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Red, and terrible, and red, she had heard herself called many a time, by people who had never known the Lord and probably never would. Old habits died hard, Melisandre knew—so hard that, after so many centuries, these trees the color of bone remained at the heart of the north’s greatest castle. She looked into the Great Other when she saw them; memories of glaring eyes and chained wolf-crows flooded her mind at the sight of the trees His Grace’s northmen called “weirwoods.” And yet they too were red, in their eyes, those thousand and one eyes that were the enemy of her Lord.That redness, that hint of the Lord, was the only thing that kept her from taking a torch to the entire godswood; nothing else, not even the angry demon-worshippers that followed His Grace, could control the fear and rage that leapt up her spine at the sight of those trees. She avoided their silent stares as she walked around the pond to where His Grace sat amongst the snow, fire-glimming broadsword drawn across his knees, eyes closed.Does he sleep? she wondered as she approached. She had seen Stannis Baratheon asleep more than his own wife had, lying on her bed as she sat and watched, alternately, her fires and his drawn face, wishing the strength the heat gave her into his bones. She had not seen him in many a moon’s turn, however, in neither flesh nor the fire, since he had gone south to fight Bolton’s bastard for the north of Westeros. The Great Other was too strong here; all she had ever seen of Winterfell, of Stannis Baratheon himself, was snow, curtains of snow, falling thick and fast against the Lord’s flames. She had almost forgotten what his face looked like, and when he opened his eyes to stare at her she smiled despite herself.“Your Grace, I am come.”Stannis frowned. Sleep still had him, she realized; one glance at the droopiness of his mouth told her that much.“Selyse, no,” he murmured, running a hand along the flat of the broadsword in his lap. The red light against his skin was cold, not hot, she knew, in this desolate wintery place. Melisandre knelt until her face was level with his and touched a cheek. He started at the feel of her, blazing against the frost that was so much a part of him no matter the season.“Lady Melisandre,” he whispered, then cleared his throat. “I thought you would not come.”“The North is large, Your Grace, but the Lord of Light is larger. You have won Winterfell. You have won the North.”He shook his head. “I have won what was Eddard Stark’s, and I am no Stark. I am a Baratheon, and what I ought to own is Storm’s End, a thousand leagues from here. What have I done? I have saved the realm from wildlings and yet a thousand worse things stand on the other side of the Wall. I have beaten back the foulest man to walk out of the Dreadfort and yet this land and this castle will never be mine by any right known in the Seven Kingdoms or beyond.”Melisandre had not moved her hand from his face, and now she brought forth the other one so that she bathed him in her heat. Azor Ahai, reborn to us all, the flames have shown me a thousand times. And a thousand and one times they have shown me Stark’s bastard, slain by his own men amidst tears and cold and Ser Patrek’s blue star sigil, whose body now rests freezing below the wall while his direwolf, the colors of the Great Other, roams with his soul beyond the Wall. “You are a servant of the Lord who rules us all, Your Grace; none of this is ours, Stark or Baratheon, Bolton or Bolton’s bastard. It is all His.”“Azor Ahai reborn, woman, am I right?” His eyes were wide now and the hardest, firmest blue she had ever seen. “Savior of us all, fallen asleep in the sight of the Old Gods among their demon servants.”He has not heard. Melisandre pushed down a heart that beat, suddenly, far too quickly. I am the first thing come from the Wall to him in all his months of winter in the North. He knows not. She had seen Stannis Baratheon in her fires at last the morning after Jon Snow had fallen, surrounded by the demons of the Old North with their gaping red eyes, and had not been able to push him out of her mind, even if he was not Azor Ahai come once more after all. For a week she had walked the Wall, watching the North, without ceasing, without food or sleep, without even her fires, saying nothing even as she wailed in her heart against the blackness. Azor Ahai was a wolf in the Great Other’s colors, and the Long Night would fall without his protection. How could a wolf protect man, and how could she have missed him?I belong there, on the Wall, where my Lord showed me the errors of all my ways. Stannis Baratheon was a gate path to the hinges of the world only, not the true savior of the world. Even as she stood here watching him she knew she belonged with the Lord of Light, at the front edge of the known world, with the prophecy. Jon Snow’s body would need the Lord’s Kiss, if ever the wild wolf came within spitting distance of the Wall once more. She could bind them together again, she could. She would. It was the only thing left for all of them.Instead she was kneeling before an old, broken man with eyes that burned her as strongly as her fires did and a glamoured sword she had once thought made him Azor Ahai truly. A sword she had glamoured, at his request, once its first fire had begun to die. That had been the moment she had known he was hers, was the Lord’s, even if Lightbringer didn’t burn as truly as she had thought it should. She had known that again when she had seen him amongst the Great Other, even if now she knew it was only as a man and not as a messiah, and it was that vision that burned in her mind for the week she had stood on the Wall letting the Lord of Light fill her again with His grace, until she had set out to make her peace with Stannis Baratheon.He still is the Lord’s, as we all are, Melisandre told herself. He has fought against the Great Other when no other would, the only claimant for any throne to do so. He brought me to the boy who is more wolf than man and yet the lynchpin on which all the world’s hopes turn. Maybe he is not the one, as I thought, but he and I were meant to do our work together nonetheless. Everything is done in the Light of the Lord; all that we do is what He has seen for us, and Stannis is His servant once and forever.“Speak, woman.” Stannis spoke through teeth that ground against once another, and it was the tightness of his voice that made Melisandre of Asshai, for the first time since she had come to Westeros, cry, tears that evaporated off her blazing face before anyone else could see them. But she knew they were there, and she knew the man who had brought her to this war and this emotion, so much the same in her heart, and she knew the man to whom she owed more than she could have ever once believed.