They left Dragonstone in the spring of their sixteenth year.

Illyrio had sent them a ship by then — a proper ship, a great carrack called Balerion's Shadow with a crew of ninety and a captain who had served House Targaryen before the Rebellion and wept when he came ashore and saw them. Aelya had named him Lord Captain on the spot, which had made him weep harder, and had then sat him down with wine and a map and begun to explain what she needed.

What she needed was an army.

The dragons had grown, in the six months since hatching, faster than any book of lore had prepared her for. Morghon in particular was a disgrace — he was the size of a large hound now, and should by rights have been the size of a small dog, and he spent nineteen hours of every day asleep on the warmest flagstone he could find. The other five grew at what Aelya took to be a normal pace: quick, clever, hungry, already making short flights from tower to tower with shrieks of outrage when the wind pushed them sideways. Morghon did not fly. Morghon did not walk unless food was involved. Aelya had tried, twice, to coax him off his flagstone with a goat. He had eaten the goat from a reclined position and gone back to sleep.

"He'll fly when he needs to," Dany said, watching the dragon snore.

"He had better."

"He will. Look at him, Aelya. Look at the size of him. He's only going to get worse."

Morghon opened one molten-copper eye, looked at Aelya with the mild affectionate contempt of a cat being asked to do a trick, and closed it again.

They provisioned for a long voyage. Aelya left the castellan in charge of Dragonstone with a garrison of sixty, a raven-line to Illyrio in Pentos, and instructions to send no letters and receive no envoys until they returned. Then she and Dany and the six dragons — Morghon carried, with great effort, in a reinforced litter by four sweating sailors — boarded the Balerion's Shadow and sailed east.

They stopped in Pentos only long enough for Illyrio to fall to his knees in his own garden and kiss their hands, exactly as he had asked to in his letter, with actual tears running into his great forked beard. Aelya lifted him up and kissed his forehead, which was, she judged, the correct move: the cheesemonger was a sentimental man, and sentimental men were best bound with sentiment. She had him for life after that.

They stopped in Qarth. They stopped in Yi Ti, briefly, for silk. They did not stop in the Free Cities where Viserys had been known, because Aelya had no patience for questions about what had become of her brother.

They came to Astapor in the high summer of their seventeenth year.

Astapor smelled.

Aelya had read about this, in her other life, and had thought she was prepared. She was not prepared. The city smelled of human waste and old blood and the sickly-sweet rot of flesh left in the sun, and beneath it all a top-note of something Aelya could not at first identify and then realized, with a cold small shock, was fear — the particular smell of a city full of people who were regularly and systematically terrified. The Good Masters received them at the Plaza of Pride with wine and honeyed figs and a pretty slave-girl of perhaps thirteen who was presented to Dany as a gift.

Dany did not look at the girl. Dany looked at the Good Master who had offered her.

"What is her name?" Dany asked. Pleasantly.

"She has not been given one recently, Your Grace. You may name her."

"She does not know her own name?"

"Slaves do not require names, Your Grace. But if it pleases you —"

"Ask her," Dany said. "Ask her, in her own tongue, what her mother called her."

The Good Master blinked. He did not speak the girl's tongue. None of the Good Masters did; they spoke Astapori Valyrian, and the slaves spoke whatever tongues they had been stolen from. A translator was fetched. The girl was asked. She whispered something, eyes on the flagstones.

"Missandei," the translator said. "She says her name is Missandei. Of Naath."

Dany turned to Aelya.

Aelya — who had been watching this entire performance with Ēdrugon coiled cold and heavy around her shoulders, and with a small still part of her mind already composing the list of Good Masters who would die first — met her sister's eyes and nodded, once.

"Missandei of Naath," Dany said, turning back. "You are not a gift. You are a free woman. Will you serve me, of your own will, as a translator and a companion, for fair wage?"

Missandei's head came up. She was, Aelya saw, extraordinarily clever; the understanding moved across her small face in one clean wave, and then was hidden again behind a slave's careful blankness.

"Yes, Your Grace," she whispered. In Common. Perfect Common. "I will serve you."

"Then stand beside me. Not behind. Beside."

Missandei came and stood at Dany's left shoulder. The Good Masters exchanged a look.

Aelya smiled at them.

The negotiations took four days.

Aelya conducted them herself, in Astapori Valyrian she had been practicing for a year, with Missandei at her elbow correcting her accent in whispers. She bargained for the Unsullied the way a woman buys a horse — carefully, skeptically, complaining about the price, pretending twice to walk away. The Good Masters found her charming. The Good Masters thought her a girl playing at queen.

She offered Morghon in payment.

She offered him with great reluctance, with tears in her eyes, with the slow tragic air of a woman selling the last thing she loved. The Good Masters wanted the dragon badly — more than the gold she had brought, more than the ships, more than anything. Aelya let herself be persuaded, painfully, over an afternoon, to part with him.

She gave the whip to the chief Good Master. She gave him Morghon's name, in High Valyrian, for the commands. She accepted, in return, the iron collars and leashes of eight thousand Unsullied.

Then she walked into the center of the Plaza of Pride, with her sister and Missandei and the six dragons at her back, and she said to Morghon — in High Valyrian, in the tongue of Old Valyria which the Good Masters had just learned but had not yet understood —

"Dracarys."

Morghon, who had not flown in a year, who had not moved from his flagstone unless a goat was involved, who was the laziest dragon the world had ever produced —

Morghon looked at the Good Master holding his leash.

Morghon looked at Aelya.

Morghon sighed, with the weary professional air of an employee being asked to work a late shift, and opened his mouth, and burned the Plaza of Pride to the ground.