Maester Alester arrived on a Tuesday.
I didn't know it was Tuesday at the time because I didn't know the Westerosi names for days yet. That was, in fact, the first thing he taught me, the calendar, the days, the moons, the years counted from Aegon's Conquest like now was 83 AC the way my old world counted from something else I couldn't quite remember anymore. He was a compact man, grey-robed, with the kind of face that had settled into patience the way stone settles into a riverbed gradually, under pressure, until it was just the shape of him. He had a chain around his neck with links of different metals. I didn't know what they meant yet. I stared at them while he talked.
He sat across a small table they'd brought into my room and he looked at me the way people look at tasks they've been assigned without being consulted about.
"We'll begin with letters," he said. "The Common Tongue written form."
"All right," I said.
It took two weeks to get properly proficient with reading.
Two weeks sounds fast. Maester Alester clearly thought it was fast, I caught him watching me sometimes in the way people watch something they're not sure they've understood correctly, the slight furrow between the brows, the pause before the next lesson. He never said anything. He just moved to the next thing.
The mind talent was doing what it was apparently built for. Letters became words became sentences in a progression that felt less like learning and more like remembering something I'd always known but in a different alphabet. The retention was almost uncomfortable, I read a passage once and had it. Read it twice and I'd have it in twenty years. I'd noticed before, from the maids' conversations, that my memory worked differently from what seemed normal. Now I had a formal confirmation and a lot more material to put into it.
Once I could read well enough that running through letters wasn't the obstacle, Maester Alester moved on to what I suspected he'd actually been sent to teach me. History. Geography. The shape of the world.
We started with Aegon.
Here is what I learned about Aegon the Conqueror, delivered mostly without editorial comment because the facts are dramatic enough on their own:
Roughly eighty three years before I was born, a man named Aegon Targaryen sailed from a rock in the sea called Dragonstone with his two sister-wives, both sisters, both wives, simultaneously and three dragons, and proceeded to conquer most of a continent. The continent is called Westeros. It had been divided into seven independent kingdoms at the time. Aegon ended up with six of them. The seventh, the southernmost, ruled by a house called Martell from a region called Dorne, did not fall, held out through a combination of guerrilla tactics, difficult terrain, and, eventually, Aegon running out of appetite for a war that was costing more than it was gaining.
So, they call it the Seven Kingdoms. It's six kingdoms and one kingdom that will very politely not discuss the conquest. The numbers have never been reconciled and everyone has apparently decided to just keep going.
The six that fell are ruled by great houses under Targaryen supremacy. Maester Alester laid them out for me with the careful thoroughness of a man who has delivered this particular lesson many times:
House Stark of Winterfell holds the North. The largest region by land area, mostly cold, mostly empty, with a family that has ruled there since before anyone bothered writing things down. Their title is Warden of the North, which sounds ceremonial until you understand that the North's southern border is defended by a wall of ice three hundred miles long and seven hundred feet tall, and whatever the Starks are wardens against is apparently real enough that the wall is still manned.
I want to pause on that. A seven-hundred-foot wall of solid ice. I've done structural load calculations in another life. That is not a wall you build to make a political point. That is a wall you build because you are genuinely, profoundly afraid of something beyond there and if there are dragons and you didn't build wall for them then what's beyond there? A question for another day
House Lannister of Casterly Rock holds the Westerlands, rich, sitting on gold mines so productive. House Tyrell of Highgarden holds the Reach, the most fertile region, the one that feeds the most people, the one that would win any long war of attrition if it chose to pursue one. House Baratheon of Storm's End holds the Stormlands, southeastern, rocky, violent weather, the house founded by one of Aegon's bastard half-brothers which is a detail I noted with some personal interest.
House Tully of Riverrun holds the Riverlands, the central region through which every army in Westerosi history has apparently marched on its way to fighting someone else. They are strategically important and seem to spend most of their history being invaded because of it. House Greyjoy of Pyke holds the Iron Islands, a collection of grey rocks in the western sea populated by people who have made a cultural identity out of taking things from other people and who are technically Targaryen subjects in the same way a feral cat is technically your pet.
And the Crownlands. Ruled directly by House Targaryen from a city called King's Landing, from a throne made of the melted swords of their defeated enemies, which is either impressive or weird, why not make a comfortable throne?
All of this took several moons to get through properly. Maester Alester didn't just give me names he gave me histories, feudal structures, the relationships between houses, the wars that had been fought and why, the marriages that had bound them and the grievances that outlasted the marriages. I absorbed it the way dry ground absorbs water after a long drought, and leaving almost nothing on the surface.
The problem arrived about halfway through the history lessons, when I had enough context to start doing actual analysis.
The problem was this: my main quest was, functionally, impossible.
I had taken the quest at face value initially, filed it as a long-term project, something to work toward across years and decades. Fine. Ambitious but achievable. People had started noble houses before. It happened.
Except.
The first thing I hadn't accounted for was the land problem. Westeros had been under Targaryen rule for eighty-three years. Eighty-three years of marriages and grants and inheritances and the occasional confiscation. Every region had great houses and every great house had bannermen and every bannerman had their own sworn knights and every scrap of defensible land with a water source had someone's ancestral claim on it. There was no open frontier. There was no unclaimed territory sitting around waiting for a motivated bastard to show up with ambition.
Land that got given to new houses got taken from old ones first, which meant the king had to want to give it badly enough to make an enemy of whoever had it before, or it had to be land nobody wanted, which meant it was land nobody wanted for reasons that tended to be fairly compelling.
That was the first problem.
The second problem was the dragons.
I had known there were dragons in an abstract sense, Maester Alester had mentioned them early in the history lessons, and I had been hearing something large and loud from beyond my windows for years, but it was only when we got to the actual Conquest that I understood what dragons meant in practical military terms.
Aegon and his sister wives had three. Three dragons, in the opening stages, against seven kingdoms, and he won. Balerion alone, the largest, called the Black Dread, already big when the Conquest happened, had a flame wide enough to swallow a castle gate. The battles weren't battles in any meaningful tactical sense. They were demonstrations. Harrenhal, the largest fortress ever built in Westeros, constructed by a king who specifically wanted something dragons couldn't destroy, was melted. The stone walls ran like wax. The family inside died in their own great hall.
House Targaryen ruled through dragons the way you rule through anything that no one can effectively counter. Not because people loved them, people did not, uniformly, love them, but because the cost of disagreement was being set on fire from above by something that couldn't be reasoned with and didn't have a weak side you could flank.
I sat with this for a while.
So, I thought. Flying incendiary weapons. Ones that bond to their riders and can't be redirected by anyone else. Weapons that end sieges before they begin, that make walls irrelevant, that mean any open field battle is decided before the infantry closes.
In my old world we had called things like this strategic deterrents. The logic was the same. You don't fight the deterrent. You work around it, under it, or you wait until it's gone.
The Targaryens had a lot of deterrents. And they have more today than during the conquest and very much present.
And on top of all of that, I learned that only trueborn Targaryens can ever bonded with dragons. Bastards, apparently, were not part of the arrangement. I had Targaryen blood, it was written on my face, it was in my fire resistance, it was in the hair that made every maid who attended me slightly uncomfortable, but blood wasn't enough. The legitimate line was the line that mattered.
So, my situation is this, no land, no dragon, no legitimate claim to anything, and a quest asking me to found a house in a world where the only vacant positions were ones nobody wanted and the dominant power controlled the only weapons that actually mattered.
I should say something about the Targaryens as a family, since I was apparently part of one.
What I learned, across months of history lessons, was this:
They had come from a place called Valyria, an empire east across the sea that had been, by all accounts, genuinely impressive, which made what happened to it worse. Valyria fell in an event called the Doom, roughly a century before Aegon's Conquest, in circumstances that Maester Alester described with the particular careful neutrality of someone who doesn't want to speculate. Something catastrophic. The city destroyed, most of the dragonlords killed, the empire erased in a fairly short span of time. The Targaryens survived because they'd had a prophetic dream warning them to leave, which is either evidence of genuine foresight or the most convenient story in the history of convenient stories.
They'd been in Westeros since before the Conquest, sitting on their rock, watching the continent from a distance and breeding dragons. Then Aegon had the dreams, or the ambition, or both, and the rest was the history I was now learning.
The incest was old. Older than the Conquest. They had married brother to sister, cousin to cousin, for generations, this was apparently Valyrian custom, tied to keeping the bloodlines pure enough to bond with dragons and also, I suspected, tied to the more ordinary human reason of not wanting to share power with anyone who didn't share your name. The faith of the Seven, the dominant religion in Westeros, found this deeply objectionable. There had been conflicts about it. The Targaryens had, generally, won those conflicts, for the same reason they won most things.
Maegor the Cruel had ruled for six years and earned his epithet thoroughly. Maester Alester described his reign with the kind of clinical brevity that usually means the actual events were too unpleasant to list in full. He had burned people. He had burned a lot of people. He had also died on the Iron Throne under circumstances the histories described as mysterious, which I interpreted as no one was looking and someone finally did something about it.
King Jaehaerys, the current king, my grandfather in the technical sense of the word, he was different. Maester Alester spoke about him with something approaching genuine respect. Long reign. Reformist. Built roads, codified laws, tried to make the realm function as something other than a collection of armed strangers grudgingly sharing a king. His queen was Alysanne, who I knew, and she had apparently been advocating for women's inheritance rights and against certain particularly brutal regional customs since before I was born.
They were the best Targaryens I'd learned about. By some margin.
Which told me something about the average.
If I had to summarise what I understood about House Targaryen by the end of those months of lessons, it would be this "they were a family of extraordinary people who kept producing ordinary people, handed extraordinary power that ordinary people should not have, and then everyone who wasn't them paid for the gap between what the power required and what the person holding it could deliver. They had burned more people than most families could count. They had also built roads. Both things were true and neither one cancelled out the other."
Did I resent being born into this blood? Complicated question. I hadn't chosen it. The blood came with talents I would need. It also came with associations I would spend my entire life navigating carefully.
But who could say anything about them, really.
They had dragons.