Aelya wrote the letter by candlelight on their third night home.

She wrote it in High Valyrian, in her own hand, and she sealed it with a ring she had taken from her mother's chamber — a three-headed dragon in red wax, the old sigil, the true one. She had thought for a long time about how to pitch it. Illyrio was not a man to be threatened; he was a man to be honored, flattered, invited into a story large enough to swallow him. So she wrote him into the story.

Magister, she wrote.

You will have heard by now that my brother is dead. I will not trouble you with the particulars. Know only that he died as he lived, and that he did not suffer overmuch, and that Daenerys and I are safe upon the island of our birth.

You have served our house for longer than I have been alive. I know what you have spent. I know what you have risked. I know also — for I have dreamed it, Magister, as Daenys the Dreamer dreamed the Doom — that you hold in your manse three eggs of stone, gifts long ago from across the Jade Sea, which you have kept against the day a Targaryen queen should have need of them.

That day has come.

Send them to me at Dragonstone, with men you trust and a captain who can hold his tongue, and I swear to you by salt and smoke and the memory of Old Valyria: when my sister and I come into our own, you shall stand at our right hand. Not as a magister. As a lord of the Seven Kingdoms. Choose the seat. It is yours.

Fire and blood.— Aelya of House Targaryen, First of Her Name

She read it three times. She sealed it. She gave it to Quhoro with a purse of gold and instructions to sail at dawn.

"If he refuses?" the smuggler asked. He was a practical man.

"He will not refuse."

"If he does."

Aelya smiled at him. "Then come home, Quhoro, and we shall try something less polite."

She began searching the Dragonmont the next morning.

She had told Dany only that she was exploring the castle — which was true, as far as it went — and had taken a lantern and a length of chalk and the old castellan's promise that no one would disturb her. The castle had passages. Everyone knew the castle had passages. The problem was that the castle had too many passages, that the dragonlords had built for three centuries and each generation had added its own tunnels and chambers and sealed doors, and the maps in the library were incomplete and contradictory and in at least one case, Aelya was fairly sure, deliberately wrong.

She searched for six days.

She found: a chamber full of rotted tapestries. A chamber full of rotted furniture. A chamber full of bats, which screamed at her and which she screamed back at before retreating with as much dignity as she could manage. A chamber containing a single skeleton in rusted armor, sitting very politely in a chair, which she did not investigate further. A chamber containing what she was almost sure had once been a privy.

She did not find an egg.

On the sixth evening she climbed back up to the tower room covered in cobwebs and soot and sat down on the edge of the bed and put her head in her hands.

"No luck?" Dany said, from the window seat.

"No luck."

Dany came and sat beside her and began, gently, to pick cobwebs out of her hair.

"Perhaps your dream was wrong," she said.

"My dreams are not wrong."

"Perhaps this once."

"Dany."

"Perhaps," Dany said, still picking, "you could rest for one evening and eat something and not crawl around under the mountain for a few hours, and the egg will still be there tomorrow, and I will not have to worry that my sister is going to fall down a well and leave me alone on this rock with an old maester and a drunk castellan."

Aelya lifted her head. Dany's face was very close. Her sister's fingers were in her hair and her violet eyes were steady and a little amused and a little something else, and Aelya's breath did a small foolish thing in her chest.

"All right," Aelya said, after a beat. "All right. One evening."

"Good."

Dany kept picking cobwebs. She did not move away.

Quhoro returned three weeks later with three eggs in a cedar chest and a letter from Illyrio Mopatis that ran to eleven pages and wept, at several points, actual tears onto the parchment.

Aelya read it in the solar with Dany leaning against her shoulder. Illyrio pledged his fortune, his ships, his spies, his cheesemonger's network across nine Free Cities; he pledged, at some length, his love; he asked, at the end, with the humility of a man who expected to be refused, whether he might be permitted one day to kiss the hands of the queens he had served in shadow for fifteen years.

Dany was crying by the end of it. Quietly, but crying.

"He loved her," she said. "Our mother. Didn't he?"

"I think he did."

"We will let him kiss our hands."

"Yes," Aelya said. "We will."

They opened the chest together.

Three eggs lay in dark velvet: one deep scaled black with scarlet ripples, one green-and-bronze in a different pattern from Aelya's Morghon, one cream and gold. Dany reached out with both hands and did not quite touch them, her breath coming short.

"They're warm," she whispered.

"They're yours," Aelya said. "All three. Your dragons, Dany. The ones I dreamed for you."

Dany touched the black one first. Her fingers lingered, and something in her face shifted.

"This one is Drogon," she said — not asking, but knowing, the way Aelya sometimes knew things. "Isn't he?"

Aelya went very still.

"Yes," she said. "Yes, my love. That is exactly his name."