The raven came from King's Landing in the ninth week.

Aelya had been expecting it — had been, in fact, somewhat surprised it had not come sooner — but the sight of the little black bird wheeling down out of a grey sky toward the rookery still put a cold hand on the back of her neck. She climbed the tower stairs two at a time and took the message from the maester's shaking fingers before he had finished unrolling it.

It was short. It was signed Jon Arryn, Hand of the King, in a careful old man's hand.

To whomever now holds the seat of Dragonstone in the king's name: be advised that His Grace Robert of the House Baratheon, First of His Name, has received troubling intelligence concerning the presence upon the island of persons of interest to the Iron Throne. An envoy shall arrive within the moon's turn to inquire after the health and loyalty of the garrison. You are commanded to receive him with all due courtesy.

Aelya read it twice. Then she went down to the solar and set it in front of Dany without speaking.

Dany read it. Her face did not change, which Aelya noted with a small fierce pride — her sister had stopped being afraid of pieces of paper some time in the past year, and Aelya had not quite registered when.

"How long?" Dany asked.

"A moon. Less. The raven was slow; the ship will be faster."

"Do we run?"

"No."

"Do we fight?"

"No."

"Then what?"

Aelya sat down across from her and took both of Dany's hands in hers.

"We hatch them," she said.

They did it on the beach below the Dragonmont, at the hour before dawn, on a night when the moon was dark.

Aelya had chosen the place with care. It was a black-sand cove sheltered by cliffs on three sides, reachable only by a narrow stair cut into the rock, and at its center rose a natural outcropping of stone that had been used, the old maester swore, by Aegon himself for certain rites no maester had been permitted to record. The tide was low. The wind was down. The sea lay flat and black as obsidian.

They built the pyre together. Driftwood, and pitch, and the old dry timbers of a fishing boat the castellan had sold them for a silver. Aelya laid her three eggs at one end of the pyre and Dany laid her three at the other, and between them Aelya placed the things she had chosen to burn.

Her mother's ring, that she had taken from the tower chamber.

The little knife Willem Darry had given her when she was four.

A lock of her own silver hair, cut at the roots that morning with Dany weeping quietly beside her.

And, after a long moment of hesitation, a folded square of parchment on which she had written, in her own hand, every name she remembered of every person she had loved in her other life. A mother. A father. A brother. Three friends. A woman she had once almost married. She had not spoken these names aloud in fifteen years. She burned them now because she had understood, in the long nights of planning this, that the magic wanted cost, and that the cost had to be real.

Dany had brought her own things. Aelya did not ask what they were. Dany laid them beside the eggs with shaking hands and then stepped back, and looked at her sister across the unlit pyre, and said: "Now?"

"Now."

Aelya lit the torch.

The fire took faster than it should have.

It went up in a roar, blue at the heart and gold at the edges, and the heat of it struck Aelya in the chest like a blow and did not burn her. She heard Dany gasp. She reached across the flame and found her sister's hand through the fire, and Dany's hand found hers, and together they stepped into the pyre.

The world went white.

Aelya could not, afterward, say how long they stood in the flame. Minutes, perhaps. An hour. The fire sang around them in a voice that was almost a voice, and the eggs at their feet began to move — to rock, and then to crack, and then to split — and somewhere very far away Aelya could hear Dany laughing, a sound she had not heard her sister make since they were children, a sound of pure astonished joy.

The first to hatch was Morghon.

He came out of the green-and-bronze shell larger than he had any right to be — nearly the length of Aelya's forearm, when his brothers and sisters emerged scarcely the length of her hand — and he looked at her once, with eyes like molten copper, and then he flopped onto his side in the hot sand and closed his eyes and went immediately, catastrophically, back to sleep.

Aelya, standing naked in the embers of what had been a god-fire, burst out laughing.

"Morghon," she said. "Morghon, you enormous layabout, we have just been born, you cannot possibly —"

Morghon snored. A small ribbon of smoke curled out of one nostril.

Sōvegon came next, cream and gold, and she was already trying to fly before she had quite finished hatching — flopping about in the embers with stubby wings working furiously, chirruping in outrage at gravity. Ēdrugon emerged last of Aelya's three, black and blood-red, and he did not chirrup or flop. He simply uncurled, watched everything with long slow considering eyes, and then climbed with perfect unhurried dignity up Aelya's leg and hip and arm to settle on her shoulder, where he wrapped his tail twice around her throat and went still.

Dany's three came half a heartbeat behind.

Drogon erupted from the scarlet-and-black egg like a thrown spear — shrieking, furious, already snapping at the air — and flung himself at Dany's chest, and Dany caught him against her bare skin and laughed and laughed. Rhaegal, green and bronze, was quieter; he climbed her arm as Ēdrugon had climbed Aelya's, and settled against her throat, and purred. Viserion, cream and gold, stayed in the sand a moment blinking, and then waddled over and tried, with enormous determination, to eat Aelya's foot.

"No," Aelya said, laughing. "No, little one, I am not breakfast —"

"He likes you," Dany said, her voice wrecked with joy.

"He is biting me."

"He likes you."

They stood in the ashes of the pyre, two naked silver girls, six newborn dragons between them, and the sun coming up red over the Narrow Sea. Aelya reached across and took her sister's hand.

"Six," she whispered.

"Six," Dany whispered back.

And from Aelya's shoulder, very softly, Ēdrugon began to hum.