Aelya let three days pass before she went to find him.

She used the days. She walked the length of Eastwatch with Cotter Pyke and inventoried every weakness — the rotten timber of the south gate, the cracked cistern, the bowmen's loops half-blocked by a century of seabird droppings — and she made notes, and she sent the Balerion's Shadow back to Dragonstone with orders for masons and carpenters and a shipment of pitch. She rode the eight leagues to the Watch's nearest waycastle with Mormont and a small escort and looked at the state of it (worse) and made more notes. She received a delegation of three wildling chieftains who had come down out of the Haunted Forest under truce to see the dragon they had heard about, and she fed them, and she let them touch Ēdrugon's cool black-and-red flank with their calloused fingers and watched their faces go still with awe, and she sent them back north with a message for Mance Rayder: Come and treat with me. I will not betray you. My word in fire and salt.

She did all of this with one part of her mind, and with another she watched Jon Snow.

He was hard to watch without seeming to. The boy had a hunted quality that Aelya had not been prepared for — not the haunted quality of a man marked by the dead, though he had a touch of that too, but the older haunted quality of a child raised on the wrong side of a wall in his own family. He sat at the end of the long table at meals and ate quietly and answered questions briefly and listened more than he spoke, and the men of the Watch — even the ones who had clearly liked him before, even his great fat friend who never left his side — gave him slightly more space than they had given him a week ago, because Jon Snow had been seen across a council table from a Targaryen queen and had been looked at by her that way, and the Watch was not a stupid institution. The Watch had noticed.

He was waiting for her to come and find him.

He just did not yet know what he was waiting for.

She found him on the third evening on the top of the Wall.

He had taken the late watch — voluntarily, Cotter had told her, the boy was forever volunteering for the watches no one else wanted — and he was alone on the eastern parapet with his cloak pulled tight against the wind and Ghost lying at his feet like a drift of snow. The sky was a pale clear green at the horizon and almost black overhead, and the first of the night's stars were out, and the sea seven hundred feet below was a sheet of dull pewter.

Aelya climbed up in the iron cage. It rattled the whole way and she was extremely aware, for several long minutes, of the height of the drop. She had ridden a dragon. She did not enjoy the cage. There was no shame, she had decided, in not enjoying the cage.

Jon Snow heard her come out onto the top and turned and saw her, and his hand went to his sword and then away from it, and he straightened.

"Your Grace."

"Ranger."

She came and stood beside him at the parapet. She did not touch the ice. The men had warned her not to touch the ice with bare skin. She had brought her thickest gloves anyway.

For a while neither of them spoke. Ghost rose silently and came around to her other side and sat down, and pressed the side of his head, very lightly, against her hip. The weight of it was extraordinary; the wolf was the size of a small horse already and was nowhere near full grown. She put her gloved hand on the top of his skull.

"He likes you," Jon said quietly. "He doesn't, mostly. People."

"I know." Aelya scratched behind one of Ghost's enormous ears. "He has been trying to decide what to make of me for three days. I think he has decided."

"He decides faster than I do."

"He has fewer things to weigh."

Jon looked at her sidelong. The wind moved his dark hair across his face. He was, she saw, not as young as she had first thought; he was perhaps a year younger than her, no more, and there was already in his face the beginning of the long, lean, sad shape she remembered Ned Stark having had in the books.

"Your Grace," he said. "You said something. In the hall. The first night."

"I said many things, Jon Snow."

"You said you had dreamed me."

"Yes."

"What did you mean by it."

Aelya looked out over the dark land beyond the Wall. The Haunted Forest was a great black mass to the north, broken here and there by the silver of a frozen river. Somewhere in that forest a king was waiting to hear from her. Somewhere beyond that king, something colder than a king was waiting for them all.

"Jon," she said. "Sit with me. There is a thing I need to tell you, and I would rather not tell it standing up."

There was a wooden bench under the eaves of the watchhouse, sheltered from the worst of the wind. They sat. Ghost laid himself across both their feet, an enormous warm white weight, and Aelya was grateful for him. She had expected this conversation to be hard. She had not, until this moment, understood quite how hard.

She had thought about how to do it. She had thought about it through the entire voyage north, and she had come to the conclusion that there was no graceful way and no kind way, and that the best she could do was clean. Clean and short. Get it said. Let him have his time with it.

"Jon Snow," she said. "You are not Ned Stark's son."

He went very still.

"Your Grace —"

"Listen. Please. Just listen. I will tell you the whole of it and then I will let you ask me whatever you wish, and I will answer everything, and if you want to throw me off this Wall when I am done, Ghost will probably let you. Yes?"

He did not nod. He did not move. But after a long moment he breathed out, and he said: "Yes."

She told him.

She told him about Lyanna Stark and about Rhaegar Targaryen, and about the tower of joy in the red mountains of Dorne, and about a promise Ned Stark had made to a sister dying in a bed of blood. She told him about the babe Ned had wrapped in his cloak and ridden home with, north and north and north, while Robert Baratheon raged through King's Landing looking for Targaryen children to break against walls. She told him about the lie Ned Stark had carried for seventeen years — a lie that had cost him his honour with everyone who knew him, and his wife's love in places, and his own sense of himself, and that he had carried anyway because it had been the price of keeping his sister's child alive.

She told him his name. His real name. The one she had read in a book in another life and had carried in her mouth like a small pebble for fifteen years, waiting for the right moment to set it down.

"Aegon," she said. "Aegon Targaryen. Sixth of that name, if you choose to be it. Your father named you. He named you in a letter to your mother that survived the Sack, and that letter is in a chest in Oldtown right now, in the keeping of a maester who has been my friend by raven for two years. I have not seen the letter. I have only been told it exists. But I know your name, Jon Snow, because I have dreamed it, and the dreams of my line are not wrong."

He did not speak.

He did not move.

Ghost, at their feet, made a small low sound that was not a growl and not quite a whine.

Aelya waited. She had decided in advance she would wait however long he needed. She had nowhere to be.

After a very long while — long enough that the green at the horizon had faded entirely and the stars overhead had thickened — Jon Snow said, in a voice she could barely hear over the wind:

"My uncle."

"Yes."

"He let me. He let me go to the Wall. He let me take the vows."

"Yes."

"He let me — he let me think I was a bastard, Your Grace. My whole life. He let his wife — his wife hated me, do you know that? She hated me because she thought I was — and he never told her. He never told anyone. He let me go to the Wall and take vows that mean I cannot have a child or hold land or marry, and he never once —"

His voice broke. He stopped. He pressed the heel of his hand hard against his mouth.

Aelya did not reach for him. She knew, instinctively, not to reach for him yet. She kept her hands in her lap.

"He did it," she said softly, "because Robert Baratheon would have killed you if he had known. And then Cersei Lannister would have. And then Joffrey would have. He did it because the only way to keep you alive in a Seven Kingdoms ruled by a Baratheon was to let you be the bastard at the foot of the table, where no one looks. He let his wife hate you to make her hatred a cover. He carried that lie and the cost of that lie every single day of his life, Jon, and he did it because he loved his sister and because he loved you. The vows are a thing we can deal with. The Watch can release a man under royal pardon, and there will be a queen on the Iron Throne by spring who will sign that pardon, I promise you. The vows are a problem with a solution. The lie is — the lie is what it is. It was done out of love. I cannot make it not have hurt you. I am sorry."

Jon was not crying. Aelya looked at him sidelong and saw that Jon was not crying — that he had got himself, just barely, under control, and that he was staring out into the dark over the parapet with his jaw locked and his eyes very bright.

She did not ask him if he was all right. She knew he was not.

"Your Grace," he said at last. The voice was steadier. "Why are you telling me this."

"Because you are my nephew."

"Yes. But why now. Why you. Why on this wall."

Aelya took a breath.

"Because," she said, "I am going to ride to Mance Rayder's camp in two weeks, and I would like you to ride with me. Because my sister is going south to take a throne, and you are her nephew too, and she should know you. Because there is a thing coming down out of the north that is going to require every Targaryen alive to stand on a wall together, and I am not going to do that without telling you who you are first. You deserved to know before the dead came over. You deserved to choose what you did about it as a Targaryen, Jon, not as a bastard who didn't know better. The Watch took you under false pretenses. I am giving you the chance to decide if you want to keep the cloak knowing what you know, or take it off."

She paused.

"I will not press you for an answer tonight. I will not press you for an answer this moon. Take your time. Tell no one who does not need to know. I have told the Lord Commander already — yesterday, privately — and he is sworn not to speak of it. Your friend, the fat one — what's his name — Tarly — he can be told if you wish, and only if you wish. The rest of the Watch must not know. Not yet. The realm cannot know until my sister is crowned. Do you understand?"

"Yes," Jon said. Distantly. "Yes, Your Grace."

"Aelya."

"Your Grace."

"Aelya, Jon. We are blood. Aelya."

He looked at her.

There was a very long moment in which his face did several things at once — shock and grief and something underneath them both that Aelya recognised, with a small ache, as a desperate young hunger to belong to someone — and then he closed his eyes and pressed the heel of his hand into them and said, in a low ruined voice:

"Aelya."

"There you are," she said softly. She reached out, then, because she judged the moment had come, and she put her hand on his shoulder. He did not flinch. He did not lean in. He sat very still under her hand as though he did not yet know what to do with the touch.

Ghost rose silently from their feet and laid his huge head in Jon's lap, and Jon's hand went into the white fur, and he held on.

They sat like that for a long time.

The stars wheeled. The wind did not drop. Somewhere in the far north, very faintly, a wolf was howling, and it was not Ghost.

When Aelya finally stood to go, she leaned down and pressed her gloved hand to the top of Jon's dark head — once, briefly, the way a sister might — and she said:

"Welcome to the family, Aegon Targaryen. We have been waiting for you."

Then she went down in the cage.

She did not weep until she was alone in her chamber, with the door bolted, and Ēdrugon coiled warm around her throat. Then she wept for a long while, quietly, into her hands.

For Rhaegar, whom she had never met. For Lyanna, whom she had never met. For Ned Stark, who had carried a thing too heavy for one man for seventeen years and had died with his mouth shut. For the boy on the Wall who had just learned his name, and who would, she knew, need months to hold it.

For her sister, far to the south, who was still expecting Aelya home in two moons and who did not yet know that what Aelya was going to bring home with her was a new brother.

And for herself, a little. Just a little. Because she was nineteen years old, and she had just done a hard true necessary thing, and there was no one in this castle she could go to and lay her head on their shoulder and be told you did it well.

Dany would have told her. Dany was a thousand miles away.

She wept until she was finished, and then she washed her face in cold water, and she went to bed, and she slept.