Ser Rodrik Cassel was a good man.
Aegon had arrived at this conclusion through patient observation, cross-referenced against everything he already knew, and it had the quality of a theorem proven rather than an opinion formed. Rodrik Cassel was good in the specific way that soldiers who survive long enough to grow grey become good: not naïve, not soft, but possessed of a bedrock decency that had been tested and found sufficient. He had buried his wife and his eldest son and still came to the yard every morning before dawn to lay out the practice swords in careful rows, which Aegon considered a form of heroism the world did not adequately recognize.
He was also, Aegon had decided by the time he was four years old and had been training under the man for three months, entirely inadequate for what needed to be taught.
This was not Rodrik's fault. It was simply the situation. The master-at-arms of Winterfell knew the Northern style: direct, economical, built on strength and endurance and the assumption that the man you were fighting would eventually tire before you did. It was a fine style. It had won wars. It would kill Aegon dead within ten years if it were all he ever learned.
He had begun supplementing it before he was five.
The visions — the prescience the goddess had pressed into him like a gift wrapped in thorns — had shown him almost immediately that looking forward was only half of what they could do. It had come to him during one of his early sessions in the godswood, sitting at the base of the Heart Tree while the red leaves moved in the autumn wind. He had been trying to see the future, trying to grip the shape of what was coming, and found himself instead sliding in the other direction — not forward but back, into a past that the weirwood network had witnessed and stored in its roots the way a library stores books.
The First Men had carved faces into the trees because the trees watched. He understood this now in a way the books did not quite capture. They had not been making icons. They had been making windows. And those windows looked both ways.
He sat at the Heart Tree's base on a cold morning three months before his fifth nameday, and he looked through the window, and he saw:
A training yard in white stone, hot Dornish sunlight, and a man moving through forms with a greatsword that caught the light strangely — pale as milkglass, forged from something that was not quite iron, not quite steel. The man was young, perhaps twenty, and he moved the way water moves through a narrow channel: with complete inevitability, without a wasted gesture in the whole of it. The blade described arcs that seemed simultaneously effortless and precisely lethal, the geometry of a mind that had spent years reducing violence to mathematics and then reconstructing it as art.
Arthur Dayne, Aegon thought, and the name arrived with the electric certainty of the visions at their clearest. The Sword of the Morning. The finest knight Westeros has ever produced.
He watched for a long time. He memorized everything.
He was four years old and could not yet replicate a fraction of what he witnessed. But he filed it — all of it — in the part of his mind that a previous life had trained to hold engineering schematics and building tolerances and the precise load-bearing coefficients of structures under stress. He would grow into it. He had time.
In the yard, when Ser Rodrik called him back to the practice sequence, Aegon executed it with the Northern precision the master-at-arms expected and said nothing about what he had seen.
Patience was the first lesson of prescience. He had been learning it since before he could walk.
Two years passed. He grew. The mind in the child's body stopped feeling so pressurized as the body caught up with it, inch by inch and month by month, the gap between what he could think and what his muscles could execute slowly narrowing. He ran every morning before the castle woke — circuits of the walls in the grey pre-dawn dark, because a body that could fight brilliantly for ten minutes was less valuable than one that could fight adequately for an entire day, and he intended to be able to fight brilliantly for an entire day eventually. He did not tell anyone about the runs. He simply did them.
He returned to the Heart Tree when the visions called him and sometimes when they didn't. He had begun to understand the weirwood network the way an engineer understands a power grid: a vast connected system, most of it dormant, some nodes more active than others, all of it carrying something that had been accumulating since before the Andals came. Winterfell's Heart Tree was one of the stronger nodes. When he sat at its base he could sometimes feel the others — faint, distant, like lights seen through fog — and once, only once, he felt something looking back at him from the deep north that was not the wind and not his imagination.
He did not pursue that thread. Not yet.
What he pursued were the dead.
That was what the past-sight gave him that he had not anticipated: not history as he had known it from books, processed and abstracted and filtered through the perspectives of those who wrote it down, but observed history. Direct. Unmediated. He sat in the godswood and watched Barristan Selmy at twenty-five, lean and bright-eyed and moving through a tournament yard with the effortless economy of someone who had forgotten how to be frightened. He watched the man who would become the Bold at the absolute apex of his ability, before age and loyalty and grief had spent him, and he took notes in the palace of memory that a previous life had taught him to build.
He watched the Smiling Knight — not the duel, but the training. The outlaw had learned to fight on the edges of society, picking up technique from anyone who could be killed for it, and his style was a patchwork of twenty different schools that he had assembled through blood and stolen knowledge into something genuinely dangerous. There was a lesson in that too: the virtue of eclecticism, of refusing the tyranny of any single tradition.
He watched older things. He watched the great knights of a century past, and two centuries, and three, the tradition stretching back through the years the weirwoods had seen — and the weirwoods had seen everything, patient and eternal and entirely indifferent to the politics of the things that happened in front of them.
He was six years old and synthesizing four hundred years of swordsmanship into a style that no living person had yet faced.
In the yard, he was careful.
The showing of ability was its own tactical problem. Show too little and you waste Ser Rodrik's instruction, get assigned drills below your level, stagnate. Show too much and questions get asked — questions about where a bastard child of Winterfell learned to move like that, where he found the technique, who taught him — and those questions led to conversations he was not yet ready to have. He calibrated it: better than expected for his age, improved quickly and visibly, displayed flashes of something exceptional that could be attributed to natural talent. He kept the deeper material in reserve. He lost the bouts he could afford to lose.
Robb Stark was the hardest person to lose to deliberately.
Not because Robb wasn't good — he was, genuinely, better than most children his age, with the natural athleticism of someone who had never had a reason to doubt his own body and a competitive instinct that expressed itself as joy rather than desperation. He was going to be a formidable fighter by adulthood. Aegon had seen it. He had also seen what Robb's raw talent without the prescient's supplement looked like compared to what he himself was building, and the gap was not closeable.
Which meant that losing to Robb required actual craft, because Robb was good enough to notice if the loss felt manufactured. So he won most of the time and lost occasionally in a way that felt genuine — a half-second delay in recovery, a footwork mistake that could plausibly happen to a tired child — and Robb took the losses as evidence that he was better than he'd thought and the wins as evidence that Jon was the one person in Winterfell worth taking seriously.
"You're different when you fight," Robb said once, sitting in the snow after a bout, catching his breath. He was six Aegon was six. "It's like — you know what I'm going to do before I do it."
"I watch your shoulders," Aegon said, which was not untrue.
"It's more than that." Robb looked at him with the straight, unguarded attention that was his particular gift — he could not be indirect about anything, Robb, it was simultaneously his greatest vulnerability and the thing Aegon found most valuable about him. "You always look calm."
"I think a lot," Aegon said. "While we're fighting."
"What do you think about?"
Four hundred years of dead men, he thought. The geometry of where your weight will be in three seconds. The sixteen ways this exchange can end and which two of them I prefer. "The next move," he said. "And the one after."
Robb was quiet for a moment, turning this over. Then he nodded — the nod of someone who has received an answer that explains something without fully illuminating it — and stood up, and picked up his practice sword again. "Again?"
"Again," Aegon agreed.
Arya was born that year, in the cold deep of winter, and arrived in the world with the same energy she would maintain for the rest of her life: furious, loud, and apparently convinced that the existing arrangements were insufficient. He had looked at her — red-faced and furious in the arms of the wet nurse, while Catelyn Stark lay exhausted and Ned stood beside the bed with the expression of a man trying to contain something very large inside his chest — and felt something complicated and warm.
She would be a swordsman. He knew it. He had seen it in the past-sight not as a vision of the future but as a pattern in the present: the way she reached for things, the way her eyes tracked motion, the jaw-first quality of how she met new information. It was the same thing he had recognized in himself as a child in his first life — the specific hunger of someone who needs their body to be an instrument rather than a vehicle.
He would help her when the time came. He filed it.
In the meanwhile, he had other matters under development.
Catelyn Stark's particular campaign against him had settled, by his sixth year, into something he privately considered a stalemate of elegant mutual frustration. She could not openly mistreat him — she was Tully-raised and Stark by marriage, too conscious of her own dignity and too aware of Ned's watchful guilt to allow herself anything as legible as cruelty. What she deployed instead were the smaller weapons: the tasks that arrived through Maester Luwin rather than directly, the absence of her presence at his training milestones, the way rooms rearranged themselves slightly when she entered them so that he was always fractionally further from the center of things.
He responded in kind.
He called her Lady Stark with the precise formal courtesy of a young lord addressing the lady of the castle, never my lady, never anything warmer — correct in every particular and somehow, through its very correctness, communicating exactly how much of a choice it was. When she set him tasks, he completed them with such scrupulous thoroughness that Ned invariably heard about the results. When she found him somewhere she hadn't expected — the library, the maester's tower, the great hall's high table when guests came and he had, quietly and entirely within the rules of hospitality, arranged to be seated where the interesting conversations happened — he greeted her with serene composure and gave her nothing to use.
She was intelligent enough to see what he was doing. He was intelligent enough to do it anyway.
The year he turned six, the ravens began arriving from the south with increasing frequency. He had been expecting this. The messages bore the stag of House Baratheon and the spare language of official military correspondence, and Ned Stark's face over them told him what words couldn't quite capture. The Lord of Winterfell was being called to war again.
Balon Greyjoy, Lord of the Iron Islands, had declared himself King and sent his fleet against the shores of Westeros. The Lannister fleet burned at Lannisport. Raiders struck the western coast. The fragile order Robert Baratheon had spent six years constructing cracked along its oldest lines.
Ned rode south to answer the King's call.
He left Jon behind, because Jon was six years old, which was correct and necessary and not something Aegon spent any time resenting. He was six years old. He stayed in Winterfell and trained and worked the visions and let Catelyn Stark manage the castle with the competence of a woman who had been trained for exactly this since girlhood. He watched her do it and filed everything she did correctly under methods that work, because she was good at this even if she was not good with him, and he saw no reason to waste a lesson.
The war lasted the better part of a year. Robert's forces ground the rebellion down with the systematic brutality of a man who had learned from one civil war and refused to be surprised by another. Stannis Baratheon destroyed the Iron Fleet at Fair Isle. Ned Stark and Robert together breached the walls of Pyke.
And then a ship arrived at White Harbor, and made the journey north, and delivered to Winterfell's gates a boy of eleven who looked at the castle with calculating eyes and the chin-up pride of someone who had been comprehensively defeated and had not yet decided whether to admit it.
Theon Greyjoy. Ward of Eddard Stark. The price of his father's rebellion.
Aegon watched him ride through the gates from a position he had chosen two hours earlier — high ground, good sightlines, inconspicuous. He watched Ned's welcome: formal, correct, and underneath the formality something genuine — the kindness of a man who had gone to the Eyrie at twelve as someone else's hostage and had never forgotten what that meant. Theon did not know how to receive it. He was braced for contempt, and received instead the specific dignity of a lord who would not demean a child for his father's choices, and the confusion on Theon's face was almost painful to observe.
He did not approach. Not that day. He watched, and filed, and waited.
What he had understood about Theon Greyjoy from the moment of his arrival was this: the boy was in the unique misery of the gifted and displaced, someone who had been important and was now held property, who had been heir to something and was now proof that the something had failed. That misery would either consume him or harden him into something useful, and which direction it went would depend largely on what Winterfell gave him to push against.
What Aegon gave him, three weeks after his arrival, was a problem.
He approached Theon in the practice yard at an hour when Ser Rodrik was elsewhere, and said, without preamble: "You're going to challenge me."
Theon looked at him with the expression he had developed for addressing Winterfell's inhabitants — carefully neutral, faintly contemptuous, built to project confidence across a foundation of loss. "I'm going to what?"
"Challenge me. In the yard. In front of Ser Rodrik and Lord Stark and whoever else is watching." He met the older boy's eyes without any warmth or hostility, simply direct. "You've been here three weeks and nobody has taken you seriously yet. You need a win. You're not going to get one over Robb — he's the heir and the northern lords' sons have already closed ranks around him, so anything that looks like aggression against Robb reads as politics, and you can't afford that. Ser Rodrik won't spar you properly yet because he's still assessing you." He paused. "I'm the bastard. Challenging me costs you nothing politically. Beating me would give you standing. You know it, and I'm telling you I know it too."
Theon stared at him. "You're six."
"I know."
"You're telling me to come after you."
"I'm telling you that you should, yes." He kept his voice even. "I'll make it a good fight. I'll push you. You'll win — not because I'll fall over for you, but because you're five years older and a natural fighter and Ironborn-trained, and that combination should beat me." He tilted his head. "Afterward, you'll have something in Winterfell. A name that isn't Greyjoy or ward or hostage."
A long silence.
"Why?" Theon said. "Why would you do that for me?"
"Because a Winterfell where Theon Greyjoy has standing is more interesting than one where you spend the next decade with your back against the wall." He held the other boy's gaze. "And because I want you off-balance enough that you stop treating everyone here like an enemy. You have things to offer. You won't offer them while you're spending all your energy surviving."
The fight happened four days later, in front of Ser Rodrik and a small gathered audience of stable hands and household knights and Robb, who watched with transparent concern and the barely-concealed competitive attention of someone who had just realized the bastard he'd been training with for years was not a guaranteed win.
Theon was good. He was genuinely good — compact and explosive, his footwork built for the rolling decks of ships rather than flat ground, which gave his movements an unpredictability that Northern fighters were not trained to anticipate. He attacked in controlled bursts, conserving energy between exchanges, and his defense was minimal by design, the Ironborn philosophy: don't waste effort stopping what you can make your opponent miss.
Aegon gave him a real fight.
He used everything up to about two-thirds of what he actually had — the material from the Heart Tree's long memory held in reserve, the deeper synthesis of the dead masters kept locked away — and fought with the top layer only: his natural talent, his conditioning, the basic Northern style overlaid with small adaptations that Ser Rodrik had noticed and not yet understood. It was enough to make Theon work for every exchange, enough to make the match last long enough to be a demonstration of quality rather than an accident, and then he let a feint pull him half a step too far left and Theon's riposte found the opening and the practice sword caught him across the shoulder hard enough to sit him down in the snow.
He sat there for a moment.
Theon stood over him breathing hard, his face doing something complicated — surprised by the difficulty of it, surprised by himself, not yet sure what had just happened.
Aegon looked up at him. Offered his hand.
After a moment, Theon took it and pulled him up.
They were not friends. They would not be friends for a long time. But something had shifted in Theon Greyjoy's careful, defended architecture, and from that day he stopped treating Winterfell like a siege and began treating it like a place where he lived, which was the first step toward something more useful than enmity.
In the weeks that followed, Theon began gravitating toward Aegon in the practice yard not with the warmth of friendship but with the specific, grudging attention of someone who has recognized a fellow student of the same subject. They never exchanged lessons directly. What happened instead was that Theon practiced near him, and Aegon watched Theon practice, and absorbed the Ironborn vocabulary through observation alone — he had four centuries of dead men in his memory for context, and the Ironborn style made immediate sense once you understood its nautical origins, the low center of gravity designed for unstable footing, the emphasis on aggression because on a ship's deck the man who hesitated drowned. Within three months he had integrated it. He never told Theon this. Theon remained, in his own mind, the one who had bested Winterfell's mysterious bastard, and that suited everyone.
The conversation with Ned came in his seventh year, after Maester Luwin arrived in the Lord's solar with the expression of a man who has discovered something he is not quite sure how to categorize.
"He's been reading High Valyrian," Luwin said, which was the sentence that began it.
Ned looked at him from across the desk. The Lord of Winterfell had the patience of stone — he heard things and sat with them and did not react until he had decided what reaction was appropriate. "High Valyrian."
"From two texts in my library that I had not directed him to, one of which is incomplete even by scholarly standards." Luwin's tone was balanced between impressed and unsettled in a way that struck Aegon as the correct emotional response. "He appears to have been working at it for approximately a year and has achieved what I would describe as functional fluency."
Ned was quiet for a moment. Then he looked at Aegon, who was sitting in the chair he had been invited to sit in, and said: "Why?"
He had prepared no speech. He had decided against speeches. "Because a bastard in this world is weak by default," he said. "He has no name, no lands, no certainty of anything. Whatever I am to become, I have to build with my own hands. Languages are leverage. High Valyrian is spoken in the academies of Oldtown and the courts of four Free Cities — it's the language of scholarship and old contracts and certain kinds of power that don't care about legitimacy." He met his father's grey eyes steadily. "I intend to be without weaknesses. Every one I can remove now I will remove now."
Ned held his gaze for a long time.
"You're seven," he said.
"I know." A pause. "That's actually an advantage in this specific case. The younger the brain, the faster the language acquisition."
Something moved across Ned's face — something between pride and the specific unease of a man who has been reassured about something he wasn't sure he wanted reassurance about. He looked at Luwin, then back at his ward. His bastard. The boy with his sister's eyes in his own dead friend's coloring, except they weren't quite right and never had been.
He said nothing about the eyes. He never said anything about the eyes.
"Is there anything else in Luwin's library you've been teaching yourself?"
"Astronomy. Some history of the Free Cities. I've made a start on the Dothraki vocabulary that appears in the trading texts, but the materials are limited."
Luwin made a sound.
"The Dothraki vocabulary," Ned repeated.
"They control an enormous amount of territory across the Narrow Sea. Understanding their language would—"
"I know why it would be useful," Ned said quietly. He looked at his hands, then at the boy across from him. "Jon."
"My lord."
"You are—" He stopped. Began again. "What are you planning?"
It was the most honest question anyone had asked him. He gave an honest answer. "To be ready," he said. "For whatever comes. I don't know yet what form it will take. I know that I am a bastard in the North, which is one of the smaller problems I will eventually face, and I would like to have resolved all the small ones before the larger ones arrive." He paused. "I am not a danger to Winterfell or to you. I want to be clear about that."
A long silence.
Ned said, finally: "You are seven years old and you speak like a maester and move in the yard like a knight twice your age." He exhaled. "I don't know what to do with you, Jon."
"Let Maester Luwin give me access to the full library," Aegon said. "It would be a start."
After another moment, Ned looked at Luwin.
Luwin shrugged, in the way that men of learning shrug when they have encountered something they cannot explain and have decided to study it rather than refuse it. "He'll have exhausted the relevant sections within the year anyway," the maester said. "Restricting access would only slow him down."
"Grant it," Ned said, and turned back to his papers in the manner of a man closing a subject before it could open into something larger than he was prepared for.
A year passed. Bran was born — serious-eyed and watchful, the kind of infant who looked at you as though assessing your structural integrity. Aegon watched Ned hold him and felt, distantly, the weight of what he knew about this particular child's future: the fall, the chair, the long road north. He filed it under problems to address later and said nothing.
He was eight now, and the time for careful concealment was beginning to shift.
Not end. Not yet. But shift.
The morning it changed was a winter morning in the eighth year of his life, grey and cold and with the particular crystalline quality of Winterfell's hard frosts, when he arrived in the practice yard before Ser Rodrik as was his custom and began the forms alone. He had been doing this for two years — arriving early, working through material that he had no business knowing at his age, and stopping precisely before the master-at-arms appeared. The forms he practiced in those morning hours were not the Northern sequences. They were things he had drawn from the Heart Tree's long memory: Dayne's sword philosophy, the Reach style that valued reach and footwork over power, the older Westerosi traditions that predated the unification and had been slowly swallowed by more standardized martial culture.
This morning, Ser Rodrik arrived twenty minutes early.
He stood at the yard's entrance for a moment. Aegon became aware of him in the peripheral way he had developed — not prescience exactly, more the heightened attention of someone who had been training it for years — and continued what he was doing, because stopping would be worse than being seen.
He was working through a sequence he had drawn from a memory of Barristan Selmy at the height of his powers, adapted for his own height and build, and it looked — he knew this, he had assessed it deliberately — like nothing that should come out of an eight-year-old body. The footwork was too precise. The blade control too complete. The anticipation of each movement's consequence built into the movement itself so that every form set up the next one rather than simply existing as an independent gesture.
Ser Rodrik watched for a long time.
Then he walked into the yard and picked up a practice sword from the rack.
Aegon stopped. Turned. Looked at the master-at-arms — the good man, the steady man, the man who came to the yard before dawn because he had decided that dignity was the only thing left worth owning after the worst things happened. Rodrik's face was doing something unusual. Not alarm. Not confusion. The face of a craftsman who has recognized something.
"Where did you learn that?" Rodrik said.
"I've been working on it myself," Aegon said. "From observation. From reading about styles I haven't trained."
"No one reads their way to moving like that."
"No." He considered this. "But if you read carefully enough, and then practice what you've read, and you have—" he paused "—a certain quality of memory, you can get somewhere close."
Rodrik looked at him for a long moment. Then he raised the practice sword. "Show me what else you've got."
This was the decision point. He had been waiting for it and had made the calculation weeks ago: there would come a moment when the concealment cost more than the revelation, when Rodrik's instruction could no longer serve him without Rodrik knowing what he was actually instructing. That moment was now.
He stopped holding back.
The bout that followed was not a performance. He approached it the way he had begun approaching everything: with the cold, complete attention of someone who had made peace with his own depth. He used the Northern foundation — Rodrik expected it, and there were technical advantages to starting in a style your opponent knows — and built outward from it, layer by layer, each exchange incorporating something from the weirwood's deep archive. The Braavosi principle of minimal contact, which made his defense look effortless and confusing. The low Ironborn center of gravity, which ate Rodrik's attempts to control the pace. The Dayne-influenced footwork, which didn't match any tradition Rodrik had ever fought and therefore generated half a second of recalibration in the master-at-arms' responses, and half a second was everything.
Rodrik Cassel had trained knights for forty years. He was old now and not what he had been in his prime, but the knowledge was still there, the instincts still largely functional, and he was good enough to be a genuine contest.
He lasted four minutes and thirty-seven exchanges.
It ended when Aegon slipped inside a horizontal swing — reading Rodrik's shoulder two beats ahead, stepping with the stroke rather than against it, the body doing what the mind had calculated without conscious direction — and put the practice sword's tip to the hollow of Rodrik's throat.
Silence.
Snow fell, faintly.
Ser Rodrik looked down at the blade at his throat with the expression of a man absorbing something that will require considerable time to fully absorb. He lowered his own sword. Stepped back.
"Well," he said, after a long moment.
"I've been working on it for a while," Aegon said.
"Evidently." Rodrik's voice was controlled, but underneath the control something had shifted — the specific shift that happens when a teacher realizes they have finished teaching and something else is required of them now. "How long have you been training like this? The real training. Not the version you show me."
"About two years," he said. "Quietly."
"Why quietly?"
"Because questions would have been asked." He met the man's eyes. "I'm a bastard, Ser Rodrik. The questions would have been the wrong ones."
Rodrik was quiet for what felt like a long time. He looked at the boy in front of him — eight years old, silver at the edges of his dyed-dark hair, with those violet eyes that didn't belong to any Stark who had ever lived — and something in his face did the thing that Ned's face did sometimes: the specific gravity of a man who knows more than he says and has decided the knowing is its own burden.
"You understand," Rodrik said slowly, "that Lord Stark will have to know about this."
"Yes," Aegon said.
"And you're not concerned about that."
He considered the question seriously. "Lord Stark's reaction to inconvenient information is to find the most honorable way to carry it. That's not a concern. It's a resource."
Another long silence.
"Gods," Ser Rodrik said, very quietly. "What are you going to be?"
He had an answer to that. He chose not to give it yet. He picked up his practice sword from where he had lowered it and asked, "Again?" instead.
The story of the morning moved through Winterfell's household the way such stories move — not through deliberate telling but through the accumulated gossip of stable hands who had been watching, household knights who heard from others who had been watching, servants who had seen Ser Rodrik's expression at breakfast and knew something had happened in the yard. Within a week the specific details had been exaggerated to the point where the bout had allegedly lasted half an hour and ended with Rodrik on his back in the snow.
It had not. The true version was interesting enough.
By the time it reached Catelyn Stark, filtered through two layers of household retelling, what she heard was this: the bastard had beaten the master-at-arms in open sparring. Her first response, delivered in private to her septa and therefore not quite private because nothing in a castle is ever quite private, was that children's sparring was hardly a meaningful measure of anything.
She was right, technically. She was also not quite satisfied by this, which showed on her face in small ways for the next several days.
By the end of the month, when Ser Rodrik had begun arranging Aegon's training separately from the other children — different hours, different material, the quiet acknowledgment that what was needed here was no longer what he normally provided — the Winterfell household had begun calling the bastard the Northern Star in the whispered way that servants give names to things they find remarkable and slightly alarming. He heard it for the first time from a stable hand who didn't know he was within earshot, and permitted himself, in the privacy of his own thoughts, one moment of satisfaction.
Then he went back to training.
Two more years passed. He grew. The body's acceleration in its middle years of childhood worked in his favor — he was not a large child, would not be a large man, but he was well-proportioned and increasingly fast, the kind of speed that comes not from muscle mass but from the absolute elimination of wasted movement. He practiced with the wooden swords Ser Rodrik assigned and practiced differently in the godswood and maintained the careful calibration between what he showed and what he had, the gap narrowing now because he was old enough that people could accept extraordinary without requiring explanation.
Robb trained harder. He had seen the morning in the yard and it had done something productive to him: kindled a competitive fire that had previously been merely warm. He was going to be a formidable fighter, Robb, and the knowledge that Jon was better seemed to have sharpened rather than discouraged him. This was one of the things Aegon valued most about his cousin-brother: Robb Stark's response to difficulty was to increase his effort, and he did not know how to hate someone for being better than him. He simply tried to close the gap.
He would not close it. But he would try with everything he had, and that was its own kind of excellence.
Theon had found his footing in Winterfell by his second year — not warmth, not belonging, but a functional position: Robb's shadow and sparring partner, the exotic presence in the yard whose Ironborn technique made him a useful opponent for the northern lords' sons who came to foster. He was still careful around Aegon, the specific carefulness of someone who knew they had been maneuvered but couldn't quite locate the exact point of the maneuver. This suited Aegon. A wary Theon was more useful than a comfortable one.
It was in his tenth year that the thing with Ned happened.
He had not planned it. He had planned many things — the conversation with Luwin, the Rodrik bout, the slow accumulation of the Northern Star reputation, the consistent performance in the castle's hierarchy that had made him simultaneously unignorable and technically inoffensive — but this was not among them. It simply arrived, as some things do, because the conditions had been building toward it for years.
They were in the yard on a cold afternoon, Ned and he, which itself was unusual. Ned did not normally spar with his ward — he sparred with Robb on schedule, the lord-father's duty and pleasure combined, and Jon existed in the practice yard as a separate matter that Ser Rodrik handled. But Rodrik was attending to some business with a visiting household's master-at-arms, and Ned had come to the yard with the slightly restless energy of a man who had been indoors with ledgers for three days and needed his body to remember it existed, and Jon was there.
"Spar with me," Ned said, in the slightly abrupt way that men who are uncomfortable asking for things ask for them.
He looked at his father. He had grown considerably in two years — the gap between ten-year-old and eight-year-old was genuine and large — and he was now tall for his age, not exceptional but respectable. He picked up a practice sword.
"My lord," he said, in the tone of assent.
What followed was not quite what either of them expected.
He had decided, in the two-second window between Ned's request and his agreement, that there was no useful lie to tell here. He could sandbag the bout — could fight poorly enough to flatter Ned's skill while not insulting his intelligence — but Ned Stark's intelligence was not something to insult, and more practically, what he needed from Ned Stark was not comfort but respect. The specific respect that a lord extends to someone he has assessed and found genuine. That respect could not be purchased with a manufactured loss.
He fought honestly.
Not everything — he was ten, and Ned Stark was one of the finest fighters the North had produced, a man who had held his own against the greatest knights of his generation during the war — but honestly within the range of what a ten-year-old body could express.
The bout lasted longer than anyone watching expected. He could not win — the physical differential was too large, Ned's reach advantage too significant, his strength in the clinch something no ten-year-old could match with technique alone. But he made Ned work. He moved in ways that forced constant readjustment, the synthesized style refusing to match any pattern Ned had spent decades learning to read. He made it past ten exchanges, past twenty, found openings he did not have the mass to properly exploit and exploited them anyway in smaller ways — the touch of a blade to Ned's forearm, the redirected stroke that scored past his guard to brush his ribs — small things, careful things, things that landed and were unmistakable.
He went down eventually, caught by a bind he didn't have the strength to escape, Ned's practice sword at his sternum.
He lay in the snow and looked up at the grey sky and breathed.
Ned Stark was also breathing, more heavily than he had expected to be. He stood over his ward-bastard and looked down at him with an expression that Aegon, even inverted and looking up, could read clearly.
He had seen that expression before, in the Heart Tree's long memory.
It was the expression of Ned Stark standing in the courtyard of the Tower of Joy, looking down at the man he had just defeated and knowing that the defeat had required more than he should have needed, and that the defeated man had been something extraordinary.
He said nothing. He extended a hand.
Aegon took it and stood.
Ned looked at him for a long moment. Something was moving behind those grey eyes — the processing of information, the slow accretion of understanding, one more weight added to a balance that had been tipping for years.
"Arthur Dayne," he said quietly, finally.
It was not a full sentence. It didn't need to be.
"I'm ten," Aegon said. "I have time to improve."
Ned's mouth did something that was almost, in different circumstances, a smile. He looked at the practice sword in his ward's hand. At the snow on his back from where he'd rolled to avoid Ned's initial assault — a move Ned had not expected and said so with his eyes. At the distant watching presence of Ser Rodrik, who had returned from his errand and stood at the yard's edge with the expression of a man who is no longer surprised but has not yet finished being impressed.
"You're going to be a problem," Ned said. It did not sound like a criticism.
"Probably," Aegon agreed. "I intend to be your problem specifically, for as long as I can manage it."
Something softened in Ned's face at that — not much, and quickly controlled — but Aegon had been watching this face for ten years and he saw it.
Then Ned turned and walked back to the castle, and Aegon stood in the snow and let the cold settle around him, and thought about what came next.
Across the yard, half-concealed in the doorway of the kitchen passage, Catelyn Stark turned and walked back inside with a silence that was more expressive than any words she might have chosen. He had not looked at her directly. He hadn't needed to. He knew she had been there, and knew she had seen, and knew what she had seen, and knew what it would mean to her — that the bastard her husband had brought home from a war she had never been given an explanation for had just, at ten years old, made Ned Stark use everything he had.
He stood in the snow for a moment longer.
She's going to make the next few years interesting, he thought.
He picked up his practice sword and went back to work.
By the time the cold deepened toward his eleventh nameday, the name Northern Star had spread past the walls of Winterfell. Visiting lords took their household knights away with them, and household knights talked, and what they said — with the embellishment that such stories attract in the telling — was that Lord Stark's bastard was a thing unlike anything they had seen. Some said he had already surpassed every fighter in the North. Some said he moved like the old knights of legend. Some put the age wrong in both directions, either understating how young he was to make the story more impressive or overstating it to make it more credible.
None of them quite captured it, because the thing that made him what he was could not be described in the language of sword technique. It was something else — the quality of attention he brought to a fight, the sense of a mind operating three exchanges ahead of the present moment, the specific composure of someone who had made peace with outcomes before they arrived.
He heard the stories when they cycled back through travelers and ravens and the murmured conversations of visiting lords in Winterfell's great hall. He filed them. He said nothing.
He was eleven years old. He was getting ready.
Outside, always, winter was coming.
He watched it through the narrow window of his room on the coldest nights, the stars burning sharp and cold above the moors, and felt the world's changed texture — the magic rising in it like water in a vessel filling slowly from some source below — and made his calculations, and waited.
He was not afraid.
He was, as he had been since the first moment of this life, interested.
Sleep now, he told himself, on the nights when the visions pressed close and the cold made the walls sing. There's still time.
But less of it than there used to be.