— Aelya —

She had not, in twelve months at Eastwatch, been warm.

She had not registered this. There was no reason to have registered it. The Wall was cold; that was the Wall. She had bundled into her furs and her wool and her oilcloth every morning and had unbundled out of them every night, and the cold had been a given the way air was a given. It had simply been there, a constant condition, and she had stopped noticing it the way one stopped noticing the sound of the sea after a week beside it.

She noticed its absence now.

She was in a tub of hot water in a stone bath-chamber off her old Dragonstone tower-room, and the water was nearly scalding, and she had been in it for a quarter of an hour, and she could feel — she could physically feel — something letting go in her shoulders that had been held there since the night of the three blasts. Maybe longer. Maybe since she had stepped onto the deck of the Balerion's Shadow twelve moons ago. Maybe longer than that. Maybe since she was four years old and had begun, without anyone's permission, to plan a war against winter.

Dany was sitting on the rim of the tub with her sleeves rolled up to her elbows, washing Aelya's hair.

She had insisted. Aelya had been preparing to argue — my love, I am perfectly capable of washing my own hair, you are a queen — and Dany had simply pointed at the stool beside the tub and said, "Sit," and Aelya had sat, and then Dany had pointed at the tub and said, "In," and Aelya had got in, and Dany had taken down the small porcelain jar of jasmine soap she had ordered up specifically from a Lyseni trader for this hour, and had begun, with the methodical patience of a woman who had been planning this hour for months, to wash twelve months of Wall out of her sister's hair.

It was a long process. There was a great deal of Wall in there.

"You are grey," Dany said reproachfully, picking another small sprig of pine needle out of a curl behind Aelya's ear. "When did this happen. Your hair has gone the colour of the Wall, Aelya, it is grey-on-silver, do you not have a comb at Eastwatch?"

"I have a comb at Eastwatch."

"Have you used it."

"In moderation."

"Aelya."

"Dany. There were larger problems."

"There are not larger problems than your hair. Your hair is a — a small national resource. Look at it. There is moss in here. Moss, Aelya, who has been letting this happen?"

"I have been letting it happen."

"Well, I am taking over."

"Yes, my love."

She closed her eyes and let her sister scrub her scalp with strong patient fingers, and the warm water went up over her shoulders, and the jasmine smell filled the small room, and somewhere above them, very faintly, she could hear the low rumble that was Morghon snoring on the warm flagstones outside the kitchen — he had been escorted up to his old place by four sweating servants and had collapsed on it as though he had personally swum the distance from Eastwatch — and Aelya, for the first time in a year, breathed out and did not breathe immediately back in.

Dany felt it. Of course Dany felt it.

"There you go," she said softly, fingers gentling. "There you go, my love. You can put it down now. I am here."

Aelya did not answer. She did not trust her voice. She turned her face slightly and pressed her cheek against the inside of Dany's forearm where it rested on the tub rim, and Dany did not pull her arm away; Dany just shifted, very slightly, so Aelya's cheek had a better surface, and kept washing with her other hand.

"Tell me about him," Dany said, after a while. "Properly."

"Jon."

"Jon."

So Aelya told her. About the night on the parapet. About the way the boy had held himself when she had said the name Aegon aloud. About Ghost recognising her before anyone had told the wolf anything. About the heart-tree at Mance's camp and the way Jon had said it is looking at me. About the night of the three blasts, and Jon on the parapet with his fire-arrows, and the small set of his jaw afterward when she had told him what they were doing was freeing the dead, not killing them. About the Red Wedding and the way he had not yet cried. About Howland Reed, and the four-word reply tell the boy yes. About the slow way Jon had unwound, on the deck of the Balerion's Shadow, under the patient yellow gaze of a black-and-red dragon who had decided, without asking anyone's permission, that this dark-haired Stark-faced young man was family and was therefore to be looked after.

She told her sister all of it. Dany listened, mostly without interrupting, the comb moving steadily through Aelya's wet hair, and once or twice — when Aelya described particular small things, like Jon hugging her awkwardly the first time, or like Ghost pressing his head between them in the cold yard — Dany made a small soft sound, the kind of sound a person made when their heart did something without their permission.

"He has not let himself cry," Aelya said. "Not once. He held it together at his brother's grief-rite. He held it together when he learned about Winterfell. He has stopped, Dany, in a place that I do not think is healthy, and I do not know how to get him out of it, and I have been hoping —"

"You have been hoping I would do it."

"Yes."

"Aelya. My love. Of course I will."

"I am sorry to lay it on you."

"You are not laying anything on me. You are bringing me a son, you idiot. You are bringing me a son and a wolf and a — gods, you have been carrying this boy by yourself for a year, haven't you. Telling no one. Just you and him. While I was off taking the Reach with smiles."

"It was not yours to carry yet. You were taking the Reach."

"It is both of ours now."

"Yes. Yes, Dany, that is why I brought him to you."

Dany set the jar of soap down. She came around to the front of the tub and crouched, so they were eye-to-eye, with the steam rising between them. Her cheeks were pink. There was jasmine on her hands. She looked, Aelya thought distantly, exactly the way she had looked at fourteen in a cabin in Volantis the first time Aelya had shown her two dragon eggs in candlelight, and twelve years had not, somehow, changed any of the part that mattered.

"Aelya. Tomorrow morning we are going to have breakfast with him. Just the three of us. Ghost too. No staff. No Missandei, even. No Arianne. We are going to feed him very well and we are going to ask him about his brothers, all of them, and his sisters, and his uncle Ned, and his lady mother that he has not let himself think about, and at some point during this breakfast he is going to cry, my love, and he is going to cry for an hour, and we are going to let him, and at the end of it he is going to be a person again. Yes?"

"Yes."

"And then in the afternoon you and I are going to plan the rest of the war and put four months of letters in front of you and you are going to read them all and tell me what I have done wrong. But the morning is for our nephew."

"The morning is for our nephew."

Dany leaned forward and pressed her forehead against Aelya's.

"Now," she said softly. "Out of the bath. You have soaked enough. I have prepared you a shocking quantity of food and you are going to eat it, and then we are going to sleep, and we are going to sleep on the same side of the bed, and tomorrow we will be a proper family for the first time in our lives. Yes?"

"Yes, my love."

She kissed Aelya, once, briefly, on the mouth. It was a kiss of welcome more than anything else — you are home, you are mine, the year is over — and Aelya closed her eyes under it, and when Dany pulled back Aelya stayed where she was for a moment with her face slightly tilted up in the steam, and something that had been wound tight in her sternum for twelve months slid, all at once, loose.

"There you go," Dany said again, very softly. "Out, reptile. Towel."

She held out the towel.

— Jon —

He was in the chamber Dany had given him.

It was three doors down from the queens' chamber, on the same hallway, with a window that looked east over the sea and a hearth already lit and a pitcher of fresh water and a dish of olives and bread on the side table. There was a low pallet on the floor at the foot of the bed for Ghost, with a thick wool blanket folded on top of it. A small touch. Whoever had laid out the chamber had thought of a direwolf in advance.

Ghost, who did not generally favour pallets, had nonetheless examined this one carefully, sniffed the wool blanket, and laid down on it. He had decided, evidently, to be polite.

Jon had not yet undressed. He was sitting on the edge of the bed in his travelling tunic, with his hands hanging between his knees, and he was thinking, and the thinking was the same thinking that had been going on in the back of his head for a moon now and that had finally, on the deck of the Balerion's Shadow, started to come forward and demand attention.

His name was Aegon.

He had a queen for an aunt. Two queens for aunts. One of them had hugged him on a quay this morning and called him sweet boy.

His brother was dead. His mother — his foster mother — was dead. His sister-in-law was dead, and her unborn child. His brothers Bran and Rickon were maybe alive and maybe not. His sister Arya was somewhere in the world or in the ground.

His real mother was dead and had been dead since the day he was born.

His real father was dead and had been dead since six moons before that.

Howland Reed was alive at Greywater Watch and was waiting for him.

He should, he thought, be feeling something specific about all of this. Some single coherent emotion. Grief, or rage, or relief, or something that had a name. What he was feeling instead was a kind of low quiet roaring in his chest, a wide flat thing, in which all the smaller emotions were stirred together and could not be pulled apart, and the roar had been there for a moon and he did not know what to do with it. He had worked, on the Wall. He had walked, on the Wall. He had stood watches, on the Wall. The work had held the roar at bay. There was no work here. There was a hot pitcher of water and a dish of olives and a chamber that smelled of jasmine, and the roar was rising.

There was a small soft knock on the door.

Jon raised his head.

"Come in."

The door opened. It was not Aelya. It was Daenerys, in a soft grey night-robe with her hair loose over her shoulders, holding a small silver tray that had on it three things: a clay cup of something hot that steamed, a small dish of honey, and a little stoppered phial of something Jon did not recognise.

"Forgive me," she said. "I would not normally walk into a man's chamber at this hour, but I am — I am your aunt, Jon, and that is going to have to do for proper. May I sit?"

"Yes — yes, Your Grace —"

"Dany, nephew. We agreed."

"Dany."

She came in. She closed the door behind her with her hip, set the tray on the bedside table, and sat down beside him on the bed — not too close, the careful distance of an older relative who knew young men did not like to be crowded — and she was quiet for a moment.

Then she said, very simply: "I have not lost as many people as you have. I want to say that first. I do not want to pretend I know what this is for you."

Jon swallowed.

"My brother Viserys," she went on. "Whom I did not love but whom I did not, in the end, want dead — he was killed by my sister, three years past, when we were fifteen. To save me from a marriage I did not want. I have grieved him in a strange complicated way. My mother, who died bearing us. My father, who died before we were born. Two foster parents in Braavos and Volantis, who were briefly kind to us and then died or moved on. Slaves I have known and freed and sometimes lost. None of these is what you have just lost. I am not pretending it is. I am only telling you that I have a few small chambers in my own life where similar furniture is kept, and that I know the rough shape of the rooms, even though my rooms are smaller and yours are very large."

Jon stared at the floor.

"I —"

"You have not cried," she said. "Aelya told me. I am not telling you to cry, sweet boy. I am telling you that whenever it happens — tonight, in the morning, three weeks from now, in front of an embassy of southern lords — when it happens, it is allowed, and your aunt will be there. Both of your aunts. Yes?"

Jon did not answer. He could not, exactly, answer.

Dany picked up the clay cup. She held it out to him.

"Hot milk and honey and a little bit of dreamwine. The phial is dreamwine; the milk is from a goat in the kitchen yard who is a personal friend of mine; the honey is from the cliffs of Sunspear. You will drink all of it, Jon, because you have not slept properly in a moon and tonight you are going to. Tomorrow we will talk about your mother. Properly. With Aelya. Over a great quantity of breakfast. Yes?"

He took the cup.

It was very warm in his hands.

He drank a sip. It was good — the dreamwine in it was barely a hint, a single thread of bitterness through the sweet — and he drank a longer pull, and the warmth went down into the wide flat roaring place in his chest, and he discovered, with a kind of dim distant surprise, that he was crying.

Not loudly. Quietly. Tears were just running down his face into the cup. He had not given them permission. They were going anyway.

"Oh, sweet boy," Dany said softly.

She did not make a fuss.

She set the cup down on the tray for him, took his hand, and just sat with him.

After a while — not very long, perhaps a quarter of an hour — Ghost rose silently from the pallet, came around the bed, and laid his enormous head heavily across Jon's knees. The weight was the weight of a small horse. Jon's free hand went into the wolf's fur. The roar in his chest went down a notch.

When the worst of it had passed, Dany pressed his hand once and rose.

"Drink the rest," she said. "Sleep. Your aunt Aelya is across the hall and I am beside her, and Ghost is on you, and you are home, Jon. Whatever home means. We will work the rest of it out tomorrow. Drink."

She stooped and kissed the top of his head — quickly, the way an older relative did — and went out, and closed the door very quietly behind her.

Jon Snow drank the rest of the cup.

He set it down on the tray. He pulled the blanket over his shoulders and Ghost's huge body across his feet, and for the first time in a moon, with jasmine and goat-milk and the small honest fact of a kind woman in a grey robe in his head, he slept without dreaming.

— Aelya, late —

It was past midnight when Dany came back into their chamber.

Aelya was already in bed, in a clean nightshirt, with her hair drying on the pillow and Ēdrugon on the long stone bench by the hearth where he had decided, after inspecting the chamber, that he belonged. The lamps were low. The window-shutters were open a finger's width to let in the sea-air, and the night smelled of salt and far-off woodsmoke and, beneath everything, the warm dry mineral smell of dragon.

Dany closed the door. She turned the key.

She came to the bed and sat on its edge.

"He is asleep," she said quietly.

"You are wonderful."

"I am not. He needed it. Anyone would have done it."

"No, Dany. Anyone would not have done it. You did it. There is a particular shape of person you are, and tonight is one of the things that shape is for, and I have been watching you do it from across a hall and I am very proud of you, my love."

Dany did not answer for a moment.

Then, quietly: "Aelya. Lie over. Make room."

Aelya lay over. Dany blew out the last lamp. She slid in under the covers. The bed was warm — Aelya had been in it for half an hour, and the sheets had taken her warmth — and Dany fitted herself along Aelya's side the way she had been fitting herself along Aelya's side since they were small, and Aelya put her arm under her sister's head, and Dany let out a long breath that had, evidently, been waiting twelve months for permission.

"Twelve moons," Aelya murmured.

"Twelve moons."

"I missed you."

"I missed you."

For a long while they did not speak. The fire ticked. The sea, far below, ran. Ēdrugon, on his bench, made a small sleeping huff.

After a while Dany shifted, and propped her chin on Aelya's shoulder, and said, in a voice that was small and careful and entirely her own: "Are you — are you very tired, my love?"

Aelya, who had been almost asleep, smiled into the dark.

"I am very tired, Dany. I am also nineteen years old, and I have not seen my wife in twelve moons, and I am extremely capable, despite the tiredness, of —"

"Aelya."

"— rising to the occasion."

"You are terrible."

"I am terrible. Come here."

"I am here."

"Come closer."

Dany came closer.

The chamber, which had been quiet, became a different kind of quiet. Ēdrugon, on his bench, turned his great horned head slightly, registered the change in the room with the patient indifference of a long-married dragon who had seen this several times before, and tucked his nose under his foreleg, and went back to sleep.

The sea ran on outside.

The candle Aelya had not blown out guttered, low and low and lower, and finally, very late, went out by itself, and the room was dark, and the two silver queens of the Seven Kingdoms held each other through the small hours of their first night home in twelve moons, and the realm — north and south, Wall and Reach, Red Keep and Dragonstone — slept on around them.