— Sansa —

The knock on her door came at the third hour past midnight.

She was awake. She had been awake since Megga had slipped in earlier with no letter — only a whispered he is asking for you, my lady, and Margaery is at a feast and cannot get to him, and Senelle is making excuses, and we do not know how long, hold on, hold on, hold on — and Megga had gone and Sansa had sat on the edge of her bed in her plain grey gown with her hands folded in her lap and her shoulders very straight, and she had practised, in her head, every possible thing she might say to Joffrey if he sent for her, and every possible thing she might do, and how she might do it without screaming.

She was not afraid. Not exactly. Not anymore. She had run out of fear at some point in the past year; what was left was a kind of cold attentive readiness, the readiness of an animal that had learned, the hard way, what every sound in its forest meant.

The knock was not a guard's knock. The guards knocked twice, hard and impatient. This was three soft taps. Then a pause. Then three soft taps.

Sansa rose. She crossed to the door. She did not unlock it.

"Who is there?"

"Lady Sansa. It is Megga. Open. Quickly."

She unlocked it. Megga was in the corridor with her hood up and a cloak thrown over her nightdress, and behind her, looming in the dim torchlight, was a figure Sansa did not at first recognise — a man in plain dark travelling leathers with a hood drawn well forward, and beside him a smaller figure in the same kind of dark cloak, and behind them —

Behind them was a third person who was simply light.

Or so it seemed for half a heartbeat, because the lantern Megga was holding caught the third figure's hair under the hood and the hair was silver, not white, not pale-blonde, but the true Targaryen silver Sansa had read about in songs and had never in her life seen, and the figure pushed back her hood the rest of the way and Sansa was looking at a young woman of perhaps twenty with grey-violet eyes and a face that was familiar in the way certain coins were familiar, the way the carved face of a king on a copper was familiar — she had seen this face on a coin once, on a bent old half-groat her father had brought back from the Crownlands when she was small, the coin had been Aegon V's and the face on it had had something of this same shape — and the young woman put her gloved finger to her lips, briefly, and then said in a low careful voice that was somehow already kind:

"Lady Sansa Stark. I am Aelya Targaryen. We have come for you. Do not scream. Pack only what you can carry in two hands. We have eight minutes."

Sansa did not scream.

Sansa did a thing she had not done in fourteen months, which was to react instantly to good news without hesitation. She turned, walked to her wardrobe, took out the small leather satchel she had been keeping packed in there for six moons against a hope she had not let herself name, and slung it over her shoulder. She took her father's old direwolf cloak-pin off the chain around her neck where she had been wearing it under her gowns in defiance of a year's worth of Cersei telling her not to. She put it on her cloak in plain sight. She picked up the cloak. She turned back.

"I am ready," she said.

Aelya Targaryen, in the corridor, looked at the cloak-pin and at Sansa's face and at the careful straight set of Sansa's shoulders, and a small thing happened in the silver woman's expression — a kind of soft surprised recognition, the look of a person who had been expecting to find a frightened girl and had found, instead, Eddard Stark's daughter — and Aelya inclined her head, very slightly, the way one warrior inclined their head to another.

"Come, my lady. Quickly. Megga, where is the king."

"Asleep. They put dreamwine in his wine an hour ago. Senelle and I. He will not wake before dawn."

"Good. Where is Cersei."

"In her solar with Margaery. They are — they are waiting, Your Grace. They told me to bring you."

"Bring us, then."

The smaller figure beside Aelya pushed her hood back, and Sansa's breath caught for the second time in a minute, because this woman had silver hair too, and a face so like Aelya's it took Sansa a beat to register that they were not the same person, and the woman gave her a smile so warm and unguarded that Sansa felt, foolishly, as though she had been hugged.

"I am Daenerys," the second silver woman said. "Sansa, my dear. Your father was the only honourable man in the realm and we are going to put his children back in his hall. Come on. We have to walk fast."

They walked fast.

— The corridor —

The man in the dark travelling leathers — the third figure, the one who had not yet pushed back his hood — fell in behind them, and Sansa, glancing back, registered that he was very tall and very pale-skinned and that he had a longsword at his hip and a hand on the pommel of it in the easy unconscious way of a man who had been carrying a sword for a long time. He said nothing. He was, she understood after a moment, guarding her — them — the queens, all of them — and he was doing it with the quiet professional competence of a man who knew the corridors of the Red Keep better than the men who were currently nominally responsible for them.

Behind him, in the deeper dark of the corridor, Sansa thought she saw two more figures. She could not see their faces. They wore Unsullied bronze caps. They carried short spears.

The Targaryens had walked into the Red Keep.

They had walked into the Red Keep with eight hundred soldiers somewhere in the city and three or four dragons somewhere in the sky and they had walked into the castle with Margaery and Cersei holding the inside, and Sansa was being escorted out of her own tower in eight minutes and no one was going to scream.

She thought — distantly, with a kind of giddy dazzle — Father, are you watching this. Father, I think you would have been pleased.

They reached the small servants' door at the end of the corridor. Megga unlocked it. They went down the narrow turning stair — Sansa's slippers were soft on the stones; she had practised, in her tower, what kinds of shoes made what kinds of noise, and she was wearing the right ones for tonight without having known she was — and at the bottom Senelle met them with another lantern, and Senelle's face was white but composed, and Senelle nodded once at Aelya and led them through a kitchen passage and out a servant's gate into the lower yard of the keep.

There was no guard at the gate.

There was no guard at the gate. Sansa, who had been in this castle for fourteen months, knew there was always a guard at the gate.

"How — "

"Margaery," Aelya murmured, beside her, without turning. "Margaery did this part. Three of the four guards on this gate are Tyrell men her father sent up moons ago for exactly this hour. The fourth was bribed last week. We have arranged the inside of the keep with her for six weeks, Lady Sansa. Tonight is — tonight is just the execution. Do not be afraid. Walk. Do not run. Look like a maidservant on an errand. Yes?"

"Yes, Your Grace."

They walked out of the Red Keep through a servant's gate at the third hour past midnight, Sansa in her plain grey gown and her father's pin and the satchel over her shoulder, with Daenerys Targaryen on her right and Aelya Targaryen on her left and a quiet white-cloaked old knight behind them, and they did not run. They walked the way maidservants walked. Through the lower yard, through the small postern that gave on the steep path down toward the river, and at the bottom of the path, in a small dark cove under the cliffs of the keep, four longboats were waiting in the shadows of the stone with Unsullied at the oars and small shielded lanterns hooded against the moon.

Sansa did not weep until they were in the longboat. Then she did, quietly, with her face turned into Daenerys Targaryen's shoulder, and Daenerys held her — a stranger of three minutes' acquaintance who already felt, somehow, like family — and Aelya, in the bow, was already speaking softly with Ser Barristan about what came next, and the longboats pulled out into the Blackwater, and the Red Keep above them on its hill receded into the dark.

— Cersei —

She watched them go from the high window of her solar, with Margaery at her elbow.

She did not let herself feel very much. She had been not letting herself feel things for a moon now and she had got good at it. She watched the small lanterns on the water move out from the cove and merge with the dark of the bay, and she counted the seconds until they were out of bowshot, and she kept counting until the soft mass of small lights that was the Targaryen flotilla offshore came up to receive them, and she did not let herself breathe out until the longboats had vanished into the larger shape of the Balerion's Shadow.

Then she did breathe out.

Margaery, beside her, said quietly: "Goodmother. That went well."

"It went well."

"They will land troops at first light."

"They will."

"You are still going to have to receive them."

"I am going to have to receive them."

"You can do this."

"I know I can do this, child. I have been receiving people I despise for thirty-three years. The Targaryen will be a small upgrade."

Margaery laughed.

It was a small startled laugh, the laugh of a young woman who had not expected an old woman to make her laugh tonight, and Cersei — who had not made anyone laugh in moons — found, despite herself, that it was a very small comfort.

"Goodmother."

"Yes."

"Joffrey will sleep until dawn."

"Yes."

"In the morning we are going to have to tell him."

"Yes."

"Have you thought about how."

"I have thought about how. I am going to tell him myself. Alone. I am his mother. I will tell him that the Targaryens have come, and that the realm has decided, and that he is no longer king, and that his life depends on his cooperation in the next twelve hours."

"Goodmother — he will scream."

"Yes."

"He may try to —"

"Yes. I know. I have arranged for the things in his chamber to be removed in advance. There are no daggers in his solar. There is nothing sharp. I have replaced his wine-cup with a wooden one. I will tell him with my hands empty. He will scream. He will throw what he can throw. He will perhaps strike me. I have been struck before. I will tell him, when he is exhausted, that his sister and brother live and that this is the price of their lives, and he will understand, perhaps, and if he does not, then I will sit with him until the queens come for him, and I will hold his hand in front of them, and he will know — he will know — that his mother did not abandon him. That is what I can do. That is the only thing I can still do for him."

Margaery did not answer at once.

Then she said, very quietly: "Goodmother. He may hurt you. Badly."

"I know."

"I will be in the corridor."

"I know, child."

"With four guards."

"I know."

"And Ser Loras."

"Margaery."

"What."

"Thank you."

It was, Cersei thought distantly, the first time in her life she had said thank you to a Tyrell. She had thought she would feel small for saying it. She did not feel small. She felt — strangely — something like relieved.

She reached out, in a gesture that surprised her even as she made it, and put her hand briefly over Margaery's on the windowsill.

"Goodaughter," she said. "When the queens come tomorrow. They will receive you first. Margaery. Tell them — tell the silver one, the older one — tell her that the bargain held. Tell her. I want her to know it from you."

"I will, goodmother."

"Good."

Cersei withdrew her hand. She turned from the window. She drained the last of her wine.

"Now go to bed, child. Tomorrow is going to be a long day."

Margaery rose. She paused at the door. She turned back.

"Goodmother."

"Yes."

"For what it is worth. You did the right thing tonight."

Cersei looked at her for a long moment.

Then, very dryly, she said: "I am aware, child. I do not always do the wrong thing. I have just been on a streak."

Margaery laughed again — properly this time — and went out.

Cersei Lannister stood alone in her solar in the high tower of a keep that was no longer hers, and she watched the dawn begin to come up over the Blackwater bay, and she waited.

— Aelya —

The Balerion's Shadow came into the harbour of King's Landing at noon on a cold bright day, with the dragon banner flying from her foremast and six dragons in formation overhead and eight hundred Unsullied debarking in good order at the docks below the Mud Gate, and the city — to its great credit, to the great credit of Margaery Tyrell and Cersei Lannister and the careful invisible work of moons — did not riot.

The bakers had been quietly told the day before to expect a peaceful transition and to keep the bread coming. The City Watch had been quietly told to stand down. The septons had been quietly told to ring the noon bells as for a coronation, not a sack. The smallfolk in Flea Bottom turned out along the streets to watch the queens ride up to the Red Keep, and they did not, in the main, throw anything; they stood and they stared, and a few of the older women, who remembered Rhaella, wept; and a great many of the children pointed at the dragons in the sky and shouted, and several of the bolder ones — Aelya saw one in particular, a thin boy of perhaps nine in a too-large tunic — shouted the silver queen, the silver queen in voices that suggested they had been rehearsing all morning.

Aelya, riding beside her sister on a white mare Doran had sent up from Dorne for exactly this purpose, with Jon on a black charger behind her and Tyrion on his pony beside Jon and Ser Barristan in his white cloak at her stirrup, smiled at the boy.

The boy went still in the way of a small child who had been smiled at by a queen.

She tossed him a copper. He caught it.

"Aelya," Dany murmured, beside her.

"Yes."

"You are doing it."

"Doing what."

"The thing I do."

"I am borrowing."

"Steal as much as you like, my love. It looks very well on you."

Sansa Stark, riding behind them on a quiet brown palfrey beside Khorane Sathmantes — Sansa had insisted, after a hot bath and a hot meal and three hours of sleep aboard the Balerion's Shadow, on entering King's Landing not as a hidden rescued thing in a longboat but as a Stark in a saddle, with her father's pin on her cloak and her hair plaited Northern-style — heard Dany's murmur and laughed, very softly. It was the first laugh Aelya had heard from her, and it was a small good sound, the laugh of a young woman who had begun, in the past nine hours, to remember she was allowed to.

The procession reached the steps of the Red Keep.

Cersei Lannister, in plain dark grey, with her hair simply braided, with no crown and no jewels and only her household around her, stood at the top of the steps.

Beside her stood Margaery Tyrell, in pale gold.

Behind them, on the broad terrace, the lords of the Crownlands and the Reach who had come into the city in advance of the Targaryen landing — and there had been many; they had been gathering for moons — stood ranged in their houses' colors, every banner properly raised, every face composed.

Aelya dismounted. Dany dismounted with her. They walked up the steps together — sister and sister, sun and shadow — and they stopped in front of Cersei Lannister, and Cersei, who had spent her whole life refusing to bend, bent, properly, into a low curtsey, with her grey skirts fanned around her, and Margaery beside her went down deeper still, in the full court formal that was almost a kneel.

"Your Graces," Cersei said. "King's Landing is yours."

Aelya looked at her for a long moment.

Then she did a thing she had been thinking about for moons — the right gesture, here, in this exact second, was going to set the tone for her sister's entire reign — and she stepped forward, took Cersei's hands, and raised her up.

"Lady Cersei," she said, in a voice pitched to carry to the lords on the terrace and to the smallfolk in the lower yard and to every raven in the rookery that would be carrying the news of this moment to every corner of the realm by nightfall. "You have given us the city peacefully. You have given us the keep peacefully. You have given us the realm. House Lannister has paid in full, and House Targaryen does not require further payment. Rise. Stand with us. The terms your father offered will be honored, and more than honored. Welcome your queen."

Cersei Lannister, who had not in living memory been visibly moved by anything, stood with the new queen of the Seven Kingdoms holding her hands at the top of the Red Keep steps, and her green eyes filled — once, briefly — and then she mastered it, and she turned to Daenerys Targaryen, and she sank into the deep formal curtsey again, and she said:

"Your Grace. Long may you reign."

Daenerys reached down and raised her up too.

"Long may we all reign, Lady Cersei," Dany said. "The realm has had enough of falling. Come inside. We have a great deal to do."

The lords on the terrace, who had been ready for a sack, who had been ready for executions, who had been ready for the new queens to be cold and triumphant and frightening — the lords saw, instead, two silver women raising a Lannister widow up by the hands at the top of the steps of the Red Keep, in front of every banner of the realm, and they understood, all at once, in a single collective intake of breath, what kind of reign they were being asked to swear to.

It was not the reign they had expected.

It was — by all signs — going to be considerably better.

The Tyrell banner dipped in salute.

The Crownlands banners followed, one by one, in a long careful ripple around the terrace, and the smallfolk in the lower yard, who had been waiting for a sign, took the dipping banners as their permission and began, ragged at first and then in a long building wave, to cheer.

Aelya took Dany's hand.

They walked into the Red Keep together.