— Aelya —

They sailed from Dragonstone nine days later, at dawn, with a fog over the water so thick the masthead lanterns looked like small moons.

Aelya had chosen the hour with care. She wanted her departure to be noted but not followed; she wanted the lords of the Narrow Sea to know she had gone somewhere, and to spend the next two moons guessing where. The fog did half the work for her. Ser Barristan, watching from the Stone Drum as her small fleet slipped out of harbour, would, according to their arrangement, spend the next fortnight loudly provisioning Dragonstone as if for a siege, and would allow a rumour to escape — through a carefully chosen drunk sailor in a carefully chosen Gulltown inn — that the silver queens had sailed for Braavos to treat with the Iron Bank.

It was the sort of lie that would hold long enough. Long enough was all she needed.

She had brought four ships. The Balerion's Shadow, under the Lord Captain, as flagship. Two Dornish cogs loaded with grain, fodder, winter wool, and a hundred picked Unsullied who had grown up in the cold mountains north of Qohor and would tolerate the northern weather better than their brothers from the sun-baked plains. And a small swift Braavosi galley Illyrio had sent her a year ago and which had turned out to be the fastest thing she owned.

She had brought three dragons. Morghon, because she was not going anywhere without him, and because the mere sight of him made garrison commanders reconsider their life choices. Ēdrugon, because Ēdrugon refused to be separated from her and had, on her one previous attempt, followed her ship out of Meereen harbour for three hours before she had given up and let him aboard. And Drogon, because Drogon was Dany's and Dany was coming.

Sōvegon, Viserion, and Rhaegal she had left on Dragonstone with a handler and strict instructions to fly only at night, over water, and only as far as the Claw.

She had also brought, at Ser Barristan's quiet insistence, a Kingsguard of three.

He had been adamant about this. Two queens going north without proper knightly escort was, in his view, not a matter to be compromised on. He had drawn up a list of candidates from among the better Dornish knights and the handful of reputable Westerosi he had gathered through his own old connections, and Aelya had approved three: a quiet Dornish woman called Ser Elinor Sand, who had won a minor melee at Starfall the previous year and who was, Doran had told her privately, the best spear in the Water Gardens; Daemon Sand, whom Arianne had insisted on sending because she trusted him, and whose presence also meant Aelya had, now, an indirect line to Arianne at any hour; and — a surprise — a grizzled Westerlander sellsword named Ser Rollam Westerling, cousin to Robb Stark's new queen, who had contacted Ser Barristan quietly through an old comrade and asked to be considered. His family was on the losing side of the riverlands war, and he had no love for the Lannisters who were about to destroy them.

Aelya had spoken to Rollam for an hour in a closed room. He had told her the truth about why he wanted in. She had accepted him, and given him her cloak, and noted that there was now a Westerling in her service who could serve, when the time came, as an extremely useful bridge to whatever was left of House Westerling and therefore to the West.

She was, she thought, getting better at this.

— Dany —

The first three days out of Dragonstone were easy.

The sea was quiet. The fog lifted on the second morning. Dany stood at the rail of the Balerion's Shadow and watched the coast of the Crownlands slide past — a green smudge in the distance, dotted with fishing villages, with once the spires of a small town she thought might be Duskendale — and felt, for the first time since they had landed, the pull of the country she had never seen.

Her country. Technically.

She was going to have to be queen of it. That was what Aelya had decided, and once Aelya decided a thing and told Dany why, Dany's resistance tended to last approximately one night before her sister's reasoning settled into her bones and stayed. But the country was a stranger to her. The country had hated her family for fifteen years. The country had children in it who were being raised on songs about the Mad King and the dragon-spawn, and Dany was going to have to arrive and be loved, somehow, by children whose grandmothers had taught them to spit at her name.

It was a terrifying thing to contemplate.

She contemplated it mostly at the rail.

Missandei found her there on the third afternoon. Missandei was not a good sailor and had spent the first two days being quietly, dignifiedly ill in her cabin, but she had recovered, and she came up to the rail now with two cups of watered wine and a shawl and the particular expression she wore when she had come to have a conversation.

"Your Grace."

"Missandei. Sit with me."

They sat on a coil of rope. Missandei handed her one of the cups.

"You are troubled," Missandei said. "Shall I fetch Her Other Grace?"

Dany laughed, despite herself.

"Her Other Grace. Missandei. You cannot call her that."

"I have been calling her that for a moon in my own head. It is efficient. Your Graces are a mouthful."

"Call her Aelya. She will not mind."

"I could not possibly."

"Missandei. She has washed your hair for you when you had the fever in Yunkai. She will not mind."

Missandei smiled. It was a small private smile and it had in it all the reasons Dany loved her fiercely.

"I will call her Aelya," Missandei said, "when we are alone. In council, I will call her Her Other Grace. It is a compromise."

"Accepted." Dany sipped her wine. "You did not come up here to discuss titles."

"No, Your Grace. I came up to tell you a thing I have been thinking about, and to ask your leave to do it."

"Tell me."

Missandei drew a breath.

"Your sister," she said, "is going to the Wall. She has told me why. She has told me about the boy at the Wall, and about — about the other thing, the thing behind the Wall, and I believe her, Your Grace, I believe every word of it. But she is going north. And you are going south. Are you not?"

Dany went still.

"She has not told me that."

"No. Not yet. But she will. I have been reading her, Your Grace. Three ships are going north, and one is going to keep you with her for a while, and then at some point it will turn around and carry you back. Because while she is at the Wall, someone has to be in the south to command the three armies she has placed there, and Ser Barristan cannot do it from Dragonstone alone, and the Reach host needs a Targaryen to rally to, not a Dornish prince, however loved. You are going to have to ride with Prince Doran up the Prince's Pass. You, Your Grace. In person. With two dragons. It is what the shape of the plan requires, and she has been sparing you the telling of it."

Dany did not speak for a long time.

Missandei did not press her. Missandei was very good at not pressing.

"She is going to send me away from her," Dany said eventually. Very quietly.

"For a season. Yes."

"For how long."

"A moon. Two. I do not know. Long enough to take the Reach, I think. Long enough for her to go to the Wall and come back."

Dany closed her eyes.

She had known, without knowing, that this was coming. Aelya had been careful with her these past weeks, in a way that Aelya was careful only when Aelya was protecting her from a thing. She had thought it was the weight of the war in general. It had not been. It had been this particular cut, this particular separation, saved up and not yet delivered.

"Why are you telling me, Missandei. And not her."

"Because she is going to tell you tonight. I know her patterns. She has chosen tonight because we will have cleared the Fingers by dusk, and she wants to tell you somewhere you cannot look back at Dragonstone. I wanted you to have a few hours to feel it before she gave it to you, so that when she gives it to you, you can — you can receive it gracefully. Forgive me, Your Grace. It is not my place."

"It is exactly your place," Dany said, fierce. "It is exactly what I made your place for. Gods, Missandei. Thank you."

Missandei inclined her head.

"Your Grace."

Dany stared out over the grey water.

"How do you know her," she asked, after a while, "so well. You have only served us a year."

Missandei was quiet for a long moment.

"I watched masters for fifteen years, Your Grace," she said. "The ones who were about to sell a child. The ones who were about to beat one. You learn to read the particular stillness they fall into before they do the thing they do not wish to do. Your sister has that stillness now. She has had it for three days."

Dany looked at her sharply.

"She has been kind to me for three days."

"Yes. That is the stillness."

Dany was silent.

Then, slowly, she reached out and took Missandei's small dark hand and held it.

"You are the finest person I know, Missandei of Naath," she said, "who is not my sister. Do not ever leave me."

"I will not, Your Grace," Missandei said. "I will not."

— Aelya, that night —

She told her.

She told her in the stern cabin with the lamps low and her sister in her lap and Dany's silver head on her shoulder, and she did not dress it up, because Dany had earned the truth without dressing. Two moons. Perhaps three. Aelya north with Ēdrugon and a hundred men, to the Wall and beyond if she had to. Dany south with Drogon and the rest of the fleet, back to Dragonstone, then on to Sunspear to join the Dornish host as it mustered for the Prince's Pass.

Dany did not cry. Dany, Aelya noted with a bittersweet pride, had done her crying privately at the rail that afternoon — Aelya had seen her face at supper and had understood Missandei had, blessedly, done the advance work — and was now ready, in the cabin, to be brave.

"I hate it," Dany said.

"I know."

"I hate it and I will do it."

"I know, my love."

"Two moons."

"Two moons. I swear."

"And you will come back."

"I will come back. In salt and fire."

Dany was quiet for a long moment. Then she lifted her head and looked at Aelya with eyes that were dry and very steady.

"Aelya," she said. "If you do not come back from the Wall, I will take the dragons and I will fly them beyond the Wall myself, and I will find the thing in the ice, and I will burn it, and then I will come and find your body and I will burn that too, and I will lie down beside it in the ashes and I will not get up. Do you understand me?"

Aelya's breath caught.

"Dany —"

"Do you understand me."

"Yes."

"Good." Dany laid her head back on Aelya's shoulder. "Then come back, my love. So I do not have to."

Aelya tightened her arms around her sister, and outside the cabin the wind sang in the rigging, and somewhere above them on the masthead Morghon was snoring loudly enough that one of the sailors, passing below, could be heard complaining about it to another, and the ship carried them north.