“However it please your lordship.”

“As you will. Your king could burn my city down to ash, I do not doubt. Tens of thousands would die in dragonflame. Men, women, and children. I do not have the power to wreak that sort of destruction upon Westeros. Such sellswords as I might hire would flee before your knights. My fleets could sweep yours from the sea for a time, but my ships are made of wood, and wood burns. However, there is in this city a certain…guild, let us say…whose members are very skilled at their chosen profession. They could not destroy King’s Landing, nor fill its streets with corpses. But they could kill…a few. A well-chosen few.”

   “His Grace is protected day and night by the Kingsguard.”

“Knights, yes. Such as the man who waits for you outside. If indeed he is still waiting. What would you say if I were to tell you that Ser Gyles is already dead?” When Septon Barth began to rise, the Sealord waved him back to his seat. “No, please, no need to rush away. I said what if. I did consider it. They are most skilled, as I said. Had I done so, however, you might have acted unwisely, and many more good people might have died. That is not my desire. Threats make me uncomfortable. Westerosi may be warriors, but we Braavosi are traders. Let us trade.”

Septon Barth settled back down. “What do you offer?”

“I do not have these eggs, of course,” the Sealord said. “You cannot prove elsewise. If I did have them, however…well, until they hatch, they are but stones. Would your king begrudge me three pretty stones? Now, if I had three…chickens…I might understand his concern. I do admire your Jaehaerys, though. He is a great improvement on his uncle, and Braavos does not wish to see him so unhappy. So instead of stones, let me offer…gold.”

And with that the real bargaining began.

There are those even today who will insist that Septon Barth was made a fool of by the Sealord, that he was lied to, cheated, and humiliated. They point to the fact that he returned to King’s Landing without a single dragon’s egg. This is true.

What he did bring back was not of inconsiderable value, however. At the Sealord’s urging, the Iron Bank of Braavos forgave the entire remaining principal of its loan to the Iron Throne. At a stroke, the Crown’s debt had been cut in half. “And all at the cost of three stones,” Barth told the king.

“The Sealord had best hope that they remain stones,” Jaehaerys said. “If I should hear so much as a whisper of…chickens…his palace will be the first to burn.”

The agreement with the Iron Bank would have great impact for all the people of the realm over the coming years and decades, though the extent of that was not immediately apparent. The king’s shrewd master of coin, Rego Draz, pored over the Crown’s debts and incomes carefully after Septon Barth’s return, and concluded that the coin that would previously have had to be sent to Braavos could now be safely diverted to a project the king had long wished to undertake at home: further improvements to King’s Landing.

   Jaehaerys had widened and straightened the streets of the city, and put down cobblestones where previously there had been mud, but much and more remained to be done. King’s Landing in its present state could not compare to Oldtown, nor even Lannisport, let alone the splendid Free Cities across the narrow sea. His Grace was determined that it should. Accordingly, he set out plans for a series of drains and sewers, to carry the city’s offal and nightsoil under the streets to the river.

Septon Barth drew the king’s attention to an even more urgent problem: King’s Landing’s drinking water was fit only for horses and swine, in the opinion of many. The river water was muddy, and the king’s new sewers would soon make it worse; the waters of the Blackwater Bay were brackish at the best of times, and salty at the worst. Whilst the king and his court and the city’s highborn drank ale and mead and wine, these foul waters were oft the only choice for the poor. To address the problem, Barth proposed sinking wells, some inside the city proper and others to the north, beyond the walls. A series of glazed clay pipes and tunnels would carry the fresh water into the city, where it would be stored in four huge cisterns and made available to the smallfolk from public fountains in certain squares and crossroads.

Barth’s scheme was costly, beyond a doubt, and Rego Draz and King Jaehaerys balked at the expense…until Queen Alysanne served each of them a tankard of river water at the next council meeting, and dared them to drink of it. The water went undrunk, but the wells and pipes were soon approved. Construction would require more than a dozen years, but in the end “the queen’s fountains” provided clean water for Kingslanders for many generations to come.

Several years had passed since the king had last made a progress, so plans were laid in 58 AC for Jaehaerys and Alysanne to make their first visit to Winterfell and the North. Their dragons would be with them, of course, but beyond the Neck the distances were great and the roads poor, and the king had grown tired of flying ahead and waiting for his escort to catch up. This time, he decreed, his Kingsguard, servants, and retainers would go ahead of him, to make things ready for his arrival. And thus it was that three ships set sail from King’s Landing for White Harbor, where he and the queen were to make their first stop.

   The gods and the Free Cities had other plans, however. Even as the king’s ships were beating their way north, envoys from Pentos and Tyrosh called upon His Grace in the Red Keep. The two cities had been at war for three years and were now desirous of making peace, but could not agree on where they might meet to discuss terms. The conflict had caused serious disruption to trade upon the narrow sea, to the extent that King Jaehaerys had offered both cities his help in ending their hostilities. After long discussion, the Archon of Tyrosh and the Prince of Pentos had agreed to meet in King’s Landing to settle their differences, provided that Jaehaerys would act as an intermediary between them, and guarantee the terms of any resulting treaty.

It was a proposal that neither the king nor his council felt he could refuse, but it would mean postponing His Grace’s planned progress to the North, and there was concern that the notoriously prickly Lord of Winterfell might take that for a slight. Queen Alysanne provided the solution. She would go ahead as planned, alone, whilst the king played host to the Prince and Archon. Jaehaerys could join her at Winterfell as soon as the peace had been concluded. And so it was agreed.

Queen Alysanne’s travels began in the city of White Harbor, where tens of thousands of northerners turned out to cheer her and gape at Silverwing with awe, and a bit of terror. It was the first time any of them had seen a dragon. The size of the crowds surprised even their lord. “I had not known there were so many smallfolk in the city,” Theomore Manderly is reported to have said. “Where did they all come from?”

The Manderlys were unique amongst the great houses of the North. Having originated in the Reach centuries before, they had found refuge near the mouth of the White Knife when rivals drove them from their rich lands along the Mander. Though fiercely loyal to the Starks of Winterfell, they had brought their own gods with them from the south, and still worshipped the Seven and kept the traditions of knighthood. Alysanne Targaryen, ever desirous of binding the Seven Kingdoms closer together, saw an opportunity in Lord Theomore’s famously large family, and promptly set about arranging marriages. By the time she took her leave, two of her ladies-in-waiting had been betrothed to his lordship’s younger sons and a third to a nephew; his eldest daughter and three nieces, meanwhile, had been added to the queen’s own party, with the understanding that they would travel south with her and there be pledged to suitable lords and knights of the king’s court.