Chapter 2: A New Man

Eight months later, and I was hardly recognizable as the weak-ass college student that I was on arrival. I spent most of my days training, practicing my martial skills in the yard, exercising my body, honing my magic. And it showed.

I mostly collaborated with Luwin to earn my keep. I introduced him to double entry book-keeping, explained statistical techniques, and found a few loopholes in the tax code that meant Winterfell could have afforded to house, feed and equip a hundred of me and still come out ahead. That pretty much brought me up in status from “free-loading but interesting foreign guest” to “gentleman courtier”. Introducing flush toilets, and the rapid and efficient plunger pump to pull water just cemented my position.

They were less enthusiastic about my agricultural revelations, but were at least willing to try them out on fields owned by Lord Stark and worked by peasants as part of their taxes. I had grown up in an agricultural area, and both history and biology classes had made us memorize numerous facts about farming both past and present. I introduced the idea of four field Norfolk crop rotation, which alternated wheat, turnips, barley and clover and more than doubled production compared to a two field system where half the land was fallow at any given time. It was one of the most efficient farming methods available to an unindustrialized agricultural sector, and helped the explosive English population growth that helped make it an empire.

I also introduced the somewhat hardier three field system which could be applied over worse land than you found in England; that used autumn rye or winter wheat and then spring barley or oats in one field, nitrogen fixers like peas, lentils or legumes in the second, and left the third fallow.

Lastly, I gave them the concept of companion planting, where rows of one plant like carrots are alternated with another like onions and the yields of both are improved. I wrote down what I could from the half-remembered vegetable – companion – antagonist charts. The yield from the experimental portion of greenhouse, or “glass gardens” as they called it, had shown a distinct improvement, and Lord Stark had already sent messengers with written guides to inform his banner-men.

My contributions meant that Lord Stark gifted me with a full set of armor, spear, sword, shield and mail. After that I was no longer tooling about with borrowed gear when I trained in the mornings, and Lady Stark was a lot less frostily polite towards me. Part of her warming up, I suspect, came from her childrens’ affections too. I helped Luwin tutor them in math and physics, taught them chess, and told them stories that I had read.

Bran, her second son, was nine years old and as unfair as it was, he was my favorite. He loved to climb, and made me tell and re-tell stories of Sun Wukong, King Arthur and Star Wars (the original trilogy, of course). A weird mix, I know, but they were his favorites.

His climbing though scared me to death. Boy would go right up the walls and towers of Winterfell, no harness, no rope. His mother kept trying to get him to stop, but it just didn’t work. Other than that, he was the sweetest, best behaved, nicest little brat there ever was, but when it came to climbing he couldn’t help himself. It was some sort of compulsion. Personally, I was scared to death of heights, but my brother was a fiend for rock-climbing, went to compete in the US nationals and everything, so I knew a bit about it.

So I talked to Lady Catelyn, and with her support got Mikken, the chief blacksmith, to make some carabiners up. A few straps of leather with some heavy stitching for a harness, some good quality rope, and a bit of instruction and Bran was ready to go. He wasn’t willing to risk the punishment rather than take one of the preset routes with fixed belaying points, and proved to be almost creepily responsible when it came to looking after his gear.

After that, well, I think if Lord Stark had tried to get rid of me Lady Catelyn would have had him sleeping by the hearth for a year.

I got along well enough with the other kids. Young Lord Robb was a fine man, friendly and kind, perhaps too much so for a future Lord Paramount of the North. We practiced together, and he was always willing to patiently teach me a trick with the sword. His half-brother, Jon Snow, was of an age with Robb. A little cooler, more stoic and serious, and to be fair a bit broodier, Jon was still unfailing polite and helpful.

As for the girls, Arya was a spitfire. Recently turned ten, she was a total tomboy. Lord Stark said she had a full measure of the wolf’s blood, and he wasn’t wrong. More than anything, I felt bad for the girl. She just wanted to learn to fight, to ride, joust and hunt like the boys. On modern Earth, she’d have likely represented the US in the Olympics for shooting or fencing, or spent a lifetime hunting. In Westeros, with Lady Catelyn for her mother, she was in a constant war for whatever shreds of independence she could gather and keep.

I was willing to entertain Arya, told her how the most badass archer and swordsman I ever met was a woman. It wasn’t a lie, either. Even with a decade more training and magic, I’d hesitate picking a fight with someone like Aya LaBrie; not only was she at the very top of the world when it came to skill, she had that mark of self-determination on her, that she’d accept no future but what she chose. After that, Arya liked me. Still, she was a bit of a hellion, and displayed her affections with pranks and harassment as much as anything else. Unlike Bran, whose only sin was liking high places from which I was all too often sent to fetch him, Arya was trouble.

Sansa was my least favorite of the Starks. It may have been a bit unfair; she was a product of her environment. But since I was reserving judgement on little Rickon, still a toddler, and got on well with all the others, she kind of fell into it. Not that I really disliked her; it was just that she was so willfully naïve, blinded to the realities of life. Hell, I was always faintly contemptuous of people in the US who didn’t really get how bad life could be outside our little islands of civility, not just abroad but even in our own cities.

This girl basically lived in the fucking middle ages. Her aunt, Lyanna, was abducted by the previous dynasty’s crown prince. When asking for her return, her own grandfather had been burned to death, her uncle strangled as he tried desperately to free his father. When the capital, King’s Landing, was sacked the surviving royals suffered their babies skulls dashed against the walls and their women raped to death. How she could buy into the fantasy of courtly knights was beyond me. I guess her make-believe was nicer than the reality, but if her illusions were ever shattered it was likely to be ugly and I wasn’t convinced Lord and Lady Stark could keep her sheltered forever.

That said, my least favorite of the members of the Stark household was that shit, Greyjoy. He just rubbed me in all the wrong ways, and reminded me of every character flaw I’d seen as part of a frat rolled into one odious jackass. In a nutshell, he was an arrogant, insecure, aggressive, sexist, classist, drunk, whoremongering, dishonest little shit, and proud of it. It didn’t help that he felt threatened by me and kept picking fights. One time he even kicked my dog; I beat him bloody, then unconscious in the training yard, and warned him that if he fucked with me one more time I’d leave him a permanent cripple. He pissed blood for a month, and after that, we didn’t interact much. I preferred it that way.

Although I spent a goodly amount of time with the Starks or Luwin, I spent most of it training. When I arrived, I was a decent martial artist. Technically, my skills were actually pretty good. Physically, I had put on the freshman fifteen and was far from the shape I’d been in when I was competing. Other than fists, I could swing a pretty mean staff, and was beginning to hit the point of being a competitive archer. In other words, compared to the local soldiery, I was fucking chaff to be thrashed.

Ser Rodrik Cassel, the master-at-arms, had brought me up from that point to being an objectively good fighter. My first and greatest focus was on the bow, which he couldn’t help much with. I knew though that archery was the best way to kill people in battle, or to feed myself in a forest, assassinate some fucker, basically any situation my first go-to was going to be my bow. I already knew how to work on accuracy. I knew how English archers used their back and front-arm to push, allowing them to use bows with higher pull weights. I knew how Mongol master archers gripped the string with their thumbs, how they could hold more arrows between their fingers to allow for a faster reload. All the rest was practice, and I spent enough time on the range to be among the best archers of the North. Of course, my bow helped but more on that later.

Apart from the bow though I needed a lot of teaching. Teaching which Ser Rodrik was, thankfully, willing to provide. By the end of the eight months and the approach of the Royal visit, I was about as good as an inexperienced knight with my spear. I picked a spear to focus on since I was a firm believer that every inch of reach counted. I could match experienced guardsmen with sword or sword and shield, and I was a decent rider, about as good as a common guardsman when fighting on horseback, and a proficient mounted archer.

I knew my history, after all; a good mounted archer is always the most lethal soldier on the battlefield.

Ser Rodrik thought I was some kind of prodigy for learning all of that so quickly. Eight months, after all, was a very short time to turn someone from inexperienced into a match for the typical man-at-arms with years of training and experience. Honestly, I was talented. I already had a lot of the principles, the footwork, the reaction time from my karate background. But that wouldn’t have been nearly enough.

No, I cheated like crazy with my magic. And that was definitely the biggest change between my arrival and then. I was a fantasy nerd suddenly given access to magic; of course I abused the hell out of it.

First I ended up figuring out the general scheme behind my magic. It worked by my bonding with the land. Different types of land provided different types of magical energy, mana, which I classified by color. They didn’t actually have color, but felt like that color, if that makes sense? It’s hard to explain, like color to a blind man. Nonetheless, there were five colors.

Green, which I had bound on arrival, was the color of nature, wildlife, the inter-connectivity of life, spirituality. It was good for improving living things, wood, animals, even myself. It could be found in forests and other wilderness that was full of life. I resonated very well with Green, which meant I could bind forests faster and use the mana more efficiently than otherwise.

White, which was the most available in the settled regions near Winterfell, was the color of peace, law, structure, selflessness and society. It was good for direct healing, protection, and imposing order and bonds. It could be found in cities, towns, and castles like Winterfell as well as managed plains; basically anywhere that was full of order or humanity. I resonated reasonably well with White.

Blue, available in the Winterfell library and Maester Luwin’s turret, was the color of knowledge, deceit, caution, deliberation, and perfection. It was good for gaining knowledge, seeing the future, improving thought, and interacting with arcane energies. So far I had only found it available in libraries and other places of scholarly pursuit, but I had hopes for sufficiently large bodies of water to provide it as well. A devoted student and seeker of knowledge, it was unsurprising that I resonated best with Blue mana.

Black, available in the Winterfell Crypts and Lichyard, was the color of raw power, self-interest, death, sacrifice, and uninhibited action. It was good for aging things, curses, maledictions, and receiving gain from pain, whether that of others or yourself. I resonated the least with this color, taking at least twice as long to make gains with it as I did with Green or Blue.

Red, available in the Winterfell Hot-Springs and the Broken Tower which had been struck by lightning, was the color of freedom, emotion, activity, impulsiveness and destruction. It was good for raw power, speed and destructiveness. I resonated fairly well with it, my massive love for my own freedom overcoming my reservations to causing senseless destruction while in an emotional fit.

Mana seemed to be fairly discretized as well. When riding in the Wolfswood, I had practiced bonding to the land and found that there was a certain minimum area of land that would be bound at a time. I decided to standardize the output of one minimum region of standard land as one mana. Certain special locations, such as the Godswood, provided a higher energy density.

In all, I had bound four green mana, six white, two blue, two black, and two red. It sufficed for most any spell I had developed, especially since many spells required a specific amount of colored mana only to define the spell-structure. The remainder could then be powered by taking a different mana and removing the overlay of color, turning it into raw magical energy which could be fed into the spell.

The first spell I developed was accidental, the regeneration effect that came when I first arrived on Westeros and bound the Godswood. Within a short time I could recreate the effect at will. The second was not a proper spell at all, but rather an application of magical energy. I spent a lot of time practicing karate, and that included meditation techniques. I didn’t know on earth whether ki was a thing or not. But real or not, those who practiced those techniques ended up with greater body control. There were dozens of possible explanations for that, most of which I didn’t care about; it worked after all, and that slight edge when you’re competing was the difference between victory and defeat, so I practiced it.

On Westeros, with magical energies, it wasn’t surprising that the first thing I’d really think to try would be to use those self-same techniques to slowly bind mystical energies to myself. I tried to be somewhat balanced in my application, though did end up favoring Green twice as much and Blue one and a half times as much as I did Red, White and Black.

From Green, I developed a stronger, faster, tougher body with improved regeneration. By working out and repairing myself with magic, I had grown my natural physique to match veteran knights. With my cultivation technique, that was boosted to the point that I was one of the strongest men in Westeros. Maybe not as strong as the Mountain, but I was likely a fair match for his brother, the Hound.

I improved my thoughts to be faster, slightly precognitive, and with an improved sense for mana by cultivating Blue. With Red, I gained faster reactions and a slightly explosive increase in power when hitting someone. White gave me a small store of healing energy that would automatically activate to heal crippling wounds. Black, ironically, was used to keep me healthy, its energies primed to attack foreign diseases and toxins.

For my spells, I used my small set of healing magics the most frequently. I could mend wounds with White energy, imbue life-force with either White or a mixture of White and Green, and give myself an energizer better than a half-dozen shots of coffee with either White or Green.

That said, the greatest number of my spells were buffs. Regeneration and bark-skin saw a lot of use, and used Green. Destined Shot, a type of fated reversion of causality allowed for “the target is hit” to causally precede “the arrow is shot”. Like Combat Precognition, it used Blue Mana. Out of combat, Blue also helped me Improve Recall and perform Thought Acceleration.

With White added to Blue I could manage Mage-Sight, which so far had only been useful to see the magical energy of my own spells but might prove useful in the future. Another White/Blue spell was Temporary Photographic Memory, which was great to memorize Luwin’s texts on heraldry, plants, animals, and maps. With Green added in, I could do a Temporary Permanent Muscle Memory, which massively sped up my training. My most complicated spell to date combined White for protection and structure, Blue for analysis, and Red for energy to create an anti-Arrow Ward which could then be sustained with colorless mana. With Red mana I had a single spell, Haste, which improved reaction and movement speed.

Black had no buffs as yet, but did provide for my sole curse, which I called Wither. Red provided all of my evocation or combat spells, including Burning Touch (which was also good for lighting campfires) and Shock, which was basically a taser bolt. Combined with Blue, I could manage the iconic Magic Missile, a homing bolt of reasonably destructive anti-personnel blasting, but the damage and single shot was too limited for my desires of dakka. I’d been fairly limited with my evocations, since I didn’t want to obviously and impossibly out myself as a mage to the Starks, so I only practiced what I could manage safely.

I also had some utility spells. Grow Straight Arrow used Green and White to get a tree to grow a perfect arrow shaft. Process Arrow used Black and Red to age the arrow-wood. But the utility spell I used most was definitely Hygiene. A mix of White and Red, it cleaned dirt, restored clothes, brushed teeth, and generally allowed me to maintain the level of cleanliness I had come to expect from the twenty-first century Earth. Other than that, I also used a White-Red spell to gather water moisture from the air, making clean water for me to drink.

But for my true masterpieces of magic, I had to point to my pets. Companions, really, by that point.

Togo was my dog, a local breed that resembled a husky. I named him after the famous sled-dog that was the lead for the longest leg of an emergency medicine delivery to Alaska. I love dogs. We always had at least one when I was growing up, often two or three. I was homesick, and I wanted a friend who’d have my back whatever happened; dogs are great for that. But I didn’t just want a dog; I had magic. I wanted a super-dog.

So I got Togo as a young puppy, and began experimenting with him, adding Green mana to improve him physically, Blue to improve him mentally, White to create a familiar bond, Red to sheathe his claws and fangs in destructive energies that allowed them to tear through steel armor. Something about the Green mana, especially how it interacted with him as a puppy, made Togo develop gigantism. I’ll admit to a bit of culpability myself; my favorite dogs at home had both been around a hundred and twenty pounds, little of it fat.

Northern Mountain Dogs, the type of breed that Togo belonged too, only grew up to sixty to eighty pounds, and I guess my desire for a slightly larger dog affected the magic. Togo was already closing in on five hundred pounds, about the size of a large-ish tiger, and he wasn’t done growing yet. By the time he was, he was probably going to come in at around six hundred pounds, maybe a bit more. Luckily the Mana seemed to have modified his biology, optimizing it and improving it to support his now massive frame. It also made him even stronger, faster and most importantly tougher than any natural creature, even one his size, had a right to be.

At some point during his modification, something had clicked and since then Togo was nearly totally reactive to my will; that was definitely a good thing, considering I’d seen him take down a bear neat as you please. I was still figuring out how to give him the ability to communicate with me, beyond his expressive body language.

I also had a horse, Aethon. He was a tawny gelding who I’d named after some divine horses from Greek mythology. Aethon was already an adult when I was given him. Like Togo, I slowly and repetitively channeled Green, Blue, White and Red mana into him. However, where Togo was about three Green to one Blue to one White to one Red, Aethon was about two Green to one Blue to two White to one Red. The White made Aethon calmer, which was definitely necessary considering he too had near-human intelligence, but unlike Togo couldn’t follow me about for entertainment.

Ridiculously swift and surefooted, he could canter all day at twenty five miles per hour, and could reach speeds in excess of sixty miles per hour in a sprint. He was a beautiful, glossy creature, and was kept that way without any effort on my part after I figured out how to enchant him to have an ever-clean coat. Every single member of the castle who had seen me riding on him, practicing my horse archery or just racing Togo for the joy of it, was deeply jealous.

I had already gotten requests for me to “see to” other peoples’ horses, which I’d so far brushed off, but I was just waiting until Arya, or Robb, or hell, Lord Stark, decided that they’d really appreciate my treating their mounts to the same process. Honestly, Togo and his gigantism had kind of fucked things up for me staying subtle, and appearing non-magical, but once I’d started I just didn’t have the heart to stop until he was the best dog he could be. I even got a little attached to Togo being ridiculously oversized compared to, well, everything. So when the kids got direwolf puppies (because that was going to end well) I decided to pump Togo up a little more. He didn’t get much larger, but he did get more muscular, stronger, faster. I had no doubt who the top dog of Winterfell was, and nor did anyone else.

Between Togo, Aethon, and the fact I was always clean, there were persistent rumors that I was a wizard, a warg, a child of the forest (despite my being over six foot two, practically a giant in a middle-ages society), the child of an Old-God, and so on and so forth. The last of those rumors hadn’t been helped when I went into the Godswood and came out with a legendary-quality weirwood bow.

I had been meditating near the Heart tree, as I was wont to do, and thinking about what my perfect bow would be like. Heavily recurved to allow me to shoot from horseback, a hundred and sixty pound draw weight to take advantage of my new strength, when I wanted it to the bow’s flexion increased by Green mana and the arrow given an extra push with Red for maximum penetration, the bow guiding the hand of the archer by a Blue enchantment bound into the bow.

I didn’t realize it until I was nearly done, but I had been channeling those mana while thinking about the bow, and when I was done if fell off the weirwood fully formed. I called it the Wyrdwood bow, and I had been unable to recreate the phenomenon of its creation. That said, it was the most amazing piece of archery equipment I’d ever seen or heard of, capable of lofting an arrow into a man-sized target at over five hundred yards. Between it and my mobility atop Aethon, I had little fear for most fights I was likely to end up in.

And then my first eight months on Westeros came to a close as the King came visiting to Winterfell.