Dragonstone rose out of the sea like a black tooth, and Aelya wept the moment she saw it.

She had not expected to. She had planned this voyage for years — had chosen the captain, a discreet Braavosi smuggler named Quhoro who asked no questions of girls with silver hair and heavy purses; had chosen the season, late enough that the Stannis Baratheon of her memory had not yet been installed as its lord; had chosen even the hour, dawn, because she wanted Dany to see it in the light. But she had not expected the weeping. The island was a stranger to her and yet something in her bones knew it, and the knowing came up through her throat and out of her eyes before she could stop it.

Dany found her at the rail and did not speak. She simply put her arm around Aelya's waist and leaned her silver head against Aelya's shoulder and watched the black cliffs grow.

"Home," Dany said, after a long while. It was not quite a question.

"Home," Aelya agreed. Her voice was raw. "For a little while. Long enough."

The castle was not empty, but it was close.

A skeleton garrison held it for the crown — two dozen men-at-arms, a castellan who drank, a maester so old he had forgotten which king he served. Aelya had chosen the moment with care. Robert Baratheon, in the Red Keep a thousand miles west, had not yet remembered that Dragonstone existed. Stannis would not be given the seat for another two years. In the meantime the island drowsed, and the smallfolk who worked its terraced fields remembered, still, the silver children who had been born in its highest tower on a night of storm.

Aelya walked up from the harbor in a plain grey cloak with the hood down, and she let her hair catch the morning sun.

The first fisherman who saw her fell to his knees in the road.

"Princess," he whispered, in the old Valyrian way, the word bent around centuries of exile. "Princess, you have come home."

Aelya lifted him up with her own hands. Dany, behind her, was already weeping.

"Tell no one," Aelya said. "Not yet. Soon. But not yet."

By the time they reached the castle gates a crowd had gathered behind them, silent, wondering, some of the women with their aprons pressed to their mouths. The castellan came out onto the walls half-dressed and saw them, and saw the people, and understood in an instant what was happening and what was about to happen. He was a Velaryon by-blow, Aelya had been told, and his loyalty had been bought a year ago through a series of letters that had cost her a great deal of money and a greater deal of patience.

He knelt. The gates opened. The garrison knelt.

It was, Aelya thought distantly, almost embarrassingly easy. She had been rehearsing speeches for a week.

They slept that night in the chamber where their mother had died.

Dany had wanted to. Aelya had not argued. The tower room was cold and smelled of salt and the sea wind came in through the arrow-slits, and the bed was fresh-linened by weeping servants who had not been allowed to attend a Targaryen birth in fifteen years and were determined, now, to attend a Targaryen homecoming.

Aelya lay in the dark with her sister's head on her shoulder and listened to Dany's breathing, and did not sleep.

She was thinking about the fourth egg.

She knew — she remembered, from the stories of her other life — that Dragonstone was riddled with passages, and that one of those passages led down beneath the Dragonmont to a chamber where the old dragonlords had kept things they did not want their cousins to find. She did not know exactly where. She knew only that it existed, that Stannis Baratheon's daughter Shireen would one day hear a story about it from an old maester, and that the old maester had heard it from his predecessor, and that the predecessor had been a Targaryen loyalist who had hidden things there during the Dance.

She had three eggs already. She had promised Dany three more.

She had time.

"Aelya," Dany said in the dark, not asleep after all.

"Mm."

"When we wake them. The dragons."

"Yes."

"How will we do it?"

Aelya had thought about this, too.

"Fire," she said. "And blood. And a thing given up. That is how the old spells worked. Something of yours, burned with the eggs, while you stand in the flame and do not burn. It has to be yours, Dany. Something that matters."

Dany was quiet for a long time.

"Will we burn?" she asked finally. Her voice was very small.

"No." Aelya turned her head and pressed her lips, very softly, to her sister's brow. "We are the blood of the dragon, Dany. Fire cannot kill us. I have dreamed it. I have seen it. You and I, standing in the pyre, and the dragons coming out of the shell to us. Both of us. Together."

"Together," Dany echoed.

Her hand found Aelya's under the furs and laced their fingers tight.

"Aelya," she said, after a moment. Her voice had changed, gone quieter, gone somewhere Aelya did not quite know how to follow. "When we are older. When we are — grown. Will you — "

She stopped.

"Will I what?" Aelya asked. Gently. Not pushing. Her heart had begun, very quietly, to pound.

"Nothing," Dany whispered. "Nothing. Ask me again in three years."

She turned her face into Aelya's shoulder and did not speak again.

Aelya lay awake for a long time after, staring at the ceiling of the chamber where their mother had died, and she thought: Three years. Three years until we are eighteen. Three years until she asks me again.

Gods help me. I will be ready.

Outside, the sea threw itself against the black cliffs of Dragonstone, and far below the castle, in a chamber no one had entered in a hundred years, a fourth egg slept in the dark and waited to be found.