Viserys sold the last of their mother's jewels in Myr when the twins were eight.

Aelya watched him do it from the doorway of the pawnshop, Dany's hand in hers, and she memorized the Myrish merchant's face the way another child might memorize a song. One day, she thought, I will come back for what you took from us at half its worth. The merchant smiled at Viserys with too many teeth and counted out coins that would not last the winter.

They were in Pentos by the time she was nine, Tyrosh by ten, Lys by eleven. Viserys grew taller and thinner and crueler, and the thing Aelya remembered about him from the old stories — the small cruel madness curling inside him like a worm — began to show its face in earnest. He struck Dany first when they were ten, for laughing too loudly at a juggler in a market square. Aelya caught his wrist before the second blow landed.

"Touch her again," she said, very quietly, in High Valyrian so the crowd would not understand, "and I will wait until you sleep, brother, and I will open your throat with the little knife Willem gave me. Do you believe me?"

Viserys stared at her. His violet eyes, so like their sister's and so unlike, searched her face for the lie.

He did not find one.

He never struck Dany again in Aelya's presence. He struck Aelya instead, when the mood took him, and Aelya let him — because Aelya could bear it and Dany could not, and because every blow Viserys landed on her was a coin she was saving up to spend later.

The second egg came to her in Qohor when they were twelve.

She had been watching the caravan traders for weeks, learning their rhythms, learning which of them had come from the Shadow Lands east of Asshai. A thin man with a face like a dried fig sold curiosities from a stall near the Black Goat's temple — finger-bones of forgotten saints, rings of glass that sang when you breathed on them, a shrunken head that was said to whisper prophecies to those who slept beside it.

And, wrapped in black velvet at the back of the stall, an egg.

"A stone," the trader said when she asked. "Only a stone. Pretty, yes? From a mountain in Asshai where the ground still burns. Ten silver."

Aelya turned it over in her hands. It was the color of fresh cream shot through with veins of gold, warm against her palm in a way no stone should be, and heavy — far heavier than it ought to have been for its size.

"Three silver," she said.

"Eight."

"Three. And I will not tell the magisters you are selling Valyrian steel filings under the counter."

The trader's eyes went very still. Aelya smiled at him, sweet as a child ought to smile, and handed him three silver coins she had stolen from Viserys's purse that morning.

She wrapped the second egg in the same cloak as the first and said nothing to anyone.

Not yet.

She told Dany when they were thirteen.

They were in a cheap room above a tavern in Volantis, and Viserys was out drinking away the last of the coin a sellsword captain had given them for reasons Aelya did not want to examine too closely. Dany had been quiet all evening, too quiet, her hands folded too carefully in her lap, and Aelya had watched her sister fold smaller and smaller into herself the way a flower folds at dusk.

"Dany," she said. "Come here. I want to show you something."

She drew the bundle out from beneath the loose floorboard and unwrapped it in her sister's lap. Two eggs gleamed in the candlelight — the oilslick green and the cream-and-gold — and Dany drew a breath so sharp it was almost a sob.

"Aelya."

"I found the first one in Braavos. Before Willem died. The second in Qohor."

"Are they—" Dany could not finish the question. Her hand hovered over the green egg and did not quite touch it, as though she were afraid it would vanish.

"I think so. I think if we can find the third — and I know where it is, Dany, or where it might be — I think we can wake them up again."

Daenerys looked up at her. In the candlelight her eyes were almost black, and wet, and enormous.

"How do you know things, Aelya?" she whispered. "You always — you always know things. The way you knew Willem was going to die. The way you knew Viserys would sell Mother's ring before he did it. The way you knew the captain in Pentos meant us ill. How?"

Aelya had been preparing an answer to this question for nine years.

She reached out and cupped her sister's face in her hand. Dany's skin was warm. Her pulse beat small and fast beneath Aelya's thumb.

"I dream," she said. "I have dreamed things, Dany, since before I can remember. Sometimes they come true. Sometimes they don't. I think it is a thing some Targaryens have. Daenys the Dreamer had it, and she dreamed the Doom before it came. I think I have a little of what she had."

It was not quite a lie. It was the most honest thing she could give.

Dany searched her face, and whatever she saw there she accepted. She leaned forward and pressed her forehead against Aelya's, the way they had since they were small, and closed her eyes.

"Then dream us somewhere safe," she whispered. "Dream us a home, Aelya. Dream us free of him."

"I will," Aelya said. Her voice shook and she did not care. "I swear it to you, Dany. I will."