I didn't sleep much that night.
To be fair, I don't think anyone in my position would have.
Damon Vypren—Damon Vypren, heir to House Vypren—had just offered to take me into his service. Not as a servant, not as a stableboy, but as a page, with the possibility of becoming a squire later. If I proved myself, if I worked hard enough, if I survived long enough, I might even become a knight one day.
A knight.
For a noble-born boy, that was expected. A path laid out from birth, polished and prepared for him by blood and name. For smallfolk, it was something else entirely. It was a door that almost never opened, and when it did, it usually opened for someone else.
Most smallfolk didn't get glory. We got mud, aching backs, and calloused hands. We got fields, kitchens, stables, and the privilege of dying in someone else's war if the lord of the region decided he needed bodies to stand between him and an enemy charge. Nobles became knights. Smallfolk became corpses, or if they were very lucky, camp followers who got to die slightly later.
And yet Damon had offered me a chance.
A real one, too, not some halfhearted promise made in passing. A place in House Vypren's service meant food, training, travel, and—most importantly—protection. It meant moving upward in a world where people like me were usually born, lived, and died in the same patch of dirt. It meant learning to fight properly, learning to read men and politics, learning how noble households worked from the inside instead of peering at them from the kitchen of an inn.
It also meant danger.
Knighthood sounded glorious when singers sang of it. Gleaming armor, noble vows, tournament crowns, ladies smiling from balconies, all that nonsense. Reality was different. Knights bled. Knights got crippled. Knights got sent to wars they had no say in. Knights had duties, loyalties, obligations. They had to navigate noble politics, obey their liege lord, and carry themselves in a world where one wrong word at the wrong feast could earn them a powerful enemy.
And if I accepted Damon's offer, I'd be stepping into that world with all the grace of a peasant boy who occasionally solved his problems by throwing sand in people's eyes.
So yes, I didn't sleep much.
After the common room had quieted and the last of the travelers had stumbled off to bed, my mother called me into the kitchen. The hearth had burned low, casting the room in soft orange light. Shadows clung to the corners. The smell of onions, broth, and fresh bread still hung in the air, mixed with woodsmoke and the faint sour scent of spilled ale that no amount of scrubbing ever truly erased from an inn.
My father was already there, seated at the table with a bowl of leftover soup in front of him. My mother, Bessie, ladled out the last of it into two more bowls and set one before me.
"Eat before it goes cold," she said.
That was my mother. No matter how dramatic the moment, food came first.
I sat down, wrapped both hands around the bowl, and stared at the thin curls of steam rising from it. For a few moments, none of us spoke. The quiet felt strange. Usually by this time my father would be muttering about broken stools or the price of grain, and my mother would be telling him he sounded like an old man. Tonight they were both watching me.
Well, if there was ever a time to stop stalling, it was now.
"Mom. Dad." I cleared my throat. "Damon Vypren offered to take me into service under House Vypren. He said I could start as a page and maybe become a squire later."
My father snorted into his soup.
"We know."
I blinked. "You… know?"
He gave me a look over the rim of his bowl, the kind that made me feel about four years old instead of seven. "You didn't think the heir to a noble house would ask to take someone's son without speaking to the parents first, did you?"
That stopped me dead.
Of course he had asked them first. Damon might laugh and spar and let me get away with murder on a practice field, but he was still a noble heir. He wasn't going to just toss me over a saddle and ride off into the sunset. Not without permission, anyway.
My mother sat across from me, folding her hands on the table. "He spoke to us after you finished your little duel."
"Duel," my father muttered. "Looked more like a robbery."
"I won," I said automatically.
"You threw dirt in a lordling's face."
"He's the one who stopped paying attention."
My father's mouth twitched, and I knew he was fighting a smile.
I looked between them, my spoon forgotten in my hand. "So… what do you think? Should I accept?"
There. That was the question that had been gnawing at me since Damon made the offer.
For all my second-life knowledge, for all my private plans and fears, I was still seven years old. More importantly, I was their son now, and this wasn't a choice that only affected me. If I left, I'd be leaving the inn, leaving the river, leaving the only home I'd ever known in this life. I'd be trading familiarity for opportunity and comfort for uncertainty.
My father set his bowl down with a soft clink.
"Yes."
Just like that. No hesitation. No dramatic pause. Just one blunt word delivered with the same certainty he used when telling me a board was rotten or rain was coming.
I stared at him. "Yes?"
"Yes," he repeated. "You should go."
My mother didn't interrupt him, which told me she agreed—or at least didn't disagree enough to argue.
My father leaned back in his chair and rubbed one scarred hand over his bald head. Firelight glinted off the red shine of it, making him look somehow both intimidating and ridiculous.
"Look, son," he said, voice quieter now, "your mother and I can give you food, a bed, a roof, and a place in this inn when you're grown. That's the truth of it. We can give you work, and we can teach you how to keep this place standing after we're too old to do it ourselves. That's not nothing. It's an honest life."
He paused, then fixed me with that steady brown gaze of his.
"But it's all we have."
The words settled heavily between us.
"We can't give you lands," he continued. "We can't give you a title, or armor, or a horse with your own banner on it. We can't send you to the Citadel or buy you a place at some lord's court. What Damon's offering? That's a chance at more than we can ever provide. Maybe your only chance."
My throat tightened.
I knew all of this already, of course. I wasn't stupid. I knew what being smallfolk meant. I knew the limits of what my parents could offer me in this world, no matter how much they loved me. But hearing him say it out loud made it real in a way my private thoughts never had.
My father folded his hands on the table, rough fingers interlacing.
"Your mother and I never got the chance to see much of the world," he said. "I saw war, and she saw men passing through other people's halls, but that's not the same thing as living. We were born where we were born, and life pushed us where it wanted. We made the best of it. I don't regret that." His eyes flicked briefly toward my mother, softening. "But if you've got a road open in front of you, one that might lead somewhere better, I'd be a fool to tell you to stay here because it's easier."
My mother finally spoke, her voice warm and steady.
"He's right."
I turned to her.
She smiled at me, though there was something sad tucked behind it. "I don't like the thought of you leaving. I hate it, if I'm being honest. You're my boy. I'd keep you here forever if I could." She reached across the table and squeezed my hand. "But mothers don't get to keep their children little forever, and they shouldn't try. If you have a chance to become something more than an innkeeper because of your own talent, then I won't be the one to stop you."
That nearly broke me.
Maybe Edward and Bessie weren't my original parents. Maybe I'd been born in another world to other people whose faces were already growing hazy around the edges of memory. But sitting there in that warm kitchen, with the smell of soup and woodsmoke in the air and my mother's hand wrapped around mine, I knew something with painful clarity:
These were my parents.
Not by blood of my first life, maybe, but by every measure that actually mattered.
My eyes burned. I looked down at the table so they wouldn't see just how badly.
"I don't want to leave you," I admitted quietly.
My father barked a laugh. "Good. Means we raised you right."
"Edward," my mother chided.
"What? I'm not saying he shouldn't go. I'm saying I'd be insulted if he ran off without at least pretending to miss us."
That got a watery laugh out of me, which I suspected had been his goal.
I took a slow breath, then lifted my head and met my father's gaze properly.
"If I go," I said, "and if I take this chance… I won't waste it."
"You'd better not," he replied.
"I mean it," I said, more fiercely now. "If I become a knight one day, I'll make sure you hear of me. I'll do something worth remembering. Something that makes you proud."
My father studied me for a long moment. Then, to my surprise, he reached across the table and gripped the back of my neck, squeezing once in that awkward, rough way of his.
"I'm proud of you already, boy."
That was it. That was what finally did me in.
I looked away so fast I nearly knocked over my bowl.
The rest of the night passed in a blur. We talked practical things after that—what Damon had said, what House Vypren was like, whether I would be sent to Sevenstreams or kept with Damon personally, what duties a page was expected to perform. My father knew a little of the house from soldiers he'd met during and after the rebellion. Not much, but enough to reassure me that the Vyprens were a respectable Riverlands family and not the sort to flay servants for amusement.
My mother fussed over what I'd need to pack as if I were about to march beyond the Wall instead of ride to Riverrun.
"You'll need a proper cloak."
"I have one."
"You have a rag."
"It keeps the rain off."
"It offends me on a spiritual level."
My father, traitor that he was, sided with her.
By the time I was finally sent to bed, my head was full and my chest felt too tight for my ribs. I lay awake on my straw mattress staring up at the dark ceiling, listening to the familiar sounds of the inn settling around me. A horse stamping in the stable. Wind against the shutters. The muffled creak of old wood. Someone snoring loud enough in the next room to wake the dead.
For years I had wondered when my life in Westeros would truly begin.
Not survival. Not childhood. Not the strange, uneasy waiting I had been doing since the day I realized where I was. I meant begin—when I would step onto the board instead of watching the pieces move from the sidelines.
I had my answer now.
The next morning began before sunrise.
I woke to my mother shaking my shoulder and thrusting a cup of watered ale into my hands before I was fully conscious. Then came bread, cheese, and a list of instructions so long and contradictory that I was fairly certain she was inventing half of them on the spot.
"Mind your manners. Speak clearly. Don't pick fights. If someone insults you, think before you answer. Don't eat too fast. Don't stare at nobles. Wash whenever you can. If you get sick, tell someone. If you're cold, say so. If Damon tells you to do something foolish, make sure it's the kind of foolishness that won't get you killed."
"That last one feels difficult to judge," I muttered.
"You'll manage."
By the time I stumbled downstairs, my father was already in the common room speaking with Damon and the other two knights. Sunlight spilled through the shutters in pale golden strips, catching dust motes in the air. Breakfast had been laid out—porridge, bread, a bit of salt pork, and watered wine for the knights.
Damon looked up as I entered.
There was no mockery in his expression now, no grin left over from our spar the day before. He looked every inch the young nobleman: straight-backed, composed, and entirely at ease with the world arranging itself around him.
I crossed the room, heart pounding harder with every step.
Then I dropped to one knee.
"My lord," I said, keeping my voice steady through sheer stubbornness, "I accept your offer."
For half a second there was silence.
Then Damon smiled.
"Good," he said simply. "I'd hoped you would."
That was it. No ceremony, no dramatic vows, no septon materializing from behind a barrel to bless the occasion. Just a few words over breakfast in a roadside inn, and the shape of my life changed.
The rest happened so quickly it barely felt real.
My father had already packed my things. Of course he had. The man prepared for everything short of dragon attack. My entire worldly wealth fit into a single bundle: two changes of clothes, a patched cloak my mother had apparently stayed up late repairing, a whetstone my father insisted every boy ought to own whether he had a blade or not, and a little wooden carving knife I'd been using for practice.
I held the bundle and stared at it for a moment.
This was it.
Seven years of life reduced to a sack of belongings and a knot in my throat.
My mother hugged me first, fierce and tight enough to make my ribs creak. She smelled like flour and herbs and the smoke of our hearth. When she pulled back, her eyes were suspiciously bright.
"You write if you learn how," she said.
"I don't know how to write."
"Then learn quickly."
"I'll do my best."
"You'd better."
My father was next.
He didn't do long embraces or sentimental speeches, because that would have required him to acknowledge feelings in public and I suspected he'd rather wrestle a boar. Instead, he put both hands on my shoulders and looked me over one final time.
"Listen more than you speak," he said. "Work harder than the boys born to it. If someone knocks you down, get up. If someone's stronger, be smarter. If someone's smarter…" He paused. "Well, throw dirt in their eyes if you must."
I grinned despite myself. "That sounds like terrible knightly advice."
"I wasn't giving it to a knight. I was giving it to my son."
That one lodged itself somewhere under my ribs.
I hugged him before he could object, and after a brief moment of stiff surprise, he hugged me back.
Then it was over.
One of the men-at-arms boosted me up onto the back of a horse behind him, my bundle tied securely behind the saddle. From up there, the inn looked smaller than it ever had before. The sign creaked in the morning wind. Smoke rose from the chimney. The road stretched out in two directions, one back toward the life I knew and one toward a future I could only guess at.
My mother stood in the doorway with her apron still on. My father stood beside her with his arms folded, trying and failing to look unaffected. For a moment, neither of them seemed like ordinary smallfolk innkeepers. They looked like something far greater than that.
They looked like home.
Damon gave the order to ride, and the horses began to move.
I turned in the saddle as long as I could, waving until the inn vanished behind a bend in the road. Only then did I face forward again.
Riverrun awaited. House Vypren awaited. A new life awaited.
I was seven years old, armed with a second lifetime of bad ideas and half-remembered future knowledge, riding toward nobility, politics, and whatever disaster Westeros had waiting for me next.
For the first time since waking in this world, I wasn't just surviving it.
I was stepping into it.
Gods help them all.