[ POV Arthur Stark ]
[ Eight Months After Our Arrival ]
Tobho Mott arrived accompanied by twenty-three wagons, nine apprentices, and a quantity of wine he insisted was indispensable to smithing.
The Qohorik smith stepped down from the carriage wearing a fur-lined red cloak. The fabric was covered in dust from the long journey, but the rings upon his fingers still gleamed. He surveyed the ancient towers reduced to heaps of stone, the cranes above the yard, and the first new walls rising around the foundations.
"When your letter promised interesting work, I thought you wanted swords," he declared, gripping my forearm. "Armor, perhaps, or another blade capable of making nobles fight like dogs outside a butcher's shop. I did not imagine you meant to build an entire city merely to reach the workshop."
"The workshop is already finished," I replied, indicating the large stone building beside the channel. "The roof of my chambers is not. Rhoslyn decided you were more useful to the economy than I am."
Tobho removed his gloves and examined the channel carrying water to the wheels.
"A sensible administrator," he approved. "I must meet her before anyone succeeds in corrupting her judgment."
Rhoslyn met him inside the workshop. Before allowing him to unpack his first hammer, she placed the contract, travel expenses, and the list of wages offered to apprentices before him.
"No one here works merely for the honor of learning from a great master," she warned, holding the quill between her fingers. "If you train people, they will receive increasing wages as they demonstrate skill. If they produce pieces sold by the castle, they will receive a share. You will have lodging, coal, ore, and freedom to choose commissions, but any steel produced with the domain's resources will be recorded."
Tobho read two pages, looked up at me, then returned to the contract.
Tobho followed Rhoslyn with his eyes as she handed copies of the contract to the scribes. The surprise upon his face gave way to amused caution.
"Does she speak that way to everyone?" he asked, lowering his voice as though afraid she might still hear him from across the workshop.
"She speaks worse to me," I replied, and Tobho's deep laughter echoed between the new walls.
Tobho signed and began work on the blast furnace during the following weeks, after smaller ovens began heating the mineral coal without allowing air to enter freely. The resulting coke burned with less smoke and sulfur than fuel taken directly from the galleries. We raised a narrow stone tower lined with refractory brick and fed it layers of iron ore, coke, and limestone. Two waterwheels drove alternating banks of bellows, maintaining a constant airflow and raising the temperature until the ore became liquid metal. Separate openings at the base allowed slag and iron to be drawn off.
The first charge solidified before reaching the molds.
The second carried too much sulfur from the coal and produced brittle iron.
The third ruptured part of the inner lining and forced everyone to run as a glowing stream crossed the sand floor. No one died. Two men burned their boots, Tobho lost half the beard on one side of his face, and Qyburn began requiring full buckets at marked points around every furnace.
"In Qohor, an apprentice would be whipped for allowing the lining to crack," Tobho said that night, touching the singed hair upon his face.
"Here, the master reviews the design before blaming the apprentice," I replied, spreading the damaged section across the table. "The pressure concentrated at this point. We need a thicker wall and clay with less moisture."
Tobho studied the line I indicated. Then he pulled the sheet toward himself.
"We also need to change the angle of the air inlet," he concluded, drawing over my line. "The fire attacked the same wall for hours. If the two bellows enter from opposite sides, the heat will spread."
The fourth lining held and allowed the furnace to produce enough iron for tools, rails, plates, nails, grates, chains, and machine parts. Quality varied between heats, forcing Tobho to teach the workers to separate the metal, remelt it, and combine it according to purpose. Local smiths who had spent their lives making horseshoes learned to control carbon, recognize temperatures by color, and use water-driven hammers.
Once the blast furnace produced regular heats, we began work on an experimental converter.
I called it air conversion. The name Bessemer would mean nothing to them, though it remained in my memory like a word displaced from its proper age. The vessel was broad, with a refractory lining and openings at the bottom. It received liquid iron and allowed air to be blown through the bath of metal. The oxygen burned impurities and part of the carbon, producing a violent flame above the mouth.
Tobho considered the idea madness until the first demonstration.
"You mean to blow air into molten iron," he repeated, keeping a prudent distance from the vessel. "Not over the fire. Inside the metal."
"The air will burn what we do not wish to keep," I explained, checking the valves. "It may also throw metal over all of us if the lining is damp. That is why no one crosses the stone line."
"That last part made the demonstration far more reassuring," Kevin remarked from across the workshop. Razdhan took him by the shoulder and moved him two paces back without interrupting his inspection of the leather hoses.
The first charge foamed, spat slag, and ended with too little carbon. The metal was soft. The second retained enough phosphorus to shatter under impact. Tobho wanted to abandon the vessel. We began separating ores by origin, used limestone and dolomite linings for the most contaminated charges, and produced small ingots from a manganese-rich black stone found among the hill samples. At the end of each blow, a measured quantity of that alloy returned carbon to the metal and consumed some of the oxygen that left it brittle.
On the sixth attempt, Tobho forged three bars.
He heated the first, bent it, and struck until his arms trembled. He quenched the second in oil. He turned the third into a simple blade and used it against an ordinary sword. A notch opened in the old weapon's edge. The new one remained whole.
The smith passed his thumb near the edge without touching it.
"Any man who mistakes this for Valyrian steel deserves to lose his coin," Tobho judged, almost offended by the comparison. "The weight is different, the edge yields sooner, and no spell passed through that vessel."
I took the ordinary sword by the blade and showed the notch opened along its edge. That failure mattered more to an army than any enchantment we could not reproduce.
"Uniformity and quantity will matter more to our workshops," I replied. "A broken tool or sword will cease to condemn the person who depends upon it once we can repeat this quality in every charge."
Tobho studied the apprentices gathered behind the safety line. There were northerners, two boys from King's Landing, a young woman from the Hornwood lands, and three miners' sons. All awaited his verdict.
"Then stop staring," the master ordered, returning the bar to the bench. "Prepare another charge. If the lord wants enough steel to arm peasants, we will have to teach him not to ruin the ore before it reaches my hammer."
The men obeyed, but they did not leave the workshop speaking only of carbon, ore, or valves.
That night, the story crossed the lodgings before Tobho had even finished the second bar. According to some, I had made iron breathe. Others swore the fire changed color when I spoke words in an unknown tongue. A carter told the fair that the Lord of the Dreadfort fed ore to a stone mouth and received swords in return. By the time that version reached a village half a day's journey away, the converter roared without coal, needed no smiths, and transformed any metal into Valyrian steel.
Kevin brought the story to me over supper, unable to repeat it without laughing.
"In the version I heard, you walked into the fire to fetch the first sword," he said, stealing a piece of bread from Belzakar's platter. "You came out without a burn and with your eyes glowing red."
"Tell whoever invented that he chose the wrong color," I replied. "And tell the guards to stop charging ale to show the furnace to curious visitors."
Qyburn did not laugh. He turned his cup between his fingers while watching the ordinary flames in the hearth.
"People call sorcery whatever process they cannot follow," he said. "Forbidding them to speak will only make the rumor more valuable. Let them see the ore, the bellows, the mistakes, and the men burning their own boots. A miracle loses some of its wonder when it requires work shifts and account books."
We kept a safe gallery from which craftsmen, merchants, and authorized envoys could observe the heats. Tobho complained about the eyes over his shoulder, but began explaining every stage with the pride of a priest correcting heresies about his own god.
The first bars also carried questions beyond our lands. Lord Hornwood sent his master smith to test hoes, axes, and saws before discussing orders. A short letter came from Karhold asking how many spearheads and blades we could deliver each moon, accompanied by another, much longer one in which Lord Karstark's steward demanded prices, weights, and guarantees. The Manderlys requested samples of nails, chains, and tools intended for White Harbor's shipyards. Even the Greatjon sent an old axe and instructions that Tobho return it in better condition than he received it, if all that smoke was not merely an expensive way to frighten crows.
None of them called it a threat. None treated it as simple curiosity. The neighboring lords had understood that more abundant iron meant plows, saws, ironwork, ships, and weapons; each wished to discover how much we could produce, what it would cost, and who would receive it first.
By the end of the tenth moon, the workshop produced great quantities of iron for nails, grates, chains, reinforced wooden rails, simple tools, and machine parts. The converter's steel remained limited to small batches of chisels, saws, springs, and blades subjected to Tobho's tests. Some charges came out well; others returned to the furnace. Forty-two apprentices worked under the master, though only the most experienced were permitted to touch the converter valves. The uniform production I wanted still belonged to the years ahead.
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[ As the First Year Progressed ]
The ground of the new castle became a vast construction site around it all.
The foundations were opened down to firm rock. Upon it we laid courses of broad stone, compacted gravel, and moisture-resistant mortar. Covered channels followed the footings of the planned buildings, carrying water away without allowing the earth to subside. Each section received an inspection opening. Razdhan tested the grates personally and forced small men to try passing through them before approving the design.
The hot springs entered the system in the ninth moon.
Qyburn and I designed chambers where very hot water mixed with cold before traveling through conduits beneath the floors. The galleries had removable slabs for cleaning. The children's lodgings, infirmary, baths, laundry, and greenhouses were the first to receive heat. Steam also served a bathhouse open to workers on different days for men and women, with hours reserved for families.
"Public baths spread disease when the water is not renewed," Qyburn warned, inspecting a pool.
"That is why water enters from this side and leaves through the bottom," I explained. "The pools will be emptied and scrubbed. No used water will return to the clean conduits."
He inserted a rod into the outlet, checked the flow, and nodded.
"In that case, the baths will probably prevent more diseases than my infirmary can cure," he admitted. "A terrible conclusion for any healer's professional importance."
The sewers ran through separate channels to treatment areas far from the river. Waste rested in covered pits, where ash, straw, and time turned it into manure before any use in the fields. Clean-water wells stood uphill and far from those areas. Rhoslyn paid men to inspect the systems weekly, because no modern design would survive if everyone considered maintenance another person's work.
The first ring of walls began enclosing the administrative center and the area reserved for the castle. By the end of the year, long stretches still ended in scaffolds, earth ramps, and piles of numbered blocks. The completed sections reached between five and six meters in height, but towers, battlements, and inner corridors remained open to the sky. Only one gate could be closed with portcullises and iron-clad doors; the second used reinforced timber while the masons worked around it. The foundations would allow the entire structure to be raised and thickened in the years ahead.
The designs called for round towers to better withstand impacts and eliminate blind corners. For now, only four tower bases rose above the ground. Behind the usable stretches, grain stores were divided by firebreak walls. The heavy forge was kept far from the stables. Cisterns occupied separate points so a single collapse or poisoning could not doom the entire stronghold.
The outer city wall advanced far more slowly. We marked the perimeter and opened ditches where the ground allowed. Earthworks, palisades, and wooden towers protected the occupied districts, while permanent stone concentrated upon the two gates and less than half a mile of the most vulnerable stretches. In the years ahead, masons would replace the timber without leaving the population exposed during construction.
Perseus requested corridors wide enough for soldiers to move without crushing servants. Belzakar demanded stairs that did not force armed men to break formation. Morghaz succeeded in having the area intended for the future training yard leveled first and added provisional courses of mud, stones, ditches, and logs. Kevin designed platforms for archers at different heights, then argued with Razdhan for two days over which positions offered protection without restricting the field of fire once the towers were raised.
Eldric requested few changes. He wanted record rooms without outer windows, doors that revealed signs of tampering, and a system under which important messages never depended upon a single person. He asked for no mazes, hidden cells, or corridors that allowed men to listen behind walls.
Eldric raised the lantern to illuminate the narrow opening disappearing beneath an old wall. Recent marks lay in the dust, left by the masons who had measured it, but they were enough to make him frown.
"Seal this tunnel as well," he requested. "We will retain only two emergency exits, both known, guarded, and inspected. If we preserve twenty old passages, any man who finds a map will possess a door into the castle."
Rhoslyn planned construction according to costs, materials, and the number of people capable of working at once. She repeated measurements to simplify the cutting of doors and beams, grouped workshops using the same resources, and divided the work into stages that could function without depending upon the completion of those that followed.
After comparing the quarries' progress, the time needed to dry timber, the production of lime, and the number of experienced masons, she estimated eight years to complete the castle. The deadline assumed open roads, tolerable winters, and no prolonged interruption. During the first year, we did not waste weeks arguing over the appearance of towers that did not yet possess walls. Every drawing remained subject to what we found beneath the ground and what the workshops proved capable of producing.
By the end of the eleventh moon, roughly three-fifths of the old Dreadfort had disappeared.
The torture chambers, lower cells, and towers bearing Bolton symbols were pulled down first. A dry wing beside the old wall remained as a provisional residence and administrative center. Parts of the old defenses would continue standing until the new walls reached enough height to replace them. I would not risk thousands of lives merely to declare the demolition complete a few years earlier.
We cleaned the usable blocks from the stone of the Red Kings and placed them in the heart of the foundations, in the drainage channels, and beneath the roads. New mortar and compacted earth hid much of the old material before any permanent wall rose upon it.
None of the castle's great buildings stood ready. Kitchens, storehouses, armory, infirmary, and barracks remained in temporary structures or reused wings of the old Dreadfort. Of the central citadel, only foundations, service galleries, and cellars existed, still surrounded by scaffolding. The great hall was no more than markings, trenches, and blocks accumulated beside the crane ramps. If the pace held, seven years of labor still separated us from the estimated completion.
Mara, the first woman to strike the dungeon tower, received the hammer once more when we removed the stone where the flayed man's banner used to hang. Masons, soldiers, widows, and former servants gathered around her.
When the block fell, the workers struck their hammers against the stones. The sound crossed the new walls as Mara handed the tool to the mason waiting beside her.
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[ One Year Later ]
I climbed the eastern tower of the old Dreadfort before dawn.
It was one of the Bolton structures kept standing to serve as a watchtower while we built. From there, the future castle still looked like what it truly was: an immense design marked across the ground by foundations, channels, ramps, and rows of scaffolding. No new hall stood ready. None of the principal towers had risen beyond its first stories. My chambers remained in a hastily repaired old wing, smaller than the space reserved for Rhoslyn's archives. The provisional areas functioned, and the old defenses protected what the new walls could not yet enclose.
Water ran through the channels without invading the foundations. Steam escaped in thin threads from the bathhouses and infirmary. The granaries held the first complete harvest. Beyond the inner wall, houses of wood, brick, and stone formed provisional districts around the markets. Broad streets had side channels, marked wells, and privies kept far from clean water. Where the outer wall had not yet reached, ditches and palisades cut across the landscape.
Farther below, beside the Weeping Water, two stone quays and several wooden moorings received shallow-drafted barges. Only the dredged stretch and the waters below the castle could be used regularly; mudbanks and narrow bends still prevented larger vessels from reaching the Dreadfort. Cranes powered by men and horses unloaded timber, lime, food, and tools. Four warehouses already operated, a small shipyard built riverboats, and workers continued deepening the channel. The road between the port, quarries, and castle was the first to receive durable paving, because no tower would rise if its stones sank into the mud before arriving.
The first-shift bell rang in the workshops.
A little more than nine thousand people had settled around the works, though Rhoslyn still argued with the scribes over how many intended to remain. Approximately twelve hundred houses shared the districts with workers' dormitories, inns, and family lodgings. Most had been built by the inhabitants themselves upon marked plots, using subsidized timber, brick, or stone. Taverns, bathhouses, workshops, and a central market occupied the oldest streets, while new construction continued advancing along the channels.
Men and women crossed the bridges toward furnaces, mines, weaving halls, sawmills, and yards. Some had been born beneath the Boltons. Others came from Winterfell, White Harbor, distant hills, and the alleys of King's Landing. The women who had left Craster were among them. The eldest who had spoken to me at Winterfell now managed the production of cheese and wool in three villages; the young woman with the child bound to her chest trained midwives beside Qyburn.
Perseus was already leaving the gate with a heavy patrol. His guards wore armor produced in our workshops and gray cloaks without any mark of human skin. Belzakar led a company along the road from the training field, correcting the distance between ranks. Morghaz waited in the yard with both arms free and a smile that promised suffering to late recruits.
Over the year, they had formed twelve hundred permanent soldiers, besides village militias that trained during appointed periods without abandoning the harvests. That total included two hundred and fifty archers and scouts under Kevin and one hundred and eighty men assigned by Perseus to the household guard and heavy patrols. The hills received wooden watchtowers and agreed signals; replacing them with stone would wait until roads, bridges, and granaries ceased requiring every available mason.
Razdhan crossed the storehouses with two inventory tablets, checking reserves for winter before the scribes arrived. Kevin returned from a night patrol accompanied by scouts and three wagons of hunters. He stopped beneath the tower only to shout that he still had not received the mattress he had been promised, though I knew he possessed two.
Eldric did not appear in the yard. One archive door stood open, a sign that he had begun work before the first bell.
Rhoslyn appeared upon the stairs behind me, carrying a thick book against her chest.
"If you came to collect the first payment, remember that my father promised to wait until we had reserves for two winters," I warned, resting my arms upon the battlement.
"I did not come to collect," she replied, stopping beside me. "I came to keep you from staring at the horizon and imagining that counts as work."
She opened the book upon the stone.
The iron mines already produced more than we consumed. Coal supplied the furnaces and had begun traveling to White Harbor. Gold remained under controlled extraction, but had paid its own expenses and financed new supports. The fairs had tripled traffic upon the roads. Mortality at the works had fallen after the new rules. Taxes, though reduced, exceeded the last reliable Bolton records because fewer coins disappeared between village and vault.
Four principal quarries supplied the works. Eighteen lime kilns burned outside the districts, and three water-driven sawmills cut beams to repeated measurements. Potteries produced bricks, tiles, and drainage pipes. Fifty-two miles of roads had been restored, along with eight bridges and communal granaries in chosen villages. The experimental strips improved by drainage, irrigation, and selected seeds surpassed neighboring properties by a little more than one-tenth. A complete rotation would require another harvest before demonstrating its value.
Rhoslyn turned the page and showed me the total cost of the first year: four hundred and two thousand, eight hundred and seventeen dragons. Winterfell's public fund had financed the first two hundred thousand, including Rhaegar's secret contribution. The other two hundred and two thousand, eight hundred and seventeen had come from my fortune. Machines, quarries, and workshops had consumed one portion; demolition, castle, walls, and gates the largest; port, roads, housing, agriculture, soldiers, and administration completed the sum.
Money had not been the limit. Each month we had waited for cut stone, dry timber, finished lime, wagons, boats, and arms capable of doing the work without dying beneath it.
I ran my finger along the figures until I found the line corresponding to my fortune.
"How much remains under my seal at Winterfell?" I asked, following the decimal places Rhoslyn had checked three times.
"Four million, seven hundred and eighty-four thousand, five hundred and ninety-nine dragons," she replied without consulting the page. "The reconstruction fund has been consumed, and every new work will use your gold or the income produced by the domain."
I closed the book halfway and looked at the incomplete towers beyond the battlement. The money would last for many years, provided I did not mistake possessing a fortune for possessing unlimited workers, stone, and time.
"My father will ask how much we continue to hold before asking how much we spent," I remarked, allowing a brief smile to escape. "He knows my tendency to find projects before finding limits."
"Lord Rickard raised you," Rhoslyn observed, closing the book. "That is why he demanded records."
We descended when the sun reached the walls.
In the yard, Tobho shouted at an apprentice for heating a bar too quickly. Qyburn crossed the infirmary followed by two young women repeating the names of herbs. Kevin handed his report to Perseus, Belzakar moved the new recruits away from the course chosen by Morghaz, and Razdhan argued with an overseer about three sacks of barley present in the books and absent from the storehouse. The responsibilities distributed at Winterfell had mingled with the castle's daily workings.
Fenrir and Hela waited before the path to the Heart Tree Grove, but I did not follow while Rhoslyn remained with me.
We spent the rest of the morning among the workshops, storehouses, and port. Only after nightfall, when the last shift returned to the lodgings, did I leave the old wing through a side door and find the wolves at the edge of the trees.
We entered the grove in secret. The saplings planted by Leaf and Coal had survived the cold. Oaks and pines encircled small clearings; channels of water reflected the moon between pale stones. The young weirwoods possessed red leaves and faces that were still shallow. At the center, the ancient heart of the hill was covered in new shoots.
Leaf knelt beside the roots. Coal was finishing the carving of a young tree's face. The obsidian knife removed thin shavings from the white wood, opening eyes that seemed closed. No human voice reached us from the city. To everyone but me, that grove had grown at Arthur Stark's command through the work of gardeners who were never seen.
I stopped beside Coal and studied the newly opened face in the white wood. Its eyes still seemed closed, but something in the expression made the question sound less absurd than it should have.
"Will it wake?" I asked, following the white shavings falling beside the roots.
"It is already awake," Coal replied. "It is only learning to see."
Leaf touched the ground. The leaves above us trembled though no wind crossed the clearing.
"The roots still find blood," Leaf said, gathering a little dark earth between her fingers. "Now they find water running along new paths."
Fenrir lay before the ancient weirwood. Hela settled beside him, her muzzle upon her paws. Leaf moved among the saplings, checking roots and leaves, while Coal cleaned the obsidian blade. Not even the women from Craster's lands knew of their presence.
From the top of the hill, the open foundations, unfinished tower bases, and hundreds of scaffolds could be seen between the branches. Smoke from the furnaces stained the sky to the east. Wagons creaked along the roads, bells divided the shifts, and hammers struck metal in different rhythms.
Coal finished the final cut. The young weirwood's eyes opened upon the construction site.
In the distance, the night-shift bell rang along the unfinished walls. Guards changed posts, cranes were secured, and the final wagons passed through the gate. The portcullises descended while the newly carved eyes of the weirwood remained fixed upon the work.