My father gave me a house inside Winterfell's walls.
It wasn't large. A main hall, four rooms, a courtyard in the back with enough space to work. Away from the eyes of servants and guards who didn't need to know what happened inside. It was what I needed.
Razdhan, Belzakar, and Morghaz arrived on the first day alongside me.
The three of them took positions in the courtyard without needing instruction, backs straight, eyes on the horizon, waiting. My mother had freed them and they had sworn to follow her by choice, not by chain. When she died they stayed in Winterfell, waiting, without anyone asking and without leaving. A few weeks before, when my father gave me authorization to begin, the three came to me and swore loyalty. No ceremony, no speech. Razdhan spoke for all three with three words in High Valyrian and the other two inclined their heads. That was all I needed to know. They were the best instructors I had, men that the Unsullied spent a lifetime forging and who were now free and still chose to be here. The six were going to understand what that meant soon enough.
The week of recovery ended. I sent for all of them.
The first thing I taught was the difference between training and torture.
Torture breaks. Training builds through pain, and the difference is knowing how far to go. I knew. Razdhan, Belzakar, and Morghaz knew. The six didn't know yet, but they were going to learn.
Before sunrise until sundown, the body. After dinner, the mind.
Running, weight carrying, swimming in the frozen river, climbing the inner walls, endurance work up to the point where the body wants to stop and then a little beyond that. Razdhan supervised the physical side with the silent efficiency of someone who had spent their entire life doing exactly this. Belzakar and Morghaz trained combat with each of them in parallel.
I observed. And when I observed, I saw what each of them had that no one had ever made use of.
The nights were something else. Reading, writing, mathematics, geography, history of the Seven Kingdoms and beyond. Not because they needed to be scholars, but because a man who doesn't understand the world he operates in is a blind instrument. A blind instrument serves until the moment you need it most, and then it fails.
It took three weeks for almost all of them to read with enough fluency. Rhoslyn already knew how. She spent those three weeks ahead on everything else.
The true method, when you have men under your command, is to make use of the avaricious and the foolish, the wise and the brave, and to give each the responsibility suited to them.
I saw that in a life that wasn't this one, but it kept being true.
Sigurd was the simplest to train and the hardest to contain.
He already knew how to fight. The problem was that fighting for him was instinctive, formless, pure strength and brutality that worked because he was too big for most people to answer. That worked against common men. Against someone trained, it was going to get him killed.
I taught Glíma first, because it used what he already had, the weight, the height, the strength, but with direction. Then Sambo, to bring down and control before the enemy could recover. Muay Thai for punches, knees, and elbows, which in Sigurd's body had the impact of a demolition tool. And Systema, which was the hardest, because it demanded what he had least of: patience with his own movement.
In the fourth week, Razdhan put him on the ground seven times in a row during a session.
Sigurd got up the eighth time, stopped, breathed, and did the right thing. He went quiet and asked what he was doing wrong.
That was the moment I knew it was going to work with him.
The war axe was Sigurd's natural weapon. Wielding one with both hands was obvious. Wielding one with a single hand was what separated him from any other man on the field. I added a gladius at his hip for short distances. His fighting style was direct, brutal, focused on finishing before the enemy had time to think.
I found the amanita one afternoon walking through the Wolfswood, growing at the base of an old oak. I recognized it by the spotted cap and the specific smell.
The Berserkers from my previous life used the mushroom to channel something that was already in their bodies but that fear and reason normally kept blocked. On the battlefield they were machines, anything in their path died, simple as that. Sigurd's body, reinforced by the runes, could absorb what would kill another man.
I offered it to him without explaining much.
Sigurd looked at the mushroom, then at me.
"Will it hurt?"
"Probably."
He ate it without further questions.
The fatigue that followed lasted two days. He showed nothing else beyond that.
Rhoslyn learned everything faster than any of the others.
Not because she was the strongest or the most resistant, she was the smallest of them physically. But her mind processed patterns in a way I had rarely seen. I showed a movement once and she was already adjusting on the second repetition, identifying the weak point before I pointed it out.
Jeet Kune Do was the start, because it's a system built on adaptation, and adaptation was what Rhoslyn did naturally. Krav Maga for brutal efficiency. Jiujitsu to dominate on the ground, which compensated for the size difference against any larger opponent. Aikido to redirect force, which in her hands became something almost elegant.
Every movement was studied. Every decision in training had a logic she could articulate if asked.
The mathematics came too naturally. I gave her the financial records Maester Walys had left behind, just to see what she would do. She came back the next day with three inconsistencies and misplaced money nobody had noticed.
I spoke with my father. To take some of the burden off him, Rhoslyn was put in charge of the financial side of the ventures, the Icefyre and the Frostspirit. Money in Rhoslyn's hands didn't disappear. It went to work.
Kevin tested the limits until the moment he realized I was completely serious about the eunuch.
After that, he was one of the most disciplined.
He had natural talent for range and precision, a steady hand, a calibrated eye. Bow and arrow came in two weeks at a level that would take most people months. Knife throwing in even less time. Camouflage and observation were nearly instinctive in him, the way of entering an environment and vanishing inside it without leaving the spot.
Krav Maga and Taekwondo for direct combat. Boxing for short range, where Kevin's reflexes were frightening. Capoeira took longer, but when it clicked it became lethal in an unpredictable way that matched his temperament.
The short sword was his close-range weapon. But Kevin was more dangerous at distance, an archer who could be deadly before the enemy got close enough to draw.
One afternoon during training, he hit seven moving targets in a row from the top of the inner wall.
I said nothing. He knew he was good. He didn't need me to confirm it.
Perseu was the easiest to motivate and the hardest to release.
The problem with knights is that their honor has rules. Perseu had grown up watching knights from the window of a brothel and had built a version of them in his head that was more about code than about efficiency. I had to take that apart before I could build anything.
It wasn't about honor. It was about protecting what needed to be protected. Sometimes that demanded what the books of chivalry don't describe.
It took time. Perseu pushed back, debated, questioned. I let him. A man who obeys without thinking is an instrument. A man who questions and then decides for himself is something else.
Bokator and Krav Maga for the base. MMA to combine everything into a style without fixed form. Judo for bringing down heavier opponents, which with Perseu's height became a considerable advantage.
The two-handed sword was natural in him, the posture, the balance, the way of holding it. I added a basholard as a secondary for versatility at close distances.
One morning, after a hard session, Perseu stood still in the middle of the courtyard for a long moment.
"This isn't what knights do," he said.
"No."
"But it works better."
"Yes."
He went quiet another moment.
"Right," he said, and went back to training.
That was the day he stopped being a boy from White Harbor dreaming about knights and started being something else.
Astrid was the one who unsettled me most.
Not for size or strength. It was because she gave herself to combat in a way the others didn't. Sigurd fought with brutality. Astrid fought with total intent, as if every training session were real, as if the man or woman in front of her were a genuine threat that needed to be put down.
Silat and Krav Maga for the base. Kali for working with weapons and bare hands simultaneously, which in her hands became something fluid and continuous. Savate for precise kicks, which with the muscle she'd developed through training became powerful enough to break bone.
Sword and shield were her weapons. She commanded both with a naturalness that would take an adult warrior years in the field to reach.
In one session, Sigurd brought her down and she got up, adjusted what she'd done wrong, and in three movements reversed him completely.
Sigurd stood still for a second, looking at her.
"That's going to hurt tomorrow," he said.
"It already hurt today," she answered.
Sigurd and I were the only ones capable of containing her in training. In a few years, I wasn't sure Sigurd would manage.
Eldric was invisible when he wanted to be.
Not metaphorically. The man could be in a room with you and you'd take too long to notice he was there. Growing up in the marshes had developed in him an ability to move without leaving trace that I never needed to teach, only refine.
Ninjutsu and taijutsu for movement and covert combat. Systema for breath control and silent movement. Shinkendo for fast, clean blade strikes.
And combat acupuncture, which was what caught his attention most.
I showed him the pressure points that paralyze, the ones that disorient, the ones that kill if pressed with enough precision. Eldric absorbed all of it with the attention of someone who had found the language that was always his.
His weapons were blades hidden in his clothing, nothing visible, nothing that drew attention. Six blades in specific positions he could reach in under a second from any position.
One afternoon during an assessment, I asked him to move through the courtyard without being spotted by Morghaz, who had the most trained eyes I knew.
Morghaz stood in the center of the courtyard for ten minutes without locating Eldric.
Eldric had been two meters behind him the entire time.
The months passed.
Before sunrise until sundown, the body. After dinner, the mind. Day after day, week after week, without pause beyond what recovery required.
There were hard moments. Kevin reached his limit twice and came close to leaving. Sigurd broke his wrist in training and came back before it had fully healed. Rhoslyn fell ill for a week and did the mental exercises lying down because she couldn't stand.
Perseu asked once, at the end of a particularly long night, whether it would be worth it.
I stayed quiet for a moment.
"I don't know the future," I said. "But I know what you're becoming. And that's going to be worth it."
He didn't answer. He went back to his books.
In the end, the six were something else. Not the same orphans I had found scattered across the North. They were what the training and what they had inside them had made together.
As I said at the start: I believe in two kinds of pain. The kind that hurts. And the kind that transforms.
They knew both.