Maester Luwin arrived at his door before breakfast.
He was already awake he was always already awake, the pre-dawn hours having become his most productive, the castle quiet and the Book open and his mind running at the particular speed it reached when nothing else competed for its attention. He closed the Book as the knock came, and it vanished from sight the moment his hands left it, which still occasionally startled him.
"My lord," Luwin said, stepping inside with the careful, unhurried manner of a man who had served Winterfell long enough to have opinions about everything in it. He was carrying the crop rotation proposal, annotated now in a cramped maester's hand that covered most of the margins. "I've been reviewing your proposal."
"And?" he said.
Luwin set it on the desk between them and folded his hands with the expression of a man assembling his thoughts into the correct order.
"It is," Luwin said carefully, "a remarkably sophisticated document for a boy of fifteen."
He met the maester's eyes steadily. Luwin was sharp sharper than people who underestimated scholars tended to account for, with the particular intelligence of a man who had spent decades watching lords and their children and had developed an uncomfortable accuracy about both.
"I read widely," he said.
"So I am beginning to understand," Luwin said, with a dryness that suggested he found this answer adequate without finding it entirely satisfying. He tapped the third page. "The yield projections here are consistent with agricultural texts I'm aware of from the Reach and the Westerlands. But the specific combination of methods you're proposing the three-field rotation combined with this soil management approach I haven't seen this exact formulation before. Where did you encounter it?"
A beat. Just long enough to be natural.
"I pieced it together from several sources," he said. "The individual ideas aren't new. I just combined them."
Luwin looked at him for a moment longer than was entirely comfortable. Then he looked back at the proposal.
"The methodology is sound," he said finally. "More than sound if the yields hold to even the conservative projections, the improvement to Winterfell's winter stores over a full rotation cycle would be substantial." He paused. "I intend to tell Lord Stark as much."
"I'd appreciate that," he said. "There's more I want to discuss with him. About the villages."
Luwin looked up. "The villages?"
"When did anyone last ride out to actually look at them?" he said. "Not to collect taxes. Not for any official purpose. Just to look."
The silence that followed told him most of what he needed to know.
"I would like to go," he said. "With my father, if he's willing. I want to see what's actually there."
Luwin studied him with an expression that was becoming familiar the same recalibrating look that Ser Rodrik wore now when he watched him in the practice yard, the same quiet reassessment that Jon had been performing for a month. The expression of people updating a model that had stopped fitting.
"I will speak to Lord Stark," Luwin said.
Ned agreed, which didn't surprise him. What surprised him slightly was the look on his father's face when he'd proposed it a look that mixed approval with something more complicated, something that might have been recognition, as if Ned was seeing something in his eldest son that he'd hoped for but hadn't quite expected to find yet.
They rode out two days later, just the two of them and a pair of guards at a distance, in the thin grey light of a northern morning that couldn't quite decide if it wanted to be autumn or an early declaration of winter.
He'd ridden in his previous life occasionally, badly, at a countryside place that smelled of hay and patient animals. He rode now with the automatic competence of a boy who had grown up on horseback, his body knowing what his memory didn't, and let the motion settle him into the kind of quiet that long rides produced.
Ned rode beside him without filling the silence, which he appreciated. Ned Stark was one of the rare people who understood that silence between two people who trusted each other wasn't a problem to be solved.
The first village was twenty minutes from Winterfell's walls.
He smelled it before he saw it.
Not strongly it wasn't the overwhelming assault of something catastrophically wrong, just the low, persistent undertone of a place where waste and water and living happened in too close a proximity for too long without anyone addressing the arrangement. His new mind catalogued it automatically, cross-referencing against the Book's section on sanitation and waterborne illness with an efficiency that bypassed horror and went straight to assessment.
Open drainage running too close to the well, he noted, as they rode in. Livestock sharing space with the living quarters on the eastern side. Waste disposal happening upstream of the water source. Midden heap positioned for convenience rather than safety.
The village itself was not unusual by Westerosi standards, which was precisely the problem. Thirty or forty people, a cluster of timber and thatch buildings arranged without particular plan around a central well, the general air of a community that was surviving rather than thriving. Children with the slightly hollow look of people who lost more to illness than they should. An old woman coughing outside her door with the deep, rattling persistence of something that had been going on for weeks.
He dismounted.
Ned dismounted beside him, and the village headman a weathered, broad-shouldered man named Aldric who looked simultaneously honoured and alarmed by the presence of Lord Stark came forward with a bow that bent his whole body.
"My lord," Aldric said. "We weren't - that is, we didn't know you were"
"We're not here officially," Ned said, with a gentleness that he'd noticed Ned deployed specifically with smallfolk, a deliberate lowering of the register that put people at ease without condescension. "My son wanted to see the village. We won't take much of your time."
He was already walking.
He did it politely stopping to speak to people, asking questions that sounded like the curiosity of a young lord rather than a diagnostic inventory, but building the picture systematically. The well had been in its current location for three generations. The drainage ditch had been dug when Aldric's father was young. Nobody had been formally sick recently nobody who'd died of it, anyway. But there was always something going around. Always someone with a bad stomach or a fever that lingered. Always children who didn't make it past their second winter.
Always, he thought. As if that's just how things are.
He found Ned standing by the well, watching him with that quiet, attentive look.
"What do you see?" Ned asked.
It was, he realised, a test of sorts not a hostile one, but the kind of question a father asked when he wanted to know what kind of mind his son had developed.
He looked at the village. At the drainage running its slow way toward the well. At the livestock pen on the eastern side. At the midden heap and the water source and the thirty or forty people living in the arrangement that their grandparents had built without knowing what he knew.
"The well is being contaminated," he said. "The drainage runs too close to it. When it rains heavily, waste from the livestock pen and the midden heap gets into the water source." He paused. "That's why there's always something going around. It's not bad luck. It's the water."
Ned looked at the drainage ditch. At the well. Back at the drainage ditch.
"You can see that from looking?" he said.
"Once you know what to look for," he said carefully. "It's not complicated it's just that nobody told them. The water source needs to be upstream of everything else. The drainage needs to be redirected. The midden heap needs to move." He kept his voice practical, matter-of-fact, the tone of someone identifying a structural problem rather than proposing a revolution. "It would take a week of work. Maybe two."
"And the illness would stop," Ned said slowly.
"It would reduce significantly," he said. "Not disappear entirely there are other factors. But the worst of it, the stomach sickness, the fevers that come after wet weather yes. Most of that would stop."
The silence that settled over them was the particular quality of silence that follows a simple truth landing in a place where it hadn't been before.
Ned looked at Aldric, who had been listening with the expression of a man receiving information that rearranged something fundamental.
"Can this be done?" Ned asked him directly.
Aldric looked at the drainage ditch. At the well. At his lord's fifteen-year-old son.
"Aye," he said, slowly. "Aye, I reckon it can."
They visited two more villages before the light went.
The pattern repeated itself with the grim consistency of a problem that had never been examined rather than one that couldn't be solved. Different arrangements, different specific failures, but the same underlying logic water and waste too close together, livestock poorly positioned, basic sanitation treated as an afterthought because nobody had ever explained why it mattered.
He catalogued everything. Spoke to everyone who would speak to him. Asked questions and listened to answers and filed it all away behind eyes that were, by the end of the third village, carrying more weight than his face was showing.
On the ride back, Ned was quiet for a long time.
"How many villages are there?" he asked finally. "In the immediate area around Winterfell."
"Fourteen," Ned said. "Within a half-day's ride."
He did the mathematics. Two weeks of work per village, if they sent people from Winterfell to help. Materials were cheap it was labour and knowledge that were needed, mostly knowledge. A month, perhaps two, to address the worst of it across all fourteen.
"We should visit all of them," he said.
Ned looked at him sideways.
"All fourteen," he said.
"All fourteen," he confirmed. "And then the ones further out. And then" He stopped himself, because the full scope of what he was thinking would take more explaining than a tired ride home could contain. "One at a time," he said instead. "But all of them, eventually."
Ned was quiet for another stretch of road.
"You know," Ned said at last, with a tone that was careful and warm and slightly wondering, "when I was your age, I was thinking about swords and tourneys and whether Benjen would beat me in a race to the stables."
He said nothing, waiting.
"I don't say that as a criticism," Ned continued. "I say it because" He paused, choosing words with the deliberateness of a man who didn't use them carelessly. "Because what you're doing. The proposal for the fields. Today. This is what it means to be a lord, Robb. Not the banners and the titles. This."
He looked at his father's face honest and tired and alive in the grey afternoon light, the face of a man who believed in things deeply enough to die for them.
I know, he thought. That's why I'm here.
"I had a good teacher," he said quietly.
Ned reached over and gripped his shoulder briefly, the way he had in the solar, and then let go and looked back at the road ahead.
Winterfell rose against the darkening sky in the distance, grey and solid and ancient, and he rode toward it thinking about fourteen villages and a Book full of answers and a world that had no idea what was coming for it.
He thought about how much a third more grain would matter when the snows came and didn't stop.
He thought about children who wouldn't make it past their second winter, and whether that was still true, and whether he could make it not true.
He thought, briefly and for the first time with any real focus, about a silver-haired girl somewhere across the Narrow Sea, in a city called Pentos, at the beginning of a story he knew by heart.
Not yet, he told himself. One thing at a time.
But the thought had arrived, and it didn't entirely leave.