He was up before dawn.
Not because anyone expected it. Not because Winterfell demanded it. He was up because he'd lain awake for two hours doing mathematics in his head the particular, obsessive mathematics of a man who had been handed something extraordinary and couldn't stop turning it over, examining its edges, testing its weight.
Ten to one.
One hour of training equalled ten. One push-up equalled ten. One sword drill, one wrestling bout, one archery session all of it multiplied, compounded, stacked. He'd spent the small hours of the morning working through the implications with the kind of focused clarity his new mind made almost effortless, and by the time the sky outside his window had shifted from black to the deep grey-blue of pre-dawn Winterfell, he had a rough model in his head.
In a year of serious, structured training the kind that would raise eyebrows if anyone was paying attention he would have the effective physical development of a decade. By the time Season 1 started, by the time Ned got that letter and everything began sliding toward the edge, he would be something that shouldn't exist in this world.
Not yet. The multiplier needed time to compound, same as any investment. Right now he was fifteen-year-old Robb Stark with one good night's sleep behind him.
Right now he just needed to start.
He dressed in the dark and went to find the practice yard.
Ser Rodrik Cassel was already there.
The master-at-arms of Winterfell was a compact, weathered man whose magnificent side-whiskers had always struck him, in his previous life's viewing of the show, as one of the more committed aesthetic choices in the entire cast. In person they were even more impressive white and full and maintained with a dignity that suggested Ser Rodrik considered them a professional responsibility.
He was drilling footwork patterns alone in the grey morning light, moving through sequences with the unhurried precision of a man who had done this ten thousand times and intended to do it ten thousand more. He stopped when he heard boots on the frost-hard ground and turned, and his expression shifted through surprise into something more measured.
"My lord," he said. "You're early."
"I want to change my training schedule," he said, stopping a few feet away. "More hours. More variety. I want to work on everything sword, wrestling, archery, riding. All of it."
Ser Rodrik studied him for a moment with the particular look of a man who has trained boys into fighters for thirty years and has developed a reliable instinct for which ones mean it.
Whatever he saw, he seemed to accept it.
"Aye," he said, after a moment. "you're father mentionted it." He tilted his head toward the rack of practice swords along the yard wall. "Start with the forms. Let me see where you are."
Where he was, as it turned out, was already slightly better than yesterday.
Not dramatically. Not in any way that would make Ser Rodrik call for a maester or write a letter to anyone. But there was a smoothness to the forms that hadn't quite been there before a fraction more precision in the wrist, a fraction more economy in the footwork. The kind of improvement that might ordinarily take a week of solid drilling to accumulate.
He felt it himself. The body remembered what the mind instructed with a fidelity that was just slightly beyond natural, like the difference between a good instrument and a great one same notes, same player, but the resonance was cleaner.
One morning, he thought, moving through the third form. This is one morning.
Ser Rodrik watched without comment for a long time, correcting his grip twice and his stance once, and then picked up a practice blade himself.
"Let's see the lunge," he said.
He lunged.
"Again."
He lunged again, this time consciously suppressing the shoulder telegraph that Jon had identified at breakfast yesterday pulling the tell inward, burying it, making the movement cleaner.
Ser Rodrik lowered his blade slightly.
"You worked on that," he said. It wasn't quite a question.
"I thought about it last night," he said. "Jon pointed it out."
"Jon points a lot of things out," Ser Rodrik said, with the tone of a man who considered this both a virtue and occasionally an inconvenience. "Most people don't listen." He raised his blade again. "Once more."
They went for an hour. A real hour, fully committed, and he pushed as hard as he could manage without making it obvious he was pushing which was its own skill, the skill of effort that didn't advertise itself. By the end his arms ached in the good, deep way that meant something had actually happened, and Ser Rodrik was looking at him with an expression that hadn't quite decided what it was yet.
"Same time tomorrow," Ser Rodrik said, which was apparently the highest available praise.
Jon found him at the archery butts an hour later.
He'd moved there directly from the sword work, which was perhaps not what a normal fifteen-year-old would do with tired arms, but the mathematics in his head were insistent. Every session counted. Every hour compounded. He wasn't going to waste a morning.
He heard Jon's footsteps and didn't turn around. Drew, aimed, released. The arrow landed closer to centre than the last one.
"You're going to wreck your shoulders doing that after sword work," Jon said, coming to lean against the post beside him with his arms crossed. There was that small frown again the one from breakfast, the something is different frown.
"Probably," he agreed, nocking another arrow.
"So why are you doing it?"
"Because I need to be better at it." He drew, held the breath, released. Closer still. "The form is wrong. I'm compensating with strength instead of technique."
Jon was quiet for a moment. Then, with the air of someone who has decided to test a theory: "Who are you and what have you done with Robb Stark?"
He lowered the bow and looked at Jon sideways.
Jon Snow at fifteen was all angles and dark eyes and a guardedness that went bone-deep a boy who had learned early that the world had a category for him and that the category came with a ceiling. But underneath it, visible if you knew what you were looking for, was the thing that would one day make men follow him into an army of the dead. A quality of bedrock. Of genuine, unperformable steadiness.
You're going to die, he thought. You're going to be murdered by your own brothers in the snow and it's going to mean nothing and you deserve better than any of what's coming.
"I had a strange night," he said. "Thinking about things. Decided some things needed to change."
"What things?"
"How seriously I'm taking all of this." He gestured vaguely at the practice yard, the castle, the grey northern sky. "We live in a world that will kill you if you're not ready for it. I've been treating training like a chore." He paused. "I don't want to do that anymore."
Jon looked at him for a long moment.
"That's a very strange thing to wake up thinking," Jon said slowly.
"Maybe," he said. "Will you show me the grip correction you've been using for the recurve? I've seen you adjusting it."
Jon blinked surprised, he suspected, less by the question than by the fact that Robb Stark was asking him for help rather than the other way around. A small recalibration happened behind those dark eyes.
Then Jon pushed off the post and came to stand beside him.
"Move your index finger back here," Jon said, reaching over to adjust his grip with matter-of-fact precision. "You're choking it. Let the bow do the work."
He let the bow do the work. Drew, released.
The arrow hit the inner ring.
Jon stared at it.
"Huh," Jon said.
Theon found him in the wrestling yard after lunch and immediately made it a competition, because Theon Greyjoy was constitutionally incapable of encountering someone doing something physical without making it a competition.
"You've been out here all morning," Theon said, with the particular mix of amusement and mild affront that was apparently his default setting. He was sixteen, lean and sharp-featured, wearing confidence like armour over something more complicated underneath. "Ser Rodrik, the butts, and now this. Are you trying to impress someone?"
"Just training," he said.
"Just training," Theon repeated, trying the words out like they tasted odd. "Right. Well." He cracked his knuckles with theatrical intent. "Since you're here."
What followed was not a serious bout. Theon was good quick and technical in the way of someone who had grown up needing to prove himself and under normal circumstances fifteen-year-old Robb would have had a genuine contest on his hands. But he'd been training for three hours by this point, and three hours with a ten-times multiplier was, by his calculations, the effective equivalent of a month's solid work, and something in the body's muscle memory was beginning just beginning to reflect that.
He didn't dominate. That wasn't the point and it would have raised questions he wasn't ready to answer. But he was better than yesterday in ways that were difficult to attribute to a single night's sleep, and Theon, who was perceptive underneath all the performance, noticed.
"You're faster," Theon said, after the third bout, slightly out of breath in a way he was clearly annoyed about. "Since when are you faster?"
"Since this morning," he said, which was true and explained nothing.
Theon stared at him.
"That's not how it works," Theon said.
"Apparently it is," he said mildly, and offered a hand up.
Theon took it, still frowning, and said nothing more. But he watched him for the rest of the session with the calculating attention of someone updating their assessment of a situation they thought they'd already understood.
He stopped at sunset.
Not because he wanted to the mathematics were still running, the compounding logic still whispering more, more, one more hour but because he was fifteen years old in a body that had its limits regardless of multipliers, and collapsing in the practice yard would generate exactly the kind of attention he didn't need.
He sat on the steps outside the yard and let the cold northern air do its work on his burning muscles, watching the last grey light drain out of the sky above Winterfell's towers.
His hands were shaking slightly. He was hungrier than he'd ever been in either life. Every major muscle group had filed a formal complaint.
Good, he thought.
Tomorrow it would compound. The day after, more. In a month he would be noticeably stronger than any boy his age in the North. In six months he would be something that didn't fit neatly into any category Westeros had available. In a year
In a year he would be ready to start thinking about the really difficult problems. The ones that couldn't be solved with a sword.
He thought about the Book waiting on his desk upstairs. About germ theory and steel composition and crop rotation and a hundred other threads he hadn't pulled yet.
He thought about Ned Stark laughing at breakfast.
He thought about a girl on the other side of the world who was currently property of a man she hadn't chosen, moving through a story that was going to break her in specific ways before it made her dangerous.
Two years, he thought. Don't waste them.
He got up, ignored the protest from his legs, and went inside for dinner.