The hall of Eastwatch was not built for grand councils. It had been built to keep the wind out, and it did that badly. Aelya sat at the rough oak table closest to the hearth with Ser Barristan at her right and Ser Elinor Sand at her left and Jeor Mormont across from her, and Cotter Pyke at one end and Jon Snow at the other, and a great black kettle of mulled wine on the hearth behind them that Cotter kept refilling with his one good hand.

The direwolf — Ghost, the boy had called him, with the quiet pride of a young man still getting used to the idea of a familiar — lay at Jon's feet and did not take his red eyes off Aelya for the first hour.

She did not mind. She would not have trusted an animal that did not watch her. She had three dragons in various parts of the keep doing exactly the same thing to everyone else.

Mormont came straight to it.

"Your Grace," he said, setting his cup down. "I have been Lord Commander of the Night's Watch for eight years. Before that I was First Ranger for ten. Before that I was Lord of Bear Island. I have spent more of my life looking north than any man south of the Wall. And I am going to tell you some things that no one in the Seven Kingdoms believes, and I am going to tell them to you straight, because Cotter's raven said you came asking about them, and because that is the first time in forty years anyone has ridden up to this Wall with silver hair and asked."

"Tell me, Lord Commander."

He told her.

It took him the rest of the afternoon, and Cotter Pyke refilled the kettle three times. He told her about Benjen Stark, First Ranger of the Watch, vanished beyond the Wall a year past with a patrol of six and never seen again. He told her about the wights — the dead-that-walked — and about the two that had come into Castle Black a year ago in the skins of men who had ridden out with Benjen, and about the one that had tried to murder Mormont himself in his own bed and had been cut apart by a boy and a direwolf, and he nodded at Jon, who was studying the tabletop with a tight-jawed quiet that said he had not liked the memory when it was made and did not like it now.

He told her about the Fist of the First Men. About the ranging they had mounted the previous autumn, three hundred strong, the largest the Watch had put together in a generation — and about the two men who had come back. Only two. Out of three hundred. Both of them, Mormont said, with their wits mostly burned out of them, and one had died in the first moon home and the other was now a scullion in the Castle Black kitchens who did not speak above a whisper and flinched at the sound of wood being split.

He told her about the wildlings. About how the King-Beyond-the-Wall, a man called Mance Rayder, was massing the free folk in tens of thousands for a move south — not to raid, this time, but to flee. Flee, Mormont repeated, in case she had missed it the first time. The wildlings were coming south because something north of them was making the north unlivable.

He told her, last, about the old songs. The ones the giants still sang. The ones Mormont had heard with his own ears from a woods-witch in Thenn-country before she had been killed by her own people for singing them.

"The long night's coming, Your Grace," he said. "Not in a generation. Not in ten years. Coming, like a slow tide that's three-quarters up the shore already. I have been writing ravens to every lord in the realm for two years. I have written to King Robert, rest him. I have written to the Small Council. I have written to Eddard Stark, and he, gods bless him, was the only one who wrote me back, and he was the one they took the head off of in King's Landing this past year." Mormont's big knotted fist tightened on the table. "No one is coming, Your Grace. I have been commanding a wall that is supposed to hold against the dead, with nine hundred and fifty men where there used to be ten thousand, and the realm has not sent me a single sword in my entire tenure. And now you come through my gate with a dragon on my tower, and I am trying, Your Grace, very hard not to weep in front of my own men. Forgive me."

Aelya waited until he had his face under control.

Then she reached across the table and laid her hand on top of his enormous weathered fist. She did not say anything for a long moment. She was choosing her words with care.

"Lord Commander," she said at last. "I have known about the Long Night since I was a small girl. I cannot tell you how I have known. I have known. I have spent fifteen years preparing for it. Every dragon in my holds. Every Unsullied in my army. Every alliance I have built in Essos and in Dorne. All of it. For this. Not for the Iron Throne. The throne is the instrument. The Wall is the purpose."

She paused. Mormont was staring at her.

"I came north to tell you four things," she went on. "First: you are not alone. Not any longer. Second: the grain in my ships is yours, and there is more coming. I have instructed Prince Doran Martell to divert one in every ten bushels of the southern harvest north for the next three years, and he has agreed. I have instructed Illyrio Mopatis to buy wool and hard biscuit in the Free Cities and ship it to Eastwatch every moon. You will not starve this winter. None of you will. Third: I am bringing men. A hundred Unsullied as of this ship, another thousand by midwinter, and — if the war in the south goes as I believe it will — five thousand more by spring. Fourth —"

She paused again, because the fourth was the one she had been turning over on the voyage north, and she wanted to say it cleanly.

"Fourth: I want the wildlings south of the Wall."

Cotter Pyke made a noise like a choking dog.

Mormont did not react at once. The old bear's face went very still, the way it had gone still when he was listening.

"South," he repeated.

"Through the gates. Under oath. With their children and their elders and their goats. Settled in the Gift, which is yours to grant and which has been standing empty for a century. Fighting men into the Watch as sworn brothers. Women and children behind the Wall, where the dead cannot eat them. The King-Beyond-the-Wall to be treated with as a king negotiating a truce, not a bandit begging mercy. I will come to his camp myself, under safe conduct. I will treat with him. I will bring him over."

"Your Grace," Cotter Pyke said. "Your Grace. The men will mutiny. The lords of the North will march on the Wall. The realm —"

"The realm has not sent you a sword in eight years, Ser. The realm has forfeited the privilege of an opinion." Aelya's voice was quiet. "And my sister is going to be queen of that realm by spring, and I am going to be beside her, and the first decree of her reign will be that the Watch is a part of the Crown's host and that its commander speaks with the Crown's voice on all matters north of the Neck. The lords of the North will not march. The North will love it. Ask the boy at your left hand what his father would have said to settling the wildlings in the Gift if the alternative was watching them get up again as wights."

Jon Snow's head came up sharply.

Aelya turned to him.

"Your father," she said, very gently, "was the last honorable man in the Seven Kingdoms, Jon Snow. I know this. I know it better than most. He would have done it. He would have hated it and he would have done it. Am I wrong?"

The boy stared at her.

"No," he said slowly. "No, Your Grace. He — he was talking about it. Before. The last time we spoke. He said the true enemy was north and he said the realm was looking the wrong way, and he said he was going to try to make the king understand, and then — and then he went south, and —"

Jon stopped.

Aelya saw his hand go, not quite consciously, to the hilt of the longsword at his belt — a longsword with a white wolf's head pommel that she recognised from a book in another life — and she saw, in the line of his jaw and the set of his shoulders, so much of her brother Rhaegar that she had to look away for a moment.

"Then I will finish it, Lord Commander," she said, still looking at the boy. "What Eddard Stark could not. I will bring the wildlings through, and I will hold the Wall, and I will fight the dead, and when the long night is over I will rebuild what we have lost. If you will have me."

Jeor Mormont pushed his chair back, stood up — slowly, because his knees were old — and came around the table, and knelt.

The clatter of his knee on the stone was very loud in the quiet hall.

"Your Grace," he said. "The Night's Watch is yours. Every man of it who follows my orders. Which, I'll warn you, is most of them, but not all. The rest you'll have to win yourself. I will help you where I can."

Aelya rose. She put her hand on his shoulder.

"Get up, my lord. Please. I need you standing."

He got up.

Across the table, Cotter Pyke — who had been watching this with the peculiar expression of a man whose entire world view was undergoing rapid renovation — looked at Aelya and at his Lord Commander and at the dragons and, after a long moment, said:

"Bugger me sideways. All right, Your Grace. Eastwatch is yours too."

Jon Snow had not moved. Jon Snow was still staring at her with the faint frown of a young man trying to place a face.

"Your Grace," he said. "Forgive me. But have we — have we met?"

Aelya smiled at him.

It was a small sad smile, and she kept it short, because she was not going to tell him tonight. Tonight was not the night. Tonight was Mormont's night, and Cotter Pyke's night, and the Watch's. The boy would get his own.

"Not in this life, Jon Snow," she said. "But I think you have dreamed me. As I have dreamed you."

The direwolf at his feet lifted his enormous white head and looked at her, and his red eyes were very old and very calm, and Aelya had the strong sense that Ghost, at least, already knew exactly who she was.