The top of the Wall was chaos.

Aelya came up in the cage with Ser Barristan and four Unsullied crammed in beside her, the iron groaning on its chain, and when the gate at the top swung open she stepped out onto a battlement that was already half-full of running men. Black cloaks streaming. Torches being lit and held aloft at the parapet, which was the wrong thing to do — she registered it instantly — because the torchlight blinded the men holding the torches and lit them up nicely for whatever was out beyond the Wall in the dark.

"Douse those torches!" she snapped. "Douse them! You cannot see past your own light. Lanterns shielded along the inner walk only. Do it now."

A black-cloaked officer she did not know turned, opened his mouth to argue, saw who was speaking, and shut it. "Aye, Your Grace. Lanterns shielded! Lanterns! Get those torches off the parapet!"

The torches went out, one by one. Eyes adjusted. Aelya walked to the edge of the parapet — not too close, the wind up here would push a person off the Wall if it got behind them at the wrong angle — and she put both gloved hands on the ice and she looked north.

For a moment she saw nothing. Just the dark, and the faint silver of the stars, and the blacker dark of the Haunted Forest a half-mile out.

Then her eyes adjusted further and she saw it.

The forest was moving.

Not the wind. The wind was at her back, coming down off the Wall, and the trees in the forest were not bending the way they should have been if the wind had reached them. The trees were swaying — irregular, wrong — and between the trees, at the very edge of vision, things were coming out of the dark and crossing the open snow, and they were not the right shape for men, exactly, and they were not coming fast, and they were not coming in any kind of order, and the sheer wrongness of the way they moved was what told her, before any of her conscious mind caught up, that she was looking at the dead.

Wights. Hundreds of them. Maybe more — the dark was too thick to count. They came out of the treeline in a slow shambling spread, walking in a way that was almost but not quite like the walk of living men, and behind them — and Aelya's stomach dropped at this — behind them, in among the trees, she saw flashes of pale blue.

Eyes.

Other-eyes.

She had seen them in dreams since she was four years old. Seeing them with her waking eyes, in the actual cold, set against the actual Haunted Forest, was a different thing. It was a worse thing. Some part of her that she had thought she had hardened over fifteen years was, she discovered, not hardened at all; it was, in fact, paper-thin, and it tore.

Her hands tightened on the ice.

Ēdrugon, on her shoulder under her cloak, hissed — a long low hiss she had never heard from him, the sound of a thing recognising an old enemy — and Aelya understood, with a cold flash of clarity, that her dragons had been bred for this in a way she had not entirely let herself believe until now. They knew. They knew it in their blood, the way a sheepdog knows a wolf without being taught.

She turned.

"Lord Commander," she said.

Mormont was already on the parapet. He had come up the night stairs, not the cage; he was in mail and a heavy cloak and he had Longclaw's father — the old longsword he had used before he gave his bastard blade to Jon — drawn and bare across his palms. His face was set in an expression Aelya recognised. It was the expression of a man who had been waiting a long time to see a thing and was now, at last, seeing it, and was relieved and sick at once.

"How many?" he said.

"I cannot count. Hundreds within view. More in the trees. Five, perhaps six of the Others themselves at the treeline. Probing, I think. They are not all coming. They are testing us."

"Testing us," Mormont repeated. "Aye. Aye. Testing the Wall. Seeing what we do."

"Then we make sure what we do is bad."

Mormont's mouth twitched, despite everything. "Aye, Your Grace."

She turned back to the parapet. Her mind was moving very fast now. The fear was still there but she had it in a small cold box at the back of her thoughts, where it could be useful. Aelya had learned this trick a long time ago.

"Lord Commander. I want oil down the face of the Wall. The reservoirs. The fire-troughs. I want the scorpions ready on the upper bastions. I want every archer on the Wall with a quiver of fire-arrows — soaked tonight, in the last of our pitch, do not be precious with the pitch, we have more coming. And I want my dragon."

"Your dragon, Your Grace?"

"Morghon. Send a runner to fetch me my horn. The dragon-horn from my chest. Run, Lord Commander."

Mormont turned and bellowed orders. Men ran.

Aelya put two fingers against her brow and closed her eyes for one heartbeat and reached, in the wordless way she had been learning to reach for two years now, for the place in her mind where the dragons lived. Morghon, asleep on his great heated platform on the lee of Eastwatch's largest tower, raised his head.

Up, she sent. Up, my heart. Up now. Do not argue.

Morghon did not argue.

Aelya heard him before she saw him. A great heaving rustle of leather wings. A sailor on the lower courtyard shouting in alarm. Then his enormous green-and-bronze bulk lifted up over the parapet, slow at first and then with a single hard wingbeat that sent a wash of warm air across the freezing battlements, and he climbed, and the men of the Watch — the ones who had not yet seen him in flight — made small involuntary noises that were not quite cheers and not quite prayers.

He came around in a wide circle and hovered above her, and his copper eyes found hers in the dark, and she felt rather than saw the question in him: what are we burning, mother?

Aelya pointed north over the parapet.

"Dracarys," she said.

The first sweep was the cleanest.

Morghon flew the length of a bowshot out from the Wall, low, a dozen yards above the snow, and he opened his mouth and breathed, and the world ahead of him became a long line of fire. The dead in his path went up in a single sheet — old dry corpses caught flame faster than living men, Aelya saw with cold professional interest, they crisped and collapsed almost gently — and the fire ran along the snow in a long wavering streak that lit the Haunted Forest from end to end for one bright awful moment.

In that moment Aelya saw clearly.

It was worse than she had thought. It was not hundreds. It was thousands. The treeline was a wall of moving dead two miles long, pressed up against the open ground, and the Others — five, six, seven of them now, on pale spider-mounts she had not previously believed in until this moment — were ranged in a slow line behind them, and they were not moving forward. They were watching. Watching the dragon. Watching the fire.

Watching to see how the fire compared to themselves.

Morghon made his second pass. Another long line of dead went up. The wights in the burn-line collapsed but the wights behind them simply walked over the burning bodies and kept coming, and Aelya understood, with another small cold flash, that this was not going to be won by Morghon alone. Morghon could burn the front rank. Morghon could burn the second rank. Morghon could burn every rank for an hour and still not get to the Others themselves, who were standing well back, at the edge of dragonfire range or just outside it, weighing him.

She would not throw him at the Others tonight. Not yet. Not without knowing what they would do to him.

"Lord Commander," she said. "Pull him back. After the next pass. We hold the line. We do not give them the dragon."

"Aye, Your Grace."

She lifted the dragon-horn — a small carved thing of black bone, given to her by Illyrio years ago, which she had practised with on the voyage and which Morghon had grudgingly come to acknowledge — and she blew one short note, and Morghon turned in the sky and came back to her.

He landed on the parapet like a cat. The Wall did not so much as tremble — Brandon the Builder had built it for things larger than Morghon, in some forgotten age — and her dragon folded his wings and tucked his head down beside her and made a small, oddly tender, chuff.

"You did well, my heart," Aelya murmured, laying her hand against the warm scales of his neck. "You did so well. Rest. There will be more."

The fire-arrows began.

The Watch had done this drill before, however little they had believed in it. A hundred and fifty bows along the parapet. A hundred and fifty arrows soaked in pitch. A hundred and fifty small orange streaks arcing out and down into the dark, and where they fell the dead caught fire, slow and stubborn.

It was nothing like Morghon's flame. It was, however, not nothing.

The wights at the foot of the Wall began to burn in clusters.

Mormont, beside her, made a low approving sound. "Good. Good. Good. They burn. Half of you forgot, didn't you, lads? Half of you forgot they burn. They burn, you miserable crows, they have always burned, your grandfathers knew it, they burn —"

He was, Aelya realised, almost laughing. It was not a happy laugh. It was the laugh of an old man whose nightmares had finally arrived in the daylight and had turned out to be exactly the size he had said they were, and not larger, and a thing he could fight.

She put her hand on his shoulder.

"Lord Commander. Hold the line. I am going down to the gates. Cotter Pyke needs to know we are not opening for anyone tonight, no matter what they say or what they look like."

"Aye, Your Grace. Hold the line!"

She turned and went to the cage.

Behind her, on the parapet, Morghon raised his head and made — for the second time in six weeks — that long low questioning chuff, and she did not need to look back to know what he was looking at.

The Others, beyond the fire, had stopped weighing him.

They had begun to back away into the trees.

— Jon —

He had been on the parapet from the first horn-blast. He had nocked his bow and loosed fire-arrows alongside the rest of his brothers, and he had killed — he thought; he could not be sure in the dark — perhaps ten or twelve of the dead with his own hand. He had not had time to be afraid until the flame from Morghon's first pass lit up the field.

When the field lit up, and Jon saw what was actually out there — saw the shape and the number and the slow patient watching of the things behind the wights — something in him did a small quiet thing.

It did not break. It set.

He stood on the parapet of the Wall with snow on his eyelashes and his bow in his hand and Ghost a great white shadow at his hip, and he thought, with absolute clarity, in a voice that was both his own and somehow not entirely his own:

This is what I am for.

Not the Watch. Not the cloak. Not the boy he had been a moon ago.

This.

He looked, once, sidelong, and saw his aunt — his aunt, a word he had not yet said aloud and was not sure when he would — turn from the parapet with her dragon's flame still reflecting in her silver hair, and walk to the cage, and step into it without hurry, and descend.

A queen, he thought. Aegon's blood. His blood.

He nocked another arrow, and he loosed.

The dead burned.