Managing a domain was more fucking miserable than he had expected.
It had generally not been that way in the alternate-history novels Daemon had read in his previous life. The protagonist would be thrown back into the past or cast into an unfamiliar world, then bring out modern knowledge piece by piece. Farming methods changed, waterwheels turned, roads and workshops appeared. There might be interference along the way and a few failures, but the knowledge the protagonist produced ultimately became stairs leading forward, and even failure would become groundwork for greater success a few scenes later.
Daemon, too, had enjoyed such stories quite a bit.
After becoming a lord himself and being ground down by it for several years, he had reached a very simple conclusion.
Ah, fuck.
Of course.
Reality was never going to be like a novel.
Knowing the right answer did not mean reality obligingly moved toward it.
When he devised a good design, materials were scarce. When he acquired the materials, there was no road to transport them on. When he built a road, rain came and turned it to mud. When he gathered people, there were too few skilled workers. After spending years training craftsmen, those same men were needed for other projects as well.
And whenever he tried to solve matters with money, the most terrifying person appeared.
Valena would bring out the ledgers and ask,
"And where will that money come from?"
With that one question, several of Daemon's grand plans died quietly.
Then, once he had somehow solved everything, winter came.
That was the end of it.
After spending several years at Sea Dragon Point, the variable Daemon had come to hate most was neither people nor money.
It was the seasons.
This insane world is a mess from the seasons onward.
Even on Earth in his previous life, farming had been a battle against the weather. Droughts came, floods struck, and unexpected cold snaps and heat waves ruined crops. Still, there had at least been the broad framework of spring and summer, autumn and winter.
In Westeros, even that framework could not be trusted.
Summer could last years, and once winter arrived, no one knew whether it would endure a year, two years, or longer. In such a land, farming was not merely the technique of sowing and harvesting. It was closer to a system of survival: producing and storing as much as possible while it was warm, then enduring a cold that might never end.
At first, Daemon had looked at Sea Dragon Point's broad wetlands and entertained every sort of idea. Could he hold back the water and use it for rice paddies? Could he introduce cold-resistant crops? How could land salted by the sea be put to use?
But after beginning to meddle in farming himself and seeing with his own eyes how much food local farmers could lose because of one bad decision, he changed his mind.
Ah.
Game over.
If I meddle with this for no reason, everyone here will be sniffing incense behind a folding screen.
He was not an agronomist.
Eating plenty of rice in his previous life did not mean he knew rice cultivation, nor did liking French fries mean he knew potato varieties. Overturning knowledge accumulated by farmers here over centuries with a few scraps of half-remembered information about modern agriculture was more likely to become a plan for mass starvation than innovation.
And here, even the seasons were mad.
If he imposed Earth's crop-growing methods and misjudged the sowing season, it would not merely mean a paper was wrong. People would starve.
With agriculture, if you screw up, there isn't even a retry.
People die.
Once he understood that, his lingering attachment vanished quickly.
Farmers farmed.
People who had handled this land's soil all their lives knew it far better than he did.
There were things Daemon could do instead.
He recorded which fields grew the same crops unusually well, which plants died less when the cold came, and whether any seeds survived when disease spread, then tested them again the following year. He could not reproduce genetics or plant breeding, but farmers of this age already selected and preserved seeds with desirable traits.
What Daemon added was recordkeeping and comparison.
And fertilizer.
On that matter, more definite words remained in his mind.
Nitrogen.
Phosphorus.
Potassium.
He remembered what crops needed. The question was how to supply it cheaply and abundantly in this age.
Livestock manure and compost, ash and bone meal, legumes.
Rather than throw away what people and livestock produced, return it to the fields.
It was not perfect.
But it was possible to try.
Then, one day, as Daemon connected nitrogen and nitrates in his mind, his thoughts stopped for a moment.
Nitrates.
Again.
Nitrates.
His eyes narrowed slightly.
...Wait.
Move just a little sideways from fertilizer, and this becomes gunpowder.
Agriculture and gunpowder looked like wholly different technologies, but if one followed the line of materials they required, they met in a strangely nearby place.
Daemon folded that thought away into one corner of his mind.
Later.
For now, feeding people came first.
Killing people was not urgent yet.
Once he curbed his ambition a little in agriculture, he began to see his domain more clearly.
Sea Dragon Point was not land suited to making a vast breadbasket. There were many wetlands, the winds were cold, and good farmland was limited. But to the west stretched a long coast, linked by small bays and rivers. Fish and shellfish could be caught, and timber could be obtained from the Wolfswood.
There was no need to force advantages into existence where none existed.
He only needed to use what was there.
Instead of remaking farmland, Daemon began spending money on roads and harbors, forests and fisheries, workshops and craftsmen.
The first thing he seized upon was the road.
A new lord had arrived, there was a ruined castle, and Stark was even paying reconstruction costs. Naturally, those around him assumed he would build walls first.
Then one day, two carts carrying stone meant for the castle became stuck side by side in the same mud pit.
Daemon watched the sight for a long while.
"We start with the road."
The people around him fell silent for a moment.
Daemon asked again,
"No, really. How are we supposed to haul the stone up there?"
That settled it.
The stone for the walls, the timber, lime, and food—all of it had to move along roads. If logistics were dead, then no matter how urgently he wanted a castle erected, it could not be erected quickly.
The problem was that roads, too, refused to be built as obediently as he had hoped.
Daemon wanted a road made solely with locally available stone and labor, one whose damaged portions could easily be repaired. Recalling knowledge from his previous life, he aimed for something similar to a Macadam road: compact the roadbed, lay layers of rough stone and crushed stone, raise the center slightly so water ran off to either side, and dig drainage ditches alongside it.
The concept was simple.
The first attempt subsided beautifully.
Daemon stared for a long time at a cart whose wheel had sunk halfway into the mud.
"...We're fucked."
Raymund, standing beside him, said,
"I can see that."
"Could you not comfort me a little?"
"You made it."
"Exactly why I need comforting right now."
The roadbed had been too soft.
So in the softest places, they first laid logs, bundles of branches, and large rough stones to spread the load, then built the roadbed atop them.
This time, it held.
Until the drainage ditch clogged.
Once water seeped beneath the road, parts of it sank again.
Daemon cursed.
He widened the ditches.
Where the water ran hard, he reinforced them with stone.
This time, the stretches frequented by carts rutted faster than expected.
He changed the size of the crushed stone and the compaction method.
He repaired it.
It collapsed again.
He repaired it again.
Such trial and error continued for years.
Even later, when outsiders saw Sea Dragon Point's roads and exclaimed that they were well made, Daemon would look at those same roads and think,
Water's pooling there again.
Further along:
That stretch is shifting from the roadbed up.
To others, it was a good road.
To Daemon, it was the next list of repairs.
Still, once one road began functioning properly, everything else accelerated. More timber could be hauled, horses and oxen were injured less often, and fewer days saw the entire route cut off after rain. As a single cart could move more in a day, they could send more materials to the castle and harbor with the same manpower.
Daemon was satisfied whenever he saw it.
Infrastructure really is king.
The trouble was that building that infrastructure still consisted, in the end, of people's time.
People built the pyramids.
People built the Great Wall.
People broke, carried, and stacked stone to build great castles.
In the end, if one kept people at it long enough, results came.
Whenever such thoughts arose too naturally, Daemon felt just how deeply his graduate-school life from his former existence had marked his mind.
Well.
I learned something from Kim Jaebong too.
Heat transfer.
Experimental design.
How to write papers.
How creatively people could scramble when there was no research funding.
And the horribly simple lesson that if one ground people down for a fixed period, a result came out.
Daemon considered it for a moment.
...No, fuck.
I'm still better than that bastard, aren't I?
There was a rather important difference.
For one thing, he paid people.
He did not withhold their agreed wages.
He did not embezzle the budget and stash it away somewhere.
He did not exploit people and boast as though he alone had achieved everything.
He paid skilled workers more, halted work when the risk of accidents was high, and when someone was injured, saw to their treatment and livelihood.
And in the first place—
It's not as though I'm siphoning off domain money to go play golf.
That thought abruptly made him feel considerably better.
Right.
I'm better than Kim Jaebong.
He deliberately did not consider that the standard of comparison was far too low.
Self-justification was necessary for a person's mental health.
Of course, one could not live on self-justification alone, so he established principles of his own.
Do not grind people down beyond necessity.
If they must be worked hard, pay them properly.
Feed them well.
Let them sleep well.
Keep them from getting hurt.
Use people who have learned skills on the next project too.
And record who did what.
That has to put me in the top few percent for labor ethics, right?
A moment later:
...By medieval standards.
That gave him a little more confidence.
The castle came next.
They never managed to confirm whether the ruin atop the hill had truly been the dwelling of an ancient warg king. The local people had called it that for ages, and after searching the surviving records, the maester could only surmise that it had been a very old fortress of First Men stock.
That was enough for Daemon.
Whether a king lived there or a warg, what matters now is using it without letting it collapse.
He had no intention of restoring the old castle exactly as it had been.
Nor was he capable of designing an entirely new castle from scratch.
He had studied mechanical engineering in his previous life, not earned a doctorate in medieval fortification engineering.
Still, because he had taken an interest in history, many castles remained in his memory.
Korean mountain fortresses.
Japanese castles.
European fortifications.
Defensive structures he had seen in documentaries and books.
He did not remember precise dimensions or blueprints, but the principles remained.
Do not force the terrain to fit the castle.
Fit the walls to the terrain.
Do not let the enemy pass one gate and enter the castle at once.
Turn and narrow the approach.
Place another gate.
Make the route visible from above.
Daemon blended those principles with the fortification methods northern masons already knew.
He preserved old walls that could be saved and ran new walls along the hill's ridges. The approach did not lead straight to the inner buildings. Even after crossing a gate, one had to turn once more and pass through a confined space.
Then he added what he knew better.
Drainage.
Chimneys.
Heating.
Water storage.
White Harbor glass.
Valena gradually added Tyroshi colors and decoration to the inner living quarters.
The result was strange.
To a northerner, it was plainly a northern castle.
Yet upon entering, it felt subtly unfamiliar.
The walls curved along the mountain, and the roads were strangely inconvenient for an enemy. The interior was warmer than other northern castles, and its windows held glass made in the North.
After six years, it possessed outer walls and a gatehouse, one old stone tower, a small lord's residence and a great hall, barracks and an armory, warehouses and stables, workshops and wells, cisterns, a maester's room, and a rookery.
It could not compare to Winterfell.
But anyone could see it was a lord's castle.
Daemon alone was dissatisfied.
"That wall."
Raymund looked back.
"What?"
"The lines don't match."
"It's on a mountain."
"You could still make them match a little better."
"It won't collapse."
"Not collapsing and being ugly are separate problems."
Raymund walked away without answering.
"Old man."
There was no reply.
"Doesn't that really bother your eyes?"
"It won't collapse."
"Ah, fuck. No sense of aesthetics."
Raymund stopped.
Daemon stopped as well.
The old man slowly turned around.
"What did you just say?"
"That the walls are sturdy."
"Right."
Raymund resumed walking.
Daemon quietly shut his mouth as well.
Once they began raising the walls in earnest, another problem emerged.
Stone.
More specifically, stone was fucking heavy.
Of course, the people of Westeros knew that too. They had built castles for thousands of years. They had pulleys and winches, used capstans aboard ships, and had their own hoisting equipment in mines.
It was not that they lacked technology.
The problem was that those technologies did not meet each other very well.
Sailors knew sailors' methods, masons knew masons' methods, and mines used mining methods.
Watching them, Daemon thought,
These bastards don't lack technology.
The connections are fucking weak.
Much of the engineering he had taken for granted in his previous life was not about discovering a single new principle. It was about applying known principles to other problems, comparing them under the same conditions, and leaving measurements so they could be reproduced.
So Daemon did not try to invent a new machine.
He combined existing things.
Thick posts and braces.
A long arm.
A winch.
Pulleys.
Rope.
The problem was not the device's shape.
How many tons can this rope bear?
Where will the timber joints fail first?
After how many turns will the axle begin to show noticeable wear?
Is animal fat the best lubricant, or is there something better?
He did not know.
Then test it.
"Bring me that rope."
The construction overseer asked,
"What do you intend to use it for?"
"Breaking it."
"...Pardon?"
"We need to know its breaking load first."
The man did not understand.
Daemon sighed.
"I mean, let's see how much weight it takes before it snaps."
"It is a perfectly good new rope."
"I know."
"We paid for it."
"I know that too."
"And you mean to break it on purpose?"
"It is cheaper than having it snap while lifting stone and drop that stone on someone's head."
Only then did the man close his mouth.
They separated new ropes and old ones, wet ropes and knotted ropes, changed the conditions, hung stones from them, and increased the weight.
They broke them.
They recorded the results.
People looked at the lord who bought sound ropes only to ruin them deliberately as though he were mad.
Daemon did not care.
You need baseline values to set a safety margin.
When the first hoisting device was completed, several men turned the winch and a large block of stone slowly rose.
The surroundings fell quiet.
Daemon watched the rising stone and frowned first.
"It's swaying."
No one answered.
"Add another guide rope. At this rate, when the wind blows, it'll slam into the wall."
Still no one moved.
Daemon turned around.
"Why?"
An elderly mason spoke.
"My lord."
"Yes?"
"We lifted that stone with so few men."
Daemon thought for a moment.
"Because we used pulleys."
"..."
"And a winch."
"..."
"No, if you combine the two, of course it takes less effort."
People were astonished by the rising stone, while Daemon was astonished that people were astonished by it.
A few days later, the axle wore down faster than expected.
Daemon clicked his tongue at the worn section.
Right.
Fuck.
It's reality.
He changed the lubricant and adjusted the contact points. This time the timber joints spread apart, and when he reinforced them, the rope failed first next time. After sorting ropes by condition and grade, establishing inspection periods, and repairing matters several times over, different versions of the device took root for the castle walls, quarry, and harbor according to their use.
People called them machines made by Lord Daemon.
Whenever he heard it, Daemon thought,
What did I make?
I just assembled existing things well.
A maester came to Sea Dragon Point the year after Daemon received the domain.
The Citadel chose someone to send to the new lord, and so Maester Luwin arrived.
Daemon's first impression was simple.
...He's weathered.
He did not look that old in actual years, but his tired eyes, rough skin, and heavy chain made him seem several years older.
Daemon considered it for a moment.
Ah.
It is the Middle Ages.
Even in his previous life, near the end of doctoral courses there had been people who looked ten years older than their true age. This era had worse ultraviolet exposure, nutrition, medicine, heating, and sanitation.
There was nothing strange about people aging quickly.
So Daemon called him that from the beginning.
"Mister."
Luwin stopped.
"My lord. I am a maester."
"I know."
"Then you ought to call me Maester."
Daemon looked up at him.
"But you're a mister too, aren't you?"
"..."
Luwin tried several times to correct him.
He failed.
Several years later, he simply gave up.
"Mister."
"And what is it this time?"
That was how it settled.
The problem was that the mister was truly intelligent.
He knew broadly of history and law, herbs and plants, medicine and astronomy, family genealogies, drafting documents, and managing ravens—fields Daemon knew nothing about. When he encountered something he did not know, he sought books; when books had no answer, he wrote to the Citadel.
Above all, he kept records well.
At first, he wrote down what Daemon dictated.
Then, one day after several years of working together:
"My lord."
"What?"
"Should we not leave one specimen under the same conditions as last time?"
Daemon's hand stopped.
"...What did you say?"
Luwin looked down at the paper.
"This time, you meant to change three things at once. You said last time that if the result changed, it would then be difficult to know what caused it."
Daemon's eyes widened slightly.
A control group.
Mister set up a control group before I did.
He was genuinely moved.
"Mister."
"Yes?"
"You've been corrupted magnificently."
Luwin's face stiffened.
"I still do not like that expression."
"It's the highest praise."
"Which is why I dislike it all the more."
Daemon laughed.
Then at some point, a strange question arose.
Luwin alone was this capable.
There was a place that gathered and educated people like him from throughout the Seven Kingdoms.
The Citadel.
Nobles and commoners alike could study there. It possessed a vast library and archmaesters for every field, then sent the people it taught back across the continent. It even operated a communications network of ravens, astonishingly swift by this era's standards.
When Daemon properly understood that structure for the first time, he was impressed.
Then he became furious at once.
No.
Fuck.
With a talent pool, a library, and a communications network like this, why is the world still such a mess?
His historical knowledge from his previous life also made the question feel especially strange to Daemon.
Even in the real Middle Ages, higher education and scholarship had not had only one center. In Europe, universities like Bologna, Paris, and Oxford grew in different regions, and schools such as Salerno were renowned for medicine. Within the University of Paris, the college later widely known as the Sorbonne grew, while across the Mediterranean, Cairo possessed centers of learning like Al-Azhar, which taught religion, law, and various disciplines while gathering countless scholars.
Those institutions had not been like modern universities.
Religious authority had been powerful, old theories were often accepted uncritically, and the range of people able to receive education was limited.
Even so, there had been many centers.
Students moved.
Scholars moved.
Those who learned in one city went to another and taught there. Books were copied and spread to other regions, while different schools and educational institutions sometimes debated and sometimes competed.
Progress had been slow.
Agonizingly slow.
But knowledge had not needed to pass through the gate of a single institution to spread through an entire continent.
Westeros was different.
Across the whole kingdom, the center of higher education and specialized knowledge recognized under the name of maester effectively converged upon one place: the Citadel in Oldtown. Lords kept maesters in their castles, but the place that trained them, gave them chains, and recognized their qualifications was ultimately the same place.
To Daemon, that concentration appeared grotesquely high.
Even if one did not believe every claim that Westerosi history literally spanned thousands of years, the fact remained clear that kingdoms, written records, long-distance trade, and organized administration had existed for a long time.
Yet the center of higher learning was still one place.
How is this not strange?
Daemon could not understand it at all.
At first, he thought there must be reasons he had missed.
There were, in fact.
Mad seasons.
Long winters.
War.
Low population density.
Expensive transportation.
The fragmentation of feudal domains.
The cost of books and copying.
The limited number of people who could be educated at all.
Even the problem that when the economic foundation sustaining a technology collapsed, it vanished again, however widely it had spread.
Daemon was not unaware of such things.
As someone who had loved history, he knew how dangerous it was to explain any phenomenon with one cause.
Still.
But you lot are fucking suspicious too.
His suspicion of the Citadel did not readily disappear.
Preserving knowledge.
Fine words.
Books burned in wars, and scholars died in long winters. Someone had to gather and protect the records.
He admitted that.
The problem was that the Citadel seemed to control not only the preservation of knowledge, but the entrance to knowledge itself.
We will keep the knowledge.
If you wish to learn, come to Oldtown.
We issue the qualifications for specialists.
We also send people throughout the Seven Kingdoms.
The more Daemon considered it, the more his expression soured.
What the fuck?
It's a medieval knowledge cartel.
That did not mean individual maesters were villains.
Luwin certainly was not.
He was diligent and intelligent, willing to learn, and not stingy with what he knew.
That made Daemon all the more irritated.
Gathering perfectly sound, clever people like this from across the whole continent—
what the fuck have they been doing for thousands of years?
One person like Luwin could teach ten others, and those ten could teach others in turn. If they had created a structure that spread knowledge to local scribes, craftsmen, healers, and merchants rather than stopping at teaching letters and numbers to a few lords' children, something ought to have changed after several centuries.
Yet the Citadel had remained the sole institution for too long.
To Daemon, that fact itself was the problem.
They've piled up a fucking mountain of books.
They have fucking loads of smart people.
They have a communications network.
So why does knowledge spread at the pace of a turtle with broken legs?
If that's not idiocy, what is?
Then came the day he read a medical text.
His opinion of the Citadel worsened further.
The early sections were surprisingly decent.
Wounds and fractures.
Fevers.
The effects of herbs.
There were observations that seemed accumulated through seeing actual patients.
Daemon became a little hopeful.
Then he turned the page.
Blood.
Phlegm.
Yellow bile.
Black bile.
Daemon's hand stopped.
"..."
He shut the book.
He opened it again.
He wondered if he had misread it.
He had not.
Ah.
Fuck.
It is the Middle Ages.
He read further.
There were even constellations and the balance of bodily humors.
Daemon covered his face.
No, you observed things perfectly well, so why the fuck did your conclusion go there?
They saw patients, recorded symptoms, and even observed their responses after administering medicines.
That far was fine.
Why suddenly leap to four kinds of bile and the stars?
How the fuck did these people review papers?
Daemon was not a doctor.
Nor could he reproduce a modern hospital.
But he could at least decide how to protect his own body.
Eat well.
Sleep well.
Wash.
Exercise.
Keep wounds clean.
Avoid getting injured if possible.
And do not get sick.
If I really get sick, these bastards look like they'll start by bleeding me to balance my humors.
Daemon solemnly resolved to live a long, healthy life.
Yet he began recording everything at Sea Dragon Point with Luwin all the same.
The width and drainage of roads, which stone cracked quickly, rope lifespans and hoist wear, days when storms arrived and the direction of the wind, which river saw fish run when, and which fishing grounds were good in which years—they wrote them down one by one.
At first, Daemon ordered it done.
Later, Luwin wrote it down first.
Then one day:
"My lord."
"What?"
"We lack scribes."
Daemon raised his head.
"Hire more."
"They require wages."
"..."
Valena's face came to mind.
"Hire only a few more."
Thus, at Sea Dragon Point, scribal labor costs rose before the scientific revolution arrived.
Salmon went into those records too.
When Daemon first properly saw a school of salmon swimming upriver, he was quite pleased.
"...They are here."
The official beside him asked,
"What is, my lord?"
"Nothing. Just..."
Words immediately linked together in Daemon's mind.
Norway.
Salmon.
Farming.
Exports.
Good.
This might actually work.
Then he killed the fish.
The first trial failed.
For the second, he improved the water flow.
But he stocked more fish.
More died.
Daemon stared at the dead fish for a while.
I've eaten a lot of salmon.
It's not as though I've raised them.
He did not know which was essential: oxygen and water temperature, feed and density, disease, spawning, or migration.
Rather than kill more for nothing, it was faster to find people who knew.
Old fishermen who had caught salmon in the rivers their whole lives.
People who cast nets from the coast.
People who dug shellfish.
People who had dried and salted fish.
Everyone summoned was tense at first.
The lord was calling for them.
Was it a matter of taxes?
Had they committed some crime?
Daemon asked,
"When do salmon come upriver in the greatest numbers?"
"...Pardon?"
"It differs by season, doesn't it? When are there most?"
The questions continued for a long time that day.
Daemon asked and the people answered: which rivers saw the most fish, how things changed after heavy rain, why some years had fewer, and where young fish were often seen.
Luwin wrote beside them.
Watching that, Daemon suddenly recalled someone from his previous life.
King Sejong.
A king who, when compiling a farming manual, had not only searched old Chinese books but also collected and organized the experience of people who truly farmed in the provinces.
Right.
That's it.
Being unable to read did not mean one knew nothing of the sea.
Lacking a degree did not mean one knew nothing about fish.
In the minds of people who had watched the same rivers and sea all their lives, information not found in books accumulated.
What mattered was drawing it out, comparing it, and recording it.
King Sejong asked farmers.
Who am I not to listen to fishermen?
After that day, Daemon pushed back his intention to farm salmon immediately by one step.
First, he had to understand salmon.
Thus time passed.
Daemon, who had first stepped onto Sea Dragon Point's mud at four years old, was now ten.
Over six years, roads had appeared, and a castle had risen upon the hill that had once been ruins. Fishing vessels and small merchant ships came and went at the docks, and the population had increased. The two hundred soldiers whose costs Winterfell had initially borne could now, in ordinary years, be supported in large part by Sea Dragon Point's own income.
Visitors from elsewhere called it a successful domain.
Whenever Daemon heard that, he tilted his head.
The roads constantly needed repairs, and the castle walls still had portions he disliked. The harbor was narrow, fishing was only now accumulating useful records, and something in the workshops still refused to work as it should every day.
That was why Daemon had shut himself in the workshop since morning.
To others, a successful domain.
To Daemon, a worksite with far too many things left to fix.
The difference was considerable.
*
Rickard Stark had never thought of himself as fond of gambling.
He had no hobby of rolling dice, and even less of a temperament that enjoyed risking large sums on victory or defeat. Sitting in the position of ruler of the North made it difficult to enjoy that kind of waste in the first place.
In this land, a lord's poor judgment did not end with losing a few coins. Grain ran short, people died, and castles grew weak. Then someone else, noticing that weakness, grew greedy.
So whenever Rickard made a decision, he first calculated the loss.
How much would be lost if it failed?
Could that loss be borne?
And what would be gained if it succeeded?
In that sense, granting Sea Dragon Point to a four-year-old child six years ago had clearly been a gamble.
But in Rickard's eyes, it had been a rather good gamble from the beginning.
He had liked the conversation he had shared with Daemon that day.
A child of merely four, speaking of old wars, thought not first of who had been bravest, but of why they fought, what the soldiers ate, and why castles and roads needed to stand where they did.
There were many people who liked history.
There were plenty of knights who could rattle off the names of old kings and battles.
Daemon was somewhat different.
He wondered not about the answers of the past, but why those answers had emerged.
Rickard liked that.
And he had grown greedy.
Heating and glass.
Those two things alone had already made the attention lavished upon the child worthwhile.
The heating method that began in White Harbor had offered genuine aid through the North's long cold, and being able to make in the North glass once bought from across the sea was no small change either.
The child had said he wanted a castle.
A harbor too.
Workshops too.
Rickard had been curious.
If he gave him land, people, and time—
what would that child make?
So he gave him Sea Dragon Point.
It was not simply any land he had thrown away.
Rickard knew well that Sea Dragon Point had not remained undeveloped for so long because it lacked value.
The Wolfswood lay nearby.
There were great trees.
The sea lay to the west, and fish ran in the rivers.
There were many hidden bays and even an old fortress remained.
Stark's forebears could not possibly have failed to know that.
Nor could the North's old houses.
Then why had no one developed this land on a great scale before?
The answer was not that it lacked value, but that the cost before turning that value into money was too high.
Even with timber, one needed roads to cut and transport it.
Even with the sea, one needed docks and warehouses.
To move people, one needed houses, food, and farm tools.
Soldiers had to be fed.
To turn ruins into a castle, one needed masons and carpenters, ironwork and carts.
Considerable money had to be poured in from the outset.
If it had possessed broad good farmland and densely settled old villages, someone would have claimed it long ago.
But Sea Dragon Point had many wetlands, bad roads, and few people.
Across the sea lay the Iron Islands.
If he installed a new lord there for nothing and the land was raided before it could stand on its own, the responsibility of rebuilding it would ultimately return to Winterfell.
That was why the Starks of old had not separated this land off.
Rickard did not think that incompetence.
It had been rational judgment.
And for that very reason, he could give it to Daemon.
Even failure would not be a loss great enough to shake the whole North. Winterfell would have to provide money and soldiers for the first few years, but it could bear that. The Glovers could provide men and timber, the Mormonts could lend ships and sea experience, and the Manderlys could bring money and craftsmen.
What could be gained if it succeeded, however, was far greater.
Even if Sea Dragon Point itself did not grow as hoped, a capable child named Daemon would remain Stark's bannerman. The mind that conceived heating would not vanish, nor would his experience in glassmaking.
A child first protected by the Manderlys of White Harbor could be bound to the North—more precisely, to Stark's order.
The loss had a visible end.
At the time, the gain had no visible end.
That was also why he had gone out of his way to obtain royal assent.
One did not need the Iron Throne's permission every time one separated part of the North's direct holdings to establish a bannerman.
Rickard had not asked because he needed the king's permission.
He had asked because the king's name was useful.
Daemon was a child from elsewhere.
He had no old northern surname, nor was he the second son of a famed house.
Such a child was being made a lord at four.
It was natural for complaints to arise.
Why that child?
Why not the second son of our house?
Why not a relative of some family that had long served Stark?
People's mouths could not be stopped.
There was no reason to stop them.
But one could prevent those complaints from gaining force.
Winterfell had decided it.
The Iron Throne had recognized it.
From that moment, the story changed.
It was no longer a tale of a young Stark whimsically granting land to a child he liked, but of the ruler of the North establishing a new bannerman and the king of the Seven Kingdoms recognizing his station.
There was no need, naturally, to tell others that some whim had in fact mixed into the decision.
That was even truer now.
The results were already erasing the word whim.
He also remembered the first time he had properly met Daemon's mother.
She had been a good woman.
She knew courtesy, but did not hide behind it.
Even when hearing startling things, she composed her expression first, then asked what she needed to know.
It had been the same when discussing the guardianship and management of Sea Dragon Point.
After thanking him first, she confirmed the land's extent, finances, military command, and who would bear what responsibilities until the child came of age. She asked how far Winterfell would support them and made clear the extent of her own authority.
Watching her, Rickard had thought he could see where at least some of Daemon's intelligence came from.
He did not mean the strangely broad knowledge inside the child's head came from his mother.
But there was certainly a resemblance in the way they assessed people and arranged their thoughts before speaking.
Liara had gotten along well with Valena too.
At first they had met because one was Stark's lady and the other the mother of a young new bannerman, but after speaking of their children a few times, the time they naturally spent sitting together increased.
They were born in different places and had different customs, but somehow they understood each other well.
With a little more time, they might have become good friends.
The thought made one part of Rickard's heart grow heavy for a moment.
It had not been very long since he had lost Liara.
On some days, it felt as if much time had passed. On others, it seemed she might still be sitting there if he opened a door.
It was especially so when he looked at the children.
When Brandon could not restrain his temper and rushed forward first, Liara would seem ready to laugh and say he was exactly like Rickard in his youth.
When Eddard stepped back and watched people for a long time, she would have said that child would become a man who thought longer than his father.
Lyanna made him remember more often still.
Benjen was still too young.
How much of his mother would he be able to remember?
There was no answer to that thought.
Rickard tightened his hand around the reins for a moment, then looked ahead again.
There had also been a clear reason why he entrusted Daemon's civil administration to Valena when determining the regency.
She knew the child, his property, and the people around him best.
Above all, she knew best what Daemon could do and where he absolutely had to be restrained.
There was no reason to entrust military authority entirely to one person as well.
A newly established bannerman from elsewhere.
The North's western coast.
A young lord.
So he had separately entrusted the military to a man sent from Winterfell.
Civil administration to his mother.
Military affairs to Stark's man.
As Daemon grew, they would hand matters over to him in turn.
Even six years later, Rickard did not think that choice had been wrong.
Rather, he had often felt fortunate that Daemon had his mother.
Looking at the reports that came up, one almost wondered how many hours the child believed a day possessed, for he undertook so many things. He repaired the castle while building roads, expanded workshops while making a harbor, and tested something else in between.
Someone had to spread a ledger in front of him and tell him no.
Valena did that well.
She was a good regent.
More than that, a good mother.
It had rained a few days ago.
In the North, that was rather good weather for judging roads.
A dirt road looked sound enough on a clear day.
The true difference appeared after rain.
Especially in a place with as many wetlands as Sea Dragon Point.
Rickard remembered the old roads.
They had been closer to traces left by carts passing repeatedly than roads. They could be used when the weather was dry, and turned to mud when rain came. In spring, some stretches made it difficult even to distinguish road from swamp.
Now carts were moving.
The wheels of the wagon ahead left tracks in the wet surface, but did not sink deeply. The center of the road stood slightly higher than the sides, and water did not linger there, but ran to the sides and into drainage ditches.
Where the earth was especially soft, the stone layer appeared thicker than elsewhere.
It was not perfect.
A small puddle lay where they had passed moments ago, and on the side most often used by carts, one portion had sunk slightly.
Still, the road was alive.
The knight accompanying him said,
"It is a fine road."
Rickard nodded, then suddenly wondered:
What would Daemon look at first?
Probably the puddle the knight had not noticed.
Or the road surface beginning to sink.
After reading the child's reports for years, such thoughts came naturally.
Daemon sent reports on strangely small matters. He wrote that one stretch sank after several rains, that earth kept collapsing in a particular drainage ditch, even that places using crushed stone of a certain size rutted faster than others.
At first, Rickard had not understood why Daemon wrote even such things to him.
For a lord's report, was it not enough to say whether a project was finished, what it had cost, and when it could be used?
After reading for several years, his thoughts had changed.
To Daemon, those were not trivial matters.
When Rickard looked at a road, he first saw what it connected and how quickly soldiers and food could be moved along it.
Daemon seemed to look first at why the road itself would fail.
He saw where water ran, which soil moved first, which stone broke quickly, and toward which side carts gathered.
He saw that differences others dismissed as minor could ruin an entire road months later.
Thinking back, he had been similar six years ago.
Speak of war, and he thought of what soldiers ate.
Speak of fleets, and he looked first to harbors and supplies.
At the time, Rickard had thought it an unusual habit of a clever child.
Now, that perspective was truly changing the land.
He saw piles of stones broken to a regular size along the roadside.
Rickard asked,
"What are those?"
The official guiding them answered,
"For repairs, Lord Stark. They are piled there in advance to be used at once when the road ruts or sinks."
"In advance?"
"Lord Daemon said it would be too late to go looking for stone after the road was wholly ruined."
Rickard gazed at the piles for a moment.
There were many who built roads.
There were fewer who took it for granted from the moment of building that it would one day break, and piled the materials needed to mend it by the road itself.
"Good."
This time, he said it aloud.
The fortress was visible from a distance.
Rickard remembered when this place had been ruins.
There had only been old stone walls, a collapsed tower, and foundations half consumed by dirt and moss upon the hill.
Now it was plainly a castle.
Yet it was somewhat strange for an ordinary northern castle.
The old walls had not all been torn down and rebuilt. The usable portions had been preserved and linked by new walls. The walls did not carve the hill straight by force, but rose and fell along its ridges, and the approach did not run directly to the gate.
It turned once before the gate.
Even after passing the first gate, it did not lead straight inward. One had to change direction again through a narrow space, while soldiers on the walls above could look down upon the entire approach.
Rickard guided his horse slowly onward.
He did not know where Daemon had found such an idea.
But he understood its intent.
Do not give enemies an easy road.
Do not let them think it is over merely because they have crossed one gate.
Use the hill itself as part of the defenses.
Upon that were mingled the northern masons' building methods, drainage, heating, White Harbor glass, and the Tyroshi colors Valena had added.
It looked like a northern castle.
Yet it seemed there would be no identical castle anywhere.
Rickard had heard Daemon still complained.
The stones were not of uniform size.
The line of a wall in one place was ugly.
He disliked the drainage.
Rickard looked up at the gatehouse.
His own judgment was much simpler.
It was a castle he would not want to attack.
What more practical praise could a lord's castle need?
The harbor still had more deficiencies than the castle.
The natural bay had good conditions. The hills blocked the wind to an extent, and waves from the open sea entered the bay weakened. Great trees grew nearby, so timber for repairing ships was close at hand.
But the docks were still small.
Several large ships entering at once would soon leave it crowded.
More warehouses were needed as well.
There was now a place to haul ships ashore and work on their hulls, but compared with White Harbor's shipbuilding facilities, it remained near the beginning.
Defense was the same.
A small raiding party could likely be handled by the castle and its present forces.
But if dozens of ships from the Iron Islands entered with intent, that would be another matter.
Rickard looked between the mouth of the bay and the docks, then said,
"It still has far to go."
The official beside him stiffened at once.
Only then did Rickard realize how his words had sounded.
"I do not mean it is poor."
The official's eyes widened slightly.
Rickard looked at the harbor again.
"There was nothing here at the start."
That was enough.
Six years ago, it had not possessed one proper dock.
Now fishing boats came and went. Timber was piled up, dried fish left the harbor, and even merchant vessels came in, however small. The two hundred soldiers Winterfell had initially needed to feed were now largely supported by this land in ordinary years.
What it lacked was clear.
Strangely, Rickard was not worried.
He had read the report that the first dock had been damaged in a storm.
The next one had been different.
When it was damaged in another way, the next had changed again.
Rickard had watched that process for six years.
Thus he did not consider the harbor before him a completed harbor.
He thought of it only as a harbor in its sixth year.
Several years later, it would have another shape again.
Perhaps making him believe that itself was Daemon's achievement.
At one side of the harbor, men were moving a great stone.
It was the hoisting device he had seen mentioned many times in reports.
Thick posts and braces, a long arm, a winch, and several pulleys.
Viewed separately, every part was familiar.
Northern masons and carpenters surely knew pulleys.
Ships had winches, and mines lifted heavy things too.
So Rickard had not been greatly surprised when he only read the reports.
Seeing it move himself was different.
Several men pushed long handles.
The winch turned, and rope wound around it.
The heavy stone slowly lifted from the earth.
Rickard stopped walking.
"Once more."
The work overseer gestured to the men.
This time, they attached a stone of another size.
It rose again.
Rickard examined the device closely.
Almost nothing was new.
But the way they had been combined was different.
For castle walls, suited to walls.
At quarries, made heavier.
At harbors, made to load and unload cargo quickly.
It had not magically created what did not exist, but found another combination among things that already did.
Rickard liked that about it even more.
Geniuses who created something new from nothing were rare.
The talent to see what already existed and bind it together in ways others had not considered was no less precious.
"How many men did it take to lift that stone before?"
"It varied by the stone's size, but nearly twice as many as now, I would say."
Twice.
Rickard's eyes narrowed.
People's time was a resource as well.
If five men could do in a day what ten had done, the other five could work elsewhere. It was small when viewed over one day, but if stones and timber were moved hundreds or thousands of times over months, the story changed.
The phrase from the reports—the necessary manpower can be reduced—suddenly carried a different weight before his eyes.
It could be used at Winterfell too.
The thought came naturally.
Wall repairs.
Warehouse extensions.
Towers.
And Moat Cailin, which would someday need attention again.
"Obtain drawings of that device."
The man beside him bowed his head.
"Yes, Lord Stark."
"Not merely one. You said the versions used at the wall, quarry, and harbor differ slightly?"
The work overseer answered,
"Yes."
"All of them."
Rickard watched the rising stone again.
"We shall try them at Winterfell too."
When he had read about it in reports, he had thought it a useful idea.
Seeing it in truth, he knew it was an idea that had to be used.
Only then did Daemon's records, which had seemed excessively detailed, take on another meaning.
How quickly wet rope deteriorated, which joints spread first, and what lubricant let axles endure longer.
Moving a finished device elsewhere and copying its form was not the same as reproducing the same performance.
Without records of failure, another castle would have to endure the same failures all over again.
Daemon's records did not preserve only what succeeded.
They preserved what had been discarded too.
The difference was great.
Rickard looked at a completed castle.
Daemon looked at what failed first while building it.
Rickard looked at where a road led.
Daemon thought first of why that road would collapse.
When Rickard saw a useful device, he thought it could be brought to other castles.
Daemon attached records so that others would not repeat the same failures when they took it elsewhere.
That perspective differed from his own.
And it was useful.
Rickard suddenly thought,
It is a waste to leave him only at Sea Dragon Point.
Six years ago, a similar greed had led him to give the child land.
Now that greed had grown somewhat larger.
At the end of that thought, his own children naturally came to mind.
Brandon was fiery.
Whether riding a horse or taking up a sword, he always wanted to go half a step ahead of others. Though Rickard believed that nature might one day become a source of misfortune, he did not dislike his eldest son's vigor. A child who would rule the North needed the power to draw people to him.
Eddard was different.
He listened first and thought for a long time.
He did not leap forward like his brother, but neither was he of a disposition to hide behind others. Even while still young, once he formed his own judgment, he was not easily swayed.
Benjen was still too young.
He was at the age of following his brothers about and tripping over his own feet.
And Lyanna.
At the thought of his daughter, the corner of Rickard's mouth softened slightly.
She was still small, but her nature was already clear.
If Brandon went riding, she insisted upon following him. If she was told no, she asked why before she cried. If someone restrained her, she sought a gap to slip free rather than staying still. When she saw something unfamiliar, she came close to examine it with her own eyes rather than hiding behind someone.
Liara had laughed that the wolf blood ran too strong in such a daughter.
It was an accurate description.
She was like a young she-wolf.
Her paws were still short and her teeth still small.
Yet put her in a cage and she sought the gap to escape first, while an unfamiliar scent made her prick up her ears rather than hide.
For now, it was cute.
If that nature remained unchanged in a few years, it would be another matter.
Rickard did not want a man who would break Lyanna by force and make her meek.
But neither did he want a man who would retreat and walk on eggshells whenever his daughter growled once.
Someone who would not forcibly break her nature, yet could stand beside her on his own two feet.
That was the kind of person he wanted.
And at the end of that thought, Daemon came to mind.
Rickard thought himself somewhat ridiculous.
It was not that, upon seeing Daemon, he wished that child had been his son instead of Brandon or Eddard.
It could not be so.
His sons were his sons.
Still.
It would have been convenient if that child had been a son too.
That desire did exist.
A capable bannerman was precious.
A capable son was more precious still.
To keep such talent in the North, there would be no need to give him land or borrow the king's seal.
He already had three sons. If he wanted one more, Liara would surely have laughed and called him greedy.
Another possibility naturally followed from that thought.
If he had not been born a son—
perhaps he could someday be made family.
Rickard did not discard the thought at once.
But neither did he decide now.
Lyanna was too young.
Daemon was only ten.
Being clever at ten did not mean one would certainly grow into a fine man at twenty. Some became arrogant, intoxicated by the talents for which they had been praised in youth. Many became twisted in nature as they aged.
Daemon was a person too.
He could change.
But if he did not lose his present habits upon reaching adulthood—if he admitted what he did not know, corrected failures rather than concealing them, asked people, learned, and recorded—
then it could be considered.
Lyanna.
Daemon.
Rickard placed the two names side by side for a moment.
Politically, it was not a poor match either.
A new lord on the western coast, directly established by Stark.
A bannerman who had grown his own land.
A man creating techniques that could be carried and used in other northern domains.
If he gave that man Stark's daughter, Sea Dragon Point would be bound more deeply to Winterfell for another generation.
Their children would carry Stark blood as well.
But before politics, Rickard did not want to place a stupid man beside his daughter.
If he attached an incapable man who lived only on his name and bloodline to a child like Lyanna, at least one of them would surely be unhappy.
Daemon, at least, was not stupid.
He did not seem likely to be frightened if Lyanna showed her teeth, nor likely to try pulling those teeth first merely because his own pride had been wounded.
Of course, that judgment had begun by observing four-year-old Daemon.
He would have to see for himself whether he remained that way now.
When his thoughts reached that point, Rickard realized one very simple fact.
It had already been six years since he had last seen Daemon.
At that time, he had only been four.
His feet had not reached the floor when he sat in a chair, yet he protested that he was four, while words no child of that age should say kept spilling from his mouth.
Four to ten.
His face would have changed greatly too.
After that thought came one very personal desire.
Still.
If he truly might someday become a son-in-law—
would it not be nice if he were handsome as well?
A handsome face was not needed to rule a domain.
Nor was a straight nose and jaw essential to being a good husband.
Rickard knew that much.
Still, this was someone he might give to his daughter.
Handsome was better than ugly.
Such a wish ought to be permitted a father.
Amused by his own thoughts, Rickard smiled a little.
If Liara had lived, she would have teased him for already judging the face of a possible son-in-law for their still-young daughter.
For a moment, he remembered her voice.
The longing remained.
On some days it still hurt sharply as before. On days like this, it slipped in between laughter.
It likely always would.
Rickard gathered his thoughts and turned his horse toward the inner castle.
He had not come here to view roads, walls, and harbors.
He was the lord of the North.
Seeing how a bannerman ruled his own land was not merely a right, but a duty.
Especially when it was a bannerman he had established himself.
He had received enough reports.
One could even say he had received too many.
He knew which road had sunk, which dock had broken, and which rope had snapped faster than expected.
But paper and people were different.
And duty aside, Rickard was personally curious.
He wanted to know what sort of child that strange four-year-old had become after six years of failing, repairing, building, and breaking things again on his own land.
Whether his manner of speaking remained the same.
How his nature had changed.
And, perhaps because of his earlier thoughts, he wanted to see for himself how his face had grown as well.
Rickard asked a nearby official,
"Where is Daemon?"
The reply was swift.
"He is in the workshop, Lord Stark."
"The workshop?"
"Yes. He has not come out since morning."
The official's expression was slightly peculiar.
When Rickard raised an eyebrow, he added,
"It seems there is something he does not like."
Rickard finally laughed.
After building roads for six years, turning ruins into a castle, raising a harbor, and making a domain that could feed its own soldiers, it seemed there was still something that displeased him.
In that respect, at least, Daemon seemed not very different from six years ago.
"Lead on."
Rickard urged his horse forward.
He was on his way to inspect his bannerman as lord of the North.
And apart from that—
it was also the path taken by one man named Rickard Stark, who wished to see that strange child again after so long.
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