The Wall rose out of the mist on the eleventh morning, and Aelya — who had prepared herself for this sight for fifteen years, who had read every description in every book she could lay hands on in two lifetimes, who had rehearsed her composure in a dozen mirrors — stood at the rail of the Balerion's Shadow and did not breathe for a long moment.

It was bigger.

The books had not prepared her. Nothing could have prepared her. It went up out of the grey sea like a cliff of dirty glass, seven hundred feet of ancient ice stretching east to west until it vanished into the fog in both directions, and the air coming off it was so cold it hurt her teeth. Gulls wheeled against its face and looked, from the deck, like specks of dust. A single black speck moving along the top — a ranger on patrol, she understood after a moment — looked smaller than an ant on the rim of a wine-cup.

Morghon, on the mainmast, lifted his great head and stared at the Wall and made a small, entirely new sound. It was not a shriek. It was not a hum. It was a long low questioning chuff that Aelya had never heard from any of the dragons before, and it raised the hair on her arms.

"He feels it," she murmured.

Beside her, Ser Barristan — who had come north with her after all, over her objections, on the grounds that he would hand command of Dragonstone to his second and follow her through the seven hells before he let her approach the Wall with only three Kingsguard — said quietly, "Feels what, Your Grace?"

"The magic. The old magic. Brandon the Builder raised this Wall with spells older than Valyria, Ser. The dragons know. Look at him."

Morghon chuffed again. Ēdrugon, inside Aelya's collar, had gone utterly still — not sleeping-still but *listening-*still, his small head raised, his long tongue flickering.

Ser Barristan crossed himself the old way, star-and-circle, without seeming aware he was doing it.

Eastwatch was a huddle of black stone and grey slate at the very eastern edge of the Wall, where the ice met the sea in a jumble of broken cliffs. It had a single narrow harbour, protected by a breakwater of enormous stones that Aelya suspected had been laid by giants, because nothing else made sense of the scale of them. Six ships could have fit in the harbour. Two were there now — a Braavosi trader unloading barrels of salt pork, and a small black cog flying the sigil of the Watch.

Her four ships did not fit. The Balerion's Shadow dropped anchor outside the breakwater; the Dornish cogs came in under reduced sail; the Braavosi galley slipped in behind them, and Aelya, Ser Barristan, Ser Elinor Sand, and twenty picked Unsullied were rowed in by longboat while Morghon did lazy circles overhead and caused, on the battlements of Eastwatch, a degree of consternation that she could see even from the water.

By the time the longboat touched the stone quay, the entire garrison of Eastwatch — perhaps sixty men, black-cloaked and hard-faced — was drawn up along it in a thin wary line. At the center of the line stood a huge one-armed man in a sealskin cloak, with a beard like a storm cloud and an axe across his back, and he stepped forward as Aelya climbed the quay steps and bellowed, in a voice like an avalanche:

"Who in the name of the seven bleeding hells are you, and why is there a dragon on my watchtower?"

Aelya stopped. She looked up. Morghon had, indeed, landed on one of the watchtowers and was curled around it like a cat on a fencepost.

"That is Morghon," she said, pleasantly. "He will not burn anything without my leave. You must be Cotter Pyke."

The one-armed man's eyes narrowed.

"I am. And you are?"

"Aelya of House Targaryen. I have come to speak with the Lord Commander of the Night's Watch, and I have brought grain and winter wool in my ships, and I would be obliged if your men would lower their crossbows before one of them does something that my dragon is going to take personally."

There was a long pause.

Then Cotter Pyke — who had, Aelya had been told, been a smuggler before he took the black, and who was said to be afraid of almost nothing — looked at her, and looked at the dragon on his watchtower, and looked at the old white-cloaked knight behind her, and looked at the unsmiling bronze-capped soldiers with their long spears, and he did a thing Aelya had not expected.

He laughed.

It was a huge laugh, a full bellow from the belly, and it cracked his stormy face into something much younger and much less fearsome.

"Gods," he said, when he had recovered. "Gods, but the world's an interesting place this week. Stand down, you miserable crows, the princess says please. Welcome to Eastwatch, Your Grace. I'll send a rider to Castle Black within the hour. You'll want to see the old bear, and he'll want to see you, and if you've actually got grain in those holds I'll kiss your boots myself."

Aelya smiled.

"The grain is real, Ser. The boots can remain unkissed. Your hospitality is sufficient."

"Ser," Cotter Pyke said, delighted. "She called me ser, lads. I've come up in the world."

Behind her, Ser Barristan's mouth twitched — the closest thing to a smile she had yet seen on the old knight's face — and Aelya stepped down off the quay and onto the stones of the Wall.

The Lord Commander arrived three days later.

Jeor Mormont came on horseback, in mail and furs, with a small retinue of rangers and a black-and-white direwolf pup nearly the size of a pony trotting at the horse's shoulder. The direwolf was not his. The direwolf belonged to the boy riding at his left, a tall lean lad of seventeen or so with dark hair and a long face and grey Stark eyes, and Aelya — who had been waiting on the steps of the Eastwatch hall with Ser Barristan and Cotter Pyke — took one look at him and had to put her hand flat against the stone of the wall to steady herself.

She had known she would feel something.

She had not known it would be this.

Her nephew. Rhaegar's son. A boy who did not know his own name, raised in a cold hall by a dutiful uncle, carrying her brother's face under his mother's coloring, and wearing the black of the Watch as though it were the only thing that had ever quite fit him.

Jeor Mormont dismounted with a grunt. Jon Snow dismounted behind him, easy and unconscious, and his direwolf pressed its huge head against his hip and watched Aelya with yellow eyes that missed nothing.

Aelya came down the steps.

She had planned a speech. Of course she had planned a speech. She forgot it entirely.

She stopped in front of the old bear and she bowed to him — properly, from the waist, the way a petitioner bows to a lord in his own hall — and she said, in a voice that she kept level by sheer will:

"Lord Commander. Thank you for coming. I have a great deal to tell you, and not very much time to tell it in, and I would be grateful if you would hear me."

Mormont looked at her for a long moment.

Then he, too, bowed — a smaller bow, the bow of an equal to an equal, the bow of a man who had just decided something about her in the span of a heartbeat.

"Your Grace," he said, in his rumbling voice. "I have been waiting for a Targaryen to come to my Wall for forty years. Come inside. Tell me everything."

Behind him, Jon Snow was looking at Aelya with a small puzzled frown, as though he had seen her face somewhere before and could not quite place it.

Aelya smiled at him.

"Jon Snow," she said. "We have much to speak of also, you and I. But later. Come in from the cold."

The boy blinked.

He followed them inside.