Maester Luwin was actually exceptionally kind to the strange little Stark girl who wanted to fix dead animals in the barn.
She was clever and liked to read, and didn't mind getting her hands dirty if it meant she got to help him make potions or tend to the livestock.
Was this a boy - he would certainly suggest to her Ned that the Citadel would be a fine training for child of a noble house that already had two other trueborn children that reached adulthood.
But Edaline was a highborn lady, destined for bringing highborn lords into the world and being a fine lady of a castle.
He showed her small things - the way light blue virgin tears poused to clean blood from linens could be put on a fresh wound and would fizzle away when a drop was applied - making it less likely to be infected.
The way milk of the poppy was collected from the bulbs not the flowers - long before they reached ripeness and always before dawn.
Sunlight made the collected fluid drops - leaking like tears from the small incision around the tight bud, completely useless.
Those were the few things Edaline knew in her current view.
The other hundreds of vials and pots lining up the shelves, she could not even guess their meanings.
She reached over to a jar that had yellow liquid that smelled strongly of brimstone.
A cool hand caught her wrist in the air.
"I would not handle essence of sulfur without rawhide gloves my lady" Qyburn said curtly.
"It will burn through your flesh within seconds and that would be a pity"
Eda yanked her hand away and turned her attention to an entire cabinet of jars with various body parts.
Between her own… explorations, and the state of the dead that were marching beyond the wall, she actually knew what most of them were or where they went in the body.
So those riddled with diseases of were fascinating to her.
She has come upon a jar of a fetus of a full term human infant with a smaller one fused to its side.
Her hand involuntarily went to her own barely swollen belly.
She turned away from the specimens - overcome by her own humanity and not particularly liking the thoughts it brought to the surface.
"My lady, I have some tedious matters to attend" Qyburn said in his soothing silky voice, do you mind if I step away and leave you here for a short time? I trust you not to injure yourself or try to challenge the guards left at the door?"
Edaline nodded, wondering to herself if there were enough parts in those jars to make a functional wight she could animate to strangle that bitch queen in her sleep.
If Edaline paid any attention to things Lord Tyrion had often spoken about growing up at King's Landing, she would have known one was never truly alone here.
But her plans had her far north in the arms of her king by now and she paid little attention to them.
Qyburn was watching her through a slab of a mirrored glass in the adjacent room - a clever creation of his own to allow for more private observations of his experiments.
.
He watched her lick her finger delicately as she flipped through an ancient book on, of cause, necromancy.
Her little red mouth in a silent circle eagerly reading over some of the, as he knew, more exciting parts dealing with certain types of black magics.
After a while she got up again and wandered over to the case of pinned insects he left out specifically for her.
He set that bit of bait out without much hope, but if she was bored enough...
It took less time than he anticipated!
Edaline was growing bored!
Bored and hungry, but mostly bored.
When she saw the pinned bugs she had a marvelous idea!
She animated the wight all on her own!
She could surely animate one or two dead butterflies and let them fly around the castle!
She could never learn to warge into the living from Bran and the Reeds, or her later teacher, not even a little bit, Her magnificent Night King - of sometimes infinite patience. He, who waited for a millennium before marching his dead hordes onto the damned wall, eventually froze the damn raven dead solid out of the air and told her if that was ever necessary - to just kill something ( like this bird), animate it and use its body to warge in order to 'see'.
After that he left for a few hours - she suspected to avoid being unnecessarily cruel to her, after all - he did love her and he wasn't a petty creature in general.
She mastered warging into the dead raven on her own.
She absently thought she wasn't even sure how well a butterfly could see anyways, if at all but her fingers itched to pull on those tiny strings to see if she could make the dead wings remember how to fly.
She carefully took out the pin from a small black one on the very edge, and pulled.
The wings twitched, once, twice. And the dead creature took off the table flying in a slow clumsy circle, shedding grey dust over Eda's pale fingers.
She jumped up and down in delight. The fact that she could now do that! The novelty of it never wore off for her.
Warging into one proved useless however, apparently humans and butterflies could not share vision. Ah well.
Qyburn watched his little guest in amazement.
He expected some blood magic - a spell or two from some arcane religion she learned in the North and somehow mastered.
He half expected her to not even try to animate the insects, he wouldn't have - but he was a careful suspicious man who knew very well the penalties even hints of necromancy carried.
She was all but a child, so he hoped she would be tempted with the books right there - to try something while she thought she was alone.
He wouldn't have even been surprised if she got the pinned bugs to give a twitch. She clearly was no ordinary girl - this Edaline Stark.
He was in complete shock to see that she didn't prick her finger or speak an incantation.
No painstainking alignment of crystals and blood dripping.
As far as he saw she just looked at it!
And the butterfly he killed and stored almost a decade ago across the narrow sea rose up and flew as if it was alive.
Completely under her power - making uneven wide circles in the air around her beautiful head until she seemed to decide on something and pointed at the far cabinet, where the damn thing slowly flapped towards and perched at the edge.
Back to it's dead stillness, gathering dust.
Qyburn jerked his head because he was feeling like he was suddenly in the black cells below because it was unnaturally cold.
The black glass he was watching her through was covered in frost.
No, she was indeed extraordinary, more perfect and beautiful and far more powerful than the queen he currently served.
Did she know that yet?
He was really beginning to look forward to teaching her to live up to her potential.
He found the idea of intimate contact with her in ways of... guiding her, serving and teaching her just how exceptional she was more titillating than anything else he had access to at this point in his life.
He took one more look at the way her fingers were now gliding over some other texts.
He enjoyed the view once more and left.
He really did need to attend to the...current queen