— Barristan —

The galley put him ashore at the Planky Town at dusk, and Ser Barristan Selmy — who had been, in his recent exile, going by the name Arstan Whitebeard and had let the beard grow accordingly — stood on the pier for a long moment with his small sea-chest at his feet and waited to feel something.

He had rehearsed this moment through a year of taverns from Pentos to Volantis. He had imagined the shame of it: a Kingsguard of fifty-one years' service discharged by a boy of thirteen. He had imagined the anger: the way Joffrey's small mouth had said old man as though age were a crime one chose. He had imagined, more than anything, the quiet — the long slow erosion of a purpose he had organised his entire self around.

He had not imagined a letter.

It had come to him in a dockside inn in Lys, carried by a man he did not know and sealed in red wax with a three-headed dragon. He had opened it expecting a forgery. He had read it three times. The hand was clear and careful and young, and the High Valyrian was old-fashioned and somewhat better than his own, and it said, in effect, that Princess Aelya Targaryen had been waiting for him a long time, that she had need of an old knight who remembered what service meant, that his white cloak was not forfeit but only mislaid, and that if he would come to her in Dorne she would return it to him with her own hands.

The signature was simply Aelya.

The postscript was what had decided him.

Ser, the postscript said, my father was mad and my brother was cruel, and I know both of these things, and I would not blame you for hesitating. Hesitate. Ask after me. Ask the Pentoshi merchants and the Meereenese slaves and the Unsullied captains and the Dornish septons. Ask anyone. When you have asked, come if you wish to, and do not come if you do not. I will not send for you twice. But I will not forget that I sent for you once.

He had asked. Everywhere he went for three moons, he had asked. What he had heard had brought him, at last, to this pier.

He picked up the sea-chest.

A young Dornishman in orange livery was waiting at the end of the pier with two horses. He had a careful face and sharp dark eyes, and he bowed — not deeply, but honestly — and said: "Ser Barristan. Her Grace sent me. She said to tell you the beard is too long and the cloak is waiting."

Barristan felt, quite suddenly, tears in his eyes.

He did not let them fall. He had fifty-one years of practice.

"Then let us not keep her waiting, lad."

— Aelya —

She received him in a small side chamber of the Old Palace, with Dany at her side and no one else — no Dornishmen, no Unsullied, no Missandei. She had thought about this carefully. Ser Barristan was a proud man returning to service after a humiliation, and he needed the first meeting to be quiet; needed to kneel to her without an audience of strangers watching him do it.

He came in travel-stained, beard trimmed to a decent length on the ride from the Planky Town, and he stopped in the doorway and looked at her.

He looked at her for a long moment.

Aelya understood, with a small clean ache, what he was doing. He was looking for Rhaegar in her face. He was looking for Rhaella. He was looking for anyone he had loved, across the wreckage of a dynasty, to tell him he had not wasted a year of exile on a hope.

She let him look.

"Your Grace," Ser Barristan said at last. His voice was steady. "I — I served your father. I served your brother. I did not serve them well enough to save them from themselves. I do not know if I can —"

"Ser Barristan," Aelya said gently. "Come here."

He came.

She took his weathered hands in hers. They were enormous, and scarred, and they trembled very slightly — from age or from feeling, she could not tell.

"You served my father when he was a good man," she said, "and you served my brother Viserys not at all, because you never met him, and it was not your failure that my grandfather went mad, or that the Rebellion came, or that Robert Baratheon took the throne. You have nothing to atone for to me. You have only a thing to do — which is to teach my Unsullied officers what a Westerosi knight knows, and to ride at my right hand when we go north, and to put the white cloak on again and wear it, Ser, because it was given to you by better men than have ruled since, and it was never theirs to take back."

Ser Barristan's jaw worked.

"Your Grace —"

"Kneel, Ser. Please."

He knelt.

Dany came forward with the cloak. They had had it made in Meereen — white wool, the weave heavy and soft, the clasp a three-headed dragon of red gold — and between them they laid it across the old knight's shoulders, and Aelya drew her sword, a slim Myrish blade she had been given by Illyrio on their last visit and had never yet bloodied, and she touched it once to each of his shoulders.

"Rise, Ser Barristan of the Kingsguard. Commander of my armies. And welcome home."

He rose.

He did not weep. But his eyes shone, and his voice when he spoke was not entirely even.

"Your Grace. I am — I am yours. To the last of my days. I swear it."

Dany reached up, stood on tiptoe, and kissed him on his weathered cheek.

"Welcome home, Ser Barristan," she whispered.

The old knight looked at her, and at her sister, and something in his face did a small private thing that Aelya, watching him, understood instantly and filed away: he is going to love her especially. He is going to see our mother in her. He is going to protect her with the part of him he could not give Rhaella.

Good, Aelya thought. Good. Let him.

— The Oldtown Raven —

Three days after Ser Barristan's arrival, a second raven came, and this one Aelya had been waiting for with more quiet hunger than she had let even Dany see.

It came from Oldtown. It was addressed to the silver lady in Dorne who reads Valyrian. It was written in a crabbed old hand that had not signed itself, but the seal at the bottom was the seal of a particular archmaester, a man Illyrio had been paying quietly for sixteen years, and it said:

My lady — the boy you asked after is indeed at the Wall. He took the black six moons past, against the wishes of his lord father. He has been assigned to the ranging command of the Lord Commander, an old bear named Mormont. He is well, so far as we know.

The thing beyond the Wall that you asked after — my lady, I have been watching the sky for forty years, and the stars are wrong in ways I cannot explain, and the wildlings are coming south in numbers I have not seen in my lifetime, and three rangers of the Watch went out last autumn and came back as corpses that stood up and walked. The Watch burned them. The Watch has told no one. I am telling you.

The thing is real. It is closer than we thought. You have less time than you believed. Come north, my lady. Come north soon.

— a friend, who will not sign, but who once knew your grandmother.

Aelya read the letter twice.

Then she set it down on the table and put her face in her hands, not in grief but in the peculiar hollow vertigo of a thing long planned-for becoming suddenly, unignorably, now.

Dany came in behind her. Dany had learned, in the months since Meereen, to read her sister's shoulders.

"What is it, my love."

Aelya handed her the letter.

Dany read it. She sat down, slowly, on the arm of Aelya's chair. She put her hand on the back of Aelya's neck.

"How long," Dany said quietly.

"The maester thinks we have until the next true winter. A year. Perhaps two. Not more."

"And we have a war to fight first."

"We have a war to end first. Quickly. The realm cannot be fighting itself when the snows come. I had hoped for three years to secure the south. I have one."

Dany was quiet for a long moment.

Then she bent and pressed her forehead against the crown of Aelya's head, and said:

"Then we stop planning, my love. And we move."

Aelya closed her eyes.

"Yes," she said. "We move."

Outside, on the high terrace, Morghon opened one copper eye, seemed to sense — in the strange way he sometimes sensed things — that his long warm Dornish holiday was ending, and sighed a small resigned plume of smoke into the evening air.