— Aelya, Winterfell, second week of spring —

Roose Bolton was beheaded at noon the day after the godswood ceremony, in the main courtyard of Winterfell, by the queens' headsman — a quiet Unsullied Aelya had selected for the role specifically because he had been a slave in Astapor who had been forced, as a boy, to behead disobedient slaves, and Aelya had judged that the man had earned the right to do this killing with a clean cloak, his name spoken, and a wage. She had thought about doing it herself. She had decided she would not. The man who passed the sentence should swing the sword, Ned Stark had taught his son; but Aelya was not Ned Stark, and Ned Stark had not had Roose Bolton's particular weight of crimes in front of him, and Aelya had judged that the symbolism of having a freed slave execute the man who had been the most enthusiastic flayer in Westeros was a symbolism worth more than her personal insistence on the old Northern formality. The freedman had wept, briefly, after the stroke, and then composed himself. Aelya had thanked him in High Valyrian. He had bowed.

Ramsay Snow was tried three days later. The trial took an afternoon. The witnesses — three former captives of the Dreadfort whom Aelya's outriders had freed during the arrest — testified in turn, without flinching, in front of the assembled Northern lords. Ramsay was hanged at sunset. Aelya did not attend the hanging. Sansa did. Sansa walked into the courtyard in her grey gown with the direwolf-pin on her shoulder and watched the trapdoor open and the rope go taut, and watched until the body had stopped moving, and then she turned and walked back into the great hall and asked Khorane — who had ridden up with the column — for a cup of warmed wine, and drank it sitting at the high table with her hands steady on the cup. Aelya had watched her do this from across the hall. Aelya had said nothing. There were times to comfort and times to let a young woman be the thing she had become, and this was the second.

Later that night, in the chamber Sansa had taken — her father's old chamber, which she had insisted on, and which had been aired and cleaned for two days before she had agreed to enter — Aelya had brought her a second cup of warmed wine and had sat with her by the hearth, and Sansa had said quietly:

"Your Grace. May I tell you something that I have not told anyone."

"Yes."

"I am not sorry. I thought I would be. After. I thought — I thought I would feel sick afterward, the way I felt sick after — after my father — but I do not. I feel — clean. Is that wrong?"

"No."

"It is not?"

"Sansa. Look at me. You are not your father, and you are not in your father's situation, and you do not have to feel what your father would have felt. Your father was a good man and the best of us, and he would have, in your place, signed Ramsay Snow's death warrant exactly as you did. He would, perhaps, have felt sick afterward. Perhaps not. Different people feel different things after they pass sentences on monsters, my dear, and there is no one correct feeling. You feel clean. That is the right feeling for you tonight. Drink your wine. I am proud of you."

Sansa had set the cup down. She had pressed both hands against her face, briefly, and then dropped them and looked at Aelya.

"Your Grace —"

"Aelya, Sansa. We are family now. And in this room, with the door shut, we are off duty."

"Aelya."

"Yes."

"I think — I think I would like to start writing letters again. To the houses that did not send anyone to the Twins. To the Reeds. To the Mormonts. To find out who is alive and who is not. To — to begin to put the North back together."

"That would be a queen's work, Sansa."

"I know."

"Then do it. Start tomorrow. I will give you the writing-room I have been using. I will assign you Megga, who came up with us, and a clerk. Begin."

Sansa had nodded. Then, very quietly, she had said: "Aelya. About my brothers. About Bran and Rickon."

"Yes."

"I have been thinking. The singer's story said a wildling woman and a stable boy. The stable boy — there was a boy at Winterfell when I was small named Hodor, who was a great big simple boy who had been a stable boy under his old name, Walder, before he hurt his head and could only say his one word. He was — he was very gentle. Bran liked him. Bran rode him, sometimes, in the years before he could walk again. If a stable boy took my brothers north out of a burning Winterfell, it was Hodor."

"That fits."

"And the wildling woman — there was a wildling woman who came to my father two years before the war, who had been taken in a raid south of the Wall by Benjen's rangers and given to my father for justice. He spared her. Her name was Osha. She was at Winterfell as a kitchen-woman when I went south. If she escaped the sack, she would have known the country north of the Wolfswood. She would have known where to take Bran, if Bran had — had a reason to go north."

"What reason would he have had?"

Sansa hesitated.

"Aelya. Bran had — has — a — a way of dreaming. Like you, I think. Smaller. He used to dream of crows, before his fall. Three-eyed crows. I — I never understood it. After his fall he stopped speaking about it, but I think he did not stop dreaming about it. I think — I think if he were alive, and he were going somewhere, he would be going to whatever was at the end of the dreams. And I think the end of the dreams is north of the Wall."

Aelya had set her wine down.

She had thought about this, she realised, only obliquely. She had read about Bran in a book in another life, but she had read about Bran-after-the-fall, and she had not, in the careful work of her daily planning over the past three years, sat down and asked herself what would Bran have done after Winterfell burned, given that I now know he is a greenseer in waiting.

She knew the answer the moment Sansa had asked the question.

He had gone to the three-eyed raven. He had gone north of the Wall. He had been gone two years.

"Sansa," she said. "I am going to send a small fast party north tomorrow. Through the New Gift and into Mance's territory. With a guide who knows the haunted forest. With Jon, if Jon will go."

"Jon will go."

"I know. I will ask him in the morning. The party will be small — Jon, six rangers Mormont can spare, Tormund if he is willing, and one of my dragons. Drogon. Or Rhaegal. Not Morghon — Morghon would frighten the country bald. And if your brother is alive, my dear, north of the Wall, with Hodor and Osha, then we will find him."

Sansa looked at her for a long moment.

"And Rickon?"

Aelya sighed.

"Rickon I am less sure of. The singer's story did not include a child as small as Rickon would have been. Rickon may have been separated from Bran. Rickon may be — he may be on Skagos, my dear. There is a lord there, an old man called Skagger, who I have it on good authority has been holding something for the North that he refuses to discuss. I have written to him three times. He has not replied. I am going to send a different kind of letter shortly."

"What kind."

"The kind that arrives in the talons of Sōvegon, who is very fast."

Sansa, despite herself, laughed.

"Aelya."

"Yes."

"I do not know how to thank you for any of this."

"You do not need to thank me, Sansa. This is what queens do, when their realm is being put back together after a generation of being broken. We find the children. We find them. We bring them home. That is the first duty of a court, and the previous court forgot, and we are remembering."

— Three weeks later, beyond the Wall —

Jon had taken the party north on Aelya's mark, with seven men, with Tormund as guide, and with Rhaegal — the dragon Jon had quietly bonded with over the past months at Dragonstone, the bronze-and-green one who watched the sea for hours, who Aelya had decided was Jon's in much the way Drogon was Dany's.

It had been Aelya's choice. She had not announced it. She had simply, one morning at the Dragon Yard at Dragonstone, watched Jon stand at the edge of the platform looking at Rhaegal, and watched Rhaegal turn his great green-bronze head and look back at Jon for a long unhurried moment, and then she had said quietly to her sister, that night in their chamber: Rhaegal has chosen him. I do not know how I know. I know. Dany had not protested. Dany had said only: good. He should have one. Three queens, six dragons, two queens the older sister and the younger, the third the nephew. The realm will read it as fitting. Let it be Rhaegal. Jon, when told, had looked at his aunts as though they had handed him an heirloom he had not earned, and had then — without saying anything — gone up to the Yard, climbed onto Rhaegal's back the way one climbs onto a horse, and the dragon had risen, and they had flown one careful circuit of Dragonstone, and on landing Jon had put his forehead briefly against the warm scales of Rhaegal's neck and had then said, in a voice that had not entirely recovered, thank you.

Now, thirty days north of the Wall, in the deepest part of the Haunted Forest, in a cave under the roots of an enormous weirwood that had grown into the side of a hill —

— they found him.

Bran Stark was sitting on a small wooden chair at the foot of the weirwood's roots, in a cave lit by torches and the strange pale phosphorescence of the roots themselves, and he was very thin, and his hair had grown long, and there was a great calm look about him that did not belong to any thirteen-year-old. Behind him, where the books had said there would be a man old as the hills tangled in roots, there was instead — to Jon's surprise — no one; the three-eyed raven, whoever or whatever he had been, had finished his work and gone, and the cave belonged now to Bran and to two figures further back, a great gentle Hodor sitting cross-legged feeding small pieces of root-mushroom to a fire, and a small dark wildling woman — Osha, Jon recognised her from Sansa's description — leaning on a spear by the cave mouth.

There was no Meera Reed. There was no Jojen Reed. There had not, in this version, been a Reed siblings' journey north; Howland had refused, when Sansa's question had reached him at Greywater Watch via raven, to send his children on such a quest, on the grounds — he had written to Aelya, in confidence — that my children's gift is bound up in my own and is not yet ripe, and they are too young, and the boy who needs to find the raven up there is not my son. Bran had gone north with only Hodor and Osha. Bran had — Aelya had inferred, reading Howland's letter — been guided by the raven through dream, without companions of his blood. It was an austerer journey than the books had recorded. It had also been faster.

Bran turned his head, slowly, when Jon entered the cave. He did not look surprised. He had been expecting Jon for some time, his face suggested.

"Hello, Jon," Bran said, in a voice that was too old for his throat. "Or — Aegon, I suppose. Hello. I have been waiting for you."

Jon stopped in the cave mouth. Ghost beside him stopped too. Hodor looked up from his fire with a great slow smile.

"Hodor," Hodor said, in delighted recognition.

"Hello, Bran," Jon said. His voice was rough. "Hello, Hodor. Hello — you are Osha?"

"Aye, m'lord," Osha said dryly, hefting her spear. "I'm Osha. About bloody time."

"Bran. Sansa is alive. She is at Winterfell. We have come for you."

"I know," Bran said, gently. "I have seen. Sansa is alive, and Rickon is alive on Skagos with the folk of Lord Magnar, and you have a queen-aunt called Aelya who has been moving the world for me since before I was born, and there is a thing coming over the Wall this winter that is going to require all of us, and I have come down from the tree to ride with you. I am ready, Jon. I am — I am a little tired, but I am ready. Will you take me home?"

Jon — who had expected to find a corpse, who had spent thirty days riding north through a haunted forest with Tormund cracking dark jokes about how the search parties of his youth had usually found bones, lad, only bones — sat down hard on the cave floor in front of his small brother and pulled Bran into his arms, careful of his thin shoulders, and Bran's arms came up around Jon's neck with surprising strength, and the two of them did not speak for a long while. Ghost padded forward and laid his great white head across Bran's lap, and Bran's small hand went into the wolf's fur, and Bran said, very quietly into Jon's shoulder:

"You found a mother, Jon. I was watching. I am glad."

Jon, who had not known what the boy could see meant in any specific way before this moment, made a small wet sound and held his brother tighter.

Outside the cave, Tormund was speaking to Osha in the Old Tongue in low rapid sentences, and Osha was laughing — the first real laugh Jon would hear from her — and explaining how she had kept the boys alive for two years on roots and small game and one extremely lucky elk, and Hodor was getting up from his fire with a vast contented stretch, and Rhaegal, in the snow above the cave mouth, was lying with his great green-bronze body curled around the entrance like a sentry dog, his head on his forepaws, his eyes half-shut, content to wait.

They would ride home in the morning.

— Sōvegon goes to Skagos —

Aelya had written the letter to Lord Skagger of Skagos two weeks earlier, in plain Common, on small parchment.

My lord,

I have written to you three times. You have not replied. I am writing now to tell you that Sōvegon is on her way. She is the cream-and-gold dragon you may have heard of. She is not the largest of mine, but she is the fastest, and she will be over your hall by the time you read this. She will not, I assure you, do anything ungentlemanly. She will simply land on your roof, and wait. She will wait for the boy. You know which boy. You have been keeping him for the North for nearly two years, and the realm thanks you for it, but the time for keeping has passed. Send him out. Send him south on the next ship to White Harbor. Sōvegon will accompany the ship. The Crown will pay Skagos one thousand gold dragons for the keeping, the sum to be paid on the boy's safe arrival at Winterfell.

Do not test me on this, my lord. I am told by Howland Reed of Greywater Watch that you are a clever old man, and clever old men know when a thing is over. The thing is over. Send the boy.

Yours in fire and salt,

A. Targaryen.

Sōvegon had flown to Skagos and back, and had eaten three sheep en route in a way that had cost the Crown some thirty gold dragons in compensation to a small farming community on the Three Sisters, and had landed, by all accounts, on the roof of Lord Skagger's hall and waited, exactly as Aelya had said, for two days, sleeping in spans and waking to look at the door, until Lord Skagger had come out — old, grumpy, and in a temper — with a small silent boy of perhaps six holding a wooden sword and a black shaggy direwolf the size of a pony at the boy's heel. Lord Skagger had handed the boy over to a White Harbor captain who had been hastily summoned for the purpose, and had received from Sōvegon the small leather pouch around her neck containing the Crown's promissory note for one thousand gold dragons, redeemable at Manderly's, and had taken the note, and had gone back inside his hall, and had not spoken to anyone about it for the rest of his natural life.

Rickon Stark arrived at Winterfell on the same morning Bran and Jon and Rhaegal arrived from the north, eleven weeks after Aelya had ridden into the castle with Roose Bolton at her stirrup.

Sansa Stark, standing in the courtyard, watched her two small surviving brothers arrive from opposite directions on the same morning — Bran on Rhaegal's back behind Jon, descending out of a clear cold sky; Rickon on a pony at the head of a small Manderly escort, with Shaggydog beside him snarling at every bannerman in reach — and Sansa stood very still for perhaps four seconds, taking it in, and then — for the first time since the longboat — she broke, properly, and ran across the courtyard with her skirts in both hands, and gathered both her brothers to her, and Ghost and Shaggydog and Summer (who had been with Bran and had come down from the cave and had been an enormous silent silvery presence at Bran's side throughout the ride home) all sat down in a watchful semi-circle around the three Starks, and Sansa wept for ten minutes into her brothers' hair without speaking, and the courtyard of Winterfell — full of Northern lords and Targaryen Unsullied and dragons on the roof and freedmen sellswords and a small dark Mistress of Whisperers and a young Stark-Targaryen and a quiet old crannogman — cheered.

Aelya watched from the high gallery of the hall, with Dany at her side.

She did not weep. She had decided in advance she would not. She allowed herself, however, to feel — for a moment — the small specific pride of a woman who had spent fifteen years organising for exactly this courtyard to look exactly like this, and who had pulled it off.

"Sun and shadow," Dany murmured, beside her.

"Sun and shadow."

"Husb — wife. We did it."

"Most of it."

"Most of it. The hard one is still ahead."

"Yes."

"How long do we have."

Aelya looked north out the high gallery window — past the courtyard, past the godswood, past the curtain wall, past the white horizon where the Wall lay invisible four hundred miles north — and she felt, very faintly, the cold dry watching feeling she had felt on the parapet at Eastwatch a year ago, the feeling that did not come off the sea but came down out of somewhere older.

It was closer than it had been.

"By midwinter," she said. "Six moons. Perhaps a little more. Not less."

Dany took her hand.

"Then let us enjoy the courtyard, my love."

They stood at the high window and watched their family below.