— Aelya, eight days later, the courtyard of Winterfell —

Eight days passed in the way work passed when work was a kindness.

Aelya filled them. Sansa filled them. Together they wrote letters — to King's Landing, to the Wall, to Eastwatch (which had held; the message came in on the third day, carried by a Watch-rider on a half-dead horse, and the message was that two of the towers had fallen but the breakwater and the harbour had held and Cotter Pyke was alive and was, by his own characterisation, exceedingly drunk and going to remain so for at least one more day, Your Grace, with your permission) — and they walked the keep, and they planned the small important work of receiving the host that was coming up the road, and Aelya sat with Bran in his chamber for an hour each morning and an hour each evening, and Bran got better, slowly, by visible degrees. By the fifth day he was sitting up. By the seventh he was bored, which Maester Wolkan declared with considerable satisfaction was the surest sign of a child's recovery he knew.

Aelya did the work. Aelya was, she thought distantly, good at the work. Aelya was, however, also doing a thing in the back of her chest that had nothing to do with work and that she could not, by any application of will, make stop: she was counting.

Eight days. Seven days. Six.

On the morning of the eighth day, Sansa Stark — who had been watching her aunt for a week with the careful attention of a young woman who had been studying queens for two years — came into Aelya's chamber at dawn, in a quilted robe, with two cups of warmed cider, and sat down on the edge of Aelya's writing-desk, and said:

"Aelya. She rides into the courtyard at noon. I have had three scouts in already this morning. She is six hours out. Stop pretending to read those reports. You have not turned the page in twenty minutes."

Aelya looked up.

"I have been reading."

"You have been holding. Drink the cider. Bathe. Have Megga do your hair properly, in the Valyrian way, with the small braids; I have asked her to come at the eighth bell. Wear the red. The lords will want to see the red. Then come down and walk the courtyard with me twice, because it will give you something to do with your legs for the next four hours, and if you do not have something to do with your legs you are going to do something silly in front of Howland Reed."

Aelya laughed. It came out thin and a little wet.

"Sansa Stark."

"Yes."

"You have become a menace."

"I have. I am taking notes from your wife. She has been managing me through letters for two years, and I have been studying the technique. Drink the cider."

Aelya drank the cider.

She bathed. Megga did her hair. She wore the red — the same gown she had worn at the coronation, freshened and re-pressed, with the silver chain again across her brow. Sansa walked her around the courtyard twice, and they did not speak much, and on the second circuit Sansa quietly took her aunt's hand and held it, and Aelya — who had been holding herself together with great competence for ten days — let her hand be held without making a remark about it, which was, Sansa would tell Megga later, the moment I knew she was about to be all right.

At a quarter past noon, the horns on the curtain wall sounded.

The southern host was on the road.

Aelya climbed to the high gallery window, because she had decided she would not stand in the courtyard for the approach; she would stand at the gallery and watch the column come up, and she would only come down for her sister. She stood at the window with her hands folded — not tight, this time; she had practised — and she watched the head of the column come into view at the end of the long approach road.

Drogon was the first thing she saw.

He came down out of the cold sky in a long unhurried glide and landed on the curtain wall, which was the agreed signal — Khorane had written ahead — that the queen is in the column directly behind me, and I am taking my position. Drogon settled on the wall with a great folding of black wings and turned his enormous head south to watch the road, and below him, on the road, the head of the column came into view.

Aelya saw her sister.

She saw her at half a mile out — her eyes had been good at picking Dany out of any crowd since they were six — and she saw, even at that distance, that Dany was riding at the head of the column with Tormund on one side and Jon on the other, and that she was on a small dark Northern garron and not a great horse, and that she was upright, and that her silver hair was loose under her hood, and that her cloak was the same blue cloak she had ridden out in, and that the cloak had — Aelya filed it — what looked like a long dark stain across one shoulder which she would ask about later.

She did not weep at the window.

She had decided, in advance, that she would not weep until the courtyard. It was her one small act of dignity for the day, and she meant to keep it.

At the gate, she came down.

She came down the long stair from the gallery to the courtyard, and Sansa came with her, and Bran — who had insisted, that morning, on being present, who had been carried to a position at the top of the keep steps in his wheeled chair by Hodor and who had been wrapped against the cold by Maester Wolkan with great fussiness — was already there, and Rickon beside him, and Howland beside Rickon, and the Northern lords ranged at a respectful distance, and the Unsullied at a further one, and the freedmen at a further one still. The courtyard had been broomed clean. The forge-platform held Morghon, who had risen from his nap of three days, and was awake and watching the gate with an interested chuff. Rhaegal would land on the wall beside Drogon when Jon brought him in.

The gate of Winterfell opened.

The column came in.

Tormund Giantsbane was the first man through. He saw Aelya at the foot of the keep steps and his great red face split into a grin, and he raised his great Valyrian greatsword — which was strapped across his back — by the pommel in a salute, and he bellowed, in a voice that filled the courtyard:

"Targaryen! You owe me a bloody banquet!"

Aelya laughed. It was a startled, wet, real laugh.

"You'll have it, Tormund. Two banquets. Three."

"Three. Aye. Hold to that."

He rode past. Mance, behind him, inclined his head to her with a small private smile. Jon, on Rhaegal, swept down to land on the curtain wall with a great folding of wings and a small thump that shook the gate-tower, and dismounted, and walked into the courtyard from the wall stair.

And in the column, on her dark garron —

— Dany.

She rode through the gate at the head of her command staff, with Khorane on her right and Grey Worm on her left, and she saw Aelya on the steps, and she did not, for a heartbeat, do anything. She just looked. The way she had looked, at fourteen, at the rail of a galley in Volantis when Aelya had come up from below with two warm dragon eggs. The way she had looked, at fifteen, in a Pentoshi garden when Aelya had said we leave tonight. The way she had looked, at eighteen, on a high terrace in Meereen on the night they had finally been each other's. The way she had looked, on the deck of a ship at Dragonstone, twelve months ago, when Aelya had come down the gangplank thinner and harder.

She looked.

Then she dismounted — handed her reins to Khorane without looking at her, the way one hands a thing to a friend — and she walked across the courtyard, not running, in the careful even pace of a queen receiving her consort returning from war, and she stopped at three paces from Aelya, and she did not, for a beat, embrace her. She just looked up at Aelya's face on the steps and she said, in High Valyrian, in a small steady voice:

"Husb — wife. You are home."

"I am home, my love."

Dany walked the last three paces. She came up the steps. She put her hands on either side of Aelya's face. They stood there for a second, Dany's mittened palms cold against Aelya's cheeks, and then Dany — without dignity, without staging, in front of every Northern lord and every Unsullied and every freedman and her two crowned dragons and her nephew Jon and her newly returned brother-in-law in a wheeled chair and her six-year-old little brother and the whole keep of Winterfell — burst into tears, properly, and pulled Aelya into her arms, and Aelya — who had also decided not to weep until the courtyard — did, and they stood at the top of the steps with their faces pressed against each other's necks and they did not, for a long moment, speak, and the courtyard — to its credit, by some collective unspoken instinct — let them.

Tormund, in the courtyard, blew his nose loudly into a great red kerchief and pretended he had been about to do that anyway.

Bran, in his wheeled chair, smiled — a small full thirteen-year-old's smile, the second he had given since coming home — and reached out one small thin hand to Sansa beside him, and Sansa took it, and the two of them watched their aunts on the steps, and Sansa whispered, all right, Bran, all right, we did it, we did all of it, and Bran whispered back, yes, Sansa.

Howland Reed, at his post on the steps, did not say anything. He put one small brown hand once, briefly, against the carved stone of the doorway, and he closed his eyes, and his small wrinkled mouth moved in what Sansa would later realise had been the silent saying of a name. Lyanna. He had brought her son and her two nieces home. He let himself feel it for one second. Then he opened his eyes again and was Howland Reed again, watching the courtyard, working.

Morghon, on his forge-platform, made a long contented rumbling chuff that vibrated through the flagstones.

Drogon, on the wall, answered him.

Rhaegal, on the wall beside Drogon, answered them both.

The dragons, between them, sang one short small low chord — the way they had sung at Dany's coronation, although shorter, only a beat of it — and then they fell quiet, and the courtyard was just the courtyard again, with two silver women on the steps holding each other and three dragons on the walls and a keep coming back to life around them, and a thirteen-year-old greenseer who would not greenseer anymore in a wheeled chair smiling at his sister.

Eventually, Aelya pulled back.

She did not let go of Dany's hands. She turned, with one hand in her sister's, and faced the courtyard.

She said, in a voice that carried — not loud, but pitched carefully across the open space, the queen-voice she had been refining for two years:

"My lords. My friends. The dead are dead. The thing in the ice is gone. The Wall will stand again, in time. The cold will pass. The realm has lived. Tonight there will be a feast in the great hall of Winterfell, and every man and woman who fought at the river or stood on the wall or carried a message or held a child's hand in the dark — every one of you, by my lord Howland's order, and on my own — will be at it. There will be ale. There will be venison. There will be no speeches, because I am tired and my wife is tired and we are going to sit and eat. Come in. Come inside. Wash your faces. The keep is yours."

A great rough cheer went up.

She turned. She walked Dany inside, with one hand in her sister's. Sansa, on the way past, fell in behind them, with Bran's chair pushed by Hodor; Rickon trotted alongside, with Shaggydog at his heels; Howland followed; Jon, coming in from the wall with Ghost, joined them at the door. The whole small private family, in a small clutch, went into the keep.

The doors closed behind them.

The lords and the Unsullied and the freedmen and the wildlings, in the courtyard, dispersed to wash for the feast.

The feast held until the small hours of the morning, and Tormund got his banquet, and the second one was promised for Eastwatch in the spring, and the third for King's Landing within the year, and Tormund — three cups in — proposed an oath that every red-bearded man in the Seven Kingdoms shall drink Targaryen mead at midwinter for as long as Targaryens reign, which the lords cheered, and which Aelya gravely accepted, and which Tyrion would later, on hearing of it, attempt to actually codify into law, and which Howland would, also gravely, talk him out of.

Aelya did not stay for the small hours.

She left the feast at the second hour, with her sister on her arm, and they went up the stair to their chamber together, and they did not, in the corridor, speak, and at the door Dany turned the key behind them, and Aelya — who had carried herself through ten days and four flights and a war — set her sister's hand against her own cheek and held it there for a long moment, and she said, very quietly:

"My love. I am — I am very tired."

"I know."

"I do not want — tonight — anything except —"

"I know, my love. Come to bed. I will hold you. That is all. Tomorrow we will be the rest of the things."

She came to bed.

Dany held her.

Aelya slept, for the first time since the grove, properly, with her sister's silver head on her shoulder and her sister's hand in hers, and somewhere on the heated forge-platform in the courtyard below, Morghon — who had been awake for three days and had then slept for three more — opened one yellow eye, listened to the small contented breathing of his rider through the stone of the keep, decided everything was as it should be, and went back to sleep.

The realm slept around them.

The long night was over.

The morning, when it came, would be the first of a new reign.