I looked toward the beautiful sky and sighed with a grin on my face, Spring had arrived last month so the temperature had risen a bit.
"Oh shit," I was suddenly startled out of my thoughts by a blue football-sized object suddenly appearing in front of me out of nowhere, "Come on, Frost don't scare me like that,"
I caught Frost in my hand and she immediately started chirping excitedly. Ever since she had learned to fly, she started getting delighted every time she caught me off guard. I brushed along her feathers just the way she liked it, while she closed her eyes in pleasure.
She had grown to the size of my head in the two months since the day of the hunt. For a month or so I had thought that she was a snow eagle that is said to be quite common here in the north. But as she started to grow up, I realized that while the colors of a snow eagle were white feathers with a dash of blue, Frost had her feathers completely sky blue with just a dash of white along her head.
So I went back to the library and after searching for about two weeks, I finally found what kind of species she was. She was one of the rarest birds in the north, The Ice Eagle, also known as the Queen of Skies. This creature was said to have no competition in the air before the dragons arrived in Westeros and even then it was recorded to be the only creature to escape a dragon's hunt with her speed.
When Alysanne Targayrean arrived in the north, Lord Stark at the time took her on a hunt where they saw an Ice Eagle and the Lord of Winterfell, said to the Queen of Westeros that it was the faster creature in the sky, which the Good Queen took as a challenge and immediately saddled Silverwing to try and catch it but alas after an hour she returned empty-handed.
The Ice eagle took the queen's pursuit as a game and toyed around with her by flying circles around her Silverwing while she tried her hardest to hunt it. She was the one who named the Eagle, Queen of Skies, before then it was called the silent death by the people of North. The sightings of Ice Eagles are as rare as of Direwolfs but there have been legends of Commoners having spotted a fully grown Ice Eagle hunting creatures of massive size like bears, wolfs, and stags with ease.
"Did you have a good hunt, Frost?" I asked my friend while placing her on my shoulder. I listened to her squeak while occasionally understanding what she was trying to convey, she was quite intelligent and had an uncanny grasp of human language.
My feet automatically took me through the dwindling population of Wintertown toward the house of my unofficial mentor. I found Old Mark outside his home in his usual attire already waiting for me, and when he saw me coming, he stood up and without saying anything started walking away into the trees. I looked at frost in confusion, who actually shrugged with her tiny shoulders.
'Looks like it will finally be time for a more practical lesson,' I thought while following the old hunter through roots and thick bushes under the dense canopy of trees while trying to create as little noise as possible. Over the last two months, we've only had theoretical lessons about how to behave while on a hunt, like how to always try to stay downwind, identify all kinds of animals in the wolfswood, or walk with absolute silence.
We walked without much interaction for about an hour before he suddenly stopped behind a bush and told me to stay there with his eyes and hands. He turned around and started walking into a clearing in front of the bush. I looked at the spot he was moving toward and found a rabbit chewing on the grass while occasionally looking up warily.
Old mark slowly but steadily approached the rabbit while staying out of its line of sight with ease and after he got unnaturally close to the rabbit he looked toward me to check and make sure that I was watching before he turned back and came back toward me while taking a roundabout way.
"Now, you do it," he grunted while pointing toward the rabbit.
I nodded and placed Frost on the ground, taking a couple of deep breaths to calm myself down, I started walking toward the rabbit while trying to apply all the stuff I'd learned over the last month.
I was still ways away from it, taking all the time in the world to approach it, and was looking toward the ground every few seconds, to make sure that I didn't step on any twigs when the rabbit suddenly looked up straight toward me and quickly sprang away. I didn't know what I did wrong.
I looked toward my teacher with a sigh, expecting him to look disappointed but he didn't say anything. Just turned around and waved his hand, silently telling me to follow him, he found another rabbit about 15 minutes later and told me all the mistakes I made the last time before telling me to have another go.
For a few hours, that was the only thing we did, the old hunter would find a small skittish animal like a rabbit and I would try to approach it without alerting it. About an hour into my training, frost seemed to get bored of just being a spectator, and just as I was about to approach another rabbit, she silently and gracefully glided toward the rabbit and landed just behind it before she turned and looked toward me with a triumphant look.
My bird was actually mocking me, and the worst thing was that I suddenly heard a snort behind me and when I turned around I found my teacher's face which was usually a block of ice actually sporting a small smile. 'Oh it is on,' I thought while looking toward Frost with resolution in my eyes.
About three hours later we were walking back to the cabin, with my shoulders slumped in disappointment, while frost was trying to cheer me up. I didn't even come close to approaching a single rabbit, the second I would go out of our hiding place the rabbit would run away.
When we arrived at the cabin it was to find Emilia sitting along with a girl outside. The new kid was the same age as Emilia but instead of brown hair and green eyes, she had blond hair and blue eyes. When Emilia saw us coming from the trees she immediately ran towards us and took her grandpa's tools from his hand while he patted her head gratefully.
"Hello Mr. Jon," Emilia said while turning toward me.
"Hey, Emy, who is this?" I asked Emilia while pointing toward the blonde kid who was following behind her.
"Oh hello, I am Becca," Becca answered before Emilia could even open her mouth, "I am Emilia's cousin,"
Becca was the daughter of Old Mark's nephew, who was a merchant who regularly buys every animal that Old mark hunts. He travels around a lot so he usually leaves Becca to stay at Old Mark's house.
"Do you really live in the big castle? Have you ever seen lord stark? Emy brags about you all the time but I didn't believe her at all," Becca said all in one breath.
"I don't brag," Emilia said while blushing and pushing her cousin a little.
Teaching Emilia was a little hard that day as Becca kept interrupting us and asking about one thing or the other curiously. By the time I went back to Winterfell, I was absolutely tired. In my previous life, I was an extreme case introvert so dealing with an extrovert who is not family was a little exhausting.
As the days continued to pass, my progress with the morning meditation was a bit slow but steady. But as I got better at entering the state that I have started to call 'the zone' one thing I've noticed is that whenever I found the time to do image training, my mind power gets absolutely used up and when I wake up the next day my mind sphere grows up just a tiny bit bigger.
I experimented with it by not doing any image training for a week and doing a lot of image training the next one and the result was very stark. So I've incorporated image training into my daily regimen instead of doing it whenever I felt like it so that it may hopefully turn my mind into a powerhouse.
At the breakfast today they served Lemoncakes so I thought about taking some for Emilia but Catelyn got to the last of it before I could take them all the while smirking at me. I went toward the kitchen while thinking how she could have the role of a typical evil stepmother in any movie.
"I need some Lemoncakes, Please," I said to the chef in the kitchen who was sitting and keeping a watch on the rest of the workers.
"They are none left," he said while taking a fleeting glance at me.
"Oh come on," I said, "I know you always keep some for yourself,"
"I don't know what you are talking about," he huffed, "Now go away, I am busy," before he went back to staring at young maids.
"Oh so you want to play it like that," I whispered to myself while narrowing my eyes. I had heard a saying in my world about if you can't be friends with them use them so I applied that with Catelyn, I spoke loudly, "Oh I wonder how Lady Stark will react when she finds out that her favorite maid is playing hide and seek with the chef,"
The cook immediately look around wildly at that and after making sure that no one was too close to us, leaned down and said to me in a whisper "I don't know what you're talking about,"
"Lady Stark will surely be wroth to know that the maid she brought all the way from Riverland was playing with a northern savage..."
"Alright, Alright I will get them for you," he hastily said before he stood up and went toward the cupboard and brought back two lemon cakes. I quickly took them out of his hands and wrapped them in a napkin before placing them in my pocket.
"Don't come back here," I heard the cook say from behind me.
I just looked at him with an evil smile and went out of the kitchen. I suddenly paused in my step and wondered, 'Is this how Baelish started,'... before I dismissed it as nonsense.
There was a skip in my step as I went toward Old marks place. 'I will give one of the cakes to Emy because she was really brilliant in the last class and the other one will be for me because I don't think that Old mark ever ate anything sweet,'
But when I reached the cabin it was to find that there were some extra people there. There was Emy's cousin Becca along with a man in his mid-thirties who looked like a relative of hers.
The middle-aged man, Sam was indeed Becca's father and Old Mark's Nephew. It turned out that he was trying to teach his daughter numbers the last few months but she was not very good at it, but instead of admitting her mistake, she said that he was just not a good teacher and that Emilia's teacher is way better than him.
So he arrived here to discuss if I could also teach Emilia's cousin along with her. He also generously agreed to pay a handsome sum of 10 silver stags a month, almost the amount the maid who works at Winterfell gets. So while I was not able to refuse such a mouth-watering offer, I did haggle and made him agree that he would buy all the prey I would hunt in the future just like he did for Old Mark.
"Oh are those cakes for us? You are so generous Mr. Jon," Becca said while taking the cakes sticking out of my pocket and giving one to Emy. Looking at the face of Becca happily eating the cake that was supposed to be mine, I immediately felt that I had made a very wrong decision, but I was too late by then and made the ultimate sacrifice of my desserts.
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