He was thirteen when his hair stopped cooperating.
The dye had been a constant maintenance, a quiet conspiracy between Ned and Maester Luwin — carefully worked into the roots at each washing, managed with the patience of people who understood what the alternative meant. But a body growing fast does not wait for careful management, and by the time he was thirteen the silver was coming in faster than it could be addressed, showing first at the temples where it caught firelight like something struck from a forge, then in broad pale streaks that ran through the dyed-dark lengths until the effect was less concealment and more something stranger. Like a sky with two weathers in it simultaneously.
He stopped asking for the dye. He did not explain why. He simply appeared one morning with his real hair loose around his shoulders — silver-white, Valyrian, old — and Ser Rodrik looked at him for a long moment without speaking, and Ned said nothing at supper, and Catelyn Stark's gaze moved past him as though he had ceased to require the effort of observation.
The rest of Winterfell stared.
He let them. He had run the calculation and found it straightforward: the concealment had served its purpose through childhood, when he had been physically vulnerable and politically invisible. He was neither of those things now. He was thirteen years old and had spent nine years building something that could no longer be hidden behind dark hair, and the attempt to keep doing so had begun to carry more risk than the revelation. People noticed inconsistency. People did not, as a rule, notice someone who had always been exactly what they appeared to be.
So. Silver hair. Violet eyes. The Valyrian structure of his face — the high cheekbones and the particular arrangement of features that made him look, as Winterfell's visiting lords increasingly noted with expressions they couldn't quite organize, like something from a painting of the old dragonlords. He had his father's face. He had the face of a dynasty.
He said nothing about any of this and returned to training.
He had surpassed Ned Stark in the year he turned twelve.
He had known it was coming — had seen the gap approaching through both direct assessment and the occasional flash of prescience confirming it — and had been careful about how it arrived. Not a dramatic reversal, not a single definitive bout that forced everyone to acknowledge a threshold crossed. Something quieter: a gradual shift in the dynamic of their sparring sessions, a series of exchanges where Ned began initiating less and redirecting more, the specific adaptation of a great fighter who has recognized that aggression is no longer the advantaged posture. By the time Ned consciously acknowledged what had happened, it had been the truth for six months already, and the acknowledgment therefore did not have the weight of a defeat but of an observation.
Ned Stark, Lord of Winterfell and one of the finest fighters of his generation, had looked at his ward-bastard across the practice yard and said, quietly: "You're better than me now."
"You have more reach," Aegon had said, which was true.
"That's not what I said."
He had not argued the point.
What he had not told anyone was how he was doing it. The prescience had deepened considerably in the years since he first accessed it — not just sharper and more reliable, but layered in ways he was still mapping. He could now access specific practitioners with something approaching selectivity: sitting at the Heart Tree and asking for Dayne, or for the Smiling Knight, or for the older obscure masters he had discovered through following threads of reference in the records he'd assembled, and receiving them. Not always. Not always clearly. But reliably enough to constitute a curriculum.
The style that had emerged from this was not any single tradition. It was a synthesis — what he had privately named, in the part of himself that still thought in engineering terms, a load-bearing composite: each individual tradition providing the structural integrity it was best suited to provide, assembled into something that had no single failure mode because it had no single origin. Against fighters trained in a single school, it was effectively unreadable. They encountered his defense and expected the counterattacks of the style they recognized in it; instead something else arrived from a different angle, from a different philosophy, from across centuries of dead men whose techniques had never before been assembled in one body.
It was, in practical terms, devastating.
The knighting happened on a cold morning in his thirteenth year, with no announcement and no ceremony to speak of, which was precisely why it meant as much as it did.
He had come to the yard before dawn, as was his practice, and Ser Rodrik was already there — standing in the center of the yard, his breath misting in the grey air, a sword in his hand that was not a practice sword. It was his own blade. Good steel, old, with a hilt wrapped in worn leather.
"Kneel," Ser Rodrik said.
He looked at the man for a moment. At the sword. At the specific quality of Rodrik's expression — the steady formality of someone who has made a decision he's thought about for a long time.
He knelt. The frost-hardened ground was cold through the fabric of his trousers.
Rodrik set the flat of the blade on his right shoulder. "Jon Snow." His voice was even, carrying nothing of ceremony's usual weight, stripped down to just the words. "In the name of the Warrior I charge you to be brave. In the name of the Father I charge you to be just. In the name of the Mother I charge you to defend the young and innocent." The sword moved. "I charge you by the Old Gods and the New to be brave and good and to defend those who cannot defend themselves. Arise, Ser Jon Snow."
He stood.
Rodrik held his gaze for a moment. "You've earned it three times over. I know what it costs in the North." He paused. "I thought you should have it anyway."
He had no words for that. He had not been prepared for the absence of words, which was itself unusual. He extended his hand and Ser Rodrik clasped it.
The knighting of a bastard at thirteen in a Northern castle that hadn't seen a knighting ceremony in living memory was, predictably, a topic of considerable discussion. Catelyn Stark's reaction was expressed through a silence so pointed it acquired physical dimensions. Several of the household knights had opinions that they expressed to each other and not, wisely, to Ser Rodrik or to Ned. Robb was unconcealed in his pride, which was uncomplicated and genuine, and which Aegon received with the warmth he always reserved for Robb and kept as a private thing.
Ned said nothing directly. He watched his ward-bastard across the supper table that night with the expression he had been developing for years — the weight of something large kept carefully in balance — and he said nothing, and that said enough.
Three days later, Aegon went to Ned's solar.
"I want to visit the Wall," he said. "To see Benjen."
Ned looked at him.
"I'm old enough for the road. I know the route. I'd take Jory Cassel and two others." He sat without being invited, which was a deliberate choice — not rudeness, but the specific posture of someone who has moved past the need to perform deference and is conducting a conversation between equals. "I haven't seen my uncle in three years. And there are things at the Wall I'd like to see firsthand."
"What things."
"The cold," he said. "The north of it. Things you can't see from here."
Ned was quiet for a long time. He looked at the young man across from him — silver hair, violet eyes, newly made knight, and something else that had been growing behind all of it that Ned had not yet found language for and was perhaps not trying to. "You'll come back."
It was not quite a question.
"I'll always come back," Aegon said. "For as long as it's Winterfell."
There was something in the qualifier that Ned heard and did not address. He agreed to the journey.