The third egg was in Asshai, and Asshai was the end of the world.

Aelya had known this for nine years and had been saving for it for seven. Every coin she stole from Viserys's purse, every copper she earned running messages for a Volantene spice merchant who thought her quick and quiet, every bent silver she picked from the pockets of men too drunk to notice — all of it went beneath the floorboard with the eggs, wrapped in an old stocking, counted and recounted in the dark.

By fourteen she had enough to buy two passages on a trader's galley bound for Qarth. Viserys would not come. Viserys was in Pentos by then, installed in the manse of Magister Illyrio Mopatis, and Aelya had spent six months carefully, delicately, surgically convincing her brother that his twin sisters were a burden he could afford to leave behind for a season while he courted kings.

"You will write," Viserys said, on the morning they left. He did not look at them. He was examining his reflection in a polished shield. "You will write, and you will return when I send for you, and you will remember that you are princesses of the blood, not tavern girls."

"Yes, brother," Aelya said, and kissed his cheek with perfect daughterly sweetness, and did not tell him that she had already forged three letters in his hand which Illyrio would receive over the coming year explaining her continued absence.

Dany watched her do all of this with something like awe.

"You frighten me sometimes," her sister said on the deck of the galley, as Pentos shrank into the haze behind them.

"Only sometimes?"

"Often," Dany admitted, and laughed — a real laugh, the first Aelya had heard from her in a year — and the sea wind took her silver hair and threw it across both their faces.

They were half a year reaching Asshai.

Qarth first, where Aelya made quiet inquiries in three languages and learned the name of a warlock who was said to trade in eggs of the long-dead; then down the jade coast, then across the Saffron Straits, and at last up the black river to the city where the stones drank light.

Asshai was worse than the stories. The river ran sluggish and dark. The buildings were carved of a stone that seemed to eat the sun. Nothing grew. Nothing sang. The people wore veils and did not speak above a whisper, and the market where Aelya had been told to go smelled of old smoke and something sweeter underneath that she did not want to name.

The shadowbinder who sold her the third egg had no face beneath her red lacquered mask, and would take no coin.

"A memory," the shadowbinder said, in a voice like wind through reeds. "One memory, child. Your choosing. I will take it from you and you will never know it was gone."

Aelya thought about this for a long time.

"My mother's face," she said at last. "I never knew her. But I have — dreamed her, sometimes. Take the dreams."

The shadowbinder tilted her masked head. "A cruel trade, for you."

"Yes."

"You are certain?"

"Yes."

The shadowbinder reached out one gloved finger and touched Aelya's forehead, and something small and silver and warm went out of her — a face she had never quite seen, a voice singing a lullaby in High Valyrian, a hand smoothing her hair — and was gone. Aelya did not weep. She had decided not to, in advance.

The egg the shadowbinder pressed into her hands was black as wet ink, shot through with veins of deep blood-red, and it was cold. Not the warm waiting of the other two. A patient, watchful cold, like a held breath in winter.

"This one will not love you easily," the shadowbinder said. "This one remembers older fires. Be careful, child of the dragon. Be very careful."

Aelya wrapped the black egg in silk and did not speak until they were on the ship home.

She showed the third egg to Dany in their cabin by candlelight, and Dany cried — not from sorrow, Aelya thought, but from the weight of the thing becoming real.

"Three," Dany whispered. Her fingers hovered over the black shell. "Three dragons, Aelya. Three."

"Mine," Aelya said — gently, carefully, because she had thought about how to say this for months. "These three are mine, Dany. For what I have paid for them. For what I will pay still."

Dany looked up, startled.

"But you will have your own," Aelya went on, before her sister's face could fall. "I have dreamed it. Three more eggs, Dany — yours — and I know where one of them sleeps already. A gift, at a wedding that will not happen the way other people mean it to. We will find the others together. Six dragons between us, sister. Six. The world has not seen the like since Aegon."

Dany's breath caught. "Six?"

"Six." Aelya took her sister's hands. "Yours and mine. Sisters' dragons. Do you understand me? Not Viserys's. Not a husband's. Ours."

Daenerys looked at her for a long moment. Then she leaned forward and pressed her lips to Aelya's forehead — a sister's kiss, still, at fourteen — and held there a beat too long.

"Ours," she agreed, against Aelya's skin. "Always ours."

Something turned over, quiet and dangerous, in Aelya's chest. She set it aside. There would be time.

She named them on the voyage home, whispering to the eggs in the dark.

The great green-and-bronze one, heavy as a small boulder and warm as a banked hearth, she called Morghon — death, in High Valyrian

The cream-and-gold, quick and restless under her hand, when she held it — Sōvegon. To fly.

And the black one, cold and watchful and patient: Ēdrugon. To sleep.

Three names. Three eggs. And one year, she judged, until it was time to wake them.