— Dany —

The host marched out of Winterfell on the day Morghon went north, and they marched north-and-east on the Kingsroad, and the snow was deep and falling, and the breath of every man froze in his beard, and Daenerys Targaryen — riding at the head of the column on a sturdy garron the Northerners had sourced for her, with Drogon a black weight wheeling overhead and Viserion in close pursuit and sixteen thousand fighting men strung out behind her over four miles of road — found that she was not afraid.

She had thought she would be. She had spent the previous night beside an empty pillow in a chamber that still smelled of her sister, and she had told herself, in the cold dark, I am going to be terrified in the morning. I am going to mount the horse and I am going to look north and I am going to have to do this without her and I will be terrified.

She was not terrified. She was — concentrated. She had her sister's voice in her head, the one her sister used when she was planning, and she had a list of the day's tasks running in order in her mind, and she had Tormund Giantsbane on her right and Mance Rayder on her left and Jon Snow somewhere in the air above her on Rhaegal, and she had the host she and her sister had built between them, and she had the river — the Last River — eight days' march ahead, where she would draw her line.

The plan was simple. Aelya had drafted it three weeks ago over one long evening at the Winterfell map table. Hold the river, the plan said. Do not advance north of the river. Burn what comes to you. Buy the days. The days are what matter. The grove is three weeks' flight; we need three weeks of held river. Burn the dead at the river. Do not chase. Do not heroics. Hold.

Dany had read the plan twice and had said, yes, my love, I can do this.

Aelya had said, I know you can. I would not leave it with anyone else.

Now, on the road, Dany held the plan in her mind the way one held a polished stone: a thing to keep one's thumb on for steadiness. She did not think about the grove. She did not think about her sister and her nephew on a great green dragon flying through air so cold the dragon's breath would crystallise in his nostrils. She did not think about Bran, whom she had come to love in the past two moons in the careful way one loves a quiet child who is not entirely a child. She thought about the Last River.

Tormund, beside her, snorted at something Mance had said and slapped his thigh with one mittened hand. Mance laughed, low. The two old enemies had been, since Castle Black, an unlikely double act — a wildling king who had thrown in with the queens and a wildling chieftain who had personally led twelve thousand free folk south through the Wall — and they had developed, on the long ride down to Winterfell two moons ago and up again now, the kind of friendship that men of certain ages developed when they had stopped having anything left to prove. Dany found their banter steadying. Tormund was steady. Mance was steady. Jon, when he came down from Rhaegal in the evenings to camp with them, was steady. Khorane Sathmantes, riding ten paces back at the head of Dany's small command staff, was the steadiest of all.

Six days into the march, scouts came in from the north. The dead were on the road. They were two days out from the Last River, coming hard. Their numbers were — the scouts disagreed — somewhere between forty thousand and the entire dead population of the world.

Tormund spat into the snow.

"Aye," he said. "Aye, then. We'll know in two days."

The Last River was wide and slow and frozen at the banks, with a fast black channel down the middle. Dany had chosen the position with Aelya at the map table: a stretch of river south of the Long Lake where the ground rose in low ridges on the southern bank, giving them height; where the channel was narrow enough to defend; where the road came down out of the hills to a single bridge that could be broken; where the dragons would have a long field of fire across the open ice with nothing in the way.

The bridge was broken on the morning of the seventh day, by a small disciplined work-party of Unsullied with sledges and pitch. It went up in flame and came down in three pieces. The dead would have to come across the ice, on foot, in numbers, and the ice — Dany's sappers had been working on it since their arrival — had been weakened with iron bars and oil-fires in a long pattern, so that any large mass of weight on it at once would crack and dump the front rank into the black channel.

The host was deployed along the southern ridge. Twelve thousand spears in three lines of four. The Unsullied front. The Reach pikes second. The Northern axe-and-shield levies third, with the wildlings in three flying companies on the flanks under Tormund, Mance, and a younger wildling chieftain called Soren Shieldbreaker who was, in Tormund's grudging estimation, almost as good as me, the bastard. The dragonglass was distributed: every man in the front line had at least a dragonglass dagger, and the second line had pikes tipped with dragonglass heads.

The Valyrian steel was spread across the line in the hands of the captains. Tormund had his great Valyrian greatsword across his back. Mance had a slim Valyrian dagger. Grey Worm — who had ridden up from King's Landing two moons earlier with three thousand fresh Unsullied as part of the reinforcement — had an Unsullied-altered shortspear with a Valyrian tip. Khorane had a slim Valyrian-edged falchion. Dany herself had a Valyrian shortsword Aelya had pressed into her hand at Winterfell, which she had not yet drawn and which sat heavy at her hip.

They waited.

The dead came over the rise on the second hour past dawn on the eighth day, and the world darkened.

Dany had read all of Aelya's reports. She had read the Eastwatch dispatch about the Three Blasts. She had heard the description of how the wights moved. She had not been prepared for the actual sight, and no one was — the realm has not seen anything like this before, Tyrion had said in a council chamber a year ago, and the realm had not. The dead came over the rise in a single moving mass, and the mass went on, and on, and on, all the way back to the horizon, and the front of the mass was wights — old corpses, shambling, wrong-jointed, in every kind of clothing from old furs to the rags of a Watch cloak; some of them were wildlings and some of them, Dany registered with a small cold thread, were Northern men she half-recognised from the old tapestries at Winterfell, wights of Stark bannermen who had died in raids two centuries ago and had been pulled up out of long-frozen graves to walk south with the dead — and behind the wights, on the high ground, ranged a long line of pale figures on pale spider-mounts, and at the centre of that line, Dany saw with the clarity that came at long range in cold dry air —

Him.

The first of the Others. The one Bran had named. The man-at-the-heart. He was not standing close, not yet, but he was there, on the high rise, watching, with the cold patient attention of a thing that had been planning this march for eight thousand years and was finally executing it.

Dany lifted her dragon-horn.

She blew one long blast.

Drogon and Viserion, who had been circling high overhead for an hour, plunged.

The first sweep was Drogon's. He came down in the long unhurried glide Dany had practised with him a hundred times now, low over the ice, and he opened his great black mouth and breathed, and the world ahead of him became a long line of black-and-orange fire that ran across two hundred yards of the front rank of the dead. The wights in the burn-line went up like dry tinder. The fire ran along the snow on the far bank in a wavering streak that lit up the whole field for a full second, and in that second Dany saw, again, the count, the actual sheer count of what they were facing, and it was — as the scouts had said — more than the world had men.

Viserion's sweep crossed Drogon's ten yards back, in the second rank. Two more lines of dead caught fire. The dead behind the burn-line — the third rank, the fourth, the fifth, the sixth — kept walking, into and over the burning bodies, indifferent.

Above them, high above where the dragonfire could reach, Rhaegal made his pass. Jon — who had been told by Aelya, during their council, do not engage individual Others, burn breakthroughs — held his fire on this first pass, but flew slow and low across the entire front, letting the dead see Rhaegal's shadow, letting them register the third dragon. The Others on the rise turned their pale heads to track Rhaegal. They did not flinch. They were, Dany observed with the small cold professional part of her brain that her sister had been training in her for years, calculating.

The dead reached the ice.

The first wave came onto the ice in the thousands, and the ice held — for a beat — and then, exactly as the sappers had planned, a long crack ran along one of the prepared lines, and a quarter-mile section of the front rank dropped through the ice into the black channel, and the dead in it sank, and did not rise immediately, because the dead in the water moved badly and the channel was deep.

The second wave reached the broken ice. They walked over the swimmers. Some of them sank too. Some of them did not.

The third wave reached the southern bank.

"Loose!" Grey Worm's voice rang out along the line, and the front rank of Unsullied and the Reach pikes loosed their fire-arrows, in a single great hissing volley, and the dead at the foot of the bank began to burn.

The dead behind them came on, indifferent.

The melee began.

— The river —

Dany did not, herself, fight in the melee. Aelya had specifically forbidden it. You are a queen, my love, and the host needs to see you on a horse on the ridge, not down in the line getting your throat ripped out by a wight that used to be a Karstark. Stay on the ridge. Direct. Burn what needs burning. Do not draw the sword unless the line breaks.

Dany stayed on the ridge. She directed.

She was, she found, good at it.

It was a strange small discovery in the middle of the worst day of her life. She had been told, all her life, that she was the warm one and her sister was the cold one and that her gift was for people, not for tactics — and there was truth in all of that, but on the ridge above the Last River with the dead breaking on her line like a slow black tide, Dany discovered that the warm-one's gift and the tactician's gift were not two separate things. She knew where every captain was on her line because she had spent the past two moons learning their names and their wives' names and their small habits. She knew that the Manderly men on the right were tired because Wyman's grandson had told her at supper three nights ago that they had been marching for a fortnight before the host left Winterfell, and she ordered Khorane to rotate the Reach reserve up to relieve them an hour before any of the captains would have asked for it. She knew the Unsullied could hold their patch indefinitely because Grey Worm had told her, the night before, Your Grace, my men are not afraid of these things; they are dead, and we have killed dead men before, in slaughter pits in Astapor where the masters made us; this is not new work for us; tell us where to stand and we will stand, and she had taken him at his word, and they were standing.

The line held. For an hour. For two.

On the third hour, the Others moved.

They came down off their high ridge — five of them, in an unhurried line, on their pale spider-mounts — and they crossed the broken ice in single file, and they did not sink, and they came across the ice toward the southern bank in a way that suggested the ice did not register them as having weight at all.

Dany lifted the horn again. Two short blasts.

This was Jon's call.

Rhaegal — who had been holding high since the engagement began — folded his wings and dropped, in the long terrifying stoop Aelya had told her about a year ago, and came down out of the high cold air at a speed that hummed in the chest, and he opened his great green-and-bronze mouth fifty feet above the ice and breathed, and the line of five Others and their mounts disappeared in a column of dragonfire that ran along the ice for a hundred yards.

When the fire cleared, the ice was open water in that stretch, and there was nothing on it.

A great cheer went up along the southern ridge.

Dany did not cheer. Dany was watching the high ridge. She had read her sister's reports. Her sister had said: the Others are cautious. They send out elements. They watch what burns. They withdraw and recalculate. They do not throw their elite at a fire-breathing thing on a single pass. Be ready for them to recalculate.

The Others on the high ridge — the remaining ones, the seven still up there, including the central pale figure who was the one — did not move for a long beat.

Then they did something Dany had not expected.

They turned. Together. Without apparent signal. They turned, and they walked back from the ridge, and they were gone.

The dead kept coming.

The dead kept coming, on the ice and at the bank, in their thousands, but the Others were gone, and after another two hours of holding the line — dragonfire sweeping back and forth, fire-arrows at the bank, the front rank of Unsullied steady as a stone wall, Tormund and his free folk on the flank doing terrible joyful work with their dragonglass-tipped axes — Dany understood what had happened.

The Others had read the field. The Others had read the line that did not break. The Others had read the three dragons, two of them on this field and one of them cleaning up the elites the moment they left their position. The Others had concluded — correctly — that they could not break the southern bank by walking through it. So they had withdrawn the steerers, and they had left the wights to grind, because the wights cost them nothing to lose, and they had gone — somewhere — to try a different angle.

Dany lowered the horn.

She turned to Khorane, who was beside her on the ridge with a small writing-board strapped to her saddle for taking notes.

"Khorane. They are going to come around. Get a raven up to my sister if any of the maesters can spare a bird that will not freeze. Get word to Sansa that the Others have left the field and I do not know where they have gone. Get scouts on every rise from here to the Last Hearth. They are coming around, Khorane. They saw they could not break here. They are looking for another door."

Khorane was already writing.

"And Jon?"

"Jon stays here. Jon and Rhaegal hold this air. The dead are still coming and we still have a river to defend. The Others are not the priority anymore; the wights still are. Hold the river. That is the order. Hold the river while my sister kills the heart."

Khorane nodded. The raven went up within the quarter-hour.

The line, by sundown, had held.

The line, by midnight, had held.

By dawn of the second day, with the fires along the bank still burning the dead in black drifts and the wights still coming, in lessened numbers but coming, the line had held, and Dany had not slept, and the Others had not returned to her ridge.

She had sent six ravens by then. Two to her sister — neither of which would reach her, because Morghon was past the Wall and gods knew where, but Dany sent them anyway. Two to Sansa. One to Jon as a courtesy, who was in the air a mile away and could not read it from up there but who would read it on landing. One to Eastwatch.

The sixth — and this one Dany had thought about for an hour before sending — was south. To Winterfell. To Sansa specifically, with a small additional note for Howland Reed, attached on the same scroll. The note said only:

Howland. The seven Others on the field went somewhere not the river. Watch your back. Watch every approach. The cold may not come from the north this time. Burn anything that does not burn already. — D.

She sealed it. She gave it to a maester. She turned back to the river.

The dead were still coming.

She drew her sword for the first time, on the third day, because the line did, briefly, break — a stretch of the Reach pikes folded under a sustained press of wights at the bank, and the second rank had to plug the gap, and Dany rode down off the ridge with Khorane at her side and Drogon coming low overhead to give cover, and she got into the line for half an hour of close work that she would not, afterward, remember in much detail, only that the Valyrian steel at her hip turned out to be a thing the wights came apart in front of, and that one of the wights she killed had a Stark face that she did not let herself look at twice. She got out of the line when the gap was plugged. She was bleeding from a cut on her cheek where a wight's broken finger had caught her. Khorane bandaged it on the ridge. Tormund, when he saw the bandage at supper, gave her a great red-bearded grin and said, aye, Targaryen, now you've bled on the field with us, you're free folk, we'll have you in the songs, and Dany laughed — actually laughed, a wrecked exhausted laugh — and she thought, Aelya, my love, I wish you could see this. I am holding the line. I am doing it. Come home.

She did not know where Aelya was.

She turned back to the river, and she held the line, and the days began to count toward three weeks.