— Aelya, autumn into winter, all around the realm —

The realm had six moons, and the realm used them.

The first moon went to settling Winterfell. Sansa was confirmed as Lady of Winterfell with Bran as her co-Stark — an arrangement Sansa had insisted on, and which Bran had accepted with the grave calm that had become his default; he was, the maesters said, a greenseer in waiting, which meant he would be a useful kind of lord but not a moving-around kind of lord, and Sansa would handle the day-to-day. Rickon, who was six and feral, was to be raised by both of them with significant help from Osha, who had been formally retained at a wage and had accepted with a snort and aye, m'lady, somebody has to keep the wolf alive. Hodor was made Steward of the Stables and the Direwolves, a title Tyrion had drafted with great care, and had wept about briefly when handed his new chain of office, and had then gone to inspect his stables and had been, by sundown, quietly running them in a way the previous steward had not quite managed.

The second moon went to the south.

Aelya and Dany returned to King's Landing for six weeks to handle the business that had piled up: Petyr Baelish's trial, which ran four days and ended with his head — Aelya had thought hard about exile and had decided, in the end, that Petyr was a particular kind of man for whom exile would simply be a longer leash, and had signed the warrant herself; Tywin's removal to his cliff-castle, a quiet small affair involving one ship and four guards, with Tyrion present at the dock and Tywin embracing his son for the first time in either of their living memories, a small unwitnessed thing that Tyrion told Aelya about over wine three weeks later and still could not entirely describe; Joffrey's transport north to Winterfell, where Sansa would, in Aelya's grim prediction, take her time deciding what to do; the Greyjoy question, which resolved itself when Balon Greyjoy fell off a bridge in a storm, possibly assisted by his brother Euron, who promptly declared himself king of the islands and was, Aelya judged, going to be a problem in the spring after the long night, but not before.

The third moon went to the Wall.

Aelya rode north herself with two thousand fresh Unsullied, three thousand Reach levies who had volunteered, eight hundred Stormlands volunteers, every barrel of pitch and oil the realm could spare, every pound of dragonglass Howland Reed's network had been quietly stockpiling in the Riverlands for two years, and — the thing she had been waiting for — sixty-three blades of Valyrian steel, gathered through Illyrio's exhaustive Free Cities network at staggering cost, including an entire crate of small daggers, a dozen swords of varying quality, and four greatswords, one of which was the length of a man and which Tormund Giantsbane, when shown it at Castle Black, picked up with his great red beard splitting in a grin and said aye, this'll do, Targaryen, this'll do. The blades were distributed: most to the Watch, a careful number to the wildling chieftains who had earned them, the four greatswords to the four most reliable hands at the Wall, including Mormont's old Longclaw which was already there, and one — a slim long blade in dark grey, barely more than a heavy dagger, which Aelya had selected herself — to Sansa Stark, who would not be fighting at the Wall but who would be holding Winterfell when the Wall fell, and who needed something with a name on it for that work.

The fourth moon went to Bran.

Bran had asked, in the second week back at Winterfell, for an audience with Aelya alone. Aelya had given it to him in the small library off the great hall, with the door shut and Summer at the door instead of Ghost. Bran had wheeled himself in — Hodor had built him a chair on small wheels, on Aelya's suggestion, after Aelya had remembered something from another life — and had said, without preamble:

"Aunt Aelya. The thing in the ice has a name."

"Tell me."

"He was a man of the First Men. Eight thousand years ago. The Children of the Forest made him into the first of them by driving a dragonglass blade into his heart, in a forest, to fight against the First Men in a war they were losing. The Children won the war, and then they could not unmake him. He is the first. He has a — a kind of root in the ground at a place beyond the Lands of Always Winter, in a grove of weirwoods that have gone black. If you kill the root, you kill him. If you kill him, the others fall. The wights stop. The cold stops. It is the only way."

Aelya was silent for a long moment.

"Bran. Are you certain?"

"Yes, aunt. The raven showed me. It is what he was teaching me at the end. He said: the queens have the dragons; you have the path. Tell them the path."

"How do we get to the grove?"

"The grove is — the grove is far north. Past the Lands of Always Winter. Three weeks' flight, perhaps, on a dragon. No man can reach it on foot. It must be a dragon. The dragon rider must — must let me ride with them, because I can find the way through the dream. I cannot find it standing in this room. I have to be in the air."

Aelya looked at her small nephew in his wheeled chair.

"You want to ride a dragon."

"I have to."

"Bran. You are thirteen."

"I am thirteen and I have been a tree for two years and I am the one who knows the path, aunt. There is no other. I will ride with you, on Morghon, because Morghon is the largest and the safest and because Morghon will not throw me. And I will guide you to the grove. And you will burn the grove. And I will go into the man at the heart of the grove, in the way I have learned to go into things, and I will hold him in place while you burn him, and the fire will take both of us if the fire must take both of us."

Aelya stared at him.

"Bran."

"Aunt. I have been alive on borrowed time since I fell from a tower at seven years old. I should not have lived. I have lived, and I have learned what I have learned, and I am the only one who can do this part. If I die in the burning, I die having done the thing the raven taught me to do. If I do not die, I come home and I am Lord of Winterfell with my sister, and we have a long boring lordly life, and that is a fine outcome. Either way, the thing must be done, and I am the one to do it, and I am asking you to take me. Will you?"

Aelya did not answer at once.

She thought about it for three days. She thought about it walking the parapets of Winterfell, and she thought about it lying in bed beside Dany, and she thought about it in a long careful conversation with Howland Reed, who had ridden up from King's Landing for the council. Howland told her, quietly: Your Grace. He is right. He is the one who knows. I have been a small greenseer all my life and I have never been what he is. If he says he can go into the man at the heart, he can. The question is whether you can bear to take a thirteen-year-old boy into a fire. Aelya had told Howland that she did not know whether she could. Howland had said, then ask his sister.

She had asked Sansa.

Sansa had been quiet for a long time. Then she had said: Aelya. Bran has not been a child since he fell. He came home from beyond the Wall as the man my brother would have been at thirty. If he says he must, he must. I would rather lose him doing what he was made for than keep him here and lose the realm. It is not the choice I wish for. It is the choice that is in front of us. Take him. Bring him back if you can.

Aelya had taken his hand, in the library, on the evening of the third day, and said: yes. We will go together. You and me and Morghon. When the time is right.

Bran had nodded. He had not smiled. He had not, in all the time since he had come down from the tree, smiled — not because he was sad, but because, Aelya had come to understand, the smile of a young boy was no longer one of the expressions available to whatever Bran had become. He had patted her hand once and wheeled himself away.

The fifth moon went to drilling.

The Wall, by the start of the sixth, was held by twelve thousand fighting men: Watch, freed wildlings under Tormund's command, Unsullied, Reach and Stormlands volunteers, and a small but extremely useful contingent of Northern lords' levies sent up under Wyman Manderly's quiet competent grandson. Three dragons were stationed at Castle Black: Drogon (Dany), Ēdrugon (Aelya, when not riding Morghon), and Sōvegon (handled by a small bonded handler from Eastwatch who had over the past two years become Sōvegon's particular person and whose name was Khalla). The other three were at Winterfell: Morghon (Aelya), Rhaegal (Jon), and Viserion (Dany, when Dany was at Winterfell, which was now). Aelya had divided the dragons deliberately. Three at the Wall to hold the line on contact. Three at Winterfell as the rear reserve, to come north fast if the Wall failed, and to hold Winterfell if the Wall fell and the dead came south through a broken gate.

She had also, on a hunch, brought Bran's chair up to the Dragon Yard at Winterfell once, in the sixth moon, and had introduced him formally to Morghon. Morghon had inspected the small boy in the wheeled chair with the slow curious yellow attention he gave to interesting things, and had then — in a gesture Aelya had never seen from him before — lowered his great horned head to the level of Bran's lap and held it still, and Bran had reached out one thin hand and laid it on the dragon's snout, and Morghon had made a small low contented chuff. Bran had said, very quietly: he is older than I am, in a way. He has been waiting. Aelya had not asked what he meant.

The sixth moon was the last.

The cold came down out of the north faster than the maesters had projected. The first true snow at Winterfell fell three days into the moon, a heavy quiet snow that did not stop for a fortnight, and by the end of that fortnight the country between Winterfell and the Wall was white from horizon to horizon. The ravens stopped flying north of the Last Hearth — the cold was killing them in flight — and Aelya and Mormont had switched, weeks earlier, to a shuttle of dragon-rider couriers between Castle Black and Winterfell, with Sōvegon's handler doing most of the runs. The Wall was still holding. The dead had not come yet. Mormont's last raven, before the ravens stopped, had said only: Your Grace, the cold has changed. The cold is the cold of the dreams now. We are watching every hour. Hold.

On the eighteenth day of the sixth moon, in the dead-quiet of a clear cold dawn, Khalla flew Sōvegon down over the great court of Winterfell with Mormont's senior officer's sigil on her shoulder, and she landed in a scatter of fresh snow and dismounted shaking and said, in a voice that the courtyard would remember:

"Your Graces. The Wall has fallen. East of Eastwatch. A two-mile section dropped in the night. The dead are on the road south. There are more of them than the world has men."

Aelya, who had been standing at the high gallery window with Dany beside her in a fur cloak and a cup of warm wine in her hand, did not — for a single heartbeat — react.

Then she set the wine down.

"Right," she said. "It is time. Send for Jon. Send for Sansa. Send for Bran. Send for Howland. Send for Tormund — Tormund is here, Tormund flew down with Mance two weeks ago, where are they sleeping — never mind, I know, send for them. We muster in the courtyard within the hour. Sansa holds Winterfell with the levies and Hodor and Bran is — Bran, where is Bran —"

"I am here, aunt," Bran said quietly from the doorway. He had wheeled himself in.

"You and I and Morghon. North. To the grove. Today."

"Yes, aunt."

"Dany. You and Drogon and the southern host hold the line at the Last River. Burn the dead that come at you. Do not advance north. Hold the river. We hold them at the river while we kill the root."

"Yes, my love."

"Jon. You and Rhaegal. Hold the air over the southern host. Be Dany's dragon-cover. If the dead get past her line, you burn the breakthrough. Do not engage individual Others. Burn them in lines."

"Yes, aunt."

"Sansa. Winterfell. Hold."

"I will hold, Aelya."

"Howland. With Sansa. Coordinate the levies. Be the small careful brain in her ear."

"Aye, Your Grace."

"Tormund. With Dany. The free folk fight under your banner. Mance with you."

"Aye, Targaryen. Aye."

"All of you. Listen. We are going to win this, because we have prepared for it, and because Bran and I are going to take the heart out of it. But it will cost us. Some of us in this room are not going to come back. I will not insult you by pretending otherwise. I want each of you to look at the people you love in this room. Now. Take the moment. We may not have another."

The room was very quiet.

Dany, beside Aelya, took her hand and squeezed it once. Jon and Sansa, across the room, looked at each other for a long beat — brother and sister who had not been brother and sister in any usual sense for a year, and who had become closer in that strange year than they had been at Winterfell as children. Bran, in his chair, looked at his sister, and then at his aunt, and gave Aelya — for the first time since coming down from the tree — a small real smile. Howland Reed looked at no one and at everyone, with the still old face of a man who had been preparing for this hour for seventeen years and was, finally, allowed to use it.

Aelya let the moment hold.

Then she said: "Move."

They moved.

— Within the hour, in the courtyard —

Morghon, fully roused for the first time in moons, was the largest single moving thing the world had seen since the Doom of Valyria.

He was not the largest creature — the dragons of legend, by maester's reckoning, had been larger still; Vhagar in her last years had been larger; Balerion the Black Dread had been larger by half — but Morghon was the largest living thing in Westeros, by such a wide margin that the comparison was unkind to anything else. He filled the whole of the great inner courtyard of Winterfell when he stood with his wings half-furled, and the courtyard had been built for tournaments. His shadow, when he opened his wings to the wind, fell across the entire keep and reached the second curtain wall.

He had not flown often. He had flown lately. In the past two moons Aelya had been taking him up daily, in deliberate long flights, building his wind and his stamina the way a horse-master builds a young charger; Morghon had complained, vocally, about every one of these flights, but had done them, because Aelya had asked, and on the seventh week he had stopped complaining. He had remembered, somewhere in his great slow mind, that he was a dragon and he could fly, and he had begun, quietly, to enjoy it. It had been a relief to Aelya. She would have hated to face the long night with a sulking dragon.

She had a saddle for him now — proper, riveted, double-girthed, the work of three Reach saddlers over six weeks — and she had a smaller saddle attached to it, behind hers, designed specifically for Bran. Hodor lifted Bran into the small saddle without strain. Aelya buckled him in herself. She checked the buckles three times. Bran, patient and quiet in his great sealskin riding cloak, let her.

"Bran. You are warm enough?"

"I am warm enough, aunt."

"You are afraid?"

"I am not afraid, aunt. Not of this."

Aelya climbed into the front saddle. She buckled herself. She put her gloved hand briefly on the warm scales of Morghon's neck.

"My great green heart," she murmured, in High Valyrian. "We have a long flight today. Are you with me?"

Morghon turned his great horned head. He looked at her with one yellow eye. He chuffed — a low, almost amused chuff, the chuff of a creature who had decided, after three years of pretending, that he could in fact be bothered.

"Sōvēs," Aelya said softly. Fly.

Morghon spread his enormous wings.

The courtyard, which had been crowded with people, cleared in the manner of any space being cleared by an enormous wing-beat — Hodor caught Sansa around the waist, gently, and walked her three steps back; Howland did the same for himself with the small economy of an old crannogman; Dany stood her ground beside Drogon at the far end of the courtyard with one hand raised in farewell — and Morghon launched himself, with a single great heaving wing-beat that flung snow off the courtyard for a hundred feet in every direction, into the cold morning sky.

He climbed. He climbed and climbed. He climbed past the towers of Winterfell, past the curtain wall, past the height of the Stone Drum on Dragonstone in Aelya's memory, into the high cold wind where the air thinned and the world below became a white and brown-grey patchwork. Bran, behind her, made one small noise — a noise of genuine delight, the first such noise he had made since coming down from his tree — and Aelya, turning, saw her thirteen-year-old nephew with his hood thrown back and his dark hair whipping in the wind and his face smiling, properly, for the first time in two years, smiling at the sky and at the dragon and at the world from the height a greenseer had never been at, and she thought: whatever happens at the end of this flight, he has had this morning. He has had this.

She turned forward in the saddle. She faced north. She felt Bran, behind her, settle and close his eyes, and she felt — through him, in some indirect way she did not entirely understand — a pull, a soft persistent westerly tug that was the direction of the grove.

"Morghon," she said. "Yn jorrāelagon konir." That way.

Morghon turned his enormous body in the air, and beat once — twice — three times — and they were flying north, and below them the white world of Westeros began to slide past.

The Wall — the broken Wall — was three days' flight ahead.

The grove of black weirwoods at the heart of the Lands of Always Winter was three weeks beyond it.

Aelya leaned forward in the saddle and did not look back at the small pale shape of Winterfell receding behind her, and she rode the great green dragon north into the long night, with her sister's nephew behind her saddle and her sister's hand still warm on her gloved palm in memory, and the realm — north and south, Wall and Reach, Red Keep and Dragonstone and Winterfell — held its breath.