— Aelya —

The Lands of Always Winter were quiet.

That was the first thing that surprised her. She had expected sound — wind, ice cracking, the distant cries of things that should not have voices — and there was none of that. There was a deep particular silence she had never known a place could hold, a silence that swallowed Morghon's wingbeats almost as soon as he made them, and below them the white country went on, and on, and on, in long slow folds that the eye could not pin to any human scale, and the sun did not properly rise; there was a kind of permanent grey twilight, with a blue sun visible only as a brighter spot in the cloud, and the air at altitude was so cold it hurt to breathe.

They had been flying for two weeks.

They had landed once a day, at Bran's quiet direction, in places he picked out from the air with closed eyes. There, he would say, and Aelya would bring Morghon down to a frozen cove or a shoulder of black rock or once, terrifyingly, to the lip of a glacier that had a hollow in it deep enough for a dragon to fold his wings, and they would camp for six hours, and Bran would sleep, and Morghon would sleep — the cold did not seem to trouble him; he tucked his nose under his wing and produced internal heat at a rate that warmed the snow around him into a small steaming hollow, and Aelya slept curled against his green-bronze flank under three layers of fur — and Aelya would eat hard biscuit and salt fish and drink melted snow from a small iron pot Hodor had packed for her, and would not, generally, sleep, because sleep was an unaffordable luxury here. She catnapped against Morghon's flank when she could. She had not slept a full night since Winterfell.

Bran ate small amounts of the food and slept a great deal and was, otherwise, a quiet polite presence in the small saddle behind her. He did not speak much. He did not need to. He had told her, on the second day, that he was navigating in his sleep, and that the directions came clearer when he was not actively trying to listen for them, and that she should simply turn the dragon when he asked her to. She had turned the dragon when he asked her to. She did not understand the path. She did not need to. Bran was the path, and Morghon was the means, and Aelya was the rider who held everything together with her hands and her will and the small prepared core of herself that had been preparing for exactly this flight for fifteen years.

She thought about Dany sometimes.

She tried not to think about Dany too often. The thinking was — expensive, in the cold; it took something from her that she could not afford to spend. She thought about Dany at landings, briefly, before sleep: she is at the river. She is holding. She is alive. The line has not broken or I would feel it. She did not know if she would actually feel it. She had decided to believe she would. The belief was a small private superstition that kept her steady, and she fed it, in the way one fed a small fire in a hard place.

She thought about Jon less. Jon had Rhaegal, and Jon had instructions, and Jon had been doing the thing she had asked him to do for two weeks. He would be all right. She fed that small fire too.

She did not think about the realm. The realm was, on this flight, abstract.

She thought about Bran a great deal.

Bran, behind her, was thirteen years old in a saddle in a cold she could not measure, and Bran had not complained once, and Bran was — Aelya understood by the second week — fading. Not dying. Fading. The thing he was using himself for, the navigation, was costing him; he was going thinner; he ate less and slept more, and on the morning of the fifteenth day she lifted him out of the small saddle and he was light, much lighter than he had been when Hodor had loaded him in at Winterfell, and his face under the hood was older than thirteen and would never be thirteen again.

She did not say anything about it. She had decided, on the seventh day, not to. Bran knew. Bran was making the trade with his eyes open. Aelya's job was not to stop him; her job was to get him there, and to bring him back if a back-bringing was possible, and to honour his choice if it was not.

On the morning of the seventeenth day, Bran said, very quietly, without opening his eyes:

"Aunt. We are close. One more flight. Today."

"Today."

"Today."

"Tell me."

"There is a valley. North-and-west. It will look like a bowl in the snow. The weirwoods at the bottom are black, all twelve of them. The man — the first — is at the centre. He sleeps standing. He is not awake yet, today, but he will be by the time we reach him. He will know we are coming because something else is telling him. Aunt — you should know — the seven Others on the field, the ones who left my sister's river — they are coming back to him. They are not coming to fight us at the grove. They are coming to defend him in a way that is — they are going to put themselves into him. Make him stronger. Wake him faster. We need to reach the grove before they do."

Aelya was already moving. She had Morghon up and shaking the snow off his folded wings within a quarter-hour. She climbed into the saddle. She buckled Bran in behind her. She pressed her gloved hand once against his thin shoulder.

"How far in dragon-flight."

"Five hours. Maybe four if Morghon flies hard."

"He will fly hard."

She turned forward in the saddle. She leaned forward against Morghon's neck, her cheek against the warm scales there, and she said, in High Valyrian, in a voice pitched only for him:

"My great green heart. The day is today. I need everything you have. Will you give it to me?"

Morghon turned one yellow eye back at her.

He chuffed.

It was a small chuff. It was, however, a particular chuff — the chuff he had given her a year ago at Eastwatch, on the night of the three blasts, when she had pointed north over the parapet and said Dracarys. The chuff that meant yes, mother. Yes.

He launched.

He launched harder than he had ever launched before. The cove they had been camped in was kicked clean of snow for two hundred yards in every direction, and Morghon climbed at a steeper angle than Aelya had ever flown him at, and the cold air tore tears out of her eyes, and Bran — behind her — did not make a sound, but Aelya felt his small mittened hands close on her riding-cloak just below the shoulder, and his grip was steady.

They flew north-and-west.

For four hours, Morghon flew the way he had been built for. Aelya understood, watching the country slide under them at a pace she had never seen any of the dragons match, that her great lazy boy had been holding back his entire life. He had been a dragon who ate slowly and slept long because he had not yet been asked to be the dragon at the end of the world. He was being asked now. He was answering.

In the fourth hour, the bowl came up in the white.

It was — exactly as Bran had said — a great shallow bowl in the snow, perhaps two miles across, at the foot of a black ridge. At the centre of the bowl stood twelve weirwoods in a circle. They were not white. They were black — wholly black, root and trunk and branch and leaf, as though every red leaf on a normal weirwood had been replaced with the colour of cold soot — and their carved faces, even at altitude, were visible to Aelya as small pale eyes that opened as Morghon descended, and tracked them, the way a dozen old men in a circle would track an arriving stranger.

At the centre of the circle, in the middle of the twelve trees, stood a single tall figure.

He was, on first sight, not what Aelya had expected. He was not a giant. He was not a monster. He was a man, roughly her own height, in a tattered hide cloak that might once have been a wolfskin, with long pale hair and a face that — she registered with a kind of quiet horror — had been handsome, in some long-ago unrecognisable way. His eyes were the blue of the cold. His hands were folded in front of him at his waist. He was not moving. He was, however, awake. He had heard them.

Behind the grove, on the black ridge, three dark shapes were just topping the rise — the seven Others, having lost two of their number on the way back, but still seven minus two: five, on their pale spider-mounts, riding hard.

They would reach the grove in perhaps a quarter-hour.

"Aunt," Bran said, behind her, in a voice that was very calm. "Land at the edge. Not in the centre. He cannot be approached from the air. The trees will — they will not let it. He is bound to the trees and the trees do not allow flight inside the circle. Land, and I will guide you in on foot. You will carry me. You will burn the centre tree and him together — they are one root — and I will hold him while you do."

Aelya brought Morghon down.

He landed at the edge of the bowl, sending up a great sheet of snow. He folded his wings. Aelya unbuckled herself, climbed down, unbuckled Bran, lifted him out of the saddle.

He was very light.

She held him in her arms — the small thin frame in the great sealskin cloak, with his pale face lifted to hers and his hood thrown back — and she said, very quietly:

"Bran. If we do this, you do not come back."

"No, aunt."

"Bran —"

"Aunt. I have known. I have known since the night in Sansa's library. I have known since the cave. The raven knew when he chose me. He knew when he stopped teaching me and went, because the teaching was finished. I am not afraid. I am — I am glad. I have been a tree-child for two years. I am tired, aunt. I want to go. Take me to him."

Aelya's throat closed.

She did not let it close all the way. She had decided, on the flight, that whatever she felt at this moment she would put in a small tight box and feel later, and that what she would do at this moment was what Bran had asked her to do.

She looked at Morghon.

"My green heart. Stay here. Eyes north. The Others are coming. Burn them when they top the ridge. Do not let them into the bowl. Yes?"

Morghon turned his great horned head north. His yellow eyes narrowed. He chuffed — a different chuff, a low rumbling chuff that meant yes, leave it to me.

She held Bran tight against her chest. She walked into the grove.

— The grove —

The trees, as she crossed the perimeter of the circle, looked at her.

It was not metaphor. The carved faces on the twelve black weirwoods turned, slightly, on their trunks — wood moving as wood does not move — and tracked her with old slow hostile attention as she walked across the snow toward the centre. The snow inside the circle was different snow. It was not white. It was a pale grey-blue, the colour of the hour before dawn, and it crunched under her boots in a way that made her teeth ache.

The man in the circle did not move.

She walked closer.

She stopped at five paces. She had decided in advance she would stop at five paces. She set Bran down, gently, in the snow at her feet, and propped him with her cloak so that he was sitting upright and could see, and she drew the slim long Valyrian-steel dagger she had kept on her left hip for two years, and she stepped forward to two paces.

The man — the first — opened his eyes wider.

He smiled.

It was a small, slow, almost welcoming smile, the smile of a thing that had been alone for eight thousand years and was, in some last shred of what it had once been, glad to see another mind enter its grove.

He spoke.

She had not expected him to speak. The books had not said anything about their speech. What came out of him was not a voice in the air; it was a voice inside her head, and it was — wretchedly — gentle. A man's voice, cracked with disuse, the voice a man speaks in when he has not had cause to use his voice in a very long time and has forgotten the shape of it.

Daughter, he said, in her head. You are the second to come to my grove this winter. The boy at your feet is the first. He will not last. I am sorry for him. Will you sit with me?

Aelya did not answer.

She did not, on principle, answer voices in her head.

She lifted the Valyrian dagger.

Daughter, the voice said again. I am not what your books have told you. I was a man, once. I was made into this against my will. I was dragged into a grove by the small ones and a stone was driven into my heart and I have wanted nothing for eight thousand years except to stop, and the small ones are gone, and there is no one to stop me, and so I have walked. I have walked because walking is the one thing left. I do not enjoy the cold. I do not enjoy the wights. I am — daughter, I am tired. If you have come to end me, I thank you. Strike. The trees will let you. They have been keeping me here.

Aelya — who had been preparing for fifteen years to fight a monster — held the dagger up and did not, for a moment, strike.

She had not expected to be talked to.

She had not expected to feel sorry for the thing in front of her.

She felt, distinctly and with horror, something move in her that was pity.

Behind her, she heard Bran — small, tired, exact — say: Aunt. He is not lying. He is also not telling the truth. He is telling you the part of the truth that will stop your hand. Strike.

The voice in her head laughed. Softly.

The boy is also right, daughter. I am both. A man who wants to die, and a thing that has been killing your kind for the season. I am one inside the other. If you strike, you end both. If you do not strike, both walk on. You have come a long way. Strike.

Aelya struck.

She did not strike him.

She struck the central tree.

She drove the Valyrian-steel dagger into the trunk of the largest of the twelve black weirwoods — the one that stood directly behind the man, the one whose carved face was at the height of his shoulders, the one whose roots, she could see now, grew through his back — and the dagger went in, and the dagger kept going in, all the way to the hilt, with a slow deep cut that the wood did not resist —

— and Bran, in the snow at her feet, said in a voice that was no longer Bran's: Now, aunt.

Aelya turned, and shouted into the grey sky at the edge of the bowl:

"Morghon! Dracarys! The centre — burn the centre!"

There was a beat.

Then the grove lit up.

Morghon — who had not been able to fly into the bowl, but who had, the moment Aelya's voice reached him, risen on his hind legs at the edge — sent a single great column of dragonfire across the rim of the bowl into the centre, and the column took the central tree, and the tree caught, and the man caught with it, and Aelya, still holding the hilt of the dagger, was thrown back twenty feet by the wash of heat —

— and as she was thrown, she saw Bran's face change.

His eyes went pale blue. Not the blue of an Other; the blue of a raven, a deep glassy old blue she had seen only once before in a man much older than Bran, and she understood — in the slow way one understood things in the first second of disaster — that Bran had gone in. He was inside the man. He was holding the man inside the burning tree. He was holding both of them in place while Morghon's fire took them.

"BRAN!"

The fire took the central tree.

The fire took the man.

The fire ran outward through the roots that connected the twelve black trees in a circle, and the eleven other trees caught one by one, and the carved faces on each of them screamed — Aelya heard the screams in her head, eleven different voices, none of them pleasant — and the screams cut off, one by one, and the grove burned.

In the centre of the burning grove, the man and the boy were a single small dark shape, and the small shape did not move, and Aelya, on her back in the grey snow at the edge, did not move either.

Far away, on the southern bank of the Last River eight hundred miles south, Daenerys Targaryen — who had been holding the line for nineteen days — saw the sky to the north flash, very briefly, white-and-gold, and felt a thing go out of the world, and did not, at first, know what it was.

She knew what it was a second later, because the wights on her side of the river, all of them, in mid-shamble, dropped where they stood.

They dropped, and they stayed dropped.

The army on the far bank dropped too — every wight visible to the southern host, in a single great sigh, dropped to the snow, and the horizon, which had been a black mass for nineteen days, cleared.

The five Others on the ridge above the grove, who had been about to come over the rise with their long pale spears, fell off their pale spider-mounts in mid-stride, and shattered, each of them, into a small shower of pale ice that the wind took.

The cold dry watching feeling Aelya had been carrying in her chest since she was four years old —

— went out.

Just out, like a candle.

She lay on her back in the grey snow, with Morghon's great green head looming over the rim of the bowl behind her, and she could hear, through the ringing in her ears, the small sound of the burning grove, and she could not, for a long moment, get up.

She got up.

She walked to the centre of the grove. The fire was already going down — the trees were burning fast and clean, with very little smoke, in the way of weirwoods cut at the heart — and the small dark shape at the centre was — was —

It was Bran.

Just Bran. Curled small in the snow. The man — the first — was gone; there was a small drift of pale ash where he had stood, and the ash was already being taken up by the wind. Bran was unburnt. The fire had not touched him. Morghon's fire — Morghon had aimed around him, Aelya understood with a small wretched clarity, in the dragon's slow careful way; he had burned the tree and the man and not the boy, and the boy had been left, breathing, in the centre of the ashes.

Bran was breathing.

Aelya knelt and gathered him up. He was even lighter than he had been. His eyes were closed. His pale lips were moving, very faintly. She bent her head down close.

He whispered, in Bran's own thirteen-year-old voice — not the older voice he had used in the cave, not the borrowed voice he had used at the hilt of her dagger — Aunt. I want to go home.

Aelya pressed her forehead against his.

"Yes, Bran. Yes, my heart. We are going home. Right now. Hold on to me."

She carried him out of the grove. Morghon lowered his great horned head to the snow at the rim of the bowl, and she climbed up the long ridge of his neck with Bran wrapped against her chest in her cloak, and she did not strap him into the small saddle — she held him in front of her, against her chest, with the buckles of her own saddle around them both, his small face against the hollow of her throat — and Morghon, without being told, lifted them into the air and turned south.

The grove burned itself out behind them.

The ridge, where the seven Others had been, was empty.

The world, ahead and below, was no colder than any winter day.

The dead were lying down.

Aelya rode south on her great green dragon with her thirteen-year-old nephew breathing, very faintly, against her sternum, and the long night was over, and she discovered — somewhere over the broken Wall, three days into the flight home — that she was, against all her preparation, weeping.

Morghon flew steady. He let her weep.

He flew them home.