Jon did not come to her the next morning, or the morning after.

Aelya had not expected him to. She let him have his days. She busied herself with the work of Eastwatch — sending another raven south to Dany (the third in a week; Dany had written back twice already, short fierce letters that Aelya kept folded inside her jerkin against her ribs), and meeting with Mormont's senior officers, and walking the Wall with Cotter Pyke and pretending not to mind the height. On the fourth morning Jon came to find her in the small chamber she had made into a writing-room, and he stood in the doorway in his black cloak with Ghost behind him, and he said:

"Aelya. I am keeping the cloak. For now. Until the long night is over. After that — after — I will decide. Is that acceptable to you?"

"Entirely acceptable, nephew."

"And I am riding with you to Mance Rayder."

"Good."

"Tarly is coming too. He insists. He says he will not be left behind while I go off to a wildling camp with a queen and a dragon, and frankly I cannot make him not come, so —"

"Bring him. I have heard good things about him from Mormont. Mormont says he is the cleverest man in the Watch and the worst fighter, and that those two are connected."

Jon's mouth twitched — the first almost-smile she had seen from him since the night on the Wall. "That is exactly Sam, Your Gr—. Aelya. That is exactly Sam."

She rose and came across the room. She looked up at him — he was a head taller than her; she had not registered that, somehow, when they were sitting — and she put her hands on his shoulders.

"Aegon Targaryen," she said quietly. "How are you. Truly."

He looked at her for a long moment.

"Tired," he said. "Angry. Less angry than I was three days ago. I — I keep thinking about my father. My uncle. I keep — I keep going to be angry with him and then I cannot be, because he is dead, and because what you said about him is true. He carried it for me. For seventeen years. I cannot — I cannot be angry with a dead man for that. So I am angry at the air. Which is exhausting."

"Yes."

"Did you — " He hesitated. "Did you know him?"

"Not in this life, Jon. But I have heard of him. Everything I have heard of him has been good. I think he was the last honourable man in the realm, and I think the realm killed him for it, and I think we owe him better than to be ashamed of what he did. He kept you alive. The rest is for you to make of."

Jon nodded, once. Then he did a thing she had not expected: he stepped forward, and he put his arms around her — awkwardly, like a young man who was not sure he had the right — and he hugged her, briefly, and let her go.

"Thank you," he said. "For telling me. I would rather know and be angry than not know and be — be the boy I was a week ago."

"You are welcome, nephew."

"I am not calling you aunt," he said. "It is too strange. I am sorry."

"Aelya is fine. Always has been."

He almost smiled again. Then he turned, and Ghost turned with him, and they were gone.

Aelya sat down on the edge of the writing-table and let out a breath she had not known she was holding.

Ēdrugon, on the windowsill, hummed, soft and low.

"I know," she murmured to him. "I know. I am proud of him too."

They rode out for Mance's camp eight days later, in a cold dawn under a low grey sky.

Aelya had thought hard about the size of the party. Too large and Mance would read it as a war-band. Too small and his wilder chieftains would read it as weakness. She had settled on twenty: herself, Jon, Sam Tarly (who had wept quietly when invited and had then, to Aelya's surprise, packed with brisk competence and made himself extremely useful), Ser Barristan, Ser Elinor Sand, Ser Daemon Sand, four picked Unsullied who could walk in snow without complaint, and ten rangers of the Watch, including a dour little man called Dolorous Edd whom Cotter Pyke had volunteered with great enthusiasm and whom Aelya had liked immediately.

Ghost came. Ghost was a member of the party in his own right.

Morghon came too, but not with them — Morghon would fly. Aelya had explained this to him, in High Valyrian, with the patient voice of a woman explaining something to a deeply unmotivated cat, and Morghon had blown a small offended puff of smoke and had then, that morning, taken to the sky with what was for him remarkable promptness. He would shadow the column from above. He would not land unless Aelya called him. The wildlings, she judged, needed to see him without having him drop into their cooking-fires.

Ēdrugon she carried inside her jerkin. He had grown too large for that, technically, but he refused to be parted from her, and she had compromised by lining the inside of the leather with sheepskin and letting him settle along her ribs like a long warm armful of black-and-red. He slept most of the time. He woke when she needed him to. He was, of all the dragons, the one who paid the most attention to her actual moods, and she had come to trust the small adjustments of his weight against her side as a kind of barometer.

Mance's camp was three days' ride north and west, in the foothills of the Frostfangs.

They saw the smoke of it on the second afternoon — a great pall of cookfires hanging over a valley like a low cloud — and Aelya had to put her hand against Ser Barristan's stirrup and keep him moving, because the old knight had stopped his horse and was staring at the smoke and counting fires under his breath in a way that suggested the count was not going well.

"Your Grace," he said quietly. "There must be — there must be sixty thousand of them down there. Perhaps more. We — Your Grace, we are going to ride into that?"

"Yes, Ser."

"Twenty of us."

"Twenty-one if you count Ghost. Twenty-two with Ēdrugon. Twenty-three if Morghon decides to land."

"Your Grace."

"Ser Barristan. Look at me. I have spent fifteen years preparing for this hour, and I have not come to the foothills of the Frostfangs to lose my nerve at the size of a refugee camp. Mance Rayder has agreed to receive me under flag of truce. I have given him my word in fire and salt. He has given me his. He is a man who keeps his word. Mormont swears it; the wildlings I have already received swear it. We are riding in."

Ser Barristan looked at her.

Then, because he was Ser Barristan, he simply inclined his head and chivvied his horse back into the column.

Mance Rayder met them at the edge of the camp, on foot, in a cloak of black ringed wool that had once been a Watch cloak and had been very carefully resewn with red silk along every seam.

He was not a large man. He was lean and weathered, with a sharp clever face and grey-shot dark hair, and he stood in the trampled snow with his arms folded and watched her ride up with the patient appraisal of a horse-trader at a fair. A great red-bearded wildling stood at his right shoulder — Tormund, she recognised at once, the books had not lied about the beard — and a slim woman in white furs at his left, with hair the colour of honey and eyes the colour of new ice. Val. She had read about Val. She had not been prepared for her either; Val was beautiful in an entirely uncourtly way, and was looking at Aelya with a frank, hard, weighing curiosity that was not hostile but was also not friendly.

Aelya dismounted alone.

She had thought about this too. The first move was hers. She handed her reins to Ser Daemon, walked twenty paces forward across the trampled snow, and stopped at arm's length from Mance Rayder.

She did not bow. He was not a man who would have respected a bow.

She did, however, do a thing she had decided on the ride north. She unbuckled her swordbelt and held it out to him, hilt first.

A small ripple went through the wildlings ranged behind him.

"King-Beyond-the-Wall," Aelya said, in a voice pitched to carry. "I came to talk. I do not need a sword to talk. Hold this for me until I leave. Or keep it. I have others."

Mance did not take the sword. He looked at her over it for a long moment, and then he laughed — a short surprised laugh, the laugh of a man who had expected one thing and got another — and he said:

"Gods, girl. You are a piece of work. Put that back on. I will not be holding a queen's sword. Tormund, are you watching this? She is handing me her sword."

"I am watching it," Tormund said. He sounded delighted. "I am also watching the dragon."

Everyone looked up.

Morghon, who had been doing wide circles for the past hour at a height that had clearly been making the wildlings uneasy, had — for reasons known only to himself — decided that this was the moment. He came down out of the grey sky in a long unhurried glide and landed on a low rise about three hundred paces beyond the camp, where he immediately curled up in the snow, tucked his nose under his wing, and went to sleep.

There was a long silence in the wildling camp.

"Is he," Mance said carefully, "going to —"

"He is going to nap, my lord. He has flown for three days and he is tired and he is bored. He will not move unless I shout for him. I would prefer, for the next several hours, not to shout for him. Shall we go inside and talk?"

Mance Rayder looked at her.

Then he shook his head — not a no, a kind of disbelieving laugh of a head-shake — and he stepped forward and clapped her, hard, on the shoulder, the way one wildling captain clapped another, and he said:

"Come, Targaryen. I have stew. We will see if we are friends by sundown."