One month in Winterfell.
He'd been keeping count not with marks on a wall like a prisoner, but in the way his body kept count, the daily inventory of what had changed since the morning he'd woken up in a dead boy's life and decided to do something useful with it.
The results were, by any honest assessment, alarming.
Not visibly. Not yet not in the way that would make people stop in corridors and stare. But he felt it in the practice yard every morning, the slow and inexorable accumulation of something that had no natural business being there. A month of training with a ten-times multiplier was, by his calculations, the rough equivalent of ten months of serious, dedicated work. His shoulders had filled out in ways that his tunics were beginning to notice. His sword work had developed a crispness that Ser Rodrik commented on with increasing frequency and decreasing ability to explain. His stamina, which had started merely good, was becoming something that made Theon Greyjoy quietly furious.
Theon had stopped suggesting casual bouts a week ago, which he took as a meaningful data point.
Jon still trained with him every morning. Jon was good genuinely, naturally gifted in ways that the Wall and the wars ahead would eventually sharpen into something remarkable and for now their sessions were still genuinely competitive, Jon's technique and instinct compensating for the gap that was slowly, steadily opening between them. He was careful about that gap. Careful not to let it grow too fast, too obviously. The last thing he needed was Ser Rodrik writing to someone.
The body was one problem. The world was another.
He spent his nights with the Book.
It was past the second hour of night when he finally set it down, pressing the heels of his hands against his eyes and letting the accumulated weight of the evening's reading settle.
The Book was extraordinary. That was the only word that came close. His new mind Reed Richards and Batman and Lex Luthor all braided into the skull of a fifteen-year-old northern lord processed its contents with a speed and depth that still occasionally surprised him, making connections and extrapolations that the text itself didn't spell out, finding the threads between disciplines that a narrower mind might have missed entirely.
He'd spent the first two weeks reading everything. Just reading cover to cover, index to index, building the full map before he started navigating it. Agricultural science. Metallurgy. Civil engineering. Medicine and sanitation. Chemistry. Military theory from Sun Tzu to Clausewitz, from the Roman legions to the Eastern Front. All of it sitting in his head now like a second library, cross-referenced and indexed and waiting.
The question was never what to use. The question was always when, and how, and how fast.
Too fast was dangerous. A fifteen-year-old boy in a medieval castle who suddenly started proposing gunpowder and germ theory would not be received as a prodigy. He would be received as a problem. Possibly a supernatural one, in a world where the line between genius and witchcraft was drawn by people who believed in dragons and the power of blood.
Slow, then. Careful. Each idea introduced at the right moment, in the right framing, through the right person.
He pulled a piece of parchment toward him and began to write.
Crop rotation, he wrote at the top, and then paused, organising the argument in his head before committing it to ink.
The North's agricultural situation was, by any modern standard, a disaster waiting to happen which was ironic given that a disaster was, in fact, scheduled. The long winter was coming. Not the metaphorical political winter of Lannister scheming and Baratheon incompetence, but the actual, literal, multi-year supernatural winter that would freeze crops and starve smallfolk and reduce the already thin margin between survival and catastrophe to something that could be measured in weeks.
He knew the numbers. Or rather, the Book knew the numbers, and he knew the Book. A proper three-field rotation system winter grain, spring grain, fallow could increase yields by a third or more compared to the two-field system the North currently used. Combined with improved seed selection and basic soil management, the gains were potentially enormous.
A third more food going into storage before the Long Night arrived.
He wrote for an hour, building the argument from the ground up not as a scholar making an academic case but as a lord's son who had been paying attention to the land and come to a practical conclusion. The kind of document Ned Stark would read seriously. The kind of document that wouldn't raise questions about where the ideas had come from.
When he finished he read it back twice, adjusted three phrases that sounded too technical, and set it aside.
Tomorrow. He'd bring it to Ned tomorrow.
He found his father in the solar after the morning's training.
Ned Stark's solar was a room that suited him practical and without pretension, its shelves heavy with ledgers and correspondence rather than decoration, its single window looking north toward the Wall as if Ned had arranged his workspace specifically to be reminded of his responsibilities. He was reviewing supply reports when the knock came and looked up with the particular expression of a man who was not unhappy to be interrupted.
"Robb." He set the report down. "Sit."
He sat, and placed the parchment on the desk between them.
Ned looked at it. Then at him. "What's this?"
"A proposal," he said. "About the harvest. About how we manage the fields over the next few years."
A beat of silence. Ned picked up the parchment with the careful attention he gave everything, and began to read.
He watched his father's face while he read. It was a useful exercise Ned Stark's face was not expressive in the conventional sense, but it was legible if you knew what to look for. The slight tension around the eyes that indicated engagement. The small pause at the third paragraph, where the yield projections were laid out, that indicated something had registered. The almost imperceptible shift in posture as he moved from sceptical to considering.
He'd written it well. He knew he'd written it well. The genius-level intellect wasn't just for sword tactics and chemistry it expressed itself in the precise calibration of an argument for a specific reader, and he knew Ned Stark well enough by now to know what would land and what wouldn't.
Ned set the parchment down.
"Three-field rotation," he said.
"It's not a new idea," he said carefully. "Some of the southern lordships have been using variations of it. I was reading about agricultural management old texts, mostly and started thinking about our yields. About how much we actually have in storage versus how much we'd need if winter ran long."
Ned was quiet for a moment. Outside the window, Winterfell's yard was loud with the ordinary sounds of a working castle.
"If winter ran long," Ned repeated, with a slight weight on the words that suggested this was not a hypothetical he found comfortable.
"It could," he said. "It has before. The histories say so." He paused. "I'd rather we were ready and didn't need it than the opposite."
Another silence. Longer this time.
"You've been thinking about this seriously," Ned said. It wasn't quite a question.
"I've been thinking about a lot of things seriously," he said, which was as honest as he could be without saying anything true.
Ned looked at him that quiet, grey, penetrating look that saw more than most people expected it to. He met it steadily, which took more effort than it should have.
Whatever Ned saw, he seemed to decide something about it.
"The yield projections here," Ned said, tapping the third paragraph. "You're confident in these numbers?"
"The methodology is sound. The actual yields would depend on the land and the season, but the relative improvement a third more grain over a full rotation cycle that's consistent across every source I found."
"A third more," Ned said quietly.
"Going into storage," he said. "Before winter hits."
The solar was quiet. The fire crackled. Somewhere outside Arya shouted something that was probably not ladylike.
Ned picked up the parchment again, read the final page, and set it down with the particular deliberateness of a man who has made a decision.
"I'll have Maester Luwin look at this," he said. "If he agrees the methodology is sound, we'll start the transition on the eastern fields next planting season." He paused. "It'll take work to convince some of the tenant farmers. They don't like change."
"I know," he said. "But they'll like an empty granary less."
Something moved in Ned's expression brief and complicated, gone before he could fully read it.
"No," Ned said. "They will not." He leaned back in his chair and studied his eldest son with an attention that was slightly different from the usual recalibrated, the way Jon's had been on the archery butts a month ago. "You've changed recently."
He kept his face neutral. "Have I?"
"You're more serious. More focused." Ned's tone was careful, feeling for something. "Is there something on your mind? Something you want to talk about?"
Where do I start, he thought. Your death. The Red Wedding. The army of the dead. The fact that your honour is going to get you killed and your entire family destroyed and the only reason I'm sitting here is because a cosmic being with a sense of humour decided I should have a chance to fix it.
"I've just been thinking about the future," he said. "About what kind of lord I want to be. What kind of man." He paused, and let something genuine come through because it was genuine, underneath all the calculation. "I don't want to be caught unprepared for things. I don't want people who depend on me to suffer because I wasn't paying attention."
The silence that followed was long enough that the fire popped twice in it.
Then Ned Stark did something unexpected. He got up from behind his desk, crossed the small distance between them, and put a hand on his shoulder heavy and warm and completely unself-conscious.
"That," Ned said quietly, "is exactly the right thing to be thinking about."
He looked up at his father's face alive, present, entirely unaware and felt the full weight of everything he was carrying press down on him all at once.
"I know," he said, and his voice came out steadier than he deserved.
He was back at his desk by the second hour of night.
The crop rotation proposal was in Maester Luwin's hands now. Small. Careful. One thread pulled from an enormous tapestry, with enough patience not to unravel anything important.
He opened the Book to the metallurgy section and began to read.
Outside, Winterfell was quiet. The North was cold and dark and entirely unaware of what was coming for it.
He read until his candle burned low, making notes in a hand that no one else would ever see, building plans that would take years to execute, thinking about a world that was going to try very hard to destroy itself and a man who was going to try very hard not to let it.
One month down.
Twenty-three to go.