[ POV Arthur Stark ]
[ In the Days That Followed ]
Qyburn and I began with rules smaller than walls and harder to enforce.
We had barrels with taps placed beside the kitchens, dining halls, infirmary, and lodgings. Anyone preparing food had to wash their hands before touching ingredients and do so again after handling raw meat, refuse, animals, or privies. Water drawn from wells not yet examined would be boiled before drinking. Pots, knives, and boards would be scalded every day. Wounds would be washed with clean water before receiving fresh cloth, and no one would reuse a dirty bandage simply because it still looked whole.
The cooks accepted some of the rules. The soldiers complained about nearly all of them.
"A man does not grow stronger by wetting his hands before he eats," a veteran protested during the first inspection of the dining hall.
Qyburn set two bowls before him. One held clear water; the other, the dark water that had run from the hands of three butchers after a morning's work.
"Choose which one you would like them to dip the bread meant for your supper into," he suggested.
The veteran looked at the bowls and walked to the barrel without another word.
Temporary privies were dug downhill from the wells and far from the kitchens. Refuse and animal remains began to be collected in wagons instead of thrown behind the lodgings. The infirmary's bedding was boiled or exposed to steam, and each barracks received a day to wash blankets, air straw, and scrape the floor. Qyburn marked safe wells with blue paint and closed two that stood too near the old pits.
Rhoslyn added soap, firewood for heating water, and cleaning crews to the budget. Razdhan included the barrels and privies in his inspections. Belzakar made handwashing part of the soldiers' watch, ending most arguments. I did not try to explain invisible creatures no one could observe. I said only what Qyburn could already demonstrate: where foul water, food, and waste mingled, fevers and flux followed.
By the third week, the cases of diarrhea in the lodgings had diminished. After that, even the men who still mocked the rules began checking whether the water had been boiled.
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[ At the End of the Third Week ]
The first hammer struck the dungeon tower beneath a gray sky.
Before that, Qyburn examined every wall with local masons. Razdhan marked the structures that could not be removed while they supported defenses still in use. Rhoslyn published wages for stonecutters, porters, carpenters, diggers, smiths, cooks, and healers. Eldric checked the foremen without turning the yard into an interrogation. Kevin sent scouts to announce work in the villages. Perseus placed guards at the storehouses and demolition areas. Belzakar and Morghaz organized soldiers into shifts to help clear rubble without abandoning their training.
I gave the hammer to the woman whose husband had died in one of the cells.
Her name was Mara. She held the haft with both hands and stood before the wall so long that some men began to look away. Then she struck the stone. The sound crossed the yard like a door slamming shut, and other workers approached to receive tools. By the end of the first moon, the tower no longer existed.
In the second moon, the castle began disappearing quickly enough for the difference to be seen from one week to the next, thanks to the machines raised between the towers. The first crane occupied the outer yard upon an oak foundation. Two great wooden treadwheels held men who moved them with their own weight, while ropes passed through sets of pulleys to a revolving arm reinforced by braces. The mechanism lifted blocks that had once required dozens of workers and shifted them onto wagons without dragging them through the mud.
The first test nearly ended with Kevin's death.
"I was outside the marked area," the archer insisted, looking at the stone that had fallen two paces from his boots after a rope snapped. "The marked area merely proved smaller than it ought to have been."
Razdhan picked the broken fiber from the ground and held it before Kevin's face.
"The red band means no one enters," he explained with a calm more threatening than any shout. "It does not mean short men may consider their heads beneath the stones' reach."
"My height was never mentioned in the drawings," Kevin retorted, backing away while the workers tried to hide their laughter. "Arthur needs to write more precise instructions."
After that accident, Razdhan established double cordons around each machine, bells to announce suspended loads, and a man whose sole task was to watch ropes, hooks, and catches. Qyburn treated the first operators' burned hands and changed the treadwheels' shape so no one would be crushed if the mechanism reversed. I added wooden brakes and counterweights. On the third attempt, the crane lifted a four-ton block from the old main tower and set it intact upon a reinforced cart. We built three more and distributed smaller hoisting wheels, carts upon wooden rails, ramps covered in rollers, water-driven saws, and pile drivers among the work fronts. Timber, iron, rope, stone, and human or hydraulic power formed mechanisms the craftsmen could understand, repair, and improve.
The workers learned quickly because they were paid for output without losing wages when a machine made the work faster. Rhoslyn had rejected several foremen's proposal to reduce pay once the cranes began moving more stone.
"If we punish men for using a better tool, they will break every better tool while we sleep," she explained during a meeting at the end of the second moon. Her books occupied half the table, separated by leather strips of different colors. "The cost per block has already fallen because we need fewer injured men, fewer animals, and less time. The workers will keep their wages. They will also receive a share of the gain when they exceed the target without accidents."
Perseus ran a finger down the groups' names and the sums promised to each. The targets column tightened his brow.
"That will create competition," he said, raising his eyes to Rhoslyn. "Some will try to move faster than the ropes and cranes allow."
"Competition with limits," Rhoslyn replied, touching the column devoted to injuries. "No bonus will be paid if a group hides an accident or exceeds the permitted load. Speed without safety merely transfers the cost to the infirmary."
Qyburn looked up from his drawings and offered her a rare expression of approval.
"I begin to understand why Arthur fears your books more than all our swords," he remarked.
Rhoslyn dipped her quill and returned to the accounts.
"Swords waste men," Rhoslyn replied without raising her eyes from the page. The quill scratched across parchment as she corrected a sum. "Poorly kept books can waste an entire kingdom."
While the towers fell, Perseus transformed the garrison.
He heard the soldiers approved by Rodrik Cassel, visited the families of the dead, and removed seven captains. Two were sent to trial. Five remained as common soldiers because they had obeyed rules only when they occupied the lowest rank. Belzakar reorganized the companies into smaller groups, mixing old men with recruits from the villages. Their oaths ceased to mention the lord's absolute will and instead required obedience to northern law, protection of the defenseless, and refusal of orders involving torture or violence against innocents.
Morghaz led the first training sessions seated upon a bench and focused all his attention upon mistakes he could no longer correct by demonstration. "If I can see your opening with one arm bound and my head full of medicine, the enemy will see it before he draws his sword," he shouted at a recruit who had lost his shield for the third time. Then he rose by instinct, caught Qyburn's gaze from across the yard, and sat again with a grunt. "Pick up the shield. Belzakar, show him how to break the formation without breaking the boy. We will still need him tomorrow."
Before the end of the third moon, Qyburn removed the last bandages. Morghaz regained his movement slowly and celebrated by knocking down three soldiers, two dummies, and part of a fence not built to participate in the training. Belzakar answered by enlarging the yard as he had requested, but separated exercises by experience to keep his companion's enthusiasm from filling the infirmary.
Kevin spread the castle's eyes along the roads. Hunters received cloaks marked with a small gray wolf, monthly wages, and light horses. They built shelters a day's journey apart, repaired bridges, and established signal fires upon the hills. When they found the first deserters, Kevin offered surrender before loosing an arrow. Nine returned and stood trial. Four refused and attacked. Only one survived.
The roads grew safe enough for the first families to begin arriving.
They came as masons from Winterfell, carpenters from White Harbor, miners from the Flint hills, glaziers, tanners, potters, and men who claimed mastery of trades far greater than they could demonstrate. Landless peasants and second sons from smallholdings came. Widows seeking work in the kitchens came, women who knew herbs, boys who wished to learn smithing, and girls who had heard of the wages paid to weavers.
Some came from King's Landing after encountering our goods in the southern workshops or working in warehouses connected to the trade of Frostspirit, Icefyre, and soap. Letters sent to their kin spoke of daily meat for heavy laborers, payment made on the promised day, lodgings without charge during the first moon, and healers who treated smallfolk without asking whether they possessed silver. That news offered a reason to face the long journey beyond the promise of coin.
Rhoslyn did not allow the arrivals to become disorder. Each family received a record, a temporary place, and clear information about wages, prices, and rules. No one could claim land simply by fencing it during the night. No merchant could double the price of bread near the gates. The new markets used weights inspected by Razdhan, and any tampered scale hung above the offender's stall for seven days.
"This is humiliating," a wool merchant complained after his own scale was found with hidden lead.
Rhoslyn placed two fingers upon the false weight.
"The gallows would be more humiliating," she replied, returning the piece to the man. "Lord Arthur has decided shame and restitution correct a first theft better than death. You will return three times the amount taken and continue trading under inspection. If you prefer the old tradition, I can ask him to reconsider."
The merchant hung the scale himself.
The wages also drew complaints from beyond my lands. Lord Hornwood wrote after thirty-two woodcutters abandoned a contract in midseason. A Karstark steward accused our foremen of offering coins inside a village owing allegiance to Karhold. Wyman Manderly sent a friendlier letter, accompanied by a proposal to provide food, dressed timber, and craftsmen from White Harbor in exchange for space in the warehouses beside the Weeping Water.
Rhoslyn spread the three messages across my table. "If we continue paying more than every neighbor, workers will continue coming," she warned. "Some lords will see trade. Others will see their fields emptying to raise your walls."
I forbade our recruiters from entering another House's lands without permission and ordered valid contracts examined before anyone was hired. Men and women who arrived of their own will could remain; no guard would drag them back to satisfy a lord. Hornwood received compensation for timber already cut, the foreman who had entered Karstark lands was dismissed, and Manderly's proposal became the first regular supply agreement for the new port.
My father replied a few days later. His letter approved the agreement and carried a warning written in two lines: wages attracted people, soldiers attracted suspicion, and a growing city would need to provide explanations before King's Landing invented its own. I kept the sheet with Eldric's reports.
Eldric watched everything without becoming the center of anything.
He discovered two former men of Roose trying to burn the timber storehouse, a scribe copying shipment values for a White Harbor merchant, and a boy paid to count how many soldiers guarded the vaults. The boy was one of Varys's little birds. He was twelve.
Eldric did not harm him. He gave him food, discovered the intermediary's name, and began allowing him to send true but useless information: numbers of turnip wagons, quantities of tiles produced, rainy days, and false arguments about where the gold would be kept. For three moons, the intermediary believed our vaults occupied a reinforced cellar beneath the old sept, a building we still used to store records of no military value.
"If we arrest him, Varys will send another boy we do not know," Eldric explained when he told me. "This one believes he remains hidden. We can control the information he receives and discover who collects his messages."
"And when he realizes?" I asked, watching the boy help in the kitchens across the yard.
Eldric watched him receive a bowl from the cooks. For an instant, the hardness in his face yielded.
"I hope that by then he discovers he prefers receiving wages from you," he replied. "If that happens, we gain a man before Varys realizes he lost a little bird."
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[ Three Months Later ]
Leaf and Coal returned, but no one other than me saw them.
Fenrir scratched at my door long after the final bell. Hela waited for him in the corridor, and both went outside without looking back. I left the castle through a service passage, covered in a dark cloak, and followed the wolves into the woods without a guard. Eldric noticed my absence; the following morning, I found a note upon my table saying only that next time I should choose a route without three sentries. He did not ask where I had gone.
Leaf and Coal waited beneath the ancient weirwood near the river. The hill stood apart from the works, and I had forbidden entry on the grounds that the land still needed to be cleared of bones and stakes left by the Boltons. Leaf kept her hood of leaves over her face. Coal erased our tracks with a branch before approaching.
"You tear down the place of blood," Leaf said. Her voice sounded like branches moving in the wind. "The stones were sad."
"If anyone discovers you are here, the secret will reach Winterfell and King's Landing before the moon ends," I warned. "There are thousands of new eyes in these lands."
"Then we will help when men's eyes are closed," Coal replied.
I turned toward the weirwood. The Boltons had used the surrounding ground to display condemned prisoners in cages. We had ordered the stakes removed, the ropes burned, and the bones found beneath the earth buried, but no one had begun planting there.
Leaf placed her palm upon the white bark.
"This one still dreams," she said. "It dreams of ravens and of a man bound to the roots."
Brynden's name came with the memory of the last greenseer speaking of riches sleeping beneath the eastern lands: iron below the castle, gold in the hills near the Weeping Water, and coal in caverns beneath Gallows Hill. Until that moment, I had treated the words as clues. Leaf's presence before the weirwood restored the promise's weight.
"Brynden spoke of three places," I told them, kneeling to draw the river in the soil. "He said the castle stood over iron. That gold slept in the hills near the Weeping Water. That black stone capable of burning lay beneath Gallows Hill."
Coal crouched beside me. He used the point of his spear to mark a bend beyond the river.
"The hill of the hanging men has ancient caves," he recalled. "Before the First Men, black fire appeared along the banks when the earth broke. The wood avoided that place."
I studied the point Coal had marked, then the darkness between the trees. If Brynden's memory was correct, that entrance could feed the furnaces of an entire city.
"Can you show us?" I asked, marking Gallows Hill with a dark stone.
"I can show the entrance," he replied. "Stone men must say whether the roof will remain above their heads."
Leaf moved away from the weirwood and crossed the ground where the grove would be planted. She touched the soil with her fingertips before raising her face toward the bare branches.
"We will help here," she decided. "A new home needs ancient eyes, even if men cannot yet see them."
On the following nights, I left seeds, tools, ropes, and saplings beside the forbidden boundary. At dawn, I found oaks, sentinel trees, pines, and young weirwoods planted in positions I had not chosen. Shallow channels carried rain to the roots without drowning them. Coal used stones and branches to hide the paths by which they entered. Leaf always worked after the most distant watchers changed their shift.
When the workers asked who planted the grove, I answered that I had hired two gardeners who preferred not to be disturbed. Rhoslyn complained that no payment appeared in the books. I recorded a token expense for seeds and let her conclude that I was protecting some elderly worshipper of the old gods. Not even she was brought to the clearing.
I wrote Heart Tree Grove upon the map of the surrounding land. To everyone else, it was merely Arthur Stark's new godswood.
Fenrir and Hela guarded the path during the nights Leaf and Coal worked. By day, the wolves slept near the entrance and discouraged all curiosity without needing to attack anyone.
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[ One Week Later ]
The expeditions departed before dawn.
Rhoslyn hired miners, masons, charcoal burners, and men accustomed to prospecting for metals in rivers. Kevin supplied scouts. Perseus sent guards. Qyburn prepared sample boxes and instructions concerning gases, water, and collapses. I forbade any deep excavation before the tunnels received timber supports, ventilation, and a second way out.
Iron was found first, in extensive layers beneath the heights supporting the castle and running northeast. The first trench exposed enough reddish ore to stain every tool. Two experienced miners confirmed the deposits continued beyond the point they had reached.
The coal was found beneath Gallows Hill eleven days later. Coal had shown the fissure only to me during the night. The next day, I led Kevin and the miners to the rise, pretending to follow old notes and signs in the stone. The entrance was partly hidden by roots, and thick black bands ran through the inner walls. A lamp nearly killed the first explorer when foul air collected in a low chamber. After that, we installed ventilation pipes, limited the depth, and used caged birds to warn us when the air became dangerous.
Gold required more time. We found particles in the river, then small flecks in quartz. Rhoslyn refused to announce any discovery until three different groups had examined the samples. In the sixth moon, an excavation in the hills revealed the first vein worth working.
She placed the stone upon my table at dusk. Golden lines crossed the quartz beneath the lamplight.
"It exists," she said, though the satisfaction in her eyes had already revealed the answer. "We still do not know how much."
"How much did we spend to find it?" I asked, and Rhoslyn opened the book she had prepared before even entering.
"Two thousand, eight hundred and forty dragons in wages, animals, timber, tools, escort, and food. Iron may repay that sum faster than gold if we build enough furnaces. Coal will reduce our consumption of wood and allow us to produce greater heat. The gold vein must remain under limited exploitation until we have safe galleries and a reliable estimate."
I closed my fingers around the stone, feeling the quartz edges against my palm, and resisted the temptation to turn a single vein into wealth already assured.
"Keep gold extraction limited until we have safe galleries and reliable figures," I agreed. "Use the iron and coal first to sustain the workshops. Then prepare the workers' rules before the first contract is signed."
The rules were read in every village.
Miners would receive high wages for the risk, a small recorded share of production above the target, food during their shift, treatment for injuries, and payment to their family if they died in an accident. No child would work in a gallery. Shifts would be limited in length. Tunnels would receive supports before advancing. A fixed portion of the revenue would form a fund for widows, orphans, and men unable to return to work.
Several lesser proprietors protested that those benefits would make it impossible to hire laborers for less.
I leaned over the audience table and pushed back the contract one proprietor had tried to alter.
"That is the intention," I replied. "I do not expect to force other lords to treat their workers better; I want the results to convince them that doing so produces more as well. If a gallery's profit requires burying men alive and abandoning their children, it will remain closed."
The protests diminished when they realized I would not negotiate that part.
By the seventh moon, more than six hundred people worked in the mines, furnaces, roads, and storehouses connected to them. The five million remained recorded as personal property and never appeared in the books as income of the domain. The wealth drawn from the galleries was beginning to sustain the lands themselves.
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[ During the Following Months ]
The cold changed slowly after the Wall was sealed. Snow still came, the rivers froze along their banks, and the wind remained capable of killing an unprepared traveler. The thaw began earlier, leaving the earth open for longer, and we used those weeks in the nearby fields. I divided each area into four parts. In the first, we planted wheat, barley, and rye. In the second, peas, beans, and lentils to feed people and restore strength to the soil. In the third, turnips, beets, and other roots capable of sustaining animals through the cold months. The fourth lay fallow or received clover and pasture. The following year, each crop would change places.
The peasants met the idea with suspicion.
"My father planted barley in that field for forty years," explained a man named Cregan, crushing soil between his fingers. "His father did as well."
"And how much did it yield last year?" I asked.
He pointed toward a nearly empty granary.
"Less than we needed. But the war took the oxen and the men."
"Then we will test it in only one part," I proposed. "If the rotation produces less, I will pay the difference for three years. If it produces more, you will keep the surplus after taxes."
Cregan distrusted the agreement throughout the first harvest. Peas and beans produced food on ground that usually remained empty, while the roots allowed us to preserve more animals when the cold tightened. We recorded the yield of each strip and left part of the fields under the old method for comparison. The legumes' effect upon the grain could be measured only after the next planting, but the immediate results were enough for other peasants to request seeds and animals.
We built granaries raised upon stone, with ventilation beneath the floor, protection from rats, and sloped roofs. Simple irrigation channels brought water to fields that had once depended entirely upon rain. Small dams reduced flooding near the river and turned wheels for mills, sawmills, and bellows.
Rhoslyn turned every improvement into trade.
Flax supplied textile workshops. Wool from the new herds became thick cloaks, blankets, and felt. Craster's women taught others to preserve meat, produce hard cheese, and work hides without wasting fat. Coal traveled to White Harbor. Iron tools returned in the same wagons. Ash, fat, and herbs supported new soapworks. Sawmill waste became charcoal, compressed fuel bricks, and wall filling.
She established monthly fairs near the main road and charged fees low enough to attract merchants. Standard weights bore the mark of a wolf over a white tree, a symbol adopted by the workshops to identify work produced and inspected within the domain.
"Merchants trust a mark more when they know one bad lot can destroy it," Rhoslyn explained, showing me three tools bearing the same stamp. "Each workshop will answer for quality. If it sells brittle iron as steel, it will lose the right to use the tree."
I turned one tool over and examined the stamp engraved near the haft. A mark would mean something only if it could not be bought by the very craftsman it was meant to inspect.
"And who watches the workshops?" I asked.
Rhoslyn collected the three tools and separated the one with a slight flaw beside the blade.
"People who are not paid by them," she replied. "The inspectors will answer to the treasury, and the workshops will never choose who examines their work. I learned something from studying the ledgers of former lords."