

"Swear it."

"I swear it."

"In salt and fire."

"In salt and fire and the blood of the dragon. I come back to you. Every time."

Dany turned her face into Aelya's shoulder. She did not cry. But she stood there for a long time breathing against her sister's collarbone, and Aelya held her, and the wind off the Narrow Sea moved around them, cold and clean, and far to the west — across a sea they could not yet see over — King's Landing burned its lamps and waited.