— Aelya —

The coronation was held on the eleventh day after the bloodless taking of the city, in the Great Sept of Baelor, and Aelya — who had spent fifteen years preparing for war, who had walked into a wildling king's tent with her sword in her hand, who had stood on a Wall while the dead came out of the trees — was, on the morning of her sister's crowning, terrified.

She had not expected this. She had expected to be calm. She had expected to be the steady one — sun and shadow, as she had told Dany in Meereen on a high terrace a lifetime ago, you are the warm one and I am the cold one — and she had expected to walk her sister down the long marble aisle of the Great Sept with a face that gave the realm exactly the impression she wanted to give it.

Instead she was sitting in the small antechamber off the High Septon's vestry, in a deep red gown with a black-and-red tracery of dragons stitched along the hem by Reach seamstresses who had been working for nine days without sleep, with her hands folded too tight in her lap, and Missandei was laying a small silver chain across her brow that was almost a coronet but, by deliberate choice, not quite — Aelya was being crowned today as Princess of Dragonstone and as queen-consort, not as queen-regnant, and the silver chain was not a crown but the band of a princess of the blood, and it had been the agreed compromise after a very long argument with Dany about whose head got what — and Missandei was working with the careful unhurried hands of a woman who had braided her queen's hair every morning for three years and knew, without needing to ask, that Aelya was not all right.

"Your Grace."

"Missandei."

"Your hands."

"I know."

"Unfold them."

Aelya unfolded them. Missandei picked up Aelya's right hand, and turned it over, and pressed her thumb gently into the meat of Aelya's palm where the muscle had gone hard from clenching, and held it there.

"You are afraid," Missandei said, with the soft surprise of a woman who had expected many emotions today and had not expected this one. "Your Grace. Why are you afraid."

"I do not know."

"Yes you do."

Aelya closed her eyes.

"I have spent fifteen years getting her to this morning," she said. "Fifteen years, Missandei. She does not know it has been fifteen years. She thinks it has been since we were old enough to plan together. It has been since we were four. I have been moving toward this hour for as long as I have been able to move, and it is now — now, it is in the next hour — and I am afraid that I am going to walk her down the aisle and she is going to put on the crown and the High Septon is going to anoint her and I am going to suddenly not be necessary anymore. That is what I am afraid of. I am being silly. I know I am being silly. I am asking you not to tell her I said it, because she will be cross with me for being silly, and I do not want her to be cross with me on her coronation day."

Missandei did not answer at once.

Then she set Aelya's hand down very gently in her lap, and she took the other one, and she pressed her thumb into the other palm, and she said:

"Your Grace. Aelya. Look at me."

Aelya looked at her.

"Her Other Grace told me, three nights ago, that she does not know how to be queen without you. Those were her exact words. She said: Missandei, I have a coronation in eleven days, and I am terrified, and I have been terrified for a moon, and the only reason I am still walking around the keep being charming to the Crownlands lords is that my sister is across the hall from me writing letters, and as long as my sister is across the hall I can do this. I cannot do this without her. Please tell her so when the morning comes, because I will be too distracted to remember to. Those were her words, Your Grace. She told me to tell you on the morning. I am telling you now."

Aelya did not speak.

"You are not going to be unnecessary," Missandei went on, gently. "You are going to be the ground under her. As you have always been. She is going to put on the crown today, and she is going to walk out of the sept and onto the steps and the city is going to roar for her, and she is going to lift one hand to the city and the other hand will, with no ceremony at all, find yours. Because that is how she stands up. That is the queen the realm is getting. Two of you. They have been told this. They know. Rise, Your Grace. We must go."

Aelya rose.

The silver chain on her brow caught the morning light. Missandei tugged the dragon-traced hem of her gown straight, stepped back, and looked her up and down once with the assessment of a woman who had dressed a great many queens in her time — even though, in fact, she had only ever dressed two, and they were sisters.

"You are beautiful, Your Grace."

"Thank you, Missandei."

"Now go and walk her down."

— Daenerys —

She had not slept.

She had told Aelya she had slept, when Aelya had come into their chamber at first light and asked. She had lied. She had not slept since dinner the night before, when she had eaten three spoonfuls of soup and then gently set the spoon down, and Aelya had not pressed her, and Missandei had taken the soup away, and Dany had spent the night sitting on the window seat of their chamber in her shift with her arms wrapped around her knees, watching the sky over the Blackwater go from dark to grey to the soft pink of dawn.

She had thought about her mother for most of it.

She had thought about Rhaella Targaryen, whom she had never known, who had died in a tower of Dragonstone in a storm at the very end of a dynasty, with her husband already dead and her oldest son already dead and the realm she had been queen of already in flames, and who had given birth to two daughters in her last hour and named one of them Daenerys for her aunt and had not lived long enough to name the second, so that the second had been named by Willem Darry on a galley to Braavos two days later because the babes could not go on being called the elder and the younger. She had thought about how her mother had not, ever, sat on the Iron Throne; how her mother had been queen for sixteen years and had spent all of those years in her husband's shadow watching that husband become a thing none of them had been able to save him from. She had thought about how she — Daenerys — was about to put on a crown her mother had never worn, and had thought that if there was any sort of a god watching, the god might let her mother see this, somehow, just for the morning.

She had thought about Viserys, who had been a small bright clever child in Braavos, before the years had hollowed him out, and who had died at Aelya's hand for being something he had become rather than something he had been, and she had thought that if she could speak to him today she would say: brother, the throne is going to a Targaryen woman after all. I am sorry it could not be you. We did love you, when we were small. I am sorry.

She had thought about Aelya.

Mostly, in the long grey hour before dawn, she had thought about Aelya.

She had thought about the small dark-eyed girl at four with the planning written already in her face. The thirteen-year-old in a Volantene attic showing her two warm eggs by candlelight. The fifteen-year-old in a Pentoshi garden saying we leave tonight and her brother's blood already washed off her hands. The eighteen-year-old on a high terrace in Meereen on the night they had finally, finally been each other's. The nineteen-year-old climbing off a ship at Dragonstone twelve months thinner and twelve months harder, and the way Aelya had pressed her face into the inside of Dany's forearm in the bath like a child at the end of a very long day.

She had thought, I am putting on a crown today, and the crown is for me, but it is not for me. The crown is for her. She gave fifteen years of her life to this morning. The least I can do is wear it well.

She had thought, I am going to wear it well.

The door of her dressing-chamber opened.

Aelya stood in the doorway in her red gown with the silver chain on her brow, and Dany, who had been steady for an hour, who had been fine for an hour, who had been already crowned in her head for an hour, looked up and saw her sister and lost it entirely for one full second, and her face did something she had no control over, and Aelya — who had walked across the room without speaking — caught her by both shoulders and held her firmly, and said in a low fierce voice:

"No, my love. No. We are not crying yet. We are doing the long walk first. We are crying later. Look at me."

Dany looked.

"You are the queen of the Seven Kingdoms," Aelya said, "the moment I open that door. I am going to walk in front of you for the first three paces and then I am going to step aside, and you are going to walk the rest of the aisle alone. The realm is going to see you alone. That is my one gift to you today, sun. The aisle. They are going to see you walk it by yourself. And then at the altar, when the High Septon is done, I will be at your right hand, and the crown will be on your head, and we will walk out together. Yes?"

"Yes."

"Yes what."

"Yes, my love."

"Good." Aelya kissed her, once, briefly, on the forehead. "Breathe. The sept smells of incense. Your gown is very fine. Try not to step on the train. Missandei has told me to tell you that it is unequivocally too long and that she fought for shorter and lost. She wishes that to be on the record."

Dany laughed.

It was a small wrecked laugh, the laugh of a woman who had been holding a wire taut for an hour and had just been allowed to let it slack a quarter-inch, and she pressed her forehead against Aelya's, and Aelya closed her eyes, and they breathed together for one slow beat.

Then Aelya stepped back.

"Come, Your Grace," she said. "The realm is waiting."

Dany lifted her chin. She gathered the train of her white gown — which was too long, Missandei was right, the seamstresses had fought it — over her arm. She walked to the door.

She looked, once, back over her shoulder at her sister, and she said, very quietly, in High Valyrian:

"Sun and shadow."

"Sun and shadow, my love."

The door opened.

— The aisle —

The Great Sept of Baelor was full.

Every lord of the realm who could reach King's Landing in time had reached King's Landing in time, and those who could not had sent their heirs. The Tyrells held the front pew on the right with Mace Tyrell standing as solid and bewildered as a bullock at his daughter's elbow, and Olenna Tyrell beside him, and Margaery beside her, and Margaery had — Aelya had noted it with private delight on entry — done her hair in the simple Reach style she had worn on the day Dany had come up to Old Oak's gate two years ago, a small private signal that only Dany and Aelya and Olenna would catch. The Lannisters were across the aisle, in a smaller delegation: Cersei in plain dark blue, Tommen and Myrcella beside her, Tyrion in good black at the end of the row, Kevan Lannister behind them. Tywin himself had not come. Tywin had sent a sealed scroll of fealty by raven from the Rock, which would be presented at court tomorrow. He had also sent, Aelya had been told, a small private note for Daenerys alone, which Tyrion had handed her at dinner three nights ago and which Dany had read in their bedroom and then folded and put in the leather wallet at her chest where she kept the letters that mattered. Aelya had not asked what was in it. Dany had said only, that night with her cheek against Aelya's shoulder: it is not what I thought it would be, my love. It is — kinder. He is a strange man at the end of his life. I am glad we did not take his head.

The Martells had the second row on the right, in their orange and red — Doran in his wheeled chair, with a scarlet rug across his knees, and Arianne behind him, and the Sand Snakes ranged behind Arianne, and Daemon Sand standing very proper at the end of the pew. The Stormlands lords were behind them. The Crownlands behind them. The Riverlands — what was left of them — behind those, with old Brynden Tully standing as the senior surviving Tully and looking, Aelya thought, twenty years younger than he had four moons ago. The Vale delegation, smaller than it should have been: Yohn Royce had come, and one or two others, but Lysa Arryn had not, and the matter of the Vale was, by Aelya's own private ledger, the next problem to be solved after this morning. She would solve it within the moon.

The North was in the third row on the left, a small delegation: Maege Mormont and her daughters, and the survivors of the Greatjon's cousins, and Wyman Manderly all but bursting his doublet, and three minor northern lords she did not yet know by name. Behind them stood Howland Reed, who had come down from Greywater Watch on Aelya's invitation, in a plain wool doublet with no sigil because the crannogmen did not believe in sigils, and he was, Aelya noted, looking at Jon Snow — who was standing across the aisle in his place at the head of the queens' personal household, in a black doublet with no Stark grey on it because the grey had not yet been given to him — with a look on his small wrinkled face that was so naked and so old and so full of love and grief that Aelya had to look away after a moment because her own composure would not hold against it.

Howland Reed knew. Of course Howland Reed knew. Aelya had not told him in the letter; she had said only come south for the coronation, my lord, there is a man at this court who needs to meet you, and I think you have been waiting for him. Howland had read the letter, evidently, with the eye of a man who had been waiting for a specific instruction for seventeen years, and had come.

The reveal would happen tomorrow. Privately. In Aelya's solar, with Jon and Howland and Aelya and Dany. She had decided this a moon ago. It was not a thing for a sept full of lords. It was a thing for a small room with four people in it and a door that locked.

The trumpets sounded.

The doors of the sept opened.

Aelya stepped through first, in her red. She walked the first three paces. She stepped aside.

Daenerys Targaryen, in white trimmed with gold, with her silver hair unbound, with a thin gold-and-ruby chain across her brow that was not yet the crown, walked the long marble aisle of the Great Sept of Baelor alone.

The realm watched her.

The realm — every Crownlands lord and Reach lord and Stormlands lord and Dornish prince and Northern matriarch and Riverlands knight and Vale traditionalist and Lannister widow and Tyrell heir — watched a young woman walk down a marble aisle with her head up and her shoulders back and her face calm and her grey eyes on the High Septon at the altar, and the realm understood, in the slow collective intake of breath that ran through the sept as she passed, that they had been wrong. They had been wrong about who had been coming. They had been told silver girls and dragons and exiled madmen and fire and blood, and what they had been sent was a young woman with kind hands who had walked into the Reach with smiles and walked out of it with the Reach, and who was walking, this morning, very simply and without ornament, toward a crown her mother had never worn.

Olenna Tyrell, in the front pew, was weeping silently. Aelya saw her in passing. Aelya filed it.

Cersei Lannister was not weeping. Cersei was watching with the careful empty eyes of a woman who had decided, a moon ago, that watching this morning was a thing she would do without flinching, and was doing it.

Sansa Stark, two rows behind the Lannisters, in pale Stark grey at last, with her father's pin on her cloak and her hair loose like a Northern lady, was holding Margaery Tyrell's hand on her left and Howland Reed's hand on her right — they had reached for hers, both of them, as Dany had passed — and she was weeping, quietly, the steady patient weeping of a young woman who had been waiting for this morning for fourteen months and had decided the weeping was allowed.

Jon Snow, across the aisle, had Ghost at his hip — the High Septon had refused, twice, to permit a direwolf in his sept, and had been overruled by Aelya, twice, with the small dry smile she had been perfecting for septons — and Jon's face was very still, but his eyes followed his aunt down the aisle with the intent careful attention of a young man who had decided that whatever his own future held, this particular morning was about her.

Dany reached the altar.

She stopped at the foot of the steps. She did not kneel. The agreement had been negotiated for a fortnight; she would not kneel to a septon, because Targaryens did not kneel to septons, but she would bow her head, which was Aelya's compromise, and the High Septon had taken it with the careful grace of a man who had spent the previous moon wondering whether the new queens were going to send him to a small island and was now relieved to be sending only his pride to one.

She bowed her head.

The High Septon spoke the old words. The seven oils were brought. He anointed her — forehead, eyes, lips, breast, hands, feet, the spaces between — and at each anointing the choir of the sept lifted its small clean voice in a different note, and the notes gathered, and rose, and filled the great vault overhead, and somewhere outside the sept, far above the city, six dragons were heard — heard, by the entire congregation, by the ten thousand smallfolk waiting in the square below, by every man in the City Watch on every wall — to begin to sing.

Aelya had not known the dragons would do this. She had not arranged it. She would never know whether they had felt, in the wordless way they felt things, the change going through the sept; whether they had heard the choir; whether something in their blood had risen in answer to something in their riders' blood. She would never know, but the chronicles would record it: and at the moment of the anointing, the six dragons of Targaryen above the city sang together, in six different voices, and the song lasted as long as the anointing, and ceased when it ceased, and the smallfolk below took it as a sign, and the lords inside the sept took it as a sign, and the song was discussed for a hundred years afterward in songs of its own.

The crown was brought.

It was a circle of red gold set with three small black-pearled dragons, the work of a Lyseni master who had been paid an obscene amount of money to deliver it in nine days. The High Septon did not place it on her head; he handed it, instead, to her sister, by prior arrangement.

Aelya took the crown.

She stepped behind Dany. She lifted the crown over her sister's silver head. She paused for one beat, because she had told herself she would, because she had decided in advance that she would let herself feel this one moment.

Then she set the crown on Daenerys Targaryen's brow.

"Long live the queen," she said, in her own voice, in High Valyrian, clearly enough to carry to the front pews. "Issa ñuha tepan. Issa ñuha sēter. Issa ñuhus dāerves zaldrīzes."

She is my gift. She is my making. She is my freed dragon.

The High Septon raised his hands and cried out the proclamation in the Common Tongue:

"Hail Daenerys of the House Targaryen, the First of Her Name, Queen of the Andals and the Rhoynar and the First Men, Lady of the Seven Kingdoms and Protector of the Realm!"

The sept roared.

It was not a polite court roar. It was a real roar, the roar of three hundred lords and ladies who had been holding their breath for a year, and outside in the square the smallfolk, who had been told by their septons to wait for the bells, did not wait for the bells; they roared back, ten thousand throats, and the dragons overhead — who had finished singing — answered, one by one, in six different voices, and the city of King's Landing, which had eleven days ago been a kettle approaching the boil, instead made a single sound that was, for one sustained ringing moment, joy.

Daenerys Targaryen turned from the altar. Aelya stepped to her right hand. Dany lifted Aelya's hand in hers — without ceremony, in front of every lord of the realm, in plain view, the way any wife lifts her wife's hand in public when she has just been crowned and is about to walk down the aisle — and they walked, together, down the long marble aisle of the Great Sept of Baelor, and out onto the steps, and into the noon sun, and the city of King's Landing roared again at the sight of them, and the bells of the sept — ringing now, late, but ringing — began their long patient peal across the seven hills.

In the front pew, Olenna Tyrell wept on. Cersei Lannister, beside her, did not weep, but she put her hand on Olenna's arm and left it there, and Olenna, who had despised Cersei for thirty years, did not pull away.

In the second row, Doran Martell smiled the small placid smile he reserved for plans that had run their full course.

In the third row, Howland Reed leaned across to Sansa Stark and whispered something Aelya did not hear, and Sansa, through her tears, laughed.

Jon Snow, in the queens' household, watched his two aunts walk out of the sept hand in hand, and Ghost at his hip pressed closer against him, and he thought: yes. Yes, this is how it should have been all along.

The realm had a queen.

The realm had two.