Perrin was nine years old and he had been sick for three days.
Alex knew because Mira mentioned it when she brought their supper, the careful practiced worry of a woman who had seen fever take children before and recognized its shape too well to pretend otherwise.
Her nephew.
Forehead hot.
Keeping water down, barely.
She said it the way adults said frightening things when they did not want to be seen to be frightened, layering the words in practical detail as though the details were a kind of armour.
Alex ate his supper and thought about it.
He had never been sick.
He turned that fact over carefully, the way he turned over everything now.
Not once in seven years.
Not a sniffle, not a stomach cramp, not the summer fever that had swept through a village they’d camped near two years ago and laid half the inhabitants flat for the better part of a week.
He had walked among the sick then, carrying water alongside Mikal, and felt nothing but the warmth of the sun on his back.
He had eaten questionable meat at a roadside stall near Longtable that had sent a passing merchant stumbling to his knees before sundown.
He had woken the next morning entirely fine.
It had taken him longer than it should have to properly sit with this fact.
When you grew up a certain way things became invisible through familiarity, you assumed your experience was simply normal and other people were unlucky.
But two years of accumulated memories from another life had given him enough of a framework to look at himself clearly, and what he saw when he looked clearly was a boy who had never once lost a day to illness in seven years of living on the road in Westeros, where illness was simply a constant background condition of human existence.
That was not normal.
That was not luck.
In the stories from his previous life, the written ones especially, the ones he’d absorbed by the hundreds, reincarnated men usually received something dramatic alongside their second chance.
A power worth describing in loud terms.
Combat mastery or sorcery or some elaborate system that assigned numerical values to human capability and delivered glowing notifications when thresholds were crossed.
What he appeared to have received was an immune system.
He sat with that for a moment.
‘Right,’ he thought.
‘An immune system.’ Then, privately, he decided that whoever or whatever had arranged this transition had considerably better sense than most of those stories implied.
The invisible enemies, the fevers and fluxes and infected wounds and mysterious wasting sicknesses, killed more people in Westeros than swords did.
More than wars, probably, when you counted the campaigns that fell apart before battle because half the army couldn’t stand.
A man who simply never got sick, who never lost a week to camp fever on a march, who never watched a wound turn the wrong colour and spread, that man had an edge so quiet and so consistent he might spend decades using it before anyone thought to call it an advantage.
Not dramatic.
Not a thing you could point to.
Just a man who kept walking when other men stopped.
His mother had been First Men.
He thought about that now, picking at the last of his bread while Mikal talked to a travelling merchant two tables over about road conditions north of Ivy Hall.
Old blood.
The people who had been in Westeros before the Andals came with their seven gods and their written laws and their habit of cutting down the weirwood trees.
The First Men had their own things, the old gods, the heart trees, the deep connection to the land and its creatures that the Andals had never possessed and never fully understood.
He knew enough from his fragmented memories to know that First Men heritage sometimes carried specific gifts in this world.
Warging, the ability to enter the mind of an animal, to see through its eyes and share its senses.
Greensight, the ability to see through the weirwood network, to witness the past and catch glimpses of things yet to come.
He was the son of a First Men woman and an Andal man, carrying both bloodlines, born in a world where such things were apparently possible.
He almost smiled at himself.
‘Yes,’ he thought, ‘obviously.
The protagonist with the mixed ancient heritage, clearly on the cusp of manifesting some dramatic mystical ability that will prove central to his destiny.’ He looked at his hands.
Small.
Seven years old.
Unremarkable in every visible way.
‘More likely,’ he thought, ‘I simply don’t catch colds.
Let’s not build a legend around it.’ He wasn’t wrong to dismiss it, he thought.
He genuinely didn’t know and it wasn’t useful to speculate.
What was useful was what he could see clearly: a body that didn’t get sick, that recovered from scrapes and bruises slightly faster than other boys his age, that had more energy at the end of a long day on the road than it had any right to.
That was real.
That was something to work with.
Everything else could wait until it announced itself, if it ever did.
Perrin recovered four days later.
Mira wept in the common room without seeming to notice or care who saw her, the pure unguarded relief of someone who had been braced for the worst and been spared it.
The other guests gave her the particular courtesy of pretending not to notice, which Alex thought was one of the kinder things people did for each other in small places.
He noted it.
Filed it away.
Moved on.
There was a lesson in it somewhere, he thought, not about illness specifically but about what it meant to the people around you.
What it cost them to watch and wait and be helpless.
What relief looked like when it finally came.
The smallfolk of Westeros lived inside that vulnerability constantly, at the mercy of things that a little knowledge and a little infrastructure could dramatically reduce.
He did not have the infrastructure yet.
He was working on it.