Mance's tent was a ragged conical thing of stitched hides at the centre of the camp, and it smelled of woodsmoke and old leather and boiled mutton, and there was a fire in a pit at the centre with a black iron pot hanging over it from a tripod, and the stew in the pot was — Aelya had to admit — extremely good.

She was on her second bowl. She had not intended to be on her second bowl. She had intended to refuse food politely once and accept it on the second offer, the way one accepted hospitality from any host one wished to honour without owing too much to. But the stew was very good, with chunks of mutton and barley and something that tasted like wild onion, and she had been three days on hard biscuit, and Mance had grinned when she accepted the second helping and said good, a queen who eats is a queen worth talking to, and she had let it pass.

Jon was not eating. Jon was sitting on her left, very upright, watching every wildling face in the tent with the controlled wariness of a young man who knew he was the youngest sworn enemy in the room. Sam Tarly, on her right, was eating with the methodical focus of a man whose feelings were complicated and whose body had decided to handle them through stew. Tormund had taken a great liking to Sam within five minutes and had refilled his bowl unasked twice. Ser Barristan, against the wall, was drinking water and watching exits.

Val sat across the fire from Aelya. She had not eaten either. She was looking at Aelya with the same hard appraising calm she had brought to the camp's edge, and she had not yet said a word.

Mance set his bowl down.

"Right," he said. "The eating bit's done. Now the talking bit. Targaryen, why are you on my mountain."

"To bring you south."

"South."

"South. Through the gates. Under truce. Settled in the Gift, which has been standing empty since my line's enemies emptied it. Fighting men into the Watch, if they choose, with the same honour as any sworn brother. Women and children behind the Wall, where the dead cannot eat them. You at my table, King-Beyond-the-Wall, as my guest and my ally, and your line — if you have one, and if it survives — at my sister's table after, when she sits the Iron Throne. The terms are these: you come under oath. No raiding south of the Gift. No reaving. No old grudges paid out on northern smallfolk who happen to share a name with someone who killed your grandfather. The grudges end at the Wall. In exchange you live. Your women live. Your children live. This is the offer."

A long silence.

Tormund whistled, low.

Val's expression had not changed, but Aelya saw — barely — her shoulders drop a fraction, the way a person's shoulders drop when they had been bracing for something worse.

Mance said: "And the kneeling?"

"What of it."

"The free folk do not kneel, Targaryen. We have a song about it."

"I have heard the song."

"Have you."

"Mormont taught it to me. I will not ask you to kneel. I will ask for an oath. There is a difference. A man can stand on his feet and swear a thing in the old way, by the gods of his fathers, and be bound by it without bending a knee. I will accept that. The realm will accept it because I will make the realm accept it. My sister is going to be queen, Mance Rayder, and the lords of the Seven Kingdoms will swallow what we put in front of them or they will not be lords much longer. This is not the realm of three years past. This is the realm I am about to build."

Mance scratched his jaw. "Big talk for a girl with twenty men in my tent."

"I have more men. I have ships. I have armies in three places. I have six dragons, of which you have seen one, and I am the older dragon's mother, and he is going to be very large by spring. None of which I came here to threaten you with. I came to feed your children, Mance. The dragons are for the dead. Not for you."

Another silence.

Mance and Val looked at each other across the fire. It was a long look, an old look — Aelya had read of these two and had assumed there was something between them, and now seeing them she understood it had been more than the books had said. Val's chin moved, the smallest possible nod.

Mance turned back to Aelya.

"Tell me about the dead," he said.

"You tell me first. You have been further north than any man south of the Wall. What have you seen."

He told her.

He told her, in a flat stripped voice that Aelya recognised as the voice of a man who had had nightmares for so long he no longer used inflection on them, about a village in the Frostfangs where the women had risen the morning after a snowstorm with frost on their eyelashes and their children's blood on their teeth. About a ranging-pit beyond the Milkwater where his men had gone down with iron and come up with — nothing, just a cold that climbed into the bones and sat there, and three men lost in a place where there had been no enemy. About a giant — a giant, he said, looking her in the eye — that he had seen from a ridge a moon past, frozen upright in the act of running south, glazed in ice from the soles of its feet to the crown of its skull, and what kind of cold, Targaryen, what kind of cold freezes a giant in mid-stride.

Aelya listened.

When he was done she said: "Six weeks ago, a man called Coldhands brought a letter to a maester in Oldtown. The maester is mine. The letter said: they are not coming. They are here. The Wall will not hold past midwinter without help. That is what I have. That is what I have known I would have for fifteen years. I have not lied to you, Mance Rayder. I will not lie to you. The Wall is going to fall. Not next year. Not in five years. This winter, if we do nothing. I cannot stop it from beyond the Wall, because I am not a god and I cannot kill what is coming with my own hands. I can fight it from south of the Wall, with sixty thousand wildlings alive and on my side and not in its army. That is what I can do. That is the only thing I can do. So I came up here to you to ask you to live."

She set her bowl down.

"Mance Rayder. Will you live."

Mance looked at her for a very long time.

Then he turned to Val.

"Sister?"

(Sister, Aelya noted. Not wife, not consort. Sister. The books had got that wrong. She filed it. Many books, she was finding, had got many things wrong.)

Val spoke for the first time. Her voice was low and clear and unhurried.

"I believe her, Mance."

"Why."

"She came alone into your tent. She handed you her sword. She told you how she will fail before she told you how she will win. She is afraid of the right things and she is not afraid of you, and the only reason a southern queen would not be afraid of you is that she has seen something worse." Val's pale eyes were on Aelya, now, steady. "She has seen something worse. Look at her. Look at how she carries it. She has been afraid of the cold longer than you have, brother. I will follow her south."

Mance let out a long breath.

"You," he said. "You will follow her south. The free folk will not. The free folk will need to be talked to. And there are some — Rattleshirt, the Thenns, the Hornfoot — who will not be talked to no matter what I say. They will go south anyway, because they are not going to wait beyond the Wall to die, but they will not go south under your oath, Targaryen. They will go south as raiders. You will have to handle them yourself."

"I will handle them myself."

"You'll burn them?"

"If they raid. Yes."

"You're a hard one."

"I am a careful one. There is a difference."

Mance nodded slowly.

"All right," he said. "All right, Targaryen. Here is what I will give you. I will give you the great host. Five-and-fifty thousand at least, probably more by the count, mostly women, children, old folk, and maybe twelve thousand fighting men and women, because women fight too among the free folk and you should know that going in. I will give you my oath, in the old way, by the heart-tree at the edge of this camp. I will swear it tonight. I will tell my chieftains to swear it tomorrow. Those that won't swear it will leave. We will move south within the moon. It will take four moons to get the slowest of us through the gates, because my people are spread from the Frostfangs to the Bay of Seals. You will have to keep them fed for those four moons. Can you?"

"Yes."

"How."

"I have grain ships running from Dorne. I have wool ships running from the Free Cities. The first of them is already in Eastwatch harbour. The second arrives next week. There will be a hundred more by spring."

"You planned this."

"I planned this, Mance Rayder. I planned this when I was sixteen years old in a tent in Slaver's Bay and I have been moving ships north for two years for exactly this hour."

Mance stared at her.

"Bloody hells," he said. Quietly.

"Yes."

"All right. One more thing."

"Ask it."

Mance looked, once, at Jon — long enough for Aelya to understand he had marked Jon at the door, marked the way Jon stood, marked the long Stark face — and then back at her.

"The boy with the wolf," he said. "Mormont's pet crow. He has been watching me like a hawk for an hour and he has not eaten. Why is he with you."

Aelya did not look at Jon.

"He is my kin," she said.

A long pause.

"Ned Stark's bastard," Mance said slowly, "is your kin."

"Ned Stark's bastard is not Ned Stark's bastard. That is all I am going to say about it tonight, Mance Rayder, because it is not my secret to tell in your tent. It will be told south of the Wall, in time. He came north with me because he wished to. He is sworn to the Watch and he honours the oath, and he is also blood of my blood, and the two things are not in conflict yet. If they ever come into conflict, he will tell me which way he goes, and I will accept it. That is all."

Mance looked at Jon.

Jon looked back.

The wildling king's mouth twitched. "Boy. Did you know any of that this time last moon?"

"No," Jon said quietly.

"Ah," said Mance. Almost gently. "Yes. I know that face. You're carrying it well, lad. Better than I would have at your age."

Jon's jaw tightened. He did not answer. He did not need to.

Mance turned back to Aelya. He held out his hand across the fire.

"Targaryen," he said. "We have a bargain. Tonight, the heart-tree. Tomorrow, the chieftains. After that, we move."

Aelya took his hand.

It was a hard rough hand, and the grip was a wildling's grip, and it was — she thought, with a small private clarity — the most important handshake she had given since Doran Martell had said Dorne is with you in a shaded hall a thousand miles to the south.

"After that, we move," she agreed.

She swore him at the heart-tree that night, under a sky so cold and clear the stars looked close enough to cut a hand on, and the carved face on the tree wept its slow red sap, and Mance Rayder stood beside her in the snow and gave his oath in the old tongue, and Val and Tormund stood as witnesses, and Ghost sat at Jon's feet and watched the heart-tree with eyes that, Aelya was now entirely sure, saw more than any of them.

When it was done, and the oaths were given on both sides — Mance's in the Old Tongue, Aelya's in High Valyrian, both of them sworn in salt and fire and root and stone — Aelya turned to Jon, who had been standing very still throughout.

"Aegon," she said, very quietly, in High Valyrian, so only he and Val could understand. "Look at the tree. Tell me what you see."

Jon looked.

His face changed.

He said, in a voice she did not recognise, "It is looking at me."

Val, beside him, smiled a small slow smile.

"Aye, southron prince," she said. "It would. The trees know their own."

Aelya put her hand on Jon's arm.

"We are going to talk about that," she said, "on the ride home. There is more to your blood than the silver half. The Stark blood is real too. That is a thing your father and your mother both gave you. We will see what it is."

Jon nodded, slowly, without taking his eyes off the tree.

The heart-tree's red sap ran on, slow and steady, into the snow.