Chapter 24: New Lands

Ned came by in the morning to record my house words. I went with “Thy Will Be Done”. The overt Westerosi meaning was to be obedient and dutiful to m­­y overlords, the Tullys, and my king Robert. The more hidden meaning was a reference to my magic powers. And the reference to the Lord’s Prayer was a reminder not to lose myself and my morals. I had no desire to demonstrate the concept of absolute power corrupting absolutely, after all.

I looked at Ned warily. “So now that you’ve managed to force a lordship on me, what’s next? Going to try and get me wed?” I sarcastically asked.

Ned was looking at me with the particular face he used when something was hilarious and he was not laughing because Starks are serious. A shiver went down my back and I bolted upright.

“No!” I protested.

He couldn’t help it and grinned. “I’ve already had someone approach me about that, as it so happens.” He paused long enough to really wind me up, then continued. “Arya decided that if she had to marry someone it was going to be you.” At that, I knew he was joking.

“Oh, you jackass!” I exclaimed. “You had me so worried for a moment.”

Ned chuckled. “But seriously, if you aren’t wed by the time she’s sixteen, we’ll be having this talk again.” He raised a hand to stop my protest. “I know how you feel about marriage; you explained the customs of your homeland, and I haven’t forgotten. But ten years difference is not too long, not when I suspect you will live far longer than any ordinary man. For your own sensibilities you can be betrothed when she’s sixteen, and wed when she’s eighteen so long as her feelings don’t change. But Odysseus, you are one of the few men with whom she might be able to live a happy life,” he finished, pleading somewhat.

I sighed heavily. “Fine. If, if I’m still unmarried in four and a half years we can go ahead with your plan, at least to the point of Arya and I talking about it.”

Stark smiled and clapped me on the shoulder. “Thank you, Odysseus. That is a great weight off of my shoulders. What are your thoughts on Harrenhal?” he asked, gesturing to the documents and maps I was looking at.

Honestly, I had been pissed off a bit about being given Harrenhal at first; it felt like settling down, giving up on going home. But then I realized it might be nice to have a home in Westeros. Once I figured out how to get home I’d almost certainly be able to travel back and forth at will, and being the undisputed lord of a fief could be fun.

Still, I groaned. “You know giving me that place was adding an extra job for me to do. That place is a mess.”

And it was. Harrenhal was designed to be a royal seat, and even then it was overly large. Winterfell was a massive fortress and could host over ten thousand troops and as many civilians in a siege in reasonable comfort. Harrenhal was three times larger. The godswood alone was twenty acres, all of it inside the walls.

Winterfell needed a minimum patrol on the walls of about fifty men to detect a surprise attack, and needed about two hundred more to hold the walls properly. Two shifts to alternate sleeping and fighting and taking into account the strength and height of the walls meant that a garrison of five hundred was able to keep Winterfell safe from twenty times their number.

Harrenhal needed almost as many soldiers as a full combat shift at Winterfell just to patrol the walls properly. It should be properly garrisoned by at the very least a thousand troops. A good garrison would include two thousand foot and five hundred horse. From the latest figures, they had only two hundred guardsmen and less than a half-dozen household knights.

Everything was such a larger scale there, that monstrous edifice of a concentric castle on steroids. Harrenhal was meant to be a royal capital, not a lord’s seat, and without those extra revenues it was next to impossible to run the place properly. Then add in the fact that so much damage was caused and never fixed after the castle was burned by dragonfire, the rumored curse from the workers whose blood had been mixed into the stones and mortar, the fact that old Lady Whent had been mostly incapable of properly managing her territory for years… honestly, my “reward” was more of a punishment.

Still, I’d make it work. It was my responsibility, after all, and I wasn’t going to leave the thousands of people that lived on what were now my lands in the lurch.

Was I going to cheat like fucking crazy with magic? You’d better believe it.

My first priority was agriculture and the food supply. Initially I’d just give a boost to what the farmers were already doing; add Green to make hardier, healthier plants and animals and White to ward away pests. Then I’d introduce fully upgraded fruits and vegetables, first to my own castle for a year or two to really optimize them, then to my farmers. I’d also be requiring my farmers to use Four Field rotation, and start the enclosure movement soon. I had plans for aquaculture too; Harrenhal bordered the God’s Eye lake, and fish farms are highly productive with large protein yields. All of that would take time though.

Part of improving the agriculture would include improving the tools used, which tied into the second thrust I was planning, metallurgy. Given that I had the secret to Valyrian steel, I had no doubt that I could make my lands a center for Westeros’ smiths. I also knew how to make blast furnaces and Bessemer converters, so I could manage plentiful, cheap steel. Granted, actually making those would be very difficult if it weren’t for the fact I could shape and improve stone materials. I’d make sure to spend some time designing better plows, seed drills, harvesters and the like too.

Apart from metals and food, I was planning on one more industry: books. I wanted a paper mill and printing press. Large amounts of paper was actually likely to be the bottleneck there, but I was hoping that a half-dozen alchemists and some guidance from me might make it work.

Even better for my future industry, my lands were connected by river to King’s Landing which meant I could export easily. Someday Harrenhal would be productive and powerful. I would have the last laugh.

But most of that was for the future. My beginnings would be much more humble. And the very first step was to raise some serious funds. Luckily, there was a product that I could produce quite easily that was literally invaluable: Valyrian steel. I just needed a few good smiths to sign on with me. I still had the lion’s share of the gold I had won in the Tourney, about eight-hundred dragons, and I was sure that the Harrenhal vaults held more, so paying them wouldn’t be an issue.

I even had an idea as to who to visit first: Tobho Mott, and his apprentice, the king’s bastard Gendry Waters. When investigating Arryn’s death Ned had come across Gendry, and been impressed with his skills. Apart from being a lord, Ned was a well-trained warrior and had an eye for quality equipment. Anyone good enough for the Lord of Winterfell was good enough for me, at least until I revolutionized the industry.

Luckily Gendry and his master were willing to have him come work for me. I recruited another two journeymen level smiths who seemed skilled and worked for well-reputed masters, and gave them money to buy whatever equipment and supplies they would need at Harrenhal that wasn’t already available there. I asked Lord Stark to look over their preparations then left with Jon and Dany (short for Daenerys) for Harrenhal.

Unlike when travelling in Essos, I wanted to be there faster rather than take the chance to gain mana, so we travelled at a good pace all day, making the four hundred miles or so by noon the following day. We passed by my new town, Harrentown, and its four and a half thousand inhabitants along the way.

My new lands were fairly extensive, stretching from about forty miles west of Harrenhal over to the Kingsroad about eighty miles the east of my castle, and going from about twenty miles north of Harrenhal down to about 250 miles south. Of course, most of my southern area was occupied by the God’s Eye lake and the Isle of Faces, the latter of which was exempted from my control.

My lands were relatively productive agriculturally and fairly densely settled; all in all, I had a population of some four-hundred thousand. This included nine subordinate houses of landed knights and their lands, as well as the town of God’s Tears where the God’s Eye river starts. The rest of the population were scattered about in fishing and farming hamlets and villages.

The decent supplies of food and relatively clean fresh water meant that my peasants tended to be fairly healthy; the weak leadership in previous years meant that banditry was starting to become more prevalent. There was a decent sized piece of woods to Harrenhal’s south-east which came close to the Kingsroad; the bandits seemed to use it to raid my villages and travelers depending on their circumstances. I looked forward to collecting more Green mana and hunting the bandits at the same time.

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When we arrived, Dany was just about ready to kill me. She was pregnant and moody, and though relieved to be in my care was somewhat upset by the fact that I could do anything I wanted to her and there’d be no recourse. She trusted me not to abuse that authority, but it was still a difficult situation to digest, especially for a pregnant teen. Dany had had quite enough of riding, and was glad to be done with it. Though not, it seemed, glad to be at Harrenhal.

I couldn’t blame her. The place was a fucking disaster zone. Living there was like living in a building that had been hit by a hurricane and never properly repaired; it was better than living in the natural wild, but hardly pleasant on the mind. The half-melted stone was disturbing, but the gnarled, twisted, leaning towers were legitimately worrying.

Stone castles tended to settle over time, sinking very, very slowly into the ground. If the towers shifted much more, the whole damned things could come down. It wasn’t like the stone was reinforced by rebar or anything either. Just mortar, which meant that any and all structural integrity was really coming from the fact that everything was under compressive loading. Add shear to the mortal like the towers were experiencing from their tilts, and I gave our materials at most fifty years more until something went catastrophically wrong.

It took Harren forty years and all the money in the Riverlands to build my castle; there was no way in hell I’d be able to fix it soon enough to feel comfortable – it didn’t matter how much money I used, how many Valyrian blades I made and sold.

No, looking at that mess, I realized it was time to fess up to being a wizard, and get my magic on.

The fact that the fortress was legitimately cursed didn’t help things. I had felt the sinister tendrils of Black reaching for us before being repulsed by the protections I had given us. It was a weak thing, but the ground was cursed and over time would invite misfortune for those that called it home. No wonder Harrenhal kept changing hands.

I suspected that breaking the curse would have a noticeable effect, so I figured I might as well go all out. It wasn’t like my magic was really that much of a secret, and I was strong enough by that point that I could face the assorted armies of the world and laugh. I had a hundred and fifty five mana after coming back to Westeros. That could power enough attack magic to wipe out small armies.

Further, as I had gained more and more mana I had noticed that my bonds grew deeper, more complete. I was already starting to see a noticeable degree of diminishing returns, but my mana cycle time had decreased from a little over half an hour back when I first arrived at Winterfell to about five minutes. I had plotted it out, and determined that the cycle time for mana was roughly an hour divided by the square root of the total amount of mana I had access to.

With so much raw power available, I had to fight the temptation to just use every increasing amounts of mana in crude but easy applications, rather than improving my skill and finesse alongside my power. The latter more skillful method had fewer immediate results but would allow me to go much, much further in the future.

I shuddered to think what another mage of my variety might be capable of after gathering mana for a decade, a century, a millennium. How mighty they might be.

I had conceived of the idea of creating a spell to form mana bonds. Then it would be an exponential mana-bonding curve until the whole of Planetos gave me power. By a back of the envelope calculation, assuming that Planetos was the same size and land-area as Earth, that meant that there were about fourteen point five million chunks of land that were four square miles in size, which seemed to be the size that I bound for non-improved mana sources – for example plains as contrasted to the more efficient cities. Assuming that it took five mana per new mana bond, and my mana cycled every five minutes, I could fully bond the whole world in about five hours and fifteen minutes.

That was fucking crazy. I kind of wanted to do it. I didn’t for a few reasons.

First, I was a firm believer in the twenty second rule of evil overlords: “No matter how tempted I am with the prospect of unlimited power, I will not consume any energy field bigger than my head.” I was pretty sure bonding all the mana on Planetos counted.

Second, I had noticed a sort of subconscious awareness of the land after I bonded with it. I was pretty sure that if one of my forests burned down, for example, or was cut down and a town built there, I would know. It didn’t seem that the mana I had was pressuring my mind, but it could easily be that my mind was naturally and slowly adapting to the strain. Suddenly being aware of fourteen point five million lands seemed like it might be too much.

Third, I had noticed if I bonded a lot of mana of the same sort in quick succession that I got a little crazier. Challenging khal Drogo to a fight wasn’t out of character, sure, but it was driven by the parts of my character that had been amplified by all that extra White I’d been picking up. Otherwise I’d have never decided on a semi-honorable duel. That was why I was careful to pick up even Black mana occasionally despite my general distaste for it and inefficiency using it.

I suspected that by area, Planetos was heavily skewed to White and Green, grasslands and forests, with comparatively smaller amounts of river and coastline, mountains and swamps. Granted those had higher energy densities than forests or grassland, but it still wasn’t something I wanted to leave up to chance. Even if the planet were perfectly balanced, it still might supercharge all parts of my personality. I had no desire to give myself personality disorders, I was crazy enough already.

Fourth, I wasn’t quite sure how to do it yet. I could feel the possibility for the spell, but it just wasn’t there in my mind yet. Still, whether it took ten new mana to get there or a hundred, I looked forward to having a more efficient way of gathering mana bonds. Especially if I could do so at a nice distance, and set the spell to target a specific type of bond. That would just be grand.

But even if my power curve wasn’t as explosively exponential as it might have been, it was still at least somewhat exponential. In my magical infancy, I might have gone mad bonding ten mana of a single color back to back, and if I didn’t go mad it would have been close. After returning to Westeros I could do something like that and just take a day or two off afterwards to re-center. As I gained more and more mana bonds, and grew more and more used to them, I could gain the next ones with less effect.

So again, I was left wondering how strong a true elder land-mage like myself might become. How many worlds they might call upon. How skilled their magic, how overwhelming their power.

One day I would be like that, as much above the fabled Titans as they were above the mortals of antiquity. Already I was above any of the nations on this world.

It was a heady realization, powerful and frightening in equal measure.

But that was to worry about in the future. For now, it just meant I could fix a broken castle with impunity.