Chapter 29: Lord of Lands

I had wanted to be able to offer Daenerys the option of having her daughter be born under a different name, Drogo’s perhaps, but I had told Robert how I killed Drogo before they were wed in the eyes of the Dothraki. Nor had the original wedding had a septon or heart tree, so it was not recognized in Westeros. Robert had added one more humiliation to Dany, one more nail in her family’s coffin; her daughter was born a bastard.

Lila Rivers, she was named.

It was a pretty name, and she would, I’m sure, grow up to be a pretty girl. Drogo had been no dog, and Dany had the sort of fine cheekbones and pronounced bone structure you’d expect from generations of royals inbreeding and selecting only the finest beauties to mate with.

The birth was easy – I was there, how could it be otherwise – but even if I hadn’t been there Dany would have been fine. I was relieved to find that because so many of the physical enchantments and upgrades were Green, and birth was natural, that the enchanted Dany had an easier time with birth, rather than a harder one. That meant I was off the hook for helping birth all of Robert, Robb, Jon, Sansa and Arya’s children in the future.

With the baby born I was largely freed up from waiting around in the castle just in case there was a medical emergency. There was a six hundred square mile forest to the south east of Harrenhal, in between the God’s Eye and the Kingsroad. A band of robbers had infested it, and though the Guard had improved greatly, they were still over-extended enough to have trouble searching such a large forest.

I needed to take a break and balance out my mana anyways. It had been getting a little White heavy, especially after I bound four more mana from Harrentown on my visits there. So I was going to head to the forest for three weeks to hunt bandits and bond Green mana. Then I was going to travel back slowly along the God’s Eye and bond some Blue for two weeks.

After that was done I planned to check back in at Harrenhal, then go up to the North with Jon to visit and upgrade Robb, Bran, Rickon and Catelyn. I envisioned a stop off in the Neck for a couple weeks on the way south to balance out my Blacks. Then I intended to visit the foothills of the Vale’s mountains for about a week to get some Reds and be back into a full balance.

I checked in with my projects before leaving to make sure there weren’t any emergencies. The Valyrian steel project had stabilized at around five thousand dragons a month from the auction and a further fifteen hundred from the item. That meant a total of seventy eight thousand dragons a year in profit, which was great. My agricultural project was still mostly in the breeding stage, and would start to take real effect first on my own lands, then my territory’s, in a few years.

The paper project under Wisdom Munciter was starting to bear fruit. They’d been experimenting with different ways to make paper from cotton, linen and hemp fibers and rags. The paper was still poor quality, but they were quickly dialing in on how to make better quality paper, and how to do so in bulk. I anticipated that by the time I was done with my mana-binding they’d have a preliminary paper mill design for me.

On the printing side, they already had an effective ink formula, and the smiths were slowly finishing a sufficiently large collection of metal rollers and type. Instead of the vertical screw press, we were using a cylindrical rolling press. They were a lot faster, and better to adapt into future designs which could be more mechanical. I anticipated that the printer would be done in time for the large-scale paper production.

The more generalized steel-works, with a blast furnace and Bessemer converter, were still largely in the planning stages. I had purchasing agents out collecting and storing enough raw ingredients and metal scrap to keep us running when the production actually started. The agents had a budget of fifteen thousand dragons, and had actually slightly inflated the price of iron goods throughout the Riverlands.

The archery project was going well so far. General enthusiasm was high, and a vast number of children were avidly practicing. I intended my first book to be useful for my farmers. It would include a guide to archery practice and some training exercises I used, information on hygiene, herbalism and nutrition, and a guide to four-crop rotation and companion planting to improve agricultural yields.

Hue was at Harrenhal. In case there was an emergency there, he would be able to warn me. Ned and Robert had a pair of my Gangari Guard Ravens to carry a message to Harrenhal in case the capital caught fire or what have you. Nevermore was still off in Winterfell, and so it was just Mu, Togo, Aethon and I going to the forest.

Everything taken care of, I set out from Harrenhal for my vacation in the forest.

Did I say vacation? I totally meant my dutifully lordly bandit hunt.

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I was not a great woodsman. I hadn’t trained much for it, and didn’t spend much time stalking the woods for prey. Luckily I had Togo and Mu, so I didn’t have to be a great hunter to find the bandits, and Aethon was surefooted and stealthily minded enough for the both of us. I ended up finding the bandits after about a week had passed. Rather than shoot them all with arrows, which I was tempted to do from habit, I gave chain lightning a test fire.

It was highly effective. Zapped humans smelled disturbingly like bacon though, which was a bit disturbing. I’d hardly kept my hands clean of blood since coming to Westeros, but the red burned flesh, vacant and exploded eyeballs, the rictus of horror on the faces of the dead…

It was quite the shock to the system, I thought. Gods, I was already using puns to distance myself. Talk about gallows humor.

Togo went off for a day to take out any of their scouts who had escaped my strike, and I finished off binding a total of more than thirty Green mana. It was a… heady feeling. All that nature, all that wild, joyful life and conflict and growth. I took a couple days to calm down a bit, just sleeping and meditating.

Then I went to the outer bank of the God’s Eye, and did that same process all over again with Blue mana. It went somewhat faster than with the Green, and two weeks later I finally rode off to Harrenhal with an extra thirty Blue mana under my control.

Then Jon, Shadowfax and Ghost joined us to go to Winterfell. We decided not to waste any time, and made it to the Stark’s seat in two and a half days of heavy riding on the Kingsroad. It was nice to see the Stark boys again; Robb had grown a lot mentally as the man of the castle, as it were, and both Bran and Rickon had shot up.

Perhaps most interestingly, Bran had a strong taste of magic to him. Jon had a fair bit of warg magic, Arya only a little less, but Bran was positively glowing with it. I had no idea how to use those energies, unfortunately, and no real desire to become a warg otherwise I might have been able to help Bran with his abilities. He had been having strange dreams involving a man in a tree with roots growing out of his skin, and three eyed ravens.

To be honest that sounded suspicious as fuck.

I mean, what kind of ancient sorcerer visits the dreams of a preteen boy with good intentions? This wasn’t some children’s book where the plucky boy hero has to save the day because reasons. This was reality; there was precious fuck all Bran could achieve that the good wizard of bloody roots couldn’t do himself. And this guy didn’t sound like he was made of rainbows and sunshine either.

I upgraded Robb, Bran, Rickon, and Catelyn with a full set of enhancements, much like Jon and Ned. I held the supernaturally strong and fast physique back from Bran and Rickon. Rickon would have driven Catelyn mad otherwise, and I wasn’t risking a body I’d fully enhanced getting stolen by some potential body-snatcher.

I had hoped that the conceptual armor would be effective, but it proved to be less than useful in stopping the dreams. Which either meant that the armor didn’t consider the dreams an attack, or sufficiently harmful, or something; I didn’t know, and was hardly equipped to scientifically explore the parameters and functions of my poorly understood magic.

While I was there I could easily swat away probes coming in to Bran, their gossamer energies no match for my mana. But I couldn’t figure out how to ward Bran’s mind without also blocking off his ability to warg. I could use my comm link through the ward just fine when I tested it on myself. For Bran, the annoying dreams were worth it to be able to share skins with Summer, his direwolf.

I was worried. I decided to upgrade Ser Rodrick and two dozen other loyal, life-long Stark guardsmen with everything but for the Supernatural Physique, of which I only used a minor portion. I included the mental ward for them, as none were wargs. I turned their ravens into Gangari Guard Ravens, though with Stark markings, similarly warded. Frankly, this sort of mental-mage crap scared the shit out of me, and every single one of my Guard-variant animals back home were going to get warded as soon as possible.

I enhanced enough horses into Guard Horses to be able to provide mounts and spares for the Stark family and their enhanced guards, and turned every hunting dog they had into Gangari Guard Hounds. Again, I used Stark markings and mental wards for the horses and hounds.

Their direwolves were enhanced to match Togo. Nevermore was assigned to watch over Bran in particular, and to warn me if anything went wrong. And at that point I had to call it enough. Though after I knighted Jon in a year or two I’d definitely offer Bran a place as my squire; it was easier than worrying about him so much.

Apart from that oh-so-minor issue, and Catelyn’s constant sniping at Jon, the visit was lovely.

Really, why didn’t I go on vacation more often?

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On the way back Jon declined to stay with me and meditate for weeks in the swamps and hills, which wasn’t really surprising. He preferred to go back to Harrenhal, where he was respected and appreciated, and have his ego recover from the mauling Catelyn had subjected it to.

I couldn’t blame him. Meditating in and around swamps for a fortnight wasn’t exactly my definition of a good time either. But I sucked it up and bound my Black mana. I didn’t use them for much, and wasn’t really a fan of the style or concepts in Black magic. But I felt like it was important to be balanced.

After binding the Black mana I crossed back through to the South, then travelled along the foothills of the Vale for a week, bonding two mana each day.

With all that done, I was perfectly in balance. It was a good feeling, like when you step out of an airplane and pop your ears of that slight bit of pressure you couldn’t get rid of, or when you stretch out and accidentally get rid of some tightly wound knots that were bothering you deep in your subconscious.

After a day of meditating on the feeling, it was time. Time to try and bind mana with a spell, rather than with my direct interface. I was excited. I sat down, reached out my magic into a sort of net, targeting the nearest mana-sources while adding in new mana in proportion to maintain balance. Then I cast the spell out.

And it worked! First time too, it was so easy!

No more spending large periods of time binding mana.

No more having to voyage long and far to find the mana needed to balance myself out.

Even better, after I tied the spell into an enchantment, set to keep a certain pressure of new-mana, it was basically automated! It wasn’t a true enchantment, more a stable spell that was permanently looped into my mana supply with some controls added on, but unless I ran my mana totally dry, it would stay there forever. Even if I dried out, I could just recast the spell.

This was a true watershed moment. I bound seven mana that first day, when previously it was vanishingly rare for me to bind three, and that only when I was taking Blue with which I had the highest resonance. As my mana pool grew, and the relative impact of the new mana on the old became smaller, I’d be able to bind even more mana than that.

But even at just seven mana a day, over a year that would be two thousand five hundred and fifty five mana! Nearly ten times what I had when I achieved my balancing.

In fact, I needed a proper name for that moment.

The Great Balancing.

Catchy, right?

It even fell on the first of July. Or, rather, what my all-speak defined as the first of July.

I hoped my alchemists could make good graph paper soon; I needed to plot my mana growth and try to derive an expression for it in the future.

But this spell was huge. Huger than huge, even. I’d be able to grow in power at close to three times the rate that I did previously, and grow in power every day rather than just on days when I set time aside to bind mana.

At that moment, the Great Balancing, with two hundred and seventy six mana available, I could comfortably destroy a couple towers or gatehouses per mana cycling, which was down to about three minutes. Of course, that was if I basically converted mana to raw energy and tossed it about; backed up by better weight and cleverness of concepts, or working within natural laws of physics more intelligently I could do a lot better.

But twenty five hundred mana? That was more at the point of asking myself if I want a whole castle crispy, or extra crispy.

I really needed to figure out how to teleport, and find some piece of wasted land no one cared about my destroying. There was no way in hell I could test the sort of spells that would make full use of that much mana near to civilization, especially not civilization that I owned.

Come to think of it, teleportation might be a good first step to getting back home. I hadn’t been able to manage it when I was starting out, and had given up on it pretty early.

I set my focus to a distant hill, and tried to teleport there.

I must have stood there contorting my face in concentration for a good hour before I gave it up for the day. But my instinct was that I could manage it, somehow. And I would keep trying until I succeeded.

After all, I had all the time in the world.