Timeskip incoming, at most a year or two, really to push the story forward, and not write about every little thing that is going to happen; still about four or six chapters before that, though.
Currently my biggest problem is I still don't know how I'm going to have Damon convince someone, most likely Rhaenys, to come with him to the future to be his wife, which is why the Cersei chapter hasn't been posted yet even though it's already written.
The morning light through the solar's high windows had not yet burned off the last of the night's chill when Damon found his mother already awake, seated near the hearth with a shawl drawn over her shoulders and one hand resting where it always rested now, over the swell of her belly.
"You're up early," Rhaella said, without turning.
"I could say the same of you."
"Your sibling doesn't care much for my sleeping schedule." A faint smile touched her mouth, there and gone. "What brings you here before the sun has properly decided to rise?"
Damon crossed the room and took the chair opposite her. "Viserys is to attend the Small Council today."
Whatever ease had been in her expression sharpened into something more careful. "As what?"
"As my heir. For now."
"He is eight, Damon."
"I know how old my brother is."
"Eight," she said again, quieter, "and prone to imagining himself owed things he has not yet earned. You know this as well as I do. Perhaps better."
"Which is precisely why he needs to be in that room and not imagining what happens inside it." Damon leaned forward, elbows on his knees. "He hears rumors from servants and half-truths from squires his own age. He builds a council in his head made of flattery and dragons and men who bow to him because of his name. I would rather he see the truth of it. Tywin arguing over coin. Grafton telling me plainly that I cannot afford everything I want. Olenna reminding the room that laws exist for reasons. Let him learn what ruling actually looks like before he has any reason to believe it looks like anything else."
Rhaella was quiet for a moment. "And if he embarrasses himself in front of Tywin Lannister and Olenna Tyrell?"
"Then he embarrasses himself in a room where I control what happens next, instead of in front of a hall of lords when it matters." Damon's voice gentled, just slightly. "I am not doing this to punish him, Mother. I am doing it because he is my heir, and a Targaryen in his position who understands nothing of ruling is a danger to himself and to the realm, whether or not he ever sits the throne."
"You sound as though you've already decided he won't."
"I've decided nothing yet." Damon was quiet a moment. "I've decided only that whatever he becomes, he will not become it in ignorance. But there is another reason I want him in that room."
Rhaella waited.
"The Vale needs a Lord Paramount I can trust completely, and I have found no ready candidate among its own lords. Royce is too tied to men I've already killed. Grafton, I still mean to watch a while longer before I decide anything permanent about him." He met his mother's eyes. "I've been considering a new branch of House Targaryen. Give Viserys the Vale, once he's of age. A kingdom of his own to govern, rather than a lifetime spent standing behind my chair, waiting for my children to make him irrelevant."
Rhaella's hands stilled over her belly. "You would split a house that has bled enough already, over a single crown too many wanted."
"I would give my brother a purpose before resentment finds him one instead." His voice stayed even, though something almost gentle moved beneath it. "A brother with nothing to do but wait for me to father an heir becomes a danger to that heir eventually, Mother. History has shown us that more than once. Better he rule something real, and rule it well, than spend forty years counting the days until a crown that was never going to be his."
She studied him a long moment, grief and calculation both moving behind her eyes, the way only a mother who had lived through one mad king's reign could manage at once. "Does he know?"
"Not yet. It's a thought, not yet a decision. I wanted to sit with it before I brought it to him, or to anyone."
"Then perhaps," Rhaella said slowly, "today is a fitting place for him to begin learning what a Lord Paramount's council looks like, if that is the future you mean to hand him."
"That thought had also occurred to me."
He rose.
She watched him a moment longer, something unreadable behind her violet eyes, and then inclined her head. "Be patient with him today. He is trying very hard not to seem afraid of you."
Damon paused at the door. "Is he afraid of me?"
"He watched you kill three men in a morning, my son. Even I am not entirely certain he sleeps well."
He said nothing to that. There was nothing to say that would not sound either colder or softer than he meant it, and so he left it where it lay, and went to meet his council.
---
The Small Council chamber filled the way it always did now, one measured entrance at a time, each arrival its own small performance whether the arriver intended it or not.
Tywin Lannister came first, as he always did, taking the seat to the right of the King's chair with the unhurried certainty of a man who had never once doubted his place in any room he entered. He set down a single leather folio, precisely aligned with the table's edge, and said nothing until spoken to.
Olenna Tyrell arrived next, cane tapping an unbothered rhythm against the stone, and lowered herself into the seat opposite Tywin with a faint grunt that fooled no one into thinking her frail. "Lovely morning for judgments and taxation," she said to no one in particular, and reached for the pitcher of watered wine before any servant could offer it to her.
Varys came without sound, as always, slipping into his seat like a shadow finding its accustomed corner. He folded his soft hands atop the table and smiled at everyone and told them nothing with his eyes.
Marq Grafton entered with the careful, slightly too-formal bearing of a man newly promoted well past where he had expected to end his career, bowing a fraction deeper than strictly necessary before taking his seat. Paxter Redwyne followed close behind him, broader, more at ease, a man used to command even if it had until recently been command of ships rather than councils.
Grand Maester Pycelle shuffled in last but one, robes heavy, chain clinking with every labored step, and eased himself into his chair with a wheeze he made no effort to disguise. Barristan Selmy came last of all, white cloak immaculate, and took his position standing rather than seated, near the door, sword at his hip and eyes on the room the way they were always on the room.
Damon looked at them, one after another, and felt something close to satisfaction, though his face gave none of it away.
A lion for administration. A rose for law and politics. A spider for information no one else could gather. A port lord for coin, loyal and competent and not yet powerful enough to be dangerous. A fleet lord for ships, tying the Reach's greatest maritime house to the Crown without handing the Reach anything it didn't already half-own. A maester who would, in time, need replacing. Damon was already certain of that, though he said nothing of it to anyone in this room. And a knight whose honor was worth more than any oath a lesser man might break.
Viserys came in behind them, dressed in black and red too fine for a boy his age, and made his way around the table pouring wine into cups that mostly did not need refilling, his hands steady enough, his eyes flicking once, twice, to each face in the room as if cataloguing them. When he finished, he did not take a seat. He stood behind Damon's chair, hands folded, the way a squire stood behind a knight, and every person at that table understood exactly what his presence there was meant to say.
No one commented on it. No one needed to.
"My lords," Damon said, and the room settled. "There is a great deal to discuss."
He laid it out plainly, the way he laid out everything not as ambition dressed up as necessity, but as a list, each item stated without embellishment. The rebuilding of the Dragonpit, and the caverns beneath Rhaenys' Hill that would make it a sanctuary rather than a prison. The collection of the treasuries owed by the North, the Vale, the Stormlands, and the Riverlands. The recruitment and training of the standing army, twenty thousand men to start, drawn from every region of the realm and gathered at Harrenhal. The repair of King's Landing's sewers, which had been failing since before his father's reign and which no one, apparently, had thought worth the expense of fixing. And the partial restoration of Harrenhal itself, cursed and half-ruined as it was, now that it housed both a new lord and the beginnings of a royal host.
He finished, and for a moment no one spoke.
Then Marq Grafton cleared his throat.
"Your Grace." He said it carefully, the way a man speaks when he knows the news is unwelcome and has decided the only mercy is to deliver it quickly. "I have spent the better part of the last night going through what remains of the treasury, along with what we can reasonably expect from the punished houses and the new taxation." He drew a small ledger from beneath his arm, though he did not need to open it; the numbers were plainly already memorized. "Even accounting for all of it the North's third, the Vale's half, the Stormlands' half, the Riverlands' third, the increased levies for the next several years the Crown's coffers are not what they once were. The war saw to that before I ever touched a single coin of it."
"Say plainly what you mean, Lord Grafton," Tywin said, not unkindly, though there was no gentleness in it either. "The King has little patience for men who circle a point."
Grafton nodded, swallowed once, and did. "We cannot fund all five undertakings at once, Your Grace. Not properly. Not without borrowing against future tax collection in a way I would advise strongly against, or without doing each one so cheaply that it is done poorly, which in the case of the standing army or the Dragonpit's foundations, could prove far costlier to correct later than to simply wait and do properly the first time." He set the ledger down. "I would suggest the Crown choose one matter to pursue in full, now, and allow the others to proceed slowly, or wait, until the treasury has recovered enough to bear more than one weight at a time."
Silence settled over the table, thoughtful rather than uneasy.
"A wise instinct," Olenna said, breaking it first, "for a man who has held the position for less than a week. Most new masters of coin spend a full year telling kings what they wish to hear before they find the courage to tell them what they need to hear." She looked toward Damon. "Listen to him."
"I intend to," Damon said. "Which one would each of you choose?"
Tywin answered without hesitation. "The army. Everything else follows from strength, and strength follows from soldiers loyal to the Crown alone. The Dragonpit is a symbol. Symbols matter, but they do not collect taxes or hold borders. Harrenhal's repairs can wait; a partially ruined castle housing a standing garrison is still a functioning castle. The sewers..." a faint, dry note entered his voice, "... have failed for decades. They can fail a while longer."
"The smallfolk might disagree," Barristan said quietly from his place by the door. It was the first thing he had said since entering the room, and every head turned toward him, mildly surprised he had spoken at all. "Filth in the streets breeds sickness, and sickness does not care whose reign it falls under. I say this not as a master of coin or a lord, but as a man who walked those streets before I ever wore this cloak. It might be a small thing to lords. It is not a small thing to the people living above it."
"A fair point," Olenna said, "and one I'd wager the King has already weighed." Her eyes found Damon's, sharp and knowing. "But Lord Tywin is not wrong either. A king remembered for fixing sewage is a king remembered kindly. A king who commands twenty thousand loyal swords is a king no one dares test in the first place. I know which legacy I would choose, were I sitting where you sit."
"The Dragonpit sends its own message," Varys offered, mild as ever, hands still folded. "The smallfolk already sing songs about Caraxes circling the city. A sanctuary built with royal coin, rather than a prison built with royal fear, tells every man, woman, and child in this city that Your Grace's dragons are not a leash waiting to be loosened, but a permanent, benevolent fact of their lives. That message has value that coin alone cannot easily purchase." He paused delicately. "Though I confess I am not the man best suited to weigh that value against twenty thousand soldiers."
Grand Maester Pycelle, who had said nothing through all of it beyond a series of contemplative wheezes, finally stirred. "If I may, Your Grace, the maesters of the Citadel would of course counsel whatever course Your Grace finds wisest, as...."
"That will do, Grand Maester," Damon said, not unkindly, and Pycelle subsided into his chair like a man relieved to have been interrupted.
Paxter Redwyne spoke next, unhurried, in the manner of a man used to being listened to. "If it's soldiers you mean to gather from every corner of the realm, Your Grace, my ships can carry the recruiting parties faster than any of them could ride, and bring the recruits back the same way once they're found. Worth folding into whatever's decided, whichever way this goes."
"Noted, Lord Redwyne," Damon said. "I'll want your fleet for exactly that."
Grafton, encouraged perhaps by how patiently the King had heard him the first time, spoke again. "If I may add to that, Your Grace. Recruiting itself will not cost the Crown a great deal. Wages for the men sent to find and gather recruits, some coin for the journey home, little more. The true expense, arms, armor, wages for twenty thousand men once they're actually gathered and drilling, that's further off than most would assume. A year, perhaps longer, before that weight truly lands on the treasury."
Damon was quiet for a long moment, turning it over the way he turned over everything, from every side, looking for the angle no one else in the room had thought to name aloud.
Grafton had just handed him the angle without meaning to.
"The army," Damon said finally, and watched Tywin's expression not change in the slightest, because Tywin had known the answer before he'd finished asking the question. "Lord Tywin is right. Everything follows from it. A city with poor sewers is unpleasant. A city with no army loyal to its king is finished, the first time some lord decides mercy looks like weakness instead."
He let the room settle before he went on.
"But I won't spend the next year pretending we can only manage one thing at a time, when Master Grafton has just told us we don't need to." His eyes found Grafton's. "Recruiting will take time. Riders sent to every kingdom, men found and gathered and marched or shipped back to Harrenhal, that's months before the numbers are even worth speaking of, and longer still before any of them need paying as soldiers rather than recruits. That's coin sitting idle in the meantime, if we let it."
He looked to Barristan. "So the sewers begin now, alongside the recruiting, while the army's true cost is still ahead of us instead of upon us. By the time twenty thousand men need proper wages, arms, and armor, the sewers should be finished, or close enough that finishing them costs little more than patience."
Barristan inclined his head, satisfied, or as close to it as a man like him allowed himself to look.
"The Dragonpit's foundations can be surveyed and planned this year, even if the digging waits for next. Harrenhal remains Ser Harold's concern, funded modestly, as it has been. The treasury collection proceeds regardless, on its own schedule." Damon's eyes swept the table once more. "Are we agreed?"
No one disagreed. No one in that room, Damon reflected, was foolish enough to disagree with a king who had explained his reasoning so plainly that disagreement would have required arguing with arithmetic itself.
Behind his chair, Viserys shifted his weight, just slightly, and Damon did not turn to look at him, but he noted it all the same the boy leaning forward a fraction, as if he meant to speak, then catching himself, then simply watching, the way Damon had told him to watch, long before either of them had ever set foot in this room.
Good, Damon thought. Let him learn it that way. Watching. Listening. Understanding, before he ever believed himself entitled to an opinion worth voicing.
"Then that concludes the matter," Damon said.