Tristan had the look of a man who had been asked to swallow something he was not entirely certain was food.
He stood in the small council chamber off the great hall of Evenfall, a room that had served, in its long history, as a map room, a war room, a place where Lord Selwyn occasionally played chess against himself, and, most recently, the site of Alexander Tarth's increasingly complicated experiments in governance. The chamber's stone walls were hung with charts of the Narrow Sea, the Stormlands coastline, and, in one corner, a hand-drawn map of Tarth itself that Alexander had produced over the course of several months and that was, Tristan privately suspected, more accurate than anything the maesters had managed in three centuries.
Tristan was a household knight of thirty-two, lean and brown-haired and possessed of the particular kind of quiet competence that made him invaluable in a crisis and invisible at a feast. He had served House Tarth for nearly a decade, having come to the island as a young hedge knight with a good sword arm and a bad habit of being in the wrong place during the wrong conversations. Lord Selwyn had hired him for the sword arm and tolerated the rest, and over the years Tristan had proven himself reliable enough to be trusted with duties that went beyond the standard remit of hitting people with sharp objects. Alexander had identified him early as a man whose loyalty was structural rather than sentimental, the kind who served not because he loved his lord but because he had decided, once, that service was his function, and having decided, would not revisit the question. It was the most durable form of loyalty Alexander had encountered, and he valued it accordingly.
Gabe, by contrast, was a merchant, which meant that his loyalty was negotiable in theory and absolute in practice, because Alexander had made him rich and intended to make him richer, and Gabe was intelligent enough to recognise that the surest path to continued prosperity was to remain indispensable to the boy who was reshaping the economy of the Sapphire Isle.
Gabe was forty, short, broad, and built like a storage barrel, with the weathered face of a man who had spent more of his life on ships than on land. He ran the Tarth merchant company, a modest trading enterprise that Lord Selwyn had inherited from his own father and that had, under Gabe's management and Alexander's direction, grown from two leaky cogs and an optimistic ledger into a small but efficient fleet that traded grain, worked stone, and iron goods along the Stormlands coast and as far north as Gulltown. He had the merchant's gift for seeing profit where others saw only distance, and the sailor's gift for remaining calm in conditions that made landsmen vomit and pray, not always in that order.
Both men were looking at Alexander with expressions that suggested they were not entirely sure whether the eight-year-old sitting across from them was about to propose something brilliant or something insane, and had reached the pragmatic conclusion that it was probably both.
"King's Landing," Alexander said, without preamble. He had found that preamble was generally a waste of everyone's time and served no purpose beyond allowing the speaker to hear himself approach the point without arriving at it. "Specifically, Flea Bottom. I want you to go there, together, and bring back workers."
Tristan's brow furrowed. It was a controlled furrow, the kind that a man with military training produced when he wanted to signal concern without crossing the line into objection. "Workers, my lord?"
"Labourers. Builders. Masons if you can find them, though I suspect you will find more of the raw material than the finished product. Men and women who know how to work stone, or who can learn. Carpenters. Joiners. People who can swing a hammer and carry a hod and sleep on a pallet without complaining about the accommodations, because the accommodations, at least initially, will merit complaint."
Gabe shifted his weight, which in a man of his build involved a redistribution of mass that the chair registered with a creak. "How many are we talking about, my lord?"
"For the first wave, two thousand. Perhaps twenty-five hundred if you find the quality is there. The total, over time, will be closer to ten thousand."
The silence that followed had a texture to it. It was the silence of two experienced men recalculating their understanding of the conversation they were having.
"Ten thousand," Tristan repeated. Not as a question. As a statement that he was testing for structural integrity.
"Morne will not rebuild itself, Tristan. It is a castle, not a garden. The curtain wall alone is a quarter mile in circumference, and most of it has been exposed to salt air and neglect for the better part of sixty years. The keep requires a new roof, new floors, new internal walls, and a great deal of repairs. The harbour needs dredging, and the old quay needs to be torn out and relaid. Beyond the castle itself, there is the town to consider. Morne was once a settlement of several thousand people. It needs to be that again."
"And you mean to populate it with Flea Bottom refugees," Tristan said, and now the furrow had company in the form of a tightened jaw.
"I mean to populate it with workers who are currently being wasted. Flea Bottom produces two things in abundance: misery and labour. The misery I cannot cure. The labour I can use." Alexander unrolled a sheet of parchment on the table between them. It was one of his own drawings, a plan of Castle Morne as it had existed in its prime, overlaid with annotations in his small, precise hand indicating the work that each section would require. "The Lord Hand made an appeal last autumn, asking the lords of the realm to find employment for the capital's poor. We are answering that call. No lord in the Seven Kingdoms can object to charity, even when the charity happens to serve our interests as neatly as ours will."
Gabe leaned forward to study the plan, his merchant's eyes already translating architecture into cost. "Transport alone for two thousand people, my lord. That is at minimum fifteen cogs, loaded heavy. Provisions for the voyage, two days with fair winds, four if the Narrow Sea is feeling disagreeable. Then feeding them on arrival, housing them, equipping them with tools. We are talking about..."
"Seven hundred gold dragons for the first wave, inclusive of transport, three months' wages, provisional housing, and tools. I have the figures." Alexander produced a second parchment, this one dense with columns of numbers that Gabe recognised as the particular species of accounting that made maester-trained stewards weep with confused admiration. "The agricultural surplus will cover it. I spoke with Maester Germund yesterday. The numbers are sound."
Gabe studied the figures. His lips moved slightly as he followed the calculations, a habit he had never managed to break despite Alexander's gentle suggestion that it made him look like a man arguing with himself. After a moment, he sat back.
"The numbers are sound," he agreed, with the faintly surprised tone of a man who had expected to find a flaw and was, as usual, disappointed.
Tristan, who did not share Gabe's facility with ledgers but compensated with a soldier's instinct for identifying things that could go wrong, raised a different concern. "Flea Bottom is not a village with green workers, my lord. The people who live there are desperate, and desperate people can be dangerous. You are asking us to recruit from the poorest, most violent quarter of the capital, transport them to an island they have never seen, and set them to work on a castle they have no reason to care about. What happens when they arrive and discover that the paradise you have promised them is a ruin surrounded by sheep?"
"I have not promised them paradise. I have promised them work, wages, meals, shelter, and the opportunity to build something that will outlast them. For a man who is currently sleeping in a gutter and eating what he can steal, that is not paradise. It is merely a future." Alexander looked at Tristan steadily. "You are worried about discipline."
"I am worried about everything. It is what you pay me for."
"Then worry productively. I want you to recruit selectively. Not the youngest or the oldest. Men and women between sixteen and forty, healthy enough to work and hungry enough to want to. Families where possible, because families are anchors. A man with a wife and children is a man who has something to lose, and a man who has something to lose is a man who will think twice before causing trouble." He paused. "And I want you to bring enough men-at-arms with you to make the authority structure clear from the beginning. Not to threaten. To reassure. People who have lived their entire lives in Flea Bottom understand power, and they are more comfortable when they know who holds it."
Tristan considered this. His expression shifted through several intermediate stages of resistance before arriving at a reluctant acknowledgement that the argument was difficult to refute. "And Gabe?"
"Gabe handles logistics. Ships, provisions, contracts, pay schedules. You handle people. Between the two of you, I expect a recruitment operation that is efficient, humane, and completed within six weeks." Alexander rolled the parchment and set it aside. "I will provide letters of introduction from Lord Selwyn and a charter authorising the recruitment under the terms of the Lord Hand's appeal. You will have the authority to negotiate wages, sign contracts, and make reasonable promises on behalf of House Tarth, within the limits I have set."
"And what limits are those?" Gabe asked.
"Pay them fairly. Feed them properly. Do not lie to them about what awaits them. If a man asks whether the work will be hard, tell him yes. If a woman asks whether her children will be safe, tell her yes, and mean it. If anyone asks whether the lord who is hiring them is mad, you may tell them that he is eight years old and leave the question of madness to their own judgment."
Something that might have been a smile crossed Tristan's face, though it was gone before it could be formally identified. "Six weeks."
"Six weeks. Begin with the dockyards and the outer wards of Flea Bottom. The people closest to the water tend to be the hardiest and the most willing to travel, because they have already made their peace with the sea." Alexander stood, which at his height was a less dramatic gesture than he might have wished, but which carried, nonetheless, the unmistakable finality of a commander concluding a briefing. "Any questions?"
"Several," Gabe said. "But I suspect the answers would only make me more nervous, so I will save them for the voyage."
"A wise policy. Tristan?"
The knight looked at the plan of Morne, then at the cost projections, then at the boy who had produced both with the casual authority of a man who had been building kingdoms in his mind since before he could reach the top shelf of the library without a stool.
"I will need twenty men-at-arms," Tristan said. "Good ones. Not garrison lads who have never been further than the harbour. Men who can handle a crowd without starting a riot."
"You will have them. Speak with Ser Oster about the selection. Tell him I authorised it."
"And if the City Watch objects to our recruitment?"
"They will not. The gold cloaks have been trying to thin out Flea Bottom for years without success. We are offering to do their work for them and pay for the privilege. If anything, they will want to help." Alexander moved toward the door, then paused and looked back. "One more thing. There will be women among the recruits. Ensure they are treated with exactly the same respect as the men. Not because it is virtuous, though it is, but because women who are treated well become the most effective recruiters you could ask for. They talk to each other, and what they say travels faster than any raven."
He left them to their preparations.
* * *