The boy tilted his head. “Other? No. I’m Uzumaki Naruto.” He said the name as if it should mean something. When Jon gave no reaction, Naruto’s face split into a grin that was utterly out of place in the grim North. “Okay, so that’s a no. Where am I? This isn’t the Valley of the End. Smells like… wet dog and old ghosts.”

The blond stepped past him. For once, he wasn’t smiling.

The weirwood tree’s leaves were the color of old blood. Beneath its weeping face, Jon Snow knelt, his breath misting in the frozen air. He had come here to pray, though he no longer knew to which gods. The Old, the New… they all felt silent as the grave.

Naruto laughed, soft and tired. “Nah. I don’t want a throne. Thrones make people like Sasuke—all broody and obsessed with revenge.” He glanced at Jon. “You’d be good at it, though. The ruling thing.”

The Others came not as a trickle but as a tide. A hundred thousand dead marched on the Gift, led by White Walkers on dead horses, their swords of ice glittering in the blue-black dark. The Night’s Watch broke. The wildlings broke. Even the dragons Daenerys had finally brought north—Viserion and Rhaegar, for Drogon had been lost at sea—faltered, their flames guttering against the cold sorcery of the Night King.

“You could rule,” Jon said, sitting beside him. “Everyone would follow you. The North. The South. Even the Dragon Queen.”