Seven years had passed since Daenerys Stormborn had fallen from the sky in a blaze of fire, and Jon still saw her face when he closed his eyes like the flame of a blown out candle.

Seven years since he had died, murdered by those he had thought were his brothers, since he had been returned to life for a hopeless battle. He remembered the darkness and the cold and the grasping hands, the hunger and exhaustion of the defenders, too few and their numbers dwindling with every attack, their own lost dead risen and turned against them. He had known despair in those days that were one long night. And then the Mother of Dragons had come to him with all her armies behind her. As they fought together he had thought that his rebirth into this second life had been destined by all the prophecies and songs he had ever heard. But then she had died, and the singers said the war had been won, and he was left behind to wake and sleep and eat and prepare for the next war. Seven years.

He walked out of the forest, approaching Drogon's bones where they lay in the remnants of the battlefield just north of the Wall. Viserion's shadow loomed overhead. He could have soared over the forests on dragonback if he had wished, but he preferred to walk so that he could know the land. How many years did the Others haunt these forests, he wondered, and the Night's Watch did not know they were there? How were we all so blind to the danger? He had sworn it would never happen again. The Wall was being rebuilt under the direction of a strong Lord Commander, and it already stood three hundred feet high. When the war came again, he had sworn, they would be ready.

As he moved through the cage of Drogon's ribs, he saw a rider approaching from the south. The boy was young, Jon saw as he drew near, and clad in the black of the Night's Watch with the silver bandings of a squire in training. The boy was not pledged for life, then. Accepting the service of men and boys pledged only for a time had been one of Jon's reforms. Someday this boy would return to his home in the south with tales of the Wall and the lands beyond, and the realm would be reminded of why the watch must be kept. Perhaps it would lessen the spirit of brotherhood, but Jon no longer had much faith in that, not since his once-brothers had freed him from his vows with the daggers in the dark.

"Your highness," the boy said. "Riders have come from the south. The Lady of Winterfell seeks to speak with you."

For a moment, Jon had the unsettling vision of Catelyn Stark appearing to chastise him for some misdemeanour. Not that there was that much difference, he thought, between the former Lady Stark and her elder daughter. In his capacity of Regent of the North he had granted Sansa the use of the title until Rickon married, in recognition of the work she did running Winterfell. He had not expected how much it would grate on him to hear it used.

"I will send a raven and tell the Lady that I have no time to fly to Winterfell." Not to mention that Sansa was not supposed to be at Winterfell. Their last exchange of letters had been heated, but he had made his orders clear.

"No, my lord, you misunderstand. She rode in several hours ago."

Jon's jaw dropped. "She's here?" Winterfell to the Wall was more than a two week ride in hard conditions. The way Sansa travelled it was far more likely to be over three weeks, and he could only imagine the escort she had thought necessary for the trip. Sansa did not travel light. He only hoped Sam was coping with the inundation. "At Castle Black!?" What had possessed her?

The boy cringed. "She said she would go to the top of the Wall to wait. I brought a horse -"

Jon shook his head impatiently. With a thought, he called, and felt the stirring in Visarion's wild mind. The dragon swooped down from the sky and Jon swung himself onto the creature's back. There was something still marvellous about riding a dragon, even after all these years. He knew he should spend more time with Visarion, although his control of the dragon was now unshakable. The spells that bound Targaryen to dragon were tenuous – no one knew for sure if they had duplicated what his ancestors had used, but there was no need to fear a loss of control with his ability to warg into the dragon's mind. He usually allowed Visarion to fly free for days on end.

The dragon landed on top of the wall and Jon clambered down onto the ice, thankful of the high walls that guarded his landing space and prevented a slip. Even in the weak summer sunshine, the Wall was weeping and slick.

He found Sansa sitting by the edge not far away. Even through his annoyance, found himself smiling at her concept of what to wear on top of the Wall. The wind from the north was like a steel blade, sending the full skirts of her riding dress wiping behind her in a flurry of sky-blue silk. The matching cloak was doing the same, held on her only by a round silver brooch at her throat. Even her hair was sliding out of its braid, the pins that had once secured it sparkling in the sunshine behind her. She was gazing over the edge of the Wall, looking out over the wild lands beyond.

At one-and-twenty, Sana was lovely; he had to admit it, but she was all artifice and impractical fragility. He thought of Ygritte's crooked smile and tumble of red curls, of Val striding out of the snow with Ghost at her side. How could any man think Sansa Stark is truly beautiful, if he had glimpsed Daenerys the Mother of Dragons bloody and glorious on the battlefield?

He moved to her side. A hundred feet below them, a hawk was soaring over the wreckage of the battlefield, now carpeted with flowers and masked by sapling trees. The afternoon sun shone on greenery and small summer streams flowed where five years ago the living dead had covered as far as the eye could see. The war is being forgotten, thought Jon. Perhaps it was time to send Visarion to burn the land clear again. But the green always came back to the soil so quickly. The hawk wavered in the air, then veered away north. Sansa sighed.

Jon put his hand on her shoulder when she sighed. "Were you trying …?"

She nodded, still watching the bird fly away. "I know you think I have the gift, but I have never felt it the way that the rest of you do." She shook her head, still watching the hawk fly away. "Maybe it would be different if I hadn't lost Lady so soon."

"Birds are difficult. You should practice on something easier." A skinchanger who is afraid of their gift will never be able to use it, he thought. Jon felt her shivering. Silently, he shrugged off his thick dark cloak and wrapped it around her shoulders.

"You will get cold," she protested.

"I don't even feel the wind anymore." Jon said. He waited, but she said nothing, and the silence stretched out between them. "Sansa, what are you doing here?" he asked finally. "You are supposed to be riding south."

She stood up abruptly. Her riding boots, absurdly impractical on the wet ice, slipped underneath her and Jon reached out to catch her elbow. She twisted her fingers through her hair, trying futilely to push it out of her face. She shook her head, seeming to be grasping for words. "You cannot ask this of me," she burst out.

Jon sighed. "Who else do I have to send who knows King's Landing the way you do? Aegon wants me to attend his court. I need to at least send a representative to speak in my name."

"You are the heir to the throne. Your brother is reasonable to want you to be at court until Queen Arianne gives him a son."

Jon sighed. "I understand that, which is why I need to send someone who knows how not to offend the southerners. You lived at court for two years, Sansa."

"I was a hostage! You don't understand what it was like …" she trailed off and turned away.

We all suffered in the war, he thought. And I've never heard that the living dead made it to King's Landing. But he didn't want to burden Sansa, pretty and delicate Sansa, who had probably never missed a meal or slept without a roof over her head, with the knowledge of some of the things he had seen.

"Is there anything or anyone at King's Landing that have given you have cause to fear?" Jon waited until she slowly shook her head. A different thought occurred to him. "Is this about your husband?" He tended to forget that Sansa was still in law the wife of Tyrion Lannister, a marriage that appeared to exist solely through the exchange of polite letters carried by a knight in Tyrion's service. (Jon suspected the man - Pedro? – of being more enamoured of his lord's wife than Tyrion himself was). As the Hand of the King, Tyrion would be in King's Landing.

"No, Tyrion and I are …" she trailed off, waved her hands helplessly. "The way we have always been."

"Just a few months, Sansa, smooth things over with Aegon and get him to understand I am needed here." In truth, Jon had given his half-brother on the throne little thought other than to be grateful that the man's existence meant he did not have to take the throne. He had met Aegon one, when the third Targaryen had brought the Golden Company to the Wall at the end of the battle for the dawn and taken ridership of Rheagal. His impression of his brother, his elder, had been one of youth and impatience, but reports from King's Landing were that he had grown into a pragmatic and just ruler. Things had been testy, however, since Aegon's son and heir had died of a fever, returning Jon to the unwelcome status of heir to the Iron Throne. Jon had refused all of his brother's requests to attend court, and their correspondence had been increasingly antagonistic. Sending Sansa to King's Landing in his place had seemed like an ideal solution.

"But you are not needed here, Jon. What are you doing that the Lord Commander cannot accomplish without you? You neglect your duties as Prince of the Realm and heir to the throne, you leave me to make most of your decisions as Regent of the North." She held up her hand as he opened his mouth. "And I do make all the decisions, without much help from any of the rest of you. You fret about monsters that may not come for another eight thousand years. Six months ago Arya announced over breakfast that she has never seen a sea monster and I have not seen her since. Rickon is hunting aurochs with Lyanna Mormont as we speak, and Bran is a tree. Explain to me how a tree is supposed to help me negotiate trade agreements!"

"Have you forgotten that the dead rose?" Jon snapped. He was getting more and more angry with Sansa, particularly her unkindness about Arya, who had adapted almost as poorly to the peace as Jon himself. On her visits to the Wall, he had been heartbroken by the lost, empty look in Arya's eyes, at her restlessness. Sometimes he wondered how it was that only Sansa, the seemingly weakest of all of the Stark children, had emerged from the war and the winter the one most unscathed. It was as if aspects of the past had simply vanished from her mind, or had been rewritten into something more pleasant. If so, he envied her.

"I know the dead rose, and I know that the Others were defeated. We are still here." She shook her head impatiently, and sparkling pins in her streaming hair caught the sunlight. She caught her lip between her teeth, and took a breath. "But … Daenerys is gone, Jon. If she had lived and you had died she would not be wasting her life in mourning you. You know that."

It felt like a blow to his gut. "You don't understand. You have never loved anyone the way that Daenerys and I loved each other."

Sansa stepped back and her face went still. "At least I understand the difference between fulfilling one's duty and hiding from it," she snapped back. "Father, my father would never have behaved like this."

"Now you sound like your mother."

"What do you wish to say about my lady mother?" she asked, her face pale. She pulled Jon's cloak tight around herself.

"Oh do not be coy, Sansa. You know as well as I that Catelyn would have pushed me out the door to beg at the gates if she could."

"Can you blame her for the way she felt? Your presence at Winterfell shamed her. Every day, it shamed her that you were raised with the trueborn children." Sansa closed her eyes for a moment, and her voice shook. "She believed that Father loved another woman enough to disgrace his wife by taking a bastard into their home. She died believing that, and rose and died again, still believing it. He let her die believing that."

"Is that my fault? He did it to keep me safe."

"None of it was your fault, but … he lied to her for you." Her voice shook. "I thought Father would never tell a lie, and all their lives together he lied to my Mother for your sake."

"Like you have never told a lie, Sansa," he snapped, furious. "Arya told me all about how you lied for that little shit of a prince of yours after you left Winterfell. I don't remember? It all happened so fast? Does that sound familiar?"

Sansa shook her head, shrinking further into the cloak. "That is just like the two of you, laughing together behind my back."

"Arya treated me like her brother, not her bastard half-brother."

"I was a child!" She turned away, then turned back, her eyes hard and the pins in her hair flashing. "And the truth is that you were our bastard half-brother, and you are still a bastard. I don't care what the decree of legitimization says, Jon Snow, you are a bastard."

"And you are a spoilt brat who never cared about anyone but yourself." Jon took a deep breath and forced his anger down. "This ends now." He told her, keeping his voice from shaking. "Remember that I am the Regent of the North and a Prince of the Realm. You have chosen to live as a Stark and that makes you subject to my orders. You will go to King's Landing as you have been commanded. If not, you are welcome to return to the protection of your husband."

Sansa glared at him. "Valar dohaeris," she said bitterly. "I will go, and you can receive the trade delegations, and arrange the marriages, and try to control Rickon. And I hope it all goes to seven hells on you." She unfastened Jon's cloak and pushed it into his hands. "I will depart for King's Landing immediately. Goodbye, your highness." She tossed her hair over her shoulder and stormed off in the direction of the cage, her thin cloak fluttering in the wind behind her, her riding boots slipping on the ice.

He watched her walk away, and drew breath to call out to her. Then he let that breath out, the words unspoken, bitter anger still lingering like a taste in the back of his mouth.

Bastard, her voice echoed in his mind and it was like a stab, over and over again. Not a true Stark, not a true Targaryen, my oaths to the Night's Watch gone with my first life, he thought. I have no true family. I thought I came back from the dead for Daenerys, but I made the mistake of living on after her, day after day after wretched day, with nothing but duty. I was nothing but a warrior, and now I have no battle to fight.

He sat down on a pile of ice, suddenly exhausted. He felt the anger running out of him, the dark lassitude that was so familiar replacing it. He should never have let himself get so angry with Sansa. Too late to take any of it back. He looked north to where Visarion soared in the air over his brother's bones. His vision wavered and blurred. He touched his face and realized he was crying. I cannot continue existing like this, he thought. Seven years. I cannot go on, and I cannot go back, and I cannot continue like this. The Wall was ice underneath him, and the wind was blowing straight through him like a knife, and he could not even move to shield himself from its cut.