He waited until the third evening after his nameday.
Not the night itself, that had felt wrong, too neat, too much like a formal declaration.
He wanted it to seem like a decision that had naturally arrived rather than one he had been building toward carefully for months.
Mikal was perceptive in the specific way of men who spent years reading opponents across tourney yards.
You didn’t approach him without thinking first.
His father had pushed his supper plate back and settled into the comfortable sprawl of a man who had eaten well and was in no particular hurry.
The common room had thinned.
The fire was going.
Mikal had his cup and his ease and the expression of a man who might drift toward sleep if nobody made demands of him.
“Father.” “Mm.” “I want to learn the sword.” One eye opened.
The particular stillness of a man moving from half-rest to complete attention without shifting a muscle.
He looked at Alex the way he did sometimes, as though he was working out when precisely his son had become something slightly difficult to read.
“You want to learn the sword,” he said.
“Yes.” “You’re seven.” “I know how old I am.” A pause.
Mikal set his cup down with the quiet deliberateness of a man giving something his full attention and looked at Alex properly.
Alex kept his hands flat on the table and his expression even and waited.
He had learned that waiting was one of the most effective things he could do.
People filled silence.
They showed you what they were actually thinking if you gave them enough space to do it.
“Most boys your age,” Mikal said slowly, “ask me that question because they’ve watched the knights at tourney and decided it looks exciting.
They last a week before they conclude it’s considerably harder than it looks and go back to chasing cats.” He tilted his head slightly.
“You’re not asking because it looks exciting.” It wasn’t a question.
“Yes,” Alex said.
“But I won’t quit halfway, I want to be a great Knight like you.” “That’s not enough.
Starting the Knight training is easy but keep training till you become Knight is hard.
So, I need to be sure that your conviction will hold till you become proper knight.” He had prepared for this.
Not just the words, the truth underneath them.
The version that was honest enough to be convincing and careful enough not to raise questions he wasn’t ready to answer.
Mikal was a strict man in the way that came from genuine standards rather than cruelty.
He expected honesty from his son and he was good at detecting the shape of its absence.
“Because we have no house and no lands,” Alex said.
“Because what we have is what you can win and what you can protect.
Because that won’t always be enough on its own.” He held his father’s eyes and let something real come through, something he didn’t need to manufacture.
“I don’t want to be a burden.
I want to be useful.
As soon as I’m able.
And I want to become a Knight like Ser Duncan the Tall.” Mikal looked at him for a long moment.
His face did something complicated.
Something that passed through surprise and settled somewhere that looked, quietly, like grief, the grief of a father realising his seven year old had been lying awake thinking about things no seven year old should have to carry, and not knowing whether to be proud or sad about it and landing, helplessly, on both at once.
His large rough hand came across the table and rested briefly over Alex’s smaller one.
Warm and heavy and certain.
“All right,” he said.
“We start tomorrow.” The practice sword was ashwood, smoothed by years of previous use, slightly too long for him.
He held it in the inn yard in the grey early morning, the ground cold underfoot, low mist sitting over the village rooftops, while Mikal stood across from him with his arms folded and his head slightly tilted, the expression of a man taking stock.
“Hold it like you’re shaking hands with it,” Mikal said.
“Firm but not strangling.
If your knuckles are white you’re already holding it wrong.
You should be able to hold it for an hour without your forearm locking up.” Alex adjusted his grip.
“Feet apart.
Weight even across both.
Don’t lean forward, you’re not trying to intimidate the sword, you’re trying to move from a stable position.
And stop trying to stand the way you’ve seen knights stand at tourney.
You’re not them.
You’re nothing yet.
Bad habits learned at the beginning are the hardest ones to pull out later.” Alex settled his stance.
Mikal walked a slow circle around him.
Looking the way he looked at horses he was considering, thorough, without hurry, missing nothing.
“Most boys,” he said, from somewhere behind Alex, “I spend the first week just getting them to stand still for longer than ten seconds.” He came back around to face him.
“You’re not moving.” “I’m trying not to.” “No.” Mikal looked at him with that expression again, the one Alex still didn’t have a clean name for.
“You’re just still.
There’s a difference.” He shook his head once, to himself, and moved on.
“Footwork first.
Everything is footwork.
A man with good feet and a weak sword arm will beat a man with bad feet and a strong one more often than you would think.
We begin there and we don’t move on until I’m satisfied.” The morning was cold and long.
By the end of the first hour Alex’s arms ached with the deep specific complaint of muscles asked for things they had never been asked for before.
He fell twice on the footwork drills, once from overcorrecting, once because his legs simply couldn’t move as fast as his mind wanted them to.
He nearly put himself on the ground a third time overextending on a practice swing and only avoided it by dropping into a crouch that was more instinct than skill.
Each time he got up.
Adjusted.
Applied the correction immediately and moved on without comment.
When Mikal finally said that was enough, Alex nodded, didn’t complain, and went to find water.
He stood at the well and drank and looked out at the road running north from Ivy Hall.
Toward the Riverlands eventually.
Toward the Trident.
Toward the places that would, in some number of years he couldn’t pin exactly, become the stage for events he had watched as entertainment from an entirely different world.
His shoulder ached.
His legs were stiff.
His hands had the faint tremor of muscles worked to their current limit.
He thought about what a decade of mornings like this one would build.
Not just the sword, the running he intended to start this week, the other work he half-remembered from another life, the deliberate and systematic approach to physical development that nobody in Westeros had ever thought to apply because nobody in Westeros had ever had reason to think about it the way he had.
Small advantages.
Quiet edges.
The kind that compounded over years into something no single dramatic moment could replicate or undo.
‘Enough,’ he thought, rolling his sore shoulder once.
‘It will have to be enough.’ He pushed off from the well and went inside, and for the first time since the memories had started the weight behind his eyes felt less like something he was carrying and more like something he was finally, purposefully, using.
The long game, he thought, begins now.