[270 AC]
Moons have passed since the conversation with my father about the chest.
I don't know exactly how many. I wasn't counting. I know it snowed twice since then, that Brandon cracked a tooth in the training yard and came to supper with a swollen lip and a story that grew larger with every person who heard it, and that Lyanna discovered she could climb the north wall of the stable yard if she used the gaps between the stones as footholds. I know Benjen is walking with more confidence and that Old Nan has a great-grandson now, Walder, who came into the world the size of a child twice his age and who the midwife said will have the stature of a giant when he grows.
I know I've grown.
That didn't need counting. The smith had to adjust the mail shirt I use in training for the second time in four months, and Alaric spent a full day watching me with that look of his that isn't quite an expression but that I've learned to read as one. He said nothing. Alaric rarely says anything when something is going right. But the drills changed, grew longer and heavier, and I understand he's testing where the limits are now because the limits of six months ago are not the limits of today.
Five feet four inches, last time anyone measured. My hair reaches my neck, the white and black so mixed together that no one tries to separate them anymore.
Someone told me last sennight that I'm a striking sight. They said it with a seriousness that made it difficult to tell whether it was a compliment or a statement of scientific observation. I didn't know what to do with that. I still don't.
The problem in the training yard is this.
I beat everyone I fight. The boys with the same namedays as me, the ones with two or three namedays more, Harys who is a knight's son and who when he first started training with me looked me up and down with the look of someone calculating how long it would take to finish this. It didn't take long for the look to change.
But a long fight wears me down more than it should. I know exactly where the problem is. The body doesn't yet keep up with what the mind wants to do. Precision starts to deteriorate when the arms grow heavy, and the arms grow heavy sooner than they should for the level at which I'm fighting. It is frustrating in the specific way it is frustrating to know what the problem is and know that the only solution is time and work.
So I work.
Before the sun rises. After it sets. Stones carried through the castle corridors when Winterfell sleeps. Running until the lungs burn and then a little more. The progress is slow, and it is slow in a way that irritates, until one day it isn't slow anymore, and you realise the distance has closed without there having been a specific moment when it happened.
Yesterday morning Harys ran out of breath before I did for the first time.
I said nothing about it. But I noticed.
The lessons with Walys ended.
It wasn't a rupture. It was more like the natural end of something that had already lasted longer than it had to last. One afternoon he set before me an astronomy text with the expression of someone delivering a difficult examination, and I read the first paragraphs and realised I already knew everything in them. Not because I had studied that text specifically. I simply knew. I told him so as directly as I could without being rude.
Walys's expression when he heard that was an interesting thing to see. Too neutral to be neutral. There are expressions that work like a closed door, and his in that moment was one of them.
The lessons ended. He did not come looking for me again.
The Old Tongue continues. Old Nan teaches on the afternoons when Walder sleeps, and Walder sleeps with the vigour of someone who has not yet discovered there is a world beyond sleep and food. Her voice is low on those afternoons, the old words come slowly, and there is in learning a tongue this way, in pieces and in conversation, a quality different from anything else I have ever learned. The words settle deeper when they come like that.
They are the quietest hours of my week. I can't quite explain why. But they are.
The idea about the orphans came to me on one of those afternoons.
I was watching Walder sleep in his cradle while Old Nan folded a cloth and said something about an expression in the Old Tongue, and suddenly I was thinking about children without family, and about loyalty, and about the difference between people who serve because they are paid and people who serve because they owe their lives to whoever they serve. Old Nan kept talking. I kept listening. But the idea stayed.
I went to my father two days later.
I brought no prepared arguments. With Rickard it is better to speak plainly, because he has little patience for circling and I have little inclination to do it. I said what I thought. That there were orphans in the orphanages of the North without guaranteed futures. That giving them training and purpose was an investment. That loyalty born from genuine debt has no price because it did not begin as a transaction.
Rickard listened to the end.
"How many children?" he asked.
"Few to start. Chosen with care."
He was quiet for a moment.
"Then you'll have to go fetch them yourself."
That was approval. With him, when something makes no sense, he says it makes no sense. When it does, he asks how.
That same day I asked him for a room.
"What for?" he said.
"Studies."
He looked at me. That look which evaluates without showing what it is evaluating.
"There are enough empty rooms," he said. "Take what you need."
I left without explaining further. He didn't ask for more. That is one of the things I've learned about my father over the years: he knows when there is nothing more to ask.
The room is in a distant wing, narrow window facing north, hearth that creaks but works.
I brought my mother's chest there. A table the carpenter made without asking what for. And months of experiments that began as curiosity and became something else entirely.
There is a makeshift shelf with flasks. A copper still that cost me three failed attempts and the patience of Winterfell's smith, who is a man of few words but who on the third day of attempts looked at me with an expression that can only be described as existential doubt. The still works now. It didn't always.
The grimoire stays in the chest. I am reading it for the third time, more slowly than before. There are things in it I didn't see on the first reading and see now, because certain ideas only open when you already have the framework to receive them. I don't speak of it to anyone. Not yet.
A few days after the conversation about the orphans I went to the solar.
I had asked my father to let me show him something. When I entered, Maester Walys was already there.
"Arthur." My father gestured to the table. "I asked Maester Walys to be present."
"Of course," I said.
I didn't say what I thought.
I opened the sack and began to set out the objects. A handful of barleycorn. A sack of darkened grain. A clay jug. Two tin cups. And set apart, a short bottle of thick glass sealed with dark wax.
Walys leaned forward almost immediately, that interest of someone trained to learn that appears before the person has decided whether they want to have it. Rickard stood with his arms crossed.
I picked up a grain.
"Common barley," I said. "The same we use to make ale."
I let it fall onto the wood of the table.
"First we trick the grain. We wet it, leave it to rest a few days. The grain thinks spring has come and begins to sprout."
I made the gesture with my fingers.
"When it sprouts, the inside changes. The hard starch becomes sugar. That is what we want."
I worked through the rest of it methodically — opening the sack of darkened grain, crushing some between two small stones, pointing to the jug. I explained the malt, the hot water, the sweet wort. I explained the yeast more carefully than the rest because Walys had looked up in a way that told me it would be the point where he would ask questions later, and I preferred to give him fewer reasons to.
"While the yeast feeds on the sugar, it produces alcohol. In a few days the sweet wort becomes strong ale."
"We already make ale," said Rickard.
"Yes. But this is where everything changes."
I broke the wax seal with my knife. The dry sound of it echoed in the solar. When the stopper came out, the smell spread through the room before I said another word, wood, toasted grain, something burning that had no name yet but that filled the space in a way that made Rickard uncross his arms.
I poured two cups. The drink was pale amber in the firelight.
I pushed one toward my father.
"I made this batch a few days ago."
He took the cup and looked at the liquid for a moment, with that attention he gives everything before touching it. Walys smelled his and said interesting in the voice of someone who had not yet decided whether it was.
Rickard brought the cup to his mouth.
One small sip.
You could see the effect travel down. He let out a breath through his nose, slowly, like a man who has just come in from the cold. He looked at the cup. Then at me. In a corner of his face that rarely moves, something appeared.
"That," he said, with the calm he says everything, "would make any man forget winter."
Walys took his sip after and coughed. He hadn't expected the strength.
I made an effort not to smile.
I took the second flask from the sack. Clear glass, completely transparent liquid.
"There is a variation. Instead of stopping the distillation, we repeat the process several times. We remove almost all the flavour of the grain. What remains is clean as water but much stronger. We filter it through charcoal after. The drink is born ready, without needing a barrel or years of waiting."
I poured a cup and pushed it toward Rickard.
"This one I would call Frostspirit."
The first is Icefyre, I said, gesturing back to the amber. The second is Frostspirit.
My father tried the clear one. This time he was quiet longer before setting down the cup. Then he did what Rickard does when he is genuinely interested in something: he began asking practical questions.
How much it costs to produce. How much it could sell for. How long until the process is refined enough to scale. Which houses in the North have the capacity to distribute. Which ports. Lord Manderly in White Harbor, certainly. Who else.
I answered what I could. What I couldn't I said I didn't know yet but would find out. Rickard didn't stop asking questions for hours, and there was in it a quality I recognised, it was the same he brought to petitions when the matter was genuinely worth his attention, when what was in front of him was not a problem but a possibility.
Night fell without either of us noticing.
Walys contributed little to the conversation. But he was writing. I saw his hand moving over the parchment from the corner of my eye throughout the whole afternoon, while Rickard and I talked.
I said nothing about that.
I followed him.
I should have gone to my room. It was late, I was tired, I had training early. But I stayed in the corridor when I left the solar, leaning into an alcove where the stone was cold against my back and the nearest torch was far enough away that the shadow covered me.
I waited.
Walys came out later than I expected. He walked quickly, in that particular way of someone who has a destination and doesn't want anyone to notice they do. I followed at the distance Alaric taught me without knowing he was teaching me, my steps at the right rhythm to be lost in the echo of his.
He went back to the solar.
The door didn't close all the way. Through the gap I saw the light of the candle he lit, saw his shadow move toward the table. I heard the scrape of the chair. The scratch of quill on parchment.
And then, in a moment when he likely thought the silence belonged only to him, he muttered something to the empty room in the voice of someone who believes they are alone.
"Bloody Bastard."
I stood still.
The torches in the corridor burned low. From somewhere came the wind through the cracks in the castle walls, that sound Winterfell makes at night when it is quiet, which I have known since I can remember and have never been able to decide whether it is comforting or lonely. The scratching of the quill continued.
I went to my room.
I lay in the dark with my eyes open and listened to the wind, and thought about what I knew and what I didn't know yet, and about the distance between the two, and about what it would take to close it.