Chapter 32: Reorganization
Henry kept his promise about the accommodation. Before the party had even arrived in King's Landing, Maester Winston had arranged the purchase of a manor in the noble quarter through a factor in the city — a solid stone house three streets back from the Street of Sisters, far enough from the Red Keep that Cersei would have to make a deliberate effort to intrude rather than simply sending someone down a corridor. Henry installed Joffrey and Dominic there with a full guard rotation and turned his attention to the City Watch.
The Watch maintained two barracks. The eastern barracks sat against the Dragon Gate, responsible for the city's eastern wards and the roads coming in from the Kingswood. The western barracks operated out of a converted stable yard near Shoemaker's Square, covering the tangled streets of the western city down to the harbor. Both were in worse condition than Henry had expected, which was saying something given what Arryn's letter had prepared him for.
He pulled three hundred men each from the River Guard and his household garrison — six hundred soldiers in total, men he knew and trusted — equipped them with white cloaks over their own gear, and dispersed them between the two barracks. They would be the spine of whatever the Watch became. The existing Gold Cloaks would be reorganized around them.
The identification process began the next morning.
What it revealed was worse than the letter had indicated. Janos Slynt had treated the Watch's rolls as a personal revenue stream, and the rolls reflected it. Old men who hadn't stood a gate watch in years. Men with injuries that made them unfit for duty. Street thugs from Flea Bottom who had someone willing to put in a word and coin enough to make the word stick. Men who existed on the payroll in name only, their wages collected by officers who'd arranged their enrollment as a side business. Nearly three thousand names came off the rolls in the first week.
The dismissed men did not go quietly. A disturbance broke out near the eastern barracks on the third day — not a true riot, but enough people in a small enough space, angry enough, that it had the potential to become one.
Before Henry had finished issuing the response order, Joffrey and Dominic were already gone.
He found out afterward that the two of them had gone in with Sandor and a squad of household soldiers, Joffrey with a longsword and an expression of considerable determination. The situation was resolved without anyone being killed. Joffrey came back with mud on his boots and the look of a boy who had done something and knew it, and spent the rest of the evening being somewhat insufferable about it in a way that Henry decided to let pass.
The deeper the investigation went, the cleaner the picture of Janos Slynt's operation became, in the way that very dirty things become clear once you start washing them.
The basic structure was straightforward: Janos had imposed what his officers called, apparently without irony, a Loyalty Tax — a third of the Watch's entire payroll, skimmed off the top before it reached anyone. His officers, most of whom had bought their positions outright, ran smaller versions of the same scheme down through the ranks. By the time wages reached an ordinary soldier, a man who was supposed to draw ten silver stags a month was receiving two. Families going hungry. Men running small thefts on the side to make up the difference, which their officers ignored in exchange for a cut of that too.
Henry had the corrupt officers pulled from their posts and sent to the Wall. All of them. He wrote the orders himself.
What remained after the purge was thirty-two hundred men, plus the six hundred he'd brought. To reach the Watch's proper complement of six thousand, he needed recruits.
He sent his officers to Flea Bottom.
It was not an obvious choice to everyone on his staff, and a few of them said so. Flea Bottom was the lowest quarter of the city — the warrens beneath the Hill of Rhaenys where the poorest of King's Landing's half million people lived in conditions that the rest of the city preferred not to think about too carefully. It had a reputation, most of it deserved.
What it also had was young men with no prospects and no entanglements. No noble family's claim on their loyalty, no officer who'd done them a favor they'd need to repay, no complicated history with the Watch's old leadership. Henry wanted men he could build from the ground up, and Flea Bottom had them in quantity. He offered honest wages — the full ten stags, paid on time, in front of witnesses — and the queue formed quickly.
After the recruitment round, the Watch stood at six thousand.
Equipment was the next problem.
Henry took a proposal to Jon Arryn: thirty thousand gold dragons to rearm the Watch properly. Arryn looked at the proposal, looked at Henry, and rubbed his forehead.
"Janos Slynt's confiscated assets have been inventoried," he said. "Sell them — you'll get approximately fifteen thousand dragons. The remainder you'll advance yourself, to be deducted from the Bay of Crabs' future tax obligations."
"The crown is that short?"
"The Iron Throne carries debts that would give you nightmares, and I say that as a man who has been having nightmares about them for years." Arryn set down his quill. "However. I've been considering a solution to the broader problem, and I believe I've found it." He gestured toward the far end of the room. "I'd like you to meet my assistant. When he administered the port taxes at Gulltown, revenue increased tenfold in three years. I intend to recommend him for Master of Coin."
The lean man in the corner looked up from his writing. He was younger than Henry had expected — not yet thirty, with sharp features, grey-green eyes that had the quality of water over dark stone, a neat pointed beard, and dark hair with the first threads of grey coming in. He rose and gave a short, correct bow.
"Lord Henry. I'm Petyr Baelish."
Henry nodded back. "Lord Baelish."
He'd known as soon as Arryn said "assistant." The nickname came first — Littlefinger, the mockery that had followed Baelish from his childhood in the Fingers — and the rest of it assembled itself around the name once it was spoken. A man who had built himself from nothing into the most dangerous position in the kingdom's finances, who understood money the way some men understood weather — not just what it was doing but what it was about to do, and how to be standing in the right place when it moved.
Henry had considered, briefly, whether to say something to Arryn. He discarded it. He had no explanation for his knowledge that Arryn would find credible, and no viable alternative to offer. The Iron Throne's finances were genuinely broken, and Baelish was genuinely the most capable man in the room for fixing them. That he would use the position to advance his own interests was almost beside the point — everyone in King's Landing used their position to advance their interests. Baelish was simply better at it than most.
He bowed to Arryn, nodded again to Baelish, and left.
Back at Watch headquarters near the Red Keep, he had barely sat down before a knock came at the door.
"Come."
The officer who entered was tall, with the kind of face that had been built for endurance rather than expression — deep-set eyes, a heavy brow, a jaw like a castle buttress. His brown hair had gone partly grey, and his right arm ended not in a hand but in a fitted iron cap, jointed at the wrist with a hinge that let it lock into a functional grip. His name was Joss Hadley, and he was the captain of the Mud Gate watch — one of the handful of officers who had survived the reorganization because he'd never paid Janos Slynt a coin for his post and had the spotless record to prove it.
"Captain Hadley," Henry said. "What is it?"
"The new recruits have finished their training month, Commander. Ready to be assigned to gates and patrol squads." He paused. "There's something else. I don't know if you remember — Pyke. You led the longship assault on the sea wall. I was transferred to your unit by Ser Barristan three days before the landing."
Henry looked at him more carefully. The iron hand. The age. The bearing of a man who had done something worth doing and had the damage to show for it.
"I remember the assault," Henry said carefully. "I don't remember every man who was with me."
"No reason you would, my lord. There were a lot of us and it moved fast." Hadley's voice was even, no reproach in it. "I made it through the sea wall and up to the outer yard before an axeman took my sword hand. By the time the surgeons were done with me the fighting was over. His Majesty gave me this posting in recognition of service." He looked at the iron hand briefly. "It's served me well enough."
Henry was quiet for a moment. There was nothing adequate to say to that, and he had the sense that Hadley knew it and wasn't looking for something adequate.
"The Watch is better for having you in it," Henry said finally. "I mean that."
Hadley nodded once, the nod of a man who accepts a thing without needing to make more of it.
They both looked, for a moment, at the banner hung on the wall behind the commander's desk. Someone had painted a motto on it in large uneven letters: LOYALTY TO THE KING. UNTO DEATH.
The sentiment was correct. The execution was dreadful.
"Janos had that made himself," Hadley said.
Henry studied the crooked lettering. "A man who stole his soldiers' wages for a decade, commemorated in the watchword loyalty." He shook his head slowly. "You have to respect the audacity."
Hadley's expression didn't change, but something behind his eyes suggested he agreed.
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