— Aelya —

The dragons, reunited on Dragonstone for the first time in fourteen months, immediately began behaving like a family.

Not, Aelya noted with private amusement, a particularly functional family. More the sort of family one observed at a wedding feast and made notes about over wine afterward.

The reunion happened on the morning of the second day, on the wide flat clifftop terrace east of the Stone Drum that the household had taken to calling, with a kind of resigned dignity, the Dragon Yard. Dany's three had been roosting there for two moons. They had assigned themselves territory. Drogon held the south end, on a great wedge of black volcanic stone that drank the morning sun; Rhaegal held the central platform, where the old dragonkeepers in Aegon's day had supposedly fed the riding-mounts; and Viserion, who was the most social of the three, drifted between the two and spent a great deal of time on the parapet of the Stone Drum itself, watching the harbour and bothering gulls.

Aelya brought her three up at dawn.

Morghon arrived first, because Morghon arrived first whenever food was involved; the household had bribed him up the slope with the understanding that there would be a goat at the top, and Morghon — heaving and grumbling, his enormous green-and-bronze flank brushing the wall on either side of the stair — had, in his slow stately way, mounted the terrace with the air of a senior magistrate arriving at his own retirement banquet. He was now, Aelya estimated, the size of a small barn. Not tall — Morghon was a low broad dragon, built like a cart-horse rather than a stallion — but long, with a tail that could have swept a cottage off its foundations, and wings that, folded, hung down his sides like enormous green cloaks. He had grown more in the past year than the other five combined. The Eastwatch handler had measured him weekly and had eventually stopped measuring because the numbers had stopped fitting on the chart.

He arrived. He saw Drogon, on the south wedge.

He stopped.

Drogon — who was big, by canon standards, but who was perhaps two-thirds Morghon's bulk — rose to his full height on the wedge, flared his black wings, and shrieked.

Morghon sighed.

It was an enormous sigh. It came up out of his chest with a small rumble of smoke, the way a man sighs at the end of a long evening when his nephew has done something tediously predictable, and he turned his great horned head toward Drogon without otherwise moving, and he simply looked at him.

Drogon held the threat-display for perhaps three full seconds.

Then Drogon, very slowly, refolded his wings and lay back down on the wedge of stone, and put his chin on his foreclaws, and pretended he had never been doing anything else.

Aelya, standing at the edge of the terrace beside Dany, tried very hard not to laugh.

Dany was not trying. Dany was laughing into her sleeve.

"He is enormous, Aelya. Morghon is enormous. Why have you not told me how enormous he had got? You sent me reports. The reports did not contain the word enormous. The reports said Morghon continues to grow at an unusual rate. That is a lie, my love, that is understatement, he is the size of a building."

"He is not the size of a building."

"He is the size of a small building."

"Possibly."

Sōvegon and Ēdrugon came up next — Sōvegon flying, in a long graceful arc up from the harbour, and Ēdrugon walking, in his slow careful way, with the dignified gait he had developed over the past year of being Aelya's particular favourite. Sōvegon landed on the central platform beside Rhaegal and immediately began grooming her own wing, ignoring everyone. Ēdrugon mounted the terrace, looked once at Morghon — who, having dealt with Drogon, was now occupying the geometric centre of the terrace as though it had been built for him — and then walked, with great deliberation, around Morghon's tail and laid down at Aelya's feet, where he wrapped his tail twice around the leg of the stone bench Aelya had sat down on, and made it clear that this was his territory and the other five could negotiate the rest of the terrace among themselves.

Viserion, on the parapet, came down with a small interested chirrup and went to investigate Sōvegon, who tolerated him for about a minute before snapping at him in a way that seemed mostly social. Rhaegal raised his head, looked at the new arrivals with a kind of bored intellectual curiosity, and went back to whatever he had been thinking about. Dragons, Aelya had decided over the years, thought about things in the way cats thought about things, which was largely about prey angles and warm surfaces, but Rhaegal was the exception. Rhaegal had a contemplative streak. The Eastwatch handler had told her once that Rhaegal looked at the sea sometimes for hours, and Aelya believed it.

The whole terrace, after about a quarter-hour of small adjustments, settled into a hierarchy.

Morghon: centre, immovable, the unquestioned ranking dragon. Drogon: south wedge, second-ranking, sulking slightly. Ēdrugon: at Aelya's feet, exempt from the terrace politics by virtue of having opted out. Sōvegon: central platform, grooming, indifferent. Viserion: bouncing between Rhaegal and Sōvegon, trying to be everyone's friend. Rhaegal: contemplative.

Six dragons. One terrace. No fighting, no fires, only the occasional small puff of indignant smoke from Drogon, and a satisfied chuff from Morghon that meant yes, this arrangement is correct.

Aelya leaned her shoulder against her sister's.

"That went better than I had feared," she murmured.

"Did you fear it?"

"A little. Six adolescent dragons in one place, my love. It could have gone many ways."

"You were not going to tell me you feared it."

"There was no point. You would have feared it too, and there was nothing to do but bring them all up here and see."

"And Morghon just — settled it."

"Morghon settled it."

"By sighing."

"By sighing. He is the laziest creature in the Seven Kingdoms, Dany, but he is also — gods, I do not know how to put this — he is the boss, and the others know it. Even Drogon. Drogon flared on him for show. Drogon was not actually going to fight him. He just needed to be seen to flare. Then the whole terrace knew the order. It is — extremely tidy, actually."

Dany was quiet a moment, watching them.

"They are going to be terrifying when they are full grown."

"Yes."

"Morghon will be. Like Balerion."

"He will be larger than Balerion."

"Aelya."

"He is on track. By the maesters' books and by what I have seen with my own eyes. He is going to be the largest dragon since the Doom. I do not know why. I do not know if it is something about the egg I bought in Braavos, or about him in particular, or about both. I have stopped trying to understand it. I have started just feeding him."

"Feeding him what?"

"Mostly goats. Occasionally a cow. Once, at Eastwatch, an entire large pig. He ate it and then slept for two days."

"Two days."

"He naps after large meals. He naps anyway. He is a napping dragon."

Dany pressed her face into Aelya's shoulder and laughed properly for the first time that morning, and Morghon — sensing, in his vague benevolent way, that his rider was happy — produced, from across the terrace, a long contented rumble that vibrated through the flagstones and made Ēdrugon, at their feet, twitch one ear in mild disapproval.

— Six weeks at Dragonstone —

The next weeks moved fast.

Aelya had thought, on the voyage south, that they would have one or two moons of rest. They had, in the event, less than one. The realm did not pause for reunions. The realm had been waiting for the silver queens to come back together, and as soon as they were back together, the realm started writing.

Letters came in by the dozen. Lords of the Crownlands who had been waiting to declare. Lords of the Stormlands seeking confirmation of titles. The Tyrells, through Margaery's grandmother, with detailed proposals for the disposition of King's Landing. Tyrion Lannister, from his own quarters within the Dragonstone household — he had been formally received and given a small writing-room and a stipend and a household, exactly as Aelya had advised — with daily updates on the negotiations with his father, which had moved, by raven, into the formal articles stage. Cersei, through Margaery, with carefully worded confirmations of her cooperation. Sansa, through Margaery, with a single short letter Aelya read twice and folded into the leather wallet at her chest where she kept the letters that mattered.

The Watch sent ravens too. Eastwatch was holding. Mance was holding. The free folk in the Gift were settling. Mormont reported one small probe, three weeks past, far west of Eastwatch — a handful of wights testing a watchtower — and the watchtower had held, and the wights had been burned. Not the same kind of probe as the Three Blasts. A small one. The dead were checking, Mormont wrote, and they were not yet ready. He estimated they had until midwinter at the earliest before another major push. Possibly later.

Aelya read that letter and thought: good. Good. We have time to take King's Landing first.

She and Dany worked the days. They worked them together, in the same writing-room, at two desks pushed end-to-end, with Missandei moving between them sorting correspondence and Tyrion arriving twice a day with updates and Khorane managing the household and Ser Barristan running drills with the Unsullied below. Jon worked too — Aelya had quietly given him the task of corresponding with the Watch and the Northern lords who had survived the Red Wedding and were beginning, very cautiously, to write to Dragonstone — and he worked with the quiet focused intensity of a young man who had finally been given a job that mattered, and Ghost lay across his feet under the desk, and he did not go a day, in those weeks, without Dany finding some small reason to come across the room and put a hand on his shoulder or laugh at something he had said.

He cried once more, in the second week. Privately, with Dany, late at night, about something he would not later be able to name. He did not cry again after that. The roar in his chest, he told Aelya much later, did not entirely go away — but it stopped rising.

The dragons, meanwhile, grew.

Aelya had been prepared for this. She had been feeding Morghon for three years and tracking his weight on a chart that she had eventually had to redraw on a longer parchment. But the other five — who had grown more slowly than Morghon — accelerated, on Dragonstone, in the way young creatures sometimes do when they discover space and warmth and each other. They flew daily. They flew together. By the third week they had begun, on their own, to develop a flight order — Morghon at the rear like a flagship, Drogon and Ēdrugon flanking, Sōvegon and Viserion as fast skirmishers, Rhaegal taking the high overwatch. Aelya had not taught them this. They had done it themselves. She watched them from the high terrace one afternoon with Dany and Tyrion and Ser Barristan, and Tyrion — who was quietly turning out to be extremely interesting on the subject of the natural history of dragons, having read every book in his father's library on the topic for reasons of childhood loneliness — said, with an academic's quiet awe:

"Your Graces. There has not been a dragon-flight of six in formation since before the Dance. And those — those formations, in the books, took months of training under riders. Yours are doing it on instinct."

"Yes," Aelya said.

"Do you understand what that means."

"Tell me."

"It means," Tyrion said slowly, "that whoever — whichever Targaryen long ago bred these eggs to hatch in the same week and grow up together, knew exactly what they were doing. The dragons are bonding. As a unit. They are going to fight as a unit. The realm has not seen anything like this in three hundred years. Aegon's three flew together, but they were three, not six. Six is — six is the original Conqueror's number tripled. Your Graces. Forgive me for being a Lannister, but: this is going to be ridiculous in a battle. Whoever you point them at is not going to survive the pointing."

Aelya looked at Dany.

Dany looked at Aelya.

Then Dany, in a small dry voice that Aelya had not heard her use before, said: "Lord Tyrion. We are pointing them at midwinter. That is what we are pointing them at. Everything else is on the way."

Tyrion was silent.

After a moment he said, quietly: "Yes, Your Grace. I — I know. Forgive me. The military application is hard for a mind like mine to set down even when the real application is bigger. I am working on it."

"We all are, my lord."

— Late, on the seventh week —

A raven came in from King's Landing.

It was not from Margaery. It was not from Cersei. It was on plain unstamped parchment in a hand neither queen recognised, and it had been routed through three intermediaries, and it was addressed simply to the Targaryen who reads.

It said:

Your Graces. The boy-king has discovered there is a Stark girl in the keep. He had previously forgotten. He has not forgotten today. I am writing because I am out of moves and because the Tyrell girl is at a feast tonight that she cannot leave. He is asking for the girl to be brought to him. I do not know yet what he intends. I have sent the girl's guards three different excuses to delay, but I have only the one night, and after that he will start to ask why. If you have any way to move now, move. I will hold the city as long as I can. — V.

Aelya read it twice.

Then she stood.

"Dany. Get Drogon. Get Morghon. Get Ser Barristan, get Tyrion, get the Balerion's Shadow under sail in two hours. We are going to King's Landing tonight."

"Aelya — tonight — "

"Tonight. We have run out of clock. Sansa. Now. Move."

Dany did not argue. Dany moved.

The household, which had been preparing for a campaign in three to six weeks, executed the plan in two hours. Ser Barristan got the Unsullied moving. Tyrion got the proclamations drafted in dictation while running between rooms. Missandei got the ravens out — to Doran, to Margaery's grandmother, to Mance at Eastwatch, to Ser Barristan's seconds at Storm's End and the Stormlands — we are moving, immediate, the city falls within the week. Khorane got the ships provisioned. Jon, when Aelya put a hand on his shoulder and told him you are coming with us and you are riding Rhaegal, did not blink. He nodded once, fetched Ghost, and went to find his mail.

By sunset the Balerion's Shadow and four cogs were under sail in the harbour with eight hundred Unsullied and the silver queens and a Lannister and a Stark-Targaryen aboard.

By midnight they were halfway across the bay, and six dragons were flying ahead of them under a hard cold moon, and far to the west, in a chamber high in the Red Keep, Sansa Stark was sitting on the edge of her bed with her hands folded in her lap and her shoulders very straight, and she did not yet know it but the answer to a year of her prayers was, at that moment, sixty miles out and closing at the speed of a dragon's wing.