"But when we went to White Harbor to buy ships, we left the children behind," I pointed out.
"But we were only gone for two sennights," he countered. "A trip to Queenscrown would take much longer, Cat. Plus, who knows how long we'd stay for the ceremonies; at least a sennight, maybe more."
"Hmm," I gave a dissatisfied hum. "What if… what if we invite them to have the wedding here?" I asked.
"In Winterfell?"
"We could make it a part of the Harvest Feast," I said, growing more enthusiastic. "All the lords in the North would be there, Ned, and we could say the usual tourney is in their honor!"
"Hmm," Ned leaned back in his chair and stroked his beard. After a while, he nodded. "I'll send them a raven and ask. If they agree, we'll hold the wedding here."
"Excellent!" I half-cheered. "Oh, I'm so happy for Benjen; Dacey will make a fine wife for him!"
"She is the best choice," Ned agreed. "Not only is she a warrior in her own right, but her Uncle is also the Lord Commander of the Night's Watch."
"Creating stronger bonds of loyalty between Castle Black and Queenscrown," I nodded. "Yes… oh, I hope they accept."
"All we can do is ask."
"So what do you think?" I asked Garalt as he looked at the new machine I presented to him. The bathhouse was still under construction, and with little else to do, I'd taken to tinkering. Eventually, I'd need more precise tools so I could use some of the earliest forms of precision manufacturing. So, I was presenting my current design to the old carpenter.
"It's a lathe," he replied, a bit nonplussed.
"Ah, but this one is a bit different," I told him. "This foot pedal is what turns whatever you're carving, and see the tracks here? The blade slides along them like so; all you have to do is turn this crank."
"Hmm," he hummed with moderate interest.
"And the arm here moves like this, see?" I pointed out, moving the arm around and locking it in place with a hand screw. "This way, you can carve along the inside of an object as well as the outside. Plus, see this other crank?"
I turned the crank and watched as the blade moved closer to the track, then turned it the other way and watched it move away.
"You can control how deep your cuts are. With this, you have a lot more control over where the blade is positioned while you're working."
"I see," Garalt replied, looking a bit more impressed than before. "These are some clever improvements to the lathe, milady."
"Thank you," I smiled back at him. "Now I just need to figure out how to make a strong enough blade to trim steel!"
"Best of luck with that," Garalt replied with some teasing in his voice.
As much as I liked the design for my bathhouses, I felt that torches, braziers, or lamps wouldn't provide the right type of atmosphere I wanted. No, I'd rather have natural sunlight, at least during the day, but given the weather, I didn't want the baths open to the air. So that meant glass.
The problem was that glass had to be imported from Myr, and was terribly expensive. So, I decided to make my own.
Given that I already had blast furnaces, I could use a very similar setup to melt sand into glass. As much as I wanted to make soda-lime glass, the simplest method relies on using the ashes of sodium-rich plants, which typically grow in arid environments. As an interesting side note, our word 'alkali', the word for caustic bases, was derived from the Arabic word 'al kali', their word for the ashes of the… I forget, but some desert scrub brush.
If suitable land plants were not available, it was also possible to use ocean plants, such as kelp, to make soda ash. However, there were no arid areas near Winterfell, and we were far enough from the ocean that carting seaweed or the ash from seaweed was impractical.
However, I was already gathering wood ash from Winter Town for my soap-making business. After the collapse of the Roman empire, most of Europe lost access to the Niter salts that the Romans used to make soda-lime glass, and the desert plants were in the hands of the Caliphates in the Middle East, North Africa, and Iberia. Instead, they used what they had on hand; wood ash. The difference was that caustic soda, also called lye, was primarily sodium hydroxide, whereas the lye from wood ashes was mostly potassium hydroxide. In this case, the difference between the two was relatively minor, except that the 'forest glass', as the glass made from wood ashes was called, usually had a faint greenish or yellowish tint.
Making an oven capable of melting the materials together wasn't difficult, given my experience with blast furnaces, but I knew I'd run into problems making flat panes. I could use one or more of the traditional methods, such as blowing large cylinders, cutting them open, and laying them flat, or simply flattening glass between two flat surfaces such as polished steel sheets, but those resulted in uneven or wavy textures. So instead, I decided to implement a non-continuous float glass method.
I acquired a quantity of tin and melted it in a large rectangular pan. When the glass was sufficiently molten, the molten glass was poured over the molten tin. Since tin was denser than glass, the glass would float on it and would flatten under its own weight. While not optically perfect, it was close enough for anything short of glasses or telescopes.
And so, I started making panes of glass to make skylights for the baths, giving the rooms bright natural lighting during the daytime.
And once that was done, I would finally start constructing new glasshouses. There wasn't room inside the castle walls for more, but some relatively flat land near Winter Town would work nicely.
"Welcome to Winterfell's bathhouse," I told Ned as I led him into the moderately sized building. There were two doors outside; one with a vague silhouette of a person in a dress (and labeled "women") and another with a silhouette of a man (labeled "men"). Given the social mores of Westeros, mixed bathing was not something that would be widely accepted.
Ned stepped into the men's side right behind me. A wall to our right and ahead of us would keep anyone standing outside the door from being able to see in, since this first room was a changing room. Low wooden benches sat in front of shelves full of cubby holes where people could leave their clothes. The floor was textured concrete, which should hopefully limit slips and falls.
"This is the changing room," I told him. "Simply remove your clothes and leave them in one of the cubbies."
"Sensible," Ned commented. He glanced around the room, saw me starting to take off my dress, looked away, then did a double take. "Cat?! What are you doing?"
"Getting ready to bathe," I replied, feigning confusion.
"But as you said, this is the men's side!"
"Oh, no one will be in here," I told him. "Alyn will keep anyone else out until we're done."
"But… I…"
I gave him a tiny smirk as I folded my dress and put it in the cubby. "What, do you not want to bathe with your wife?"
Ned frowned. "Of course I do, but this isn't appropriate."