— Aelya, at Eastwatch —

The news of the Red Wedding reached her four days after it reached King's Landing, by a raven that had come up the eastern coast in stages — Riverrun to White Harbor to Eastwatch — and Aelya read it standing in the small bare yard behind the writing-room with Ēdrugon stretched out in a patch of weak northern sun on the flagstones, and when she got to the end she did not move for a long moment.

She had known it was coming.

She had known it was coming for fifteen years, and she had set the knowledge down in its own small room a long time ago because there was nothing she could have done about it from Eastwatch, and she had told herself — repeatedly, in writing, in her own internal ledger — that she could not save everyone, and that she had chosen to save the things that could be saved with the resources she had. She had not sent riders to the Twins. She had not warned Robb Stark. She had not, even, written to Catelyn Tully a letter she could have written which might have been enough. She had judged, at the time, that any such warning would have come from a Targaryen queen on a beach in Dragonstone via paths the Lannisters' spies would have read, and would have ended either with the warning being disbelieved or with the Tullys being tipped that someone in Essos was reading the Frey mail, which would have shut down the channel that had given her the warning in the first place.

It had been the right call. She had run the math three times. It had been the right call.

It still hurt.

She read the letter once more, slowly.

Robb Stark, dead. Catelyn Stark, dead. Talisa Stark, dead, with their unborn child. Most of the Northern lords who had ridden south, dead. Edmure Tully, prisoner. Riverrun under siege by Frey-Lannister forces. Roose Bolton, in possession of Winterfell, having marched in two weeks ago at the head of two thousand men and faced no resistance, because Winterfell had been already taken and burned by the Greyjoys some moons earlier and had been held since by — the report was unclear here — a small force of mixed Bolton and Frey men. Bran and Rickon Stark: presumed dead in the burning of Winterfell, but their bodies never recovered, and a singer in the Reach had been spreading a rumour for weeks that the boys had escaped with a wildling woman and a stable boy. Arya Stark: unaccounted for since her father's execution. Sansa Stark: in the Red Keep. Jon Snow: at Eastwatch, beside her, reading over her shoulder.

She had not heard him come up.

She turned. Jon was very pale. He had read it in silence over her shoulder. Ghost was at his hip. The wolf's great white head was lowered, his ears were flat, and he was making a small low sound in his throat that Aelya had not heard from him before — not a growl, not a whine, something underneath both of those.

Jon did not speak.

Aelya took his hand. He let her. His fingers were cold.

"I should have — " he began, and stopped. "I should have been there. I should have ridden south with him. I should have — "

"You could not have, Jon. You were sworn to the Watch. You did not know."

"He was my brother."

"He was your brother. He still is. You are going to mourn him properly. Properly. In the godswood here, tonight, with whoever among the Watch will stand with you, and I will stand with you, and Ghost will stand with you. We are going to do it tonight. And then — and then, Aegon, you are going to do what your brother would have wanted, which is to live, and to fight what is coming, and to be ready, when this is over, to take what is yours back. Do you hear me?"

Jon did not answer.

He was not crying. He was not yet, Aelya thought, in the place where crying would happen. He was somewhere harder than that, somewhere very quiet and very locked.

She let go of his hand. She put her arms around him instead. He stood stiff for a moment, then accepted the hug, then — slowly, with the awkwardness of a young man who had not been hugged often — put his arms around her in return.

Ghost came and pressed his huge head between them.

They stood like that for a long while in the cold sun, and Ēdrugon raised his great horned head from the flagstones and watched them with his slow yellow eyes, and somewhere over the western Wall a horn was blowing for the noon change of watch, and the world kept turning, indifferent and steady, around their small grief.

She wrote to Dany that afternoon.

It was a short letter. There was not, this time, much to say.

My love,

The raven came today. The Red Wedding is real. Robb, Catelyn, Talisa and the unborn child, most of the northern host. Riverrun besieged. Bran and Rickon presumed dead but not confirmed. Arya unaccounted for.

Jon is not all right. He is doing what he is supposed to do, which is to mourn properly and to keep his oath, and I am proud of him in a way that is not making any of this easier.

I am writing to you because I had told myself for fifteen years that when this happened, I would not let myself feel it, because I had decided long ago that the cost of saving them was too high relative to the cost of saving everything else. The math has not changed. The math is still right. But I would like to lie my head in your lap for an hour anyway, and I cannot, and so I am writing to you instead.

I have sent a rider to Cape Wrath with sealed orders. He will ride west to Riverrun as fast as he can change horses. The orders are: the Frey betrayal will not stand. Walder Frey is to be told, in your name and mine, that he has six moons to deliver himself and his sons responsible to a Targaryen court for trial, or our forces will arrive at the Twins and the Twins will not be standing afterward. That is the exact wording. I have sealed it with both our seals; I trust you will not mind. I will not have him die quietly of old age before our queen's reign begins. He must be tried, openly, for what he did, so that the realm sees what we do to men who break guest-right. The lords of the North will need to see this. The lords of every region will need to see it. The realm is going to remember how to honor guest-right again, my love, and we are going to remind it.

I am also sending a separate rider to Pyke, to Balon Greyjoy, with terms. I have wanted to handle the Iron Islands gently if possible, but they took Winterfell, and they burned it, and I cannot be gentle now. Theon Greyjoy is a hostage of Roose Bolton; we will see if we can get him out. The rest of the Greyjoys will swear or die. I am giving Balon the choice. I do not expect him to choose well.

Roose Bolton — Roose Bolton I am going to handle myself. When I come south. There is a particular kind of man Roose Bolton is, my love, and I have been reading his career, and I want to look him in the face when I tell him what I am going to do. You will not be there. I do not want you to be there. Sun and shadow.

Bran and Rickon — I am sending three small parties north of the Neck through different routes to look for them. The singer's story is the kind of story that turns out to be true about half the time, and half of true is good enough to spend resources on. If they are alive, we will find them.

Arya — Arya is harder. I have a guess about Arya, my love, but it is a guess that requires me to talk to Sansa first to confirm a thing, and I cannot do that until we are in King's Landing. Be patient. I am thinking about her.

I love you. The bed is still missing you. Three moons.

A.

She sealed it. She gave it to the rider.

Then she went down to the godswood at the foot of the Wall — Eastwatch's heart-tree was small, a young weirwood that had grown up in a cleft of stone and was scarcely taller than a man, but its red-and-white face wept its slow sap as steadily as any heart-tree of the older castles — and she stood beside Jon Snow as he knelt in the small thin snow, and she helped him say the names of his dead aloud: Robb. Catelyn. Talisa. The child. Eddard, again, properly, now that they were doing it. Lyanna, whom he had never met but whose name he had not been allowed to speak with respect until a moon ago.

A dozen brothers of the Watch came and stood with them. Cotter Pyke came. Mormont came. Sam Tarly came and stood at Jon's left, and held Jon's elbow when his voice broke on his mother's name. Even Tormund came down from the wildling camp in the Gift, which he had no business being at on this side of the Wall and which he was not technically supposed to enter but which no one made a fuss about, and stood at the back of the small crowd with his great red beard and his hands folded and his head bowed in the wildling way.

It was a small ceremony. It lasted perhaps half an hour.

When it was over, Jon Snow stood up out of the snow and turned to them, and he said — in a voice that had cracked and reset, the voice of a young man who had just decided something and would not unsay it:

"I am not yet released from my vows. But I tell you, my brothers, and I tell you, my aunt, and I tell you, Lord Mance Rayder of the free folk who is here without a cloak: when this long night is over, I am going home. I am going to Winterfell. I am going to take it back. I do not yet know what name I will use. But I am going home."

Tormund clapped him on the shoulder, hard.

"Aye, lad," he said. "Aye. We'll come with you. The free folk owe a debt to the man who's been keeping us fed. We'll come with you to your Winterfell."

Mormont, behind him, simply nodded.

Aelya looked at her nephew, with his dead silver mother's blood and his dead brown father's name and his dead grey uncle's wolf at his hip, and she thought: yes. Yes, you will. And I am going to put you on that throne if I have to do it with my own hands.

She did not say so aloud. It was not yet the moment for saying so aloud. The moment was coming.

— Sansa, two nights later —

The handmaid woke her before dawn.

It was not Senelle this time. It was a young Tyrell girl Margaery had quietly placed in the keep three weeks earlier under the cover of a transfer from Highgarden — a small dark-haired thing called Megga, one of Margaery's cousins, fifteen years old and trying very hard to look composed. She put her finger to her lips. She held out a folded scrap of parchment.

Sansa took it. She read by the dying coal of her hearth.

Sansa. The riders are out. North. A. Targaryen sent three parties through different routes to look for your brothers Bran and Rickon. She is also looking for Arya. She wrote to me directly through my grandmother last night. She said: tell the Stark girl that her family is being looked for, by name, by every resource I have, and tell her not to give up. I am telling you. — M.

Sansa read it twice.

Then she folded it very small, kissed the parchment once, walked to the hearth, and dropped it on the coals.

She went back to bed.

For the first time in a year, when she closed her eyes, she did not see her father's head.

She saw, instead, three small parties of riders moving north through forests she had grown up in, calling her brothers' names.

She slept.