Quentyn didn’t reply.
As a transmigrator, he might have been nothing more than an ordinary college student before crossing over, but he had read enough and paid enough attention to know that in moments like this, the worst thing he could do was let the other man see where his true limit lay, not this early.
A transmigrator dropped into the world of Ice and Fire was, well, rather to be pitied, honestly.
If he’d landed in the era of the main story, he would have had to face the Long Night of the Others, an event fate itself hadn’t written yet, so no one could say how it would actually unfold.
And before that, of course, there was the chaos of the War of the Five Kings, “wise” King Joffrey and his mother, the mysterious Euron, and the damned Meereenese knot to survive.
If it was the era of the Dance of the Dragons instead, he’d have to work out how to survive the coming tragedy of dragons tearing each other to pieces.
Whatever the case, a transmigrator’s first need in the world of Ice and Fire was, without question, a dragon.
And, of course, power and authority, which never went out of fashion.
For Quentyn’s part, once he’d worked out exactly which era he’d landed in, he had already drawn up a list of what needed doing.
As for a dragon: he wasn’t of the main Targaryen line, but his mother was a Targaryen, and barring some disaster, his wife would be one too.
A few more years, and once King Jaehaerys convened the Great Council of 101 AC and formally excluded him from the succession, the old king would, as compensation, likely turn a blind eye to a Targaryen through the female line, such as himself, claiming a dragon of his own.
So the matter of a dragon, in the end, wasn’t especially pressing.
What was pressing was money.
Harrenhal was simply too vast.
Harren the Black, the tyrant who had once ruled the Riverlands and the Iron Islands, had drained his people dry to build the greatest fortress in the Seven Kingdoms, and it was, quite simply, too large.
Worse, after being scorched by dragonfire, the whole castle had long since fallen into ruin.
Even now, with the family occupying only two of the castle’s towers, the Widow’s Tower and the Wailing Tower, the upkeep still amounted to a staggering sum.
Harrenhal’s revenues could barely sustain the household’s noble way of life.
His father was no hand at managing an estate, and could only just keep the books balanced.
But Lord Daeron knew how to delegate, and before Quentyn had left for King’s Landing, his father had granted him full authority.
Even so, the family’s finances remained in a dire state.
The family’s coffers, counting his mother’s dowry, had never held more than three hundred gold dragons at the very most.
At present, to be precise, there were a hundred and thirty-two gold dragons, a bit over seventy silver stags, and a heap of copper pennies.
He himself was carrying fifty gold dragons on his person.
Quentyn had done the arithmetic.
Harrenhal could raise three or four thousand men for war, but a single campaign would bankrupt the family outright.
There was simply no way to sustain it.
Such a state of affairs was, to Quentyn’s mind, entirely unacceptable.
So, once he’d returned from Oldtown, Quentyn had set to work developing the estate at once, and had already spent half the family’s savings doing it.
The family’s greatest asset was the whole of the God’s Eye itself.
The great lake was rich not only in fish and freshwater pearls, but was also the largest nesting ground for black swans anywhere.
The Isle of Faces at its heart produced fine weirwood timber and furs besides.
Fed by the lake, the surrounding lands were lush with grass and water, and served not only as one of the Riverlands’ most important grain baskets, but supported considerable pastureland and timber besides.
The only trouble was that all this wealth sat idle, undeveloped.
Since ancient times, the shores of the God’s Eye had held a tradition of weaving.
But hemmed in by outdated craft, by the flood of goods dumped on the market by the Free Cities across the Narrow Sea, and by centuries of near-constant war, the weaving trade around the God’s Eye had spent the last several hundred years in an awkward, half-forgotten state.
Worse still, a hundred years before, Harren the Black’s brutal rule had all but destroyed the God’s Eye’s weaving trade outright.
Quentyn would have wagered that Harrenhal’s very stones were soaked in the blood of skilled weavers who had died building it.
With Quentyn’s determined backing, the sound of looms was ringing once more through the workshops along the God’s Eye.
But looms cost money.
Skilled workers cost money.
Even better methods cost money.
In short, Quentyn needed money.
A great deal of it.
“I trust you know better than I do, my lord, that velvet has nothing whatsoever to do with swans.
If you tried to sell it under the sign of Harrenhal’s black swans, you’d only have my fellow merchants laughing at you behind your back.”
Seeing that Quentyn gave no response, Garwyn pressed his advantage and went on.
“You see, my lord, the finest velvet requires the finest silk, and the finest weavers besides.
But Dornish silk is poor in both quality and appearance, and Princess Deria Martell certainly isn’t about to export raw silk to us.
Lys and Myr hold a tight grip on the nearest silk-producing lands.
In all honesty, Harrenhal’s goods simply have no advantage here.
Even if I wished with all my heart to help you, my liege lord, the market itself won’t forgive my mistakes.”
Watching the old merchant perform so earnestly before him, Quentyn’s expression didn’t so much as flicker.
He only thought to himself: a hungry old fox indeed, but a seasoned one too.
Still, this fox belonged to him, leash and all.
Westerosi knights and lords looked down on merchants, and yet they couldn’t do without them.
Quentyn was not like them.
He understood the importance of trade, and with a merchant this experienced, and this thoroughly entangled with his own family’s affairs, keeping him close was by far the wiser course.
So, over the past several years, Quentyn had kept up a fairly close relationship with the old fox sitting across from him.
“Even if the cloth we produce is priced at only half to seven-tenths of what our competitors charge?”
Quentyn picked up a gold dragon from the desk beside him.
It was heavy, substantial in the hand.
On its face was stamped the likeness of King Jaehaerys, now nearly fifty years upon the throne; on its reverse, the three-headed dragon of the royal arms.
The coin turned over between his fingers as Quentyn looked Garwyn straight in the eye.
“I came across a design for a new kind of loom in the Citadel’s archives.
Each machine needs only two skilled craftsmen to turn out at least three feet of velvet a day.
Add more craftsmen and more looms, and that output only climbs higher.”
The boy paused, catching the spinning coin between two fingers with something that was almost, but not quite, a smile.
The old scholars of the Citadel had indeed preserved this sort of technical knowledge, true enough, but putting it into actual practice had drawn on fragments of Quentyn’s memories from his past life as well.
Quentyn couldn’t say for certain how accurate those half-remembered fragments were, but with the help of Harrenhal’s veteran craftsmen, he’d managed to assemble the very first loom, and it had proven a resounding success.
Garwyn choked on his next words.
Quentyn could read the old merchant’s thoughts plainly enough in his eyes.
The man held little real hope that Harrenhal could produce quality cloth, and his merchant’s instincts even tempted him to see what he could skim off the venture for himself.
But his family’s own history made it hard for him to simply stand by and watch his liege lord lose money.
On the whole, though, his instincts as a merchant were winning out.
“At present, we already have ten looms of this kind, and there will be more to come.”
Quentyn’s tone shifted, carrying now a faint note of temptation.
“His Grace’s tax laws apply only to imported cloth, not to goods produced within the realm.
Our costs can still come down further.
Wouldn’t it be far better to sell our own cloth, and perhaps even export it to the Free Cities themselves?”
“That…”
A cunning little fox, Garwyn thought to himself.
He knew he mustn’t let himself be won over by Quentyn so easily, and yet everything the boy said made perfect sense.
More than forty years before, King Jaehaerys had appointed Rego Draz as Master of Coin, and that grasping Pentoshi had slapped heavy taxes on every imported luxury good.
And yet the lords of Westeros, along with the commons grown prosperous under the long peace, still flocked to those very goods.
So even at ruinous prices, foreign imports had gone on capturing a vast share of the Westerosi market.
If Westeros could produce luxuries every bit as fine as those from the Free Cities, and win the public’s favor besides…
the profits to be made would far exceed what anyone imagined.
Garwyn fell into deep thought.
Quentyn’s mind, meanwhile, hadn’t stopped working either.
By his own reckoning, simply repairing the Widow’s Tower and the Wailing Tower, where the family currently lived, so that they’d no longer be a drain on the family’s purse, would cost at least ten thousand gold dragons.
As for restoring the whole of Harrenhal…
a hundred thousand gold dragons would likely barely make a dent.
The goods he’d accumulated since returning to Harrenhal…
if he could sell them at the floor price he’d calculated, he’d bring in perhaps two hundred gold dragons, just enough to break even.
But if he could fetch a higher price, he certainly meant to fight for it.
“My lord, it comes back to the same problem.”
Garwyn weighed the matter carefully, turning over its costs and benefits.
“Cloth made purely of wool and cotton thread will struggle to win any real share of the market.
If my lord could secure fine silk at a low price, and turn out velvet silk at this price point, then I would gladly throw my full support behind it.”
In the end, though, he shook his head.
“But the King’s Landing market…
as I’ve told you before, the lords and wealthy men of King’s Landing will spend fortunes on Myrish lace and Lysene gauze.
Even the modestly well-off favor Tyroshi cloth or Dornish silk.
The folk of Antler Alley and Threehead Lane buy from the crown’s own small vendors outside the Dragon Gate, and as for the poor folk of Flea Bottom, they can’t afford to buy cloth in the market at all.”
Garwyn split the difference between loyalty and profit.
“I myself can offer a hundred and fifty gold dragons for all the cloth you’ve brought with you, my lord.
That is the very best that Garwyn Chambers can give you.”
Quentyn’s brow drew tight at once.
It was just then that a sudden clamor rose up outside the window.
Robb Rivers rushed to the window at once, glanced out with obvious alarm, and stepped in front of Quentyn.
“My lord Quentyn, something seems to have gone wrong over near the Dragonpit.”
The dark-haired boy’s voice trembled slightly.
“…dragon…”
“…the dragon’s coming this way…”
“…Vhagar…”
The clamor grew steadily clearer, and with it came the rushing sound of wind, and then…
a low growl that raised the hair on the back of one’s neck.
The dragon’s coming this way?
What in the seven hells did that mean?
A tangle of feelings surged through Quentyn all at once.
He rose and looked toward the window.
The city spread out before him.
In the distance, atop Rhaenys’s Hill, the vast domed Dragonpit came into view, and a green dragon was spreading its wings across the whole sky, flying straight toward him.
The dragon’s shape swelled larger and larger, until Quentyn could even make out the loose fold of its throat and its short, stubby horns.
And the rider on its back.
“Prince of Spring’s Dawn,” “the Brave,” Baelon Targaryen, Prince of Dragonstone, heir to the Iron Throne, his own cousin, and rider of the dragon Vhagar.
This was the very dragon that had once borne Visenya, the Conqueror’s own sister and wife, during the Conquest itself.
She was now past a hundred years old, and when she spread her wings, the whole district seemed to plunge straight into night.
Toward him?
Quentyn’s eyes narrowed sharply.
Before he could so much as react, a rumbling shudder passed through the ground beneath his feet, as though an earthquake had just struck.
Something had happened.
Quentyn made up his mind at once.
He shot a glance at Robb, who had just steadied himself, and the dark-haired boy nodded, rushing forward to throw open the door.
The tavern below was already in chaos.
The serving boy had curled up shaking in a corner, the barmaid stood frozen, staring blankly at the enormous draconic head visible beyond the door, and the drinkers who’d been at their cups moments before now didn’t dare so much as breathe.
“Quentyn!
Cousin!”
Baelon burst into the tavern, his face a mask of panic, cradling a silver-haired boy whose upper body was drenched in blood.
Behind him came a strapping, silver-haired young man.
The moment the Prince of Dragonstone caught sight of Quentyn, he grew frantic all at once.
“Please, save Daemon.”