Pre-Chapter A/N:Another chapter on time? Guess my lock-in is going pretty well. If you haven't already, I recommend turning on notifications for my stuff so you can see when new stuff drops right as it drops. More chapters on my patreon(https://www.patreon.com/c/Oghenevwogaga)— same username as here and link in bio. Since I just started a new story, there's a cheeky discount on said patreon(https://www.patreon.com/c/Oghenevwogaga) page for anyone interested.
So, it turned out that there was not just one Archmaester in charge of education. In fact, the education arm of the Citadel—the one that set the curriculum for the acolytes and was essentially in charge of their training for the first few years until they narrowed down to forge specialized chains—was a subset of the whole Conclave itself. Three Archmaesters acted in unison, reported to the Conclave on decisions they came to, and made recommendations on those decisions that were beyond their powers.
One of them, it turned out, was sick and would not be able to meet with me during my visit. The other two were available—even if it had taken a bit of wrangling for someone to figure out an appropriate venue for the whole thing and then get them in attendance at the same time. If it were not for the fact that I was one of the wealthiest lords in the Seven Kingdoms and had a literal dragon at their gates, I was certain that I would not have gotten the visit I wanted.
Even as I sat there, I could tell from their expressions that they wanted this over and done with already. Well, it wouldn't be my first time making an offer to an uninterested audience. I just had to hope that, between the two of them, they could have the common sense to see that my offer was a good one.
"I appreciate that I have snatched the both of you from the undoubtedly important and urgent work you do for the Citadel to keep this place up and running, but I must say I have an offer for you that would benefit us both incredibly. The both of you could form an important part of the history of this world if you take this offer of mine," I said, laying down the bait.
"And what is this offer, my Lord?" The first one to speak was the one to the left. Archmaester Turquin was his name. No last name. Definitely from the merchant class or something of the sort.
"I want to establish a place of learning on Bloodstone Isle. Not too dissimilar to the Citadel, but with a focus on teaching children from all backgrounds. Smallfolk and former slaves inclusive," I said.
"You want to compete with the Citadel? And what business is this of ours?" Erreck, the other one, asked gruffly. The man by his side placed a hand on his arm, almost as if in warning. Good. Because it seemed the fool was about to forget himself.
"I want to hire Maesters from the Citadel. Maesters who would have remained here doing naught could come to my institution and teach the students. I am willing to pay about a quarter of the rate a Lord pays to have a Maester assigned to his house, per Maester," I said.
"The Citadel is not interested," Erreck, the second Archmaester, said.
"That's a lot of gold you're turning down," I countered.
"The Citadel will not aid in the establishment of a competing institution of learning. We are the foremost for a reason. If you want the children of your island educated, then the sole Maester assigned to you—one Bernard, I believe—will be enough to handle that," Turquin spoke.
"I want something larger. Not just one child or two. I want hundreds eventually, and I will pay the Citadel for the pleasure. Besides, how can this be considered a competing institution when it is Maesters of the Citadel who will be doing the teaching?"
"We remain uninterested."
"Surely, you must take my offer before the Conclave. I took the walk past your facilities on the way here. Dozens of Maesters sat about doing absolutely nothing. I give you a chance to put them to work, to earn money from them, and to stop them from being a drain on your resources, and you say no?" I was incredulous. Where was the sense of reason?
"We say no, Laenor Velaryon. We say no."
"You speak for yourselves; I will hear from the Conclave," I pressed.
"We are the voice of the Conclave in this. The full Conclave will not meet for another five moons. You may apply to be a supplicant before the Conclave and lay out your offer then, if you would rather be refused by a larger audience," Erreck said, seeming to sneer. I pushed my chair backwards and it scraped the ground. Whether it was the sound or the suddenness of the movement, I was uncertain, but they did flinch.
"Here I am in the foremost place of learning, and I still am forced to deal with fools," I said as I turned to leave.
"All the best in your future endeavors, Laenor Velaryon," one of them said—I had no interest in turning around to find out which.
The Return to Driftmark
The flight back to Driftmark was a swift one. I was boiling with rage all the way, and Igneel could feel it. We cut through the air like a hot knife through butter. A journey that should have taken quite a few hours was cut by half as Igneel went much faster than he probably should have. The speed was good for me. The feeling of the wind slapping my face was all I needed to turn my mind to better things—to think my way out of the problem.
The Maesters were not mission-critical. They would be useful, and probably easier to deal with since they had their own certification system that ensured even the least of them was at least reasonably educated to a baseline level. But they were not the only learned people in the world. There were institutions of learning all over the Free Cities. None of them were quite at the scale that I needed, but it was probably only going to be a matter of gold to tempt their brightest minds over to my own institution.
And there was a bright side to this. Not having the Citadel involved meant it would be easier to supplant them when the time came. There would be no agreement I was going to have to turn my back on. If they wanted to start this relationship on adversarial terms, then far be it from me to disappoint them. They wanted to compete with me? Then they would get it. They would come to learn that Laenor Velaryon was not the kind of man they wanted to fight against.
Those Maesters I'd seen just sitting around—what were the chances that they would say no to what I offered? I'd pay them directly for their services and recruit them for my own purposes. Most of them would say no, I imagined. The Citadel would excommunicate anyone who went rogue like that, and for some of them, the title of "Maester of the Citadel" was worth more than anything else. But there had to be a subset of them with far simpler motivations: those who had joined the Citadel for the chance of a better life than their upbringing would allow. Those ones would be swayed by promises of more gold than the Citadel would ever let them get close to.
Not just them, but those with dreams of impact. Surely there were those who joined for more than spending hours copying dusty tomes or waiting to be assigned to some family to teach a spoiled brat their letters and numbers. Those scholars would be mine as well. I just needed a way to get my offer to them.
When I landed on Driftmark, I was in a markedly better mood. By the time I'd walked through High Tide to reach Mother's rooms, I was in an even better one. Because no matter what had happened with the Maesters, today had still been a success. I'd done what Mother had thought would have been impossible. I had no illusions that the reason she'd placed that particular obstacle in our path had been only to "help" us.
She dreamed of the matches she could get for Laena and me, even with Rhaenyra off the table, and she expected this all to be some youthful indiscretion that died a quick noble death at the hands of an unwilling High Septon. But that was not to be our destiny. Because whether she expected it or not, I had succeeded. I'd gotten the High Septon to approve of incest—a feat that hadn't been achieved since Jaehaerys himself had sat the throne.
I opened the door, not surprised to find them both there. Laena lay curled around a leather-bound tome while Mother stared over an unfinished dress. I had never expected Rhaenys, the Rider of Meleys, to take up fashion design of all things as a hobby. In this world, it was still called tailoring, even though she did exactly none of the stitching herself. She'd hated it as a child, she'd said, and abhorred it as an adult. But she still enjoyed making clothes. So she sent drawings and sketches to a small army of seamstresses that enjoyed House Velaryon's patronage, and it was up to them to bring her dreams to life.
"Hello, beautiful ladies," I said in greeting, drawing both of them from their tasks.
"You're back already," Mother said, while Laena just tossed herself into my arms.
"Did he—?" she asked, not daring to quite complete the question.
I looked over her shoulder at where Mother watched the both of us in expectation, perhaps waiting for me to utter words of disappointment or failure.
"The High Septon shall see us wed at the Sept of Bloodstone in a year's time," I said. If I felt Laena's hugs were unable to get any tighter, I was proven wrong in short order. She seemed intent on squeezing all the life out of me.
When we'd finished our embrace, Mother was waiting. "Congratulations. But you both must know what this means."
"What?"
"We have a wedding to plan and only a year to do so," she said.
"A year seems like plenty of time. The Sept will be complete very soon in terms of the exterior. The furnishing shouldn't take all that long either," I said.
"Yes, you do that. Leave the real work to us," Mother said, taking Laena in hand and beginning to walk toward her desk. Part of me was tempted to ask, but the rest of me had learned its lesson much earlier.
One Moon Later: Bloodstone
Mother and Laena were back on Driftmark, forming plans for the wedding—guest lists, seating charts, those things. I had asked them to be sure to extend invitations to those worth a dime on the other side of the Narrow Sea as well, and then left it to them to do the decision-making. The Stepstones were in between Westeros and Essos, so it made sense for the wedding to allow people on both sides to interact.
It also gave me a chance to advertise my islands to the widest possible audience. All the information I'd received showed that the Essosi viewed me more as a useful business partner in some respects and competition in others, but not as an enemy, thankfully enough. I'd feared Myr would take the whole glass thing too personally, but it seemed they had grown out of their earlier pettiness. I still made the best glass in the world—that was not a matter for debate—but Myr was second, and while not close, the distance had reduced quite a bit. They were improving their process over time. It meant that while I had thoroughly captured the luxury market, people who could not quite afford Velaryon glass were more than served by Myr's options. At least that would be the case for the next few years until I had sold all the luxury glass I could and then dropped my prices to take the middle of the market for myself as well.
Surely, they wouldn't take it all too personally; it was just business. Speaking of business, I watched from the walls of Bloodstone as another ship docked and began to unload its cargo. Improvements in our planting process on Driftmark were finally bringing forth dividends. Our holdings would be fully food-independent again in three to five years if both population and capacity growth continued on the same trend. That meant I would soon have extra capacity to sell, and there were customers aplenty across the sea.
The other building I'd started working on, now that exterior work on the Sept was reaching its final steps, was an idea I'd had after looking at Oldtown. My dream had been too small, it was clear. I was going to have to take down the walls of the city soon and expand them even further. Right now, Bloodstone City was about a quarter of the island's landmass. When it was finished, it would take the whole island ideally and then ship some things to the neighboring islands. That was going to be a while away, considering this was the largest island in the Stepstones by some margin, but it was a good thought exercise for now. And it meant I felt more comfortable recategorizing what had initially been a residential district as the spot for my latest project: a colosseum.
Panem et circenses had been the idea. It hadn't even occurred to me in this world until I looked at Oldtown. Because that city, for all its greatness, had lacked something. It had felt like a hodgepodge of different interests and goals. The Starry Sept on one end, the Citadel on the other, and the Hightower at the third. All only brought together by the Honeywine. It was the greatest city in all of Westeros, yes.
But even with that, it lacked joy. Joy wasn't something you could really measure or put a finger on, but it showed in small ways. It showed in how the people who should have been busy with their days left their work to stare at Igneel as he waited outside the Sept. I had thought it a function of not seeing dragons all that often, but the more I thought of it, the more certain I became that it was a symptom of another lack in their lives: entertainment.
The Romans hadn't pursued circenses because they were the most magnanimous of overlords. They'd done so because it made sense that people who were hungry or bored would get up to no good, and it was probably better for them to prevent either of those from being issues in the long term. In terms of bread, I had that all well covered.
Entertainment was the unsolved problem. My wedding with Laena gave another reason to sort it out immediately. Building a colosseum meant we would have somewhere to host our tourney—what was a wedding without a tourney to mark the occasion? It would be smaller than the one for Aemond's birth, definitely. I had no doubt that invitations would be sent to all the realm's great and good, but only those with the resources to either rent ships or with ships of their own would make it. Aemond's tourney was just a matter of finding a horse and riding it to King's Landing.
The colosseum would be the place where my tourney would take place, so we needed to make it a bit different from what I remembered from my history lessons. Massive stables were the first change that needed to be made. Knights needed their horses, after all. Then the seating had to be stratified to make separations for the nobles. I wanted my smallfolk to attend, of course, and the lower levels would be theirs.
The boxes that lined the other levels would be set aside for Great Houses for this tourney. Other displays would have them as extra-priced seating. Pride of place would be given to the Velaryon box. It would be bigger and much more luxurious than the others. That was the way of things. And then there would be winches to take nobles from the ground floor to their boxes. Using cement blocks and levers meant we could get away with only about two operators all together and it would still work.
It just had to be ready on time.
"My Lord," Bernard said as he walked up behind me on the wall.
"Yes, Bernard?" I asked, turning to face him.
"You asked me to inform you when the Sealord sent his return missive."
"Brilliant. Is he on board?" I asked.
"Tentatively so. He says it shall be on you to convince the guild of your plan, but he shall not stand in your way," he said.
"That's fine by me," I said, feeling a smile build on my face. Brilliant.
A/N: Another chapter bites the dust, innit? Here we go with the next bit of things before the wedding bells begin ringing. Next five chapters up on patreon(https://www.patreon.com/c/Oghenevwogaga) (same username as here and link in bio), support me there and read them early. Started a new story, so there's a discount for the rest of the month on patreon(https://www.patreon.com/c/Oghenevwogaga): feel free to check that out as well.