The first thing Ser Gareth did was make me run.
Not in a dramatic way. He pointed at the training ground perimeter a rectangular stretch of packed dirt bordered on three sides by the outer wall of a smaller courtyard I hadn't been in before, and told me to run laps until he said stop. I ran laps. My legs gave out somewhere around the ninth or tenth and I sat down in the dirt without permission because I didn't have a choice in the matter, and Ser Gareth came over and looked down at me with the expression of a man taking measurements.
"Again tomorrow," he said.
I got up and went inside.
This went on for weeks.
The first few days were genuinely unpleasant in a way I hadn't anticipated. I'd had seven years of almost no physical activity, walking a room, watching out windows and my body, whatever latent talent it apparently possessed, was starting from roughly nothing in terms of actual conditioning. My legs ached. My lungs ached. I fell asleep at dinner twice and once in the middle of Maester Alester explaining the structure of the Riverlands' vassal hierarchy, which I felt bad about because I genuinely wanted to know about the Riverlands' vassal hierarchy.
But somewhere in the third week something shifted.
It wasn't dramatic. I didn't wake up one morning suddenly faster or stronger. It was more like a dial being turned very slowly, I ran the same number of laps and noticed they hurt slightly less, or I carried the buckets Ser Gareth introduced in week two and my grip didn't give out quite as quickly. The changes were small enough that I wouldn't have been sure they were real if the system hadn't been there to confirm them. But there it was in my status, the physical attributes ticking upward in fractions, slow and steady and responding to exactly the kind of repeated stress I was applying.
Strength. Agility. Endurance. All three climbing, not fast, but climbing.
I found that I didn't mind the pain much. That surprised me at first and then it didn't, in my old life I'd been the kind of person who stayed late at the office not because anyone asked me to but because the problem wasn't finished yet and leaving felt wrong. I recognised the same thing here. Push until something gives, then find where the new limit is. The body as a project with specifications to be met.
Ser Gareth added things gradually. Running, then buckets, then running again. Carrying weight while moving. Bodyweight work in the mornings before the running started, endless repetitions of the same movements until the form was right, then more repetitions until the form was automatic.
He didn't explain why he was building the programme the way he was. He just built it. I watched the structure of it emerge over weeks and understood that he knew exactly what he was doing, that this was a system developed across years of teaching young men to fight, adapted now for a seven-year-old who had the Targaryen look and instructions from the king and a rate of physical improvement that Ser Gareth hadn't yet decided what to do with.
The system gave me its first daily quest the morning after I started training.
It appeared when I woke up, pale gold at the edges the way it always was, sitting in the upper right of my vision like a patient reminder.
[Daily Quest]
[100 push ups]
[100 sit ups]
[10 km run]
[Reward: 1 attribute at the end of the week]
I stared at it for a moment.
10 kilometres. I can barely manage the training ground laps.
This was accurate. The training ground perimeter was nowhere near 10 kilometres. The first few weeks the run alone was beyond what I could complete in a single session, which meant I finished the week without collecting the reward, which irritated me in a specific way that I recognised as useful, it was the same irritation I used to feel when a project deadline moved and the work wasn't done.
So, I started waking up earlier.
The maids didn't comment on this. They came in the mornings and found me already sweating after performing push-ups and sit-ups before the sun was fully up, and they went about their business with the careful neutrality they applied to most things about me. I wasn't breaking any rules. I wasn't causing any trouble. I was a small child doing an unusual amount of floor work before breakfast, which was perhaps odd but not obviously their problem.
I collected the first attribute point at the end of the fourth week, when my endurance had built enough that I could string together the full run-in pieces across a morning. I put it into endurance because that was the limiting factor, the thing that was failing first and holding everything else back.
By the end of the second month, I was completing the daily quest consistently. I put the weekly points into different attributes depending on what I felt lagging, endurance when the runs were killing me, agility when Ser Gareth's footwork drills were exposing gaps, strength when I couldn't maintain form through the later repetitions.
It was, I realised, a fairly elegant system. Small, steady, compounding. The kind of growth that doesn't feel like much day to day but that adds up across months into something that wasn't there before.
Two months after the training began, Ser Gareth brought out the wooden swords.
He placed one in my hand without preamble and the dormant blade affinity woke up immediately. I know that sounds like something I'm describing in retrospect with more drama than it deserves, but it was genuinely sudden like the difference between hearing a description of a thing and actually touching the thing. The weight of the wooden sword, the balance point, the way it sat in my grip, my hand found the right hold without being told.
Ser Gareth noticed my grip before he'd said a word about it.
"Who showed you that?" he asked.
"Nobody," I said. "It felt right."
He was quiet for a moment. Then he reached over and adjusted my thumb placement by two finger-widths, which did feel slightly righter, and we began.
The first lesson was the downward cut. Just that. He demonstrated it full extension, using the rotation of the shoulder and hip together rather than just the arm and then had me repeat it until my hands gave out. I must have done it two hundred times. When something was wrong, he corrected it once, physically, and I kept the correction.
The second lesson, next day, was the horizontal slash. Then diagonal cuts. Then combinations of the three.
After a week it was thrust and footwork together. After two weeks it was all of it simultaneously in simple patterns, advance-cut-retreat, pivot-slash-set, the building blocks of something that would eventually be actual swordplay but was currently just vocabulary, the individual words before sentences existed.
My hands gave out every session. For the first month I went to bed with palms that ached from gripping the wooden sword and woke up and did it again. Calluses built. The ache became familiar and then just became the texture of the morning.
The running and the sword work ran in parallel; I'd run until my legs gave out, rest for a short while, then pick up the wooden sword and slash until my arms gave out. On some days this happened within an hour of each other. On other days I had more in reserve. The gap between good days and bad days slowly narrowed until most days were approximately the same, which meant the floor had risen.
The body talent was real. I could feel it being real in the specific way that you feel when something is easier than it has any right to be, not easy, never easy, Ser Gareth made sure of that, but easier than it should be for someone who started seven months ago with no foundation at all.
He still didn't say anything about it directly. He corrected and moved on and corrected and moved on. But he started adjusting the difficulty faster than I suspected he did for other students, adding new material before I'd had time to get bored with the old material, which told me he'd taken the measure of my rate and recalibrated.
Late in 83 AC, on a morning that had gone cold enough to see breath in the air, Prince Baelon came to the training ground.
I knew who he was from Maester Alester's lessons before I knew who he was standing in front of me. Prince Baelon the Brave, second son of King Jaehaerys. The Spring Prince, they called him, which I'd never entirely understood because he seemed from every account to be a summer sort of person, direct, physical, apparently happiest when doing things rather than planning them. He had two sons. Prince Aemon, my supposed father who had never visited me, and Prince Baelon.
He walked in with two boys. I placed them immediately from physical description, Prince Demon I would have known anywhere, about 2 names day old now, and the other was Prince Viserys, first born of Prince Baelon and about a year younger than me, both silver gold hair like mine with every feature you would look from a Targareyen.
Ser Gareth went to one knee before Prince Baelon had closed half the distance. I had not been taught the formal etiquette yet, Maester Alester had historical and geographic etiquette covered, the practical social kind was apparently a future lesson, but I was not so ignorant that I couldn't read the room. I went down too, maybe half a bit behind, one knee on the packed dirt, eyes down.
"Up, up," Prince Baelon said, the voice of a man who found ceremony faintly inconvenient. His footsteps stopped near me and I straightened to find him looking down at me with an expression I couldn't quite categorise, curious, assessing, something that might have been approval.
He reached out and touched my hair. I went still. There was no way to know what to do with that, a man I'd never spoken to, technically my uncle, touching my head.
"You've grown well," he said.
I had spent years watching through a window and collecting information from people and court small talk was not yet in my repertoire. I said "Thank you, my prince," which covered the situation without committing to anything. He made a small sound of acknowledgment and moved on.
I watched Prince Viserys across the training ground. He was watching me back with frank curiosity, the way children do before they learn to pretend they're not looking.
After the encounter, my training went well.
Ser Gareth told me about the Kings guard on a cold afternoon when I'd asked him what the highest honour a knight could achieve was.
He answered the way he answered most questions, directly, without softening anything.
Seven knights. The best in the realm, theoretically. Sworn directly to the king, white cloaks, the most prestigious appointment in Westeros by general consensus. They stood at the king's side, protected the royal family, and their deeds were recorded in a book called the White Book that apparently went back generations.
Highest honour in the realm.
Then he told me the terms.
No lands. No titles. No marriages. No children.
You give up everything that makes you someone in the feudal sense, the inheritance, the continuation of your name, the property and the heirs and the household, and in exchange you get the white cloak and the prestige and the proximity to power. For the rest of your life.
I let that sit for a moment.
"So, they can never marry," I said.
"No."
"Or have children."
"No."
"Ever."
"It's a life vow," Ser Gareth said, in the tone of someone who has said this before and does not share his personal feelings on the matter. "You understand what that means."
I understood exactly what that meant.
I turned it over in my head that evening and didn't like where it kept landing. A bastard with Targaryen blood and a talent for the sword, living at the Red Keep, being trained at the crown's expense, the logic of what came next was unpleasantly clear. If I got good enough, and good enough was visible enough, someone would start pointing at the Kings guard and calling it an honour. And an honour from a king was not the same thing as a request. An honour from a king was the kind of thing you accepted and thanked them for.
No land. No heirs. No house.
The opposite of everything the quest was asking me to do.
The obvious answer was to hide the talent, stay mediocre, never become visible enough to be pointed at. But that answer had its own problem, I was a bastard. Without the talent I was nothing. At some point a bastard needed to justify his own continued existence at court, and the only currency I had was what I could do.
So, too visible and risk the Kings guard. Too invisible and get sent away to obscurity.
There had to be a middle path. Visible enough to be useful, not so conspicuous that I became convenient. Good enough to matter, not so exceptional I became a solution to a problem they hadn't figured out how to solve yet.
I thought about it for days. I didn't reach a conclusion. I was eight years old and the problem was a decade away at minimum, which meant I had time to think.
A year. That's what had passed.
One full year since Maester Alester sat across that small table and taught me letters. One full year since Ser Gareth pointed at the training ground perimeter and told me to run.
I could read and write Common Tongue properly and had started on High Valyrian, which Maester Alester taught with the enthusiasm of a man glad to have a student who wasn't going to forget everything by the next lesson. I knew the history of Westeros from the Conquest forward and a fair amount before it. I knew the geography well enough that if you put a blank map in front of me, I could fill in the regions, the major keeps, the rivers and the mountain ranges, and most of the significant houses.
I could run without stopping for longer than felt reasonable for an eight-year-old, which I suspected Ser Gareth was aware of and had stopped questioning. I had calluses on both palms. I could execute the fundamental cuts and combinations without thinking about them, which was the point, to push the mechanics deep enough into the body that the mind could work on something else. I was not close to being a swordsman yet. I was at the point where the foundations were solid enough to start building.
The stat points stopped accumulating after the eighth name day after the daily quest ended, meaning I couldn't use it again, most probably because I was on the level to handle the quest without a strain.
84 AC