NOVEL NEXT Chapter 3: Training Day
Mid 265 Summer
My aunt and I faced off once again at the training yard of Mormont Keep in a mirror match. Blunted swords and kite shields in hand with padding and chainmail covering us head to toe under our spangenhelms. Neither of us preferred arming swords, but you can't blunt a mace or a poleaxe to make them safe. Geometry being a deadly bitch and whatnot.
Maege possessed impeccable footwork, and regularly fainted stepping in and attacks to bait out reactions from me. She'd started throwing in more tricks and traps to our spars when I outgrew her, revealing how she truly fights. Despite a lifetime of training, my aunt simply isn't a freak of nature like Brienne of Tarth. She can't stand and bang with the strongest warriors in the setting, and instead is an expert skirmisher.
She's come out on top against scores of wildlings and a handful of Ironborn through controlling distance, timing, and precision. Wonderful traits for a warrior, but her natural lacking strength means you don't want her in a battle formation beside you.
My father Joer is the opposite. As the wielder of a Valyrian steel sword, he possesses an absolute advantage in aggression and such presses forward and puts up offensive pressure constantly. His preferred form of defense is the master cuts, strikes that break the line of an opponent's attack and deliver cuts with the same motion. It's risky, but the man wears three layers of armor - gambeson, chainmail, and lamellar plate - to make up for any mistakes he makes, and more importantly it keeps the family sword, Longclaw, doing what it does best.
Neither of them would appear on any Top 10 Warriors in Westeros lists, but I hoped that by learning all I could from them both, and with some creativity and elbow grease, I'd contend somewhere at the top of those lists.
As Maege and I fought, I recognized one of her feints coming and quickly struck her wrist, my blunt sword clanging off her splint mail bracer. The pair of us backed off for the next exchange, but I could see my aunt's eyes seething behind the strips of metal that formed her eye and nose guards, and the hot breath escaping her chainmail face mask as she seethed with at clean score from me.
When she next engaged she tried to rush in quickly and bash me with her shield, chambering a follow up thrust behind it. I stepped towards her sword hand and binded it up with my shield while her bash failed to batter me effectively. My sword slipped in around her shield and slid across her mail aventail until the crossguard hooked her neck, and with a leg whipped around hers I tossed her onto her back and using my sword to pin her by her neck before jerking it back and forth as if to saw through the armor.
"Whooooo!" shouted my cousins, Dacey and Alysane, as they held their hands up in the air at the sight of their mother in total defeat.
"Good job, son!" my father yelled from the nearby barrel of water.
"Get off me, ya heavy son of a bitch!" Maege barked from below.
I stepped back off my defeated foe and raised my arms in victory.
"Yeah, laugh it up." Maege snarled as she got off the ground with minor difficulty, "Now I don't feel like sparring with you any more, so its attack drills till your arms can't remember anything but pain and suffering."
"Jokes on you, Aunt." I pointed at her with Skeletor sass, "I love burnout drills."
With the last laugh I found some space and began repeating single attacks in bursts, adding one rep on in each burst till hitting ten in a single set and then working back down to one attack before switching techniques and doing it again. Once I worked through all my cuts and thrusts I switched hands and did it all again, which took me into the lunchtime.
The family, guards, and staff sat around the great hall, meat and mead on every table as we devoured everything like a gathering of bears between bouts of laughter over some sensationalized retelling of a rather mundane occurrence or another.
"And he said 'Please, Uncle. I want some more.' and I shouted 'More!' so loud the boy dropped his bowl and ran out into the snow." a man retold the story of terrifying his hungry nephew and everyone around him busted out laughing.
Up at the high table Dacey and Alysane told their baby sister, Lyra, about Maege taking a beating as she suckled the girl on her teat. Maege had her daughters a few moons past four years apart, from unknown source officially, but I was fairly certain she'd taken a particularly successful woodsman as her husband. I'd learned a fair bit from the man and a handful of his peers about the interior of Bear Island, and encountered Maege visiting the man as I left his homestead one evening.
As far as husbands could go, I gave Cley a passing grade. He never once mentioned his dealings with Maege to me, meaning that if the man really was her baby daddy he respects her choice to keep him anonymous. Plus he is about as good as it gets when it comes to bushcraft, and taught me how to best exploit Bear Island's abundant natural resources.
No lean land could sustain the enormous population of brown bears like we have, and while they make the woods of the island incredibly dangerous for the regular citizens, if you're quick with your spear and rolling with some good bear hounds, they are more an exploitable resource than an existential threat. It's a great work out hauling them to the nearest village, and then I get to go home with the pelt and the grease and some lucky fishermen families get some meat I don't care for. Too sweet, and the smell sends shivers down my spine. Same with mutton.
I had a big bowl full of venison stew, and I was quite happy to eat other people's food despite the dreary nature of both Mormont Keep and its cook. Honestly the guy only knows how to stew… or he is purposefully trying to give my family depression. Definitely the kind of thing to investigate if I had the magical capacity to produce a spy network just by telling someone to establish a spy network.
"You've about learned all you can from Maege." my father told me as he squeezed a slice of lemon into his mead.
The one trader that visits Bear Island regularly does so to restock my father's one true love, lemons. It says a lot about how baller our situation is that our only luxury purchase is lemons. Over a thousand years of history, a dynasty unbroken. For lemons.
"From now on, you'll spar with me, and I will teach you how to wield the family sword." Joer sighed in satisfaction after he chugged his horn of citrus enhanced mead.
"Gladly, father." I nodded, not telling the man that the moment he left me the sword so he could go cool his heels atop a seven hundred foot wall of ice I was fixing the family sword to an ironwood shaft and from then on poking my enemies to death with my magical ever-sharp unbreakable pokey stick.
Spam poke for the win.
After the meal, I spent some time tending the ravens with our assigned Maester. The man had done his best to educate me in his many fields of expertise after I easily finished the basic education expected for lordlings. Not much considering by the end of it many lords of the North are still illiterate, but when he began teaching me about the subjects that were represented by his links the world really opened up even though he could only provide me a limited performative education without the learning aids in the Citadel.
Despite that, he taught me to navigate by the stars, keep accounts and ravens, and engineer by Westerosi standards. Lyle was like a father to me, but better because he never fucked my mom. As for the possibility of a Greyrat antimagic conspiracy, I'm all for it.
To Hell dragons, witches, and tiny forest people. Fuck grumpkins and snarks and the Others. The Lord of Light can eat shit and die.
I'm Team People, and I will kill as many men, women, and children as it takes to prove it.
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I'll likely announce this story via my Cyberpunk fic after I release chapter five. By then I should have enough here for people to understand what's up on this one. I'm taking angles I don't think I've seen anyone take before, keeping realism without losing the inherent fun of a power fantasy.
Jorah doesn't get to vaguely remember the ingredients of concrete then bam he's the best road builder in Westeros. He doesn't get to remember that Bealish and Varis used whores and orphans as spies and bam, Bear Island is the center of the biggest spy ring in Planetos.
What he can do is he can look around, see what other people are doing, and incorporate it into what he's doing. Maybe even do it better. He can maybe implement a few of the more basic historical advancements like copper plated ship hulls, but mostly because the function of the idea is in the damn name. Looking at a picture of a seed drill once in history class doesn't mean you could make one. I can draw a six legged dog, so by wank fic standards I should be able to breed one.
And for the love of God, what the fuck would be the point of building roads in the North? So the people with access to the same shit over here can have access to it over there? So the Ironborn can have an easier time raiding inland?
Anyway...
You can support me and my family at
ko - fi . com /jmanm