By dawn the field beyond the Wall was empty.

Aelya stood on the parapet in a grey light that did not quite deserve to be called morning, with Ser Barristan at her left and Cotter Pyke at her right and Mormont a little behind them, and they looked north over a half-mile of trampled, burned, blackened snow. Charred bodies in slumped heaps where Morghon's flame had taken them. Smaller scattered shapes where the fire-arrows had done their slower work. A great dark scar across the white running from the eastern tower-line all the way to the limit of bowshot west, edged in yellow ash.

The dead had withdrawn an hour before sunrise. They had not retreated; retreat was a word for things that lived. They had simply stopped advancing and turned and walked, in their wrong loose way, back into the Haunted Forest. The Others had gone with them. By the time the stars began to fade there was nothing in the open ground but smoke.

Cotter Pyke spat over the parapet.

"Bastards," he said. "Ungrateful bastards. Couldn't even leave us a body to study."

"They left us plenty of bodies, Ser," Aelya said dryly. She gestured at the field. "Just none of the kind you wanted."

"Aye. Aye, I know. I want one of them. The pretty ones. With the eyes."

"You will not get one."

"Not tonight."

"Not ever, if I can help it. They do not die under arrows, Ser, I can tell you that for nothing. They have to be killed with — with the right kind of weapon. Obsidian. Valyrian steel. There is a story about it; I have it on good authority. We will be making both."

Cotter Pyke gave her a sidelong look that was, for him, almost respectful.

"Targaryen, are you ever going to run out of plans?"

"I am hoping not, Ser."

Mormont, behind them, said: "Let us count the cost first."

The cost was: four men of the Watch dead, one of them a ranger she had liked, a quiet northerner called Dywen who had been at the parapet next to Jon for the worst of it and had taken a wight's dropped axe through his shoulder as the thing fell off the Wall. Two Unsullied dead, both from falls — the parapet had iced over fast in places, and southerners did not yet know how to walk on ice in the dark. A dozen wounded, mostly minor. One of the iron cages had jammed on its chain in the middle of the night and had to be cut free with axes; it now lay at the foot of the Wall, useless, until they could rig a replacement.

No one inside the gate. The Wall had held. The dead had not even tried it. They had come, they had been seen, they had been burned, they had withdrawn.

It was, Aelya thought, the best possible outcome, and it was also the worst news. They had been probed. The Others had wanted to know what was on the Wall now. The Others had seen Morghon. The Others had counted Morghon. The Others had backed off — which was a creature's response, not an army's, and it told her something about them she had not been entirely sure of: they were cautious.

A cautious enemy was a bad enemy. A cautious enemy did not make stupid mistakes. A cautious enemy waited until it was sure.

They would come again. They would come bigger. And they would come, she judged, with a plan for the dragon.

She did not tell Mormont this last bit yet. He had had a long night.

"Lord Commander," she said. "Stand the men down. Hot food. Hot wine. Triple the watch on the parapet, three-hour rotations so no one has to stand the cold for long. I want every brother off the Wall and warm by midday or you will have frostbite cases by tomorrow. Send a raven to Castle Black: probe at Eastwatch, withdrawn, full report tonight. Do not send to anywhere else yet. Not to Castle Black for general distribution. I want the news of this contained until I have written my own letters."

"Aye, Your Grace."

"And Ser Cotter."

"Your Grace."

"Send to Mance. Tell him I want him here within the week. The whole conversation has just changed. He needs to know."

"Aye, Your Grace."

She turned to leave the parapet and saw Jon standing a little distance off, near the night-stairs, with Ghost beside him. Both of them watching her. The boy had snow in his hair and dark circles under his eyes and what looked like a small cut on the back of his bow-hand, and she could see, even at twenty paces, that he had not yet quite come down out of the place a man went to in his first real fight.

She walked over to him.

"Jon."

"Aelya."

"You are alive."

"I am alive."

"Ghost?"

"Bit a wight in half. Spat the half out. Has been spitting for an hour, he did not enjoy the taste. Otherwise unharmed."

Aelya almost laughed. It came out as a breath, sharp through her nose. She put her hand on the wolf's enormous head.

"Good boy," she said. "You and me both, Ghost. You and me both."

She turned back to Jon. She looked at his face — at the set of him, at the way he was standing, at the quiet that was on him now that had not been there before — and she said, carefully:

"How are you?"

"I do not know yet."

"That is the right answer. You do not know yet. You will know by tomorrow. Come and find me when you do. Have you eaten?"

"No."

"Eat. Sleep. Find me in the afternoon. We will walk."

"Yes, Aelya."

She squeezed his shoulder once and went down in the cage.

She wrote the letters in her chamber with Ēdrugon coiled tight around her shoulders — he had not relaxed since the horn-blasts, his small body wound against her like a strung wire — and she wrote three before she rested.

The first was to Dany.

She did not soften it. She did not protect Dany from any of it. She and Dany had agreed, on the ship north, that there would be no protective lies between them about the war and that Dany would have everything Aelya had as soon as Aelya had it. So Aelya wrote everything. The horn-blasts, the field, the count of the dead, the count of the wights, the Others on their pale mounts, Morghon's two passes, the withdrawal. She wrote about how long the night had felt and how short it had actually been (less than four hours from first horn-blast to retreat). She wrote about the cold being wrong in a way she had not yet seen anyone else register, the dry watching cold of the dreams. She wrote that the dead burned. That the Wall had held. That the Others were cautious, and that this was both the best and the worst news of the night.

She wrote, at the end: I miss you to the point of physical pain, my love, and I am sorry for it, and I would not have you here for anything because your Reach host needs you and a queen who comes home before her work is done is a queen who loses her realm. Take the Reach. Come for me when you are crowned. I will be on this Wall when you do. In salt and fire, your A.

She sealed it with the small private seal they had agreed on — a sun and a shadow, not the dragon — and she gave it to a runner for the southbound raven before she let herself read it again, because she knew if she read it again she would soften it, and she wanted Dany to have the truth.

The second letter was to Doran Martell, in code — a code Missandei had set up for them — and it said, briefly: the long night is real, it is here, my sister will tell you the rest. Move faster. Take the Reach this winter, not next spring. I will pay any price for the speed. Burn this.

The third was to Illyrio, not in code, because Illyrio had no code: Magister, the dead came to my Wall last night. The Wall held. I need every grain ship you can send, and I need Valyrian steel — every blade, every dagger, every old broken sword still in a Valyrian cellar in the Free Cities, I will pay any price. I need it by spring. Yours in fire and salt, A.

She sealed all three. She gave them to runners. She washed her face, ate half a bowl of the hot stew Cotter Pyke had sent up, and lay down on her bed without taking off her boots.

Ēdrugon curled at her throat.

She slept for three hours, dreamed of nothing, and woke with the cold dry watching feeling gone from her chest. Whatever had been pressing south against the Wall had pulled back far enough that her dreaming mind had stopped flinching from it. For the moment.

It would be back. She knew that. It would be back, and bigger, and it would have a plan for Morghon next time.

She had until then to come up with a plan for it.

In the late afternoon she walked out beyond Eastwatch with Jon Snow, on a track that ran east along the cliffs above the sea, and they did not speak for the first half-mile. Ghost padded between them. The sea was grey and busy below them. Gulls wheeled. The cold was the ordinary cold of a Wall morning, not the other cold, and Aelya found her shoulders dropping as she walked.

"My father —" Jon said, and stopped.

She waited.

"My uncle, I mean. Ned." He shook his head, frustrated. "I do not know what to call him yet."

"Call him whatever feels true. Both are true."

"My father, then. He told me once — the last time we spoke, in fact, in the yard at Winterfell before he rode south — that the man who passes the sentence should swing the sword. That if you would take a man's life, you owe it to him to look him in the eye and listen to his last words, and that if you cannot bear to do that, perhaps the man does not deserve to die. Do you know that saying?"

"I know it. It is a Northern saying."

"It is his saying. He gave it to me. I want to tell you — last night, on the parapet, when I shot the third or fourth wight, I — I caught one of them looking at me. In the eyes. In the eyes, Aelya. There was a moment, just before he came apart, when I saw — I do not know how to say this — there was a person in there. Once. I do not know if there was still a person in there last night. But there had been. And I keep thinking — I keep thinking that those are someone's people. Out there, frozen in the snow, some of them are somebody's — somebody's son, somebody's husband, somebody's grandmother. And we are going to have to burn every one of them. Every one. And there is no man who passes the sentence and there is no last words and there is — no one is going to look any of them in the eye, Aelya, because there is no time, and —"

He stopped.

He was, Aelya saw, very close to tears, in the wrecked way of a young man who had not slept and had killed a dozen things in the dark and was now, in the daylight, beginning to think about what he had done.

She stopped on the path. She turned to him. She took both his hands.

"Aegon," she said. "Listen to me. Listen carefully. The thing you killed last night was not someone's son anymore. The person who used to be in there is already gone. Burning the body is a kindness to them. I want you to understand this. I want you to take it into your bones, because we are going to be doing this for years and you cannot carry your father's saying into this fight, or it will eat you. The saying is for the living. It is a saying about justice. There is no justice left in those bodies. There is only the thing that has stolen them. We are not killing those men. We are freeing them. Do you hear me?"

Jon looked at her for a long moment. His eyes were very bright.

"I hear you."

"Say it back."

"We are freeing them."

"Say it again."

"We are freeing them."

"Good." She held his hands a moment longer and then let them go. "Good. You are going to have to say that to yourself a great many times before this is over. You are also going to have to say it to your men, when you have men. Which you will. The first man under your command who freezes on the line because he sees a face he knew — that man is going to need you to say it to him. So learn to say it now. Learn it in your sleep."

Jon nodded, slowly.

They walked again.

After a long while, on the way back, with Eastwatch coming into view down the cliffs, Jon said, quietly:

"Aelya."

"Yes."

"I think I love you. Already. Which is — I have only known you a moon. It is strange. Forgive me."

Aelya's throat did a small painful thing. She kept her voice level.

"There is nothing to forgive, nephew. I think I have loved you since before I met you. We have a great deal of catching up to do as a family."

"Yes."

"Tell me about your brothers. Your other brothers. The Stark ones. I will want to know them, when this is over."

He told her. He told her, walking the cliffs with Ghost between them and the grey sea below, about Robb, and Sansa, and Arya — especially Arya, a small fierce girl with grey eyes and a wooden practice sword — and Bran, who had loved climbing, and Rickon, who had been very small. He spoke of them in a voice that suggested he had not yet quite let himself know that some of them, almost certainly, were already lost; but he was beginning to know it, and Aelya listened, and did not interrupt, and when he was done she put her arm through his for the last quarter-mile back to the gate.

He let her.

It was, she thought, a small thing, and it was also not a small thing at all.