The ceiling was stone.
That was the first thing he registered grey stone, old and solid, with the faint smell of cold air and wood smoke that seemed baked into the walls themselves. Not a bedroom ceiling he recognised. Not any ceiling from a life that was already dissolving at the edges like a dream you try to hold and can't.
He lay still for a moment, cataloguing.
The bed was real. Heavy wool blankets, a mattress that was firm in the way of things made to last rather than things made to comfort. The room around him was large by the standards of a world without central heating a writing desk, a wardrobe of dark wood, a window through which grey northern light leaked in without enthusiasm. A sword belt hung on a hook by the door.
He sat up slowly.
His hands were different. Broader than he remembered than he half-remembered, the ghost-memory of his old hands already fading. These were a boy's hands but a northern boy's hands, calloused from swords and riding and the kind of outdoor life that built a person whether they wanted it or not. He turned them over once, then set them flat on his knees.
Robb Stark, he thought carefully, like pressing a bruise to understand it. I am Robb Stark. Fifteen years old. Winterfell. Two years.
He found the Book on the desk.
It was simply there no fanfare, no golden light, no indication that it was anything other than a plain, leather-bound volume sitting beside an inkwell and a half-finished letter in handwriting that was apparently his. He crossed the room, opened it, and the first page nearly took his breath away. Dense, precise text in a hand that was somehow perfectly readable, organised with an index that went on for eleven pages. Metallurgy. Agricultural rotation. Germ theory. Structural engineering. Gunpowder. Anaesthetics. Hundreds of entries, each one a thread he could pull on.
He closed it carefully.
Not now. Later, when the household was asleep and he had silence and hours. Right now he could hear Winterfell waking up around him footsteps in the corridor, distant voices, the particular domestic sounds of a large castle stirring itself toward morning.
He got dressed, because apparently that was what Robb Stark did, and went to meet his family.
The great hall of Winterfell smelled of porridge and woodsmoke and dogs.
He stood in the doorway for just a moment before anyone noticed him long enough to take the scene in whole, the way he'd learned to take in rooms, cataloguing exits and faces and the invisible architecture of relationships that structured every space people shared.
The table was long and loud and alive.
Arya was already in an argument with Sansa about something involving a hair ribbon, gesticulating with a spoon in a way that suggested the ribbon was merely the latest battleground in a much longer war. Sansa had the expression of someone who considered herself above the conflict but was absolutely going to win it. Bran was watching a spider make its way along the edge of the table with the focused scientific interest of a boy who found the world genuinely inexhaustible. Rickon, small and wild-haired, was eating with the committed single-mindedness of a child who had not yet learned that meals were also social occasions.
Jon sat slightly apart from the others not excluded exactly, just occupying the particular space that had been quietly assigned to him, eating without looking up. There was something careful about the way he held himself at this table, a learned smallness that made something in the protagonist's chest do something uncomfortable.
He knows, came the thought. Even at fifteen he already knows exactly where he stands in this house.
Catelyn Stark sat at the far end of the table, pouring something from a clay jug with the efficient grace of a woman who managed a castle the way other people managed a breath automatically, constantly, without needing to think about it. She looked up when he entered, and her expression did the small, complex thing that mothers' expressions do when they look at their eldest children affection and assessment and a faint, unnameable worry all braided together.
And at the head of the table, Eddard Stark.
He'd known, intellectually, that this moment was coming. He'd had the whole cosmic journey, the conversation with the ROB, the night of fitful sleep in Robb's body to prepare himself. He'd thought he was ready.
He wasn't ready.
Ned Stark was not the man from the television screen. He was simply a man a big, quiet, tired man with grey threading into his dark hair earlier than it should, eating his breakfast with the unhurried deliberateness of someone who had learned that mornings were worth taking seriously. There was a sword callous on his right hand. There was a small scar along his jaw that the screen had never quite captured. He looked like someone who had buried friends and kept going, which was exactly what he was.
He was going to die on his knees in front of a crowd while his daughters watched.
"Robb." Ned looked up and nodded that particular Stark nod that conveyed warmth without theatrics. "You slept late."
"I did," he said, finding his voice. It came out steady, which he was quietly grateful for. He crossed to his seat his seat, the one that was clearly his, beside Jon and across from Bran and sat down. "I was tired."
"You were out past dark yesterday," Catelyn said, which was not quite a reprimand but occupied the same territory. "Ser Rodrik mentioned you were on the practice grounds until the torches were lit."
"I wanted to work on my footwork," he said.
This was apparently consistent with Robb Stark's existing behaviour, because Catelyn accepted it with only a mild pursing of lips and passed him the bread.
"Your footwork was fine," Jon said quietly, from beside him. There was a small, almost invisible smile at the corner of his mouth. "Your problem is you telegraph the shoulder before a lunge. Every time."
He looked at Jon Snow.
Jon Snow, who would go to the Wall and die and come back and ride a dragon and never sit the throne he deserved and end up in exile north of a Wall that no longer needed to exist. Jon Snow, who was sitting four inches away from him eating porridge and gently needling him about his footwork.
"You're right," he said, after a beat. "I'll work on it."
Jon blinked. Apparently the real Robb had been more defensive about criticism.
"That's it?" Jon said. "No argument?"
"You're right," he repeated simply. "Arguing with correct observations is a waste of time."
A small silence settled over that corner of the table. Jon stared at him for a moment with an expression that was trying to decide if he was being made fun of.
Arya saved the moment by flicking a piece of bread at Sansa, which immediately escalated the ribbon conflict to new heights and redirected all available attention southward.
He turned back to his bowl and ate, and watched, and said nothing more than was necessary.
He watched Ned most of all.
He tried to be subtle about it Robb Stark's father was not a man who missed much, and there was something in Ned's grey eyes that suggested he noticed more than he commented on. But there was so much to observe. The way Ned listened to each of his children when they spoke, with full, unhurried attention, as if whatever they were saying was the most important thing currently happening in the world. The way he corrected without diminishing. The way he looked at Catelyn sometimes, across the table, with an expression that was private and warm and entirely unconscious.
He's a good man, he thought. And then, immediately after: That's part of the problem.
Ned Stark was going to go south because honour demanded it. He was going to find the truth about Joffrey's parentage because it was the right thing to do and tell exactly the wrong person because he believed in fairness. He was going to refuse to play the game the way the game actually worked, and a boy-king's mother was going to have his head removed in front of a crowd.
A good man. Dead because of it.
He ate his porridge and thought about that.
"You're quiet this morning," Catelyn said. Not accusatory observational. She was watching him with that particular maternal precision that he was going to have to get used to. She noticed things. He filed that away.
"Thinking," he said.
"About?"
He considered his answer for a moment. There were approximately four hundred things he was thinking about, ranging from how to prevent the Red Wedding to the metallurgical properties of high-carbon steel to the specific expression on Ned Stark's face when he'd nodded at him across the table and whether he'd ever be able to look at it without knowing what was coming.
"Training," he said. "I want to change my schedule."
Ned looked up at this. "Oh?"
"I want to train more. Longer sessions, more variety. Not just swords wrestling, riding, archery. All of it." He kept his voice casual, the tone of a boy with competitive instincts rather than a man with a plan. "I want to be better."
Ned studied him for a moment with those quiet grey eyes.
"Ambition is good," he said finally. "Pride is dangerous. Know the difference."
"Yes, Father," he said, and the word came out more naturally than he'd expected, which unsettled him slightly.
Ned nodded and returned to his breakfast, satisfied.
Across the table, Jon was watching him with a small, curious frown the expression of someone who has known a person their entire life and has just noticed, for the first time, that something is subtly different. Not wrong. Just different.
He met Jon's eyes and offered a small, easy smile.
Jon looked away, but the frown didn't entirely leave.
Careful, he told himself. You're not him. But you have to be him well enough that no one looks too closely.
Bran chose that moment to announce that the spider had made it all the way to the bread basket, which caused enough chaos to cover any further scrutiny.
He ate, and watched, and filed everything away.
Two years.
He had two years before Ned got a letter from King's Landing and the whole world started sliding toward the edge. Two years to train, to plan, to read every page of the Book, to figure out which threads he could pull on without unraveling everything, and which disasters were so deeply woven into the fabric of this world that only something radical would stop them.
He thought about the Red Wedding. About the Sept of Baelor. About a silver-haired girl on the other side of the world who didn't know yet what she was capable of good or terrible.
He thought about three wishes and the weight of knowing too much.
Then Rickon upended his porridge bowl onto the dog, and Winterfell descended into the cheerful, domestic chaos of a family that was, for now, whole and alive and entirely unaware of what was coming.
He watched them and let himself, just for a moment, feel the full weight of it.
I won't let it happen, he thought. Not like last time. Not this time.
The fire crackled. Ned laughed at something Arya said. Jon caught his eye across the table and this time, tentatively, smiled back.
He picked up his spoon and finished his breakfast.