— Aelya —

She held the small council the day after the coronation, in the Tower of the Hand, and the council ran for nine hours.

Tyrion was confirmed as Master of Coin. He had asked, beforehand, whether the realm would accept it; Aelya had told him the realm would accept what the queens told it to accept, and that he was the most numerate Lannister alive and probably the most numerate man in the realm full stop, and that the alternative was a Reach lord who would try to skim, and that she was not in the mood for skimming. Tyrion had bowed, briefly, and accepted, and had then — within four hours — produced a six-page summary of the Crown's actual finances that was the first honest accounting the Iron Throne had received in twenty years. The summary was alarming. Tyrion had a plan. Aelya had read the plan, made three small amendments, and approved it.

Missandei was confirmed as Mistress of Whisperers, and the small handful of court traditionalists who had been planning to object discovered, when they came into the council chamber to make their objection, that the objection had already been pre-empted by Olenna Tyrell, who had taken it upon herself to inform each of them privately, the night before, that the Mistress of Whisperers was a personal friend of hers and that any objection to her appointment would be taken as an objection to the Tyrells, which the Tyrells would be compelled to take seriously. The objections had evaporated. Missandei, taking the seat with her usual composure, had inclined her head once to Olenna across the chamber, and Olenna had inclined hers back. They were, Aelya had noted with considerable amusement, rapidly becoming a terrifying double act.

Ser Barristan was confirmed as Lord Commander of the Kingsguard, with the personal stipulation — which Aelya had insisted on, over his protest — that the white cloaks would, going forward, be permitted to resign their service in cases where the realm needed them in other roles, with their honor untarnished. Ser Barristan had been startled by this. Aelya had explained: Ser, I am tired of good men being trapped in their own oaths. The Watch will release men under royal pardon. The Kingsguard will release them under royal request. The realm wastes too many useful people by not letting them grow. Ser Barristan had bowed. The small change went into the realm's books that afternoon.

Howland Reed had been quietly invited onto the council as Master of Laws. He had accepted, with the grave attention of a man who had not expected to be asked, and had then, in the council chamber, produced — from a small leather satchel he had brought down from Greywater Watch — a draft of legal reforms relating to guest-right that he had been working on, privately, for seventeen years, in the desk drawer of a small crannog hall, against a future that he had not been certain would ever come. The draft was brilliant. Aelya had read three pages of it, and looked up at the small wrinkled old crannogman across the council table, and said, in a voice that had cracked slightly:

"My lord. You have been waiting for a court that deserved this."

Howland Reed had said, very quietly: "Aye, Your Grace. I have been."

The Vale had been resolved by sundown. Tyrion had drafted, on the queens' instruction, a careful letter to Lysa Arryn at the Eyrie, in which the Crown acknowledged Lysa's grief, confirmed her son Robert as Lord of the Eyrie and Defender of the Vale, and very gently requested that Lord Petyr Baelish, presently in the Vale, present himself at King's Landing within the moon to give an accounting of certain financial matters relating to his tenure as Master of Coin. Tyrion had signed it. Missandei had added a small additional letter, on plainer parchment, to one of Lysa's senior maesters whom Missandei's network had identified as quietly loyal to the realm rather than to Petyr. The letter explained, in brisk neutral language, what Petyr had done to the Crown's accounts and what would happen to a maester who failed to ensure Petyr's prompt arrival in the capital. It was a polite letter. It was, Aelya thought, the kind of polite letter Petyr Baelish himself might have written, in his prime, and there was a small dark satisfaction in turning the form against the man.

Petyr Baelish would arrive in King's Landing in twenty-three days. He would not leave again.

Roose Bolton was to be handled in the spring, by Aelya personally, when she rode north. The Frey trial was scheduled for early summer at Riverrun, presided over by Brynden Tully, with public witnessing required. The Greyjoy question was tabled — Balon had not replied to Aelya's letter, which was an answer of its own, and the Iron Islands would be addressed after winter. Tywin's articles of surrender were ratified. Cersei was confirmed for Darry. Tommen was confirmed as the eventual Lord of Casterly Rock, with a regency by his uncle Kevan, which the realm — Aelya had judged — would tolerate, because Kevan was the kind of small steady man the realm trusted.

Joffrey was sent for. Joffrey was brought in, in a plain wool tunic, with a mute Unsullied at each elbow, and Aelya looked at him across the council table — the small white-faced fourteen-year-old with the mother's eyes and the father's none of the rest, who was not afraid because he was too proud to be afraid — and she said:

"Joffrey of House Baratheon. You are no longer king. You will be sent north to Winterfell when Winterfell has been retaken, where Lady Sansa Stark will determine your fate. Do you understand the words I have just spoken?"

He did not answer.

"Take him out," she said.

They took him out. The council was quiet for a moment.

Cersei, who had been seated at the far end of the table — invited, as a courtesy, to attend the disposition of her own children — did not weep. She had agreed to all of it in advance. She was watching her elder son walk out of a council chamber for the last time and she was, with what Aelya recognised as an enormous effort, holding her face still.

When the doors had closed, Cersei said, very evenly: "Your Grace. Thank you."

"Lady Cersei?"

"For not killing him in this room. For sending him to the girl. She will — she will judge well. Better than I would have."

"Yes," Aelya said. "I think she will."

She and Dany exchanged one quick private look across the table, and they moved to the next item on the agenda.

The council ran another four hours.

By the time it adjourned, the sun had been down for a long while, and Aelya had agreed to a hundred small things and signed off on twenty middling ones and three large ones, and the realm had — in the space of a single working day — been put on a footing that would carry it through to the spring. Dany, beside her at the council table, had not flagged once. Dany had, in fact, presided over the second half of the council with a quiet competent authority that Aelya had been waiting all year to see, and which the Crownlands lords had been waiting all month to see, and the Crownlands lords had registered it, and they had relaxed, and the relaxation was — Aelya thought distantly — the most important single political event of the day.

It was past the tenth hour of the night before they finally rose from the table and went, together with Jon and Howland, to the small private solar Aelya had set aside for what came next.

— The solar —

There was a fire in the hearth, and a lamp on a side table, and a single decanter of unwatered Arbor red, and four chairs. Aelya had asked Missandei to ensure that no servant entered the corridor for an hour. Ghost, who had become the small undeclared sixth person at every important meeting, lay across the doorway from the inside, with his red eyes half-open and his great head on his forepaws.

Aelya closed the door. She turned the key.

She did not sit. She poured wine for the four of them. She set the cup in Jon's hand. She set one in Howland Reed's. She set one in Dany's, briefly squeezing her wife's hand around it. She kept the fourth.

Then she said: "Jon. Sit."

Jon sat.

He had known, all day, that something was being prepared for tonight. Aelya had not told him the shape of it. He had known that Howland Reed had come down from Greywater Watch on a personal invitation, and he had known — with the careful instinct of a young man who had spent his life reading rooms — that Howland Reed had been looking at him across the sept the day before with the kind of attention that meant something. He had not asked. He had been waiting. He had not, in fact, slept the night before. Ghost had felt it; Ghost had not slept either, and had been at his hip all day with the steady patient weight of a creature who knew his rider was about to be told a thing that would change him.

Aelya turned to Howland.

"My lord. The boy is yours. Tell him."

Howland Reed set down his cup on the side table without drinking. He folded his small wrinkled brown hands in his lap. He looked at Jon Snow, in the firelight, with an expression that Aelya — even though she had been preparing for this moment for months — found she could not quite watch directly. It was the expression of a man who had carried something for seventeen years and had reached, at last, the only person in the world whose face would make the carrying worthwhile.

"Lad," Howland said quietly. "I knew your mother."

Jon went very still.

"I knew her well," Howland went on. "Better, I think, than anyone living except your father — than Ned. Better, by the end, than he did, because she and I spoke of things she would not speak to him about. I was at the Tower of Joy with him when she — when you came. I was the only man besides Ned to come back from that tower alive. I have been waiting, lad, all these years, to tell you about her, and I have not been sure the day would come, and I have thought, in the small hours of more nights than I will admit, that I had been stupid to keep silent so long. The day has come. I would like to tell you about her now, if you will let me. Will you let me?"

Jon's voice had gone, somewhere. He nodded.

"Aye." Howland's voice was rough. "Aye, then. Listen, lad. Your mother was a wolf-girl. She was wild. Wild, in a way the songs do not catch, because the songs make her tragic and she was not tragic — she was fierce, she was funny, she was a brawler, she could ride down a stag at full gallop and she did, more than once, in front of me, when she was sixteen, just to prove to her brothers that she could. She had a temper like a forge. She had a laugh like a bell. She had — gods — she had a way of looking at you, lad, when you said a stupid thing, that would peel paint off a wall."

Jon made a small sound. It was almost a laugh.

"Aye," Howland said softly. "Aye, lad. You have it. The look. Your aunts have been telling me you have her looks; they are wrong, they have her colour, but you have her — her way. The way you carry yourself when you are quietly angry. I have been watching you for two days. I know that walk. I have not seen that walk in seventeen years."

Jon did not answer. His hand, on the arm of the chair, was clenched white.

"She loved your father," Howland went on. "Rhaegar. She did. I will tell you that plain, lad, because there are songs that say she did not, and the songs are wrong. She loved him, and he loved her, and they were both married to other people, and they did a thing the realm could not forgive, and the realm went to war over it, and tens of thousands died, and that is the truth of it. I am not going to soften that for you. They did a foolish, terrible, beautiful thing. I have, in the years since, decided that I forgive them for it, because they did not know what would come, and because they were young, lad, they were younger than you are now when they made the choice that started it all, and young people are entitled to one terrible beautiful mistake. I forgave them a long time ago. I hope you will. Not now. Eventually."

Jon nodded, once.

"She did not know your father had died," Howland said, more quietly. "When you were born. The news did not reach the tower. She thought he was at the Trident still. She — she went into her labour on a hot afternoon, and she laboured for two days and a night, and she was small, lad, your mother was small for a woman, and you were a big babe, and the midwife — there was a Dornish midwife, an old woman named Wylla, a good woman — Wylla did her best, but Lyanna had lost too much blood by the end, and we all knew, by the second night, that she was not going to come up out of it. She knew it too. She was lucid, lad. She was lucid until the very last hour. That is what I want you to know about her end. She was not afraid. She had decided she would not be."

Howland paused. He took a breath.

"She gave you to your father — to Ned, I mean, your foster-father, who was her brother, and who had ridden into that tower to find her — she gave you to him with her own hands. She named you. She did not name you Aegon, lad; that was your true-father, in a letter from earlier in her pregnancy that I found later in her things and gave to a maester to keep safe. She herself, at the end, with her own breath, named you. Do you know what she named you?"

Jon's voice was barely there. "No."

"She named you Jon. She told Ned: call him Jon. After Jon Connington, who was a friend to me when no one else was, and who is dead at the Trident with my Rhaegar. Call my son Jon. Do not call him Aegon — Aegon belonged to Elia, and my boy will not take Elia's son's name; her son was killed for it, and I will not have my son sit a throne built on a dead babe's bones. Jon. Call him Jon, and raise him as a Stark, and let him live a good Northern life away from all of this."

Howland's voice broke, gently. He let it.

"She said: promise me, Ned. Promise me you will keep him safe. Promise me you will let him be his own man. Promise me you will not put a crown on him to make up for anyone else's grief. Promise me."

Jon's eyes were full. They had been full for some minutes. The tears had not yet come down.

"That was the promise," Howland Reed said. "That was the promise me, Ned of the songs, lad. It was three promises. Keep him safe. Let him be his own man. Do not crown him for someone else's grief. Your father — your foster-father — kept all three. He kept them at the cost of his honour with everyone he loved, including his lady wife. He kept them at the cost of his own peace of mind for seventeen years. He kept them all the way to the headsman's block on the steps of the Great Sept across the city from this room. He did not tell me what had happened in King's Landing, lad — I was at Greywater Watch, I learned of his death by raven a moon late — but I know what he was thinking, on those steps, because I knew Ned for thirty years. He was thinking: the boy is at the Wall, the boy is safe, the promises hold. That is what he died with. I am as sure of that as I am of anything in my life."

Jon was crying, now. Properly. The slow steady weeping of a young man who had not wept properly for his foster-father in a year and was, all at once, doing it now.

Howland Reed rose. He crossed to Jon's chair. He laid a small brown hand on Jon's silver-Stark-dark head, and he said, gently:

"Aegon Targaryen. Jon Targaryen, if you will hear the name your mother gave you as a Targaryen name and not only as a Stark one. Both are yours. Both are right. Your mother loved your father and your father loved your mother and they were foolish, and the realm paid for their foolishness for a generation, and you are what the foolishness made, and you are not the price of it — you are not their atonement, lad, you are not some debt to history, you are just their boy. You are theirs. You are also Eddard Stark's, in every way that matters except the one. You are also the queens' nephew. You are not less for having so many parents. You are more. Hear me?"

"I hear you," Jon whispered.

"Good lad."

Howland stood for a moment longer with his hand on Jon's head. Then he stepped back, sat down, picked up his wine cup at last, and drank.

Dany rose from her chair, came across the small room, knelt in front of Jon's, and put both her hands on his knees. She did not speak. She did not have to. Jon, after a moment, leaned forward, and put his forehead against hers, and Aelya — across the room, at the side table — did not interrupt.

Aelya watched her sister and her nephew in the firelight, and Howland Reed beside them with his small wrinkled face and his still-wet eyes, and she thought: we are a family. Right here, in this room, with the door locked. We are the family that should have existed if the realm had not burned. We do not have everyone. Lyanna is not here. Rhaegar is not here. Rhaella is not here. Ned is not here. But we are the four of us, and Ghost is at the door, and I have made this room exist, and that is what I have done with my fifteen years.

She did not weep. She had decided in advance she would not. She set down her wine.

She crossed to her sister and her nephew, and she sat down on the rug beside them, and she put one hand on Dany's back and the other on Jon's, and the four of them — five, with Ghost — sat in the small private solar in the Red Keep until the fire burned low, and no one came to the door, and the realm, beyond the corridor, went on with its small post-coronation business, and they did not talk about politics for the rest of the night.

It was, Aelya thought, the best night she had had in this life.

She was twenty years old.

The realm was hers — was theirs.

The hard part — the actual hard part, the long-night hard part — was still ahead. She knew it. She had not forgotten it for a single hour. But tonight there was a fire and a wine cup and a nephew with his forehead against his aunt's and an old crannogman who had been waiting seventeen years to put down a story.

She let it be enough, for tonight.

She would pick the rest of it up tomorrow.