Title: The Prince's Ledger

Title: The Prince's Ledger

Year and Month: 85 AC, 6th Moon

The successful containment of the Saera affair marked a turning point in my quiet consolidation of power within the family. My mother, Queen Alysanne, now looked at me with a profound and wary respect. Her love was undiminished, but it was now threaded with the understanding that my childish form housed something ancient and powerful. My father, the King, having been quietly apprised of the full story by his wife, saw further proof of my value. I had saved the family from a public schism, not with a dragon's fire, but with a whisper of strategy. The return on his investment in me was proving to be astronomical.

With the family's internal politics stabilized for the moment, my father and his Hand, Septon Barth, turned their attention to the next phase of my development: my formal education. At five years of age, I was deemed ready. For any other child, this would mean learning letters, numbers, and the lineage of the great houses. For me, it was the beginning of my entry into the grand ledger of the Seven Kingdoms. My classroom was not the nursery, but the King's own solar or the vast, silent library of the Red Keep. My only classmate was my twin, Gael, who sat in on the lessons more for the sake of appearances than actual instruction. She was a sweet, gentle child, far more interested in drawing ponies than in the history of the Rhoynish wars. Her presence was a comfort to our tutors, a constant reminder of what a normal five-year-old should be, which made my own contributions all the more jarring.

Our primary tutor was Septon Barth himself. This was an unprecedented honor, the Hand of the King personally overseeing the education of the youngest prince. The official reason given to the court was that the King wished for his 'twilight children' to have the finest instruction. The unofficial reason, known only to the three of us, was that they were trying to measure the depths of the ocean they had discovered. They wanted to know what I knew, and how I knew it.

Barth was a genius, a man whose intellect I had come to genuinely admire. He did not treat me like a child. He understood that my mind, whatever its source, operated on a level far beyond my years. Our lessons were less about instruction and more about Socratic dialogue. He would present a topic, and then he would listen.

"Today, my prince, we shall discuss the foundation of the King's Peace," Barth began one morning in the library, the air thick with the scent of old parchment and beeswax. He unrolled a large map of Westeros. "The King's Justice, the King's roads, and the King's coin. These three things bind the realm together. A man may travel from the Wall to the shores of Dorne, and the currency in his pocket will be recognized. The lord he answers to may change, but the ultimate authority, the King, does not. This is the great work of your father's reign."

He spoke of the codification of laws, of the great infrastructure projects. I listened patiently. This was rudimentary, the kind of material I had absorbed from the histories in my past life. I let him speak, my eyes fixed on the map. Then, he moved to the topic of taxation.

"To fund these great works, the Crown must collect its due," he explained, pulling out a thick, leather-bound ledger. The book was filled with columns of neat, precise script. "This is the realm's account from last year. It details the taxes gathered from each of the great houses, the tariffs from the major ports, the incomes from Crownland holdings."

He opened the book to a section detailing the taxes from the Westerlands, the domain of House Lannister. "Lord Tyland Lannister is a shrewd man," Barth noted. "His lands are rich in gold, and he pays his taxes dutifully. As you can see, the income from Lannisport and Casterly Rock accounts for nearly a third of the Crown's entire revenue from taxation."

I leaned forward, my small body barely able to see over the top of the massive book. My eyes, enhanced by the serum, scanned the columns of numbers with the speed and precision of a machine. My mind, honed by decades of analyzing financial reports and corporate balance sheets, immediately saw what neither the Hand nor the King's treasurers had. It wasn't a mistake in the math. The math was perfect. The flaw was in the underlying theory.

"He pays too much," I said, my voice quiet and clear.

Barth blinked. "Too much, my prince? A king can never have too much gold."

"Yes, he can," I replied, pointing a small finger at the final tally from the Westerlands. "If it costs him more to acquire it tomorrow than he gains today. This ledger shows what you received. It does not show the cost of acquisition. It does not account for economic distress."

Barth stared at me, his brow furrowed in concentration. "Explain."

This was it. The next step. I was moving from cryptic insights and manipulated family drama to hard data and economic policy. I was about to demonstrate my true value.

"Lord Tyland is taxing his lesser lords and merchants at a very high rate to meet this obligation to the Crown. He does it because he wants to show the wealth of his House and to curry favor. But the merchants in Lannisport… their profit margins are shrinking. To make up for it, they are raising prices on their goods. And they are not investing in new ships or expanding their warehouses because they lack the capital."

I looked up at Barth, whose face was a mask of intense concentration. "The tax is correct by the law. But it is economically inefficient. It is creating a drag on the Westerlands' economy. In five years, perhaps ten, the merchants will have less to tax. The lesser lords will have less to give Lord Tyland. And the revenue to the Crown from this source," I tapped the page again, "will begin to fall. You are celebrating a record harvest, but you are eating the seed corn for next year."

I had, of course, read about the brief but sharp economic downturn in the Westerlands during this period in one of the ancillary texts, a detail so minor it was overlooked in the grand sweep of history. It was attributed to a series of poor investments by the Lannisters. The books were wrong. The cause was not poor investment; it was a flawed royal taxation policy that incentivized short-term gain over long-term growth.

Barth was speechless. He slowly reached out and pulled the ledger closer, re-reading the figures not as an accountant, but as an economist, his mind racing to catch up with the theory I had just presented. He was seeing the invisible data, the story between the numbers.

"How?" he finally whispered, looking at me not as a child, but as something utterly alien. "How could you possibly know this?"

"The numbers tell the story," I said simply, falling back on my well-established persona of the cryptic sage. "You just have to know how to read them."

That evening, Septon Barth took the ledger and my analysis to the King. I was not present for their conversation, but I did not need to be. I had Balerion. From his resting place in the Dragonpit, I could feel the vibrations of their heated, urgent debate carrying from the King's solar. Later, under the cover of darkness, I flew over the castle myself, settling Balerion silently on the roof of Maegor's Holdfast, and listened.

"...a four-year regression analysis," Barth was saying, his voice filled with an excitement that bordered on terror. "He did not use those words, of course, but that is what he described! He predicted, with absolute certainty, a future economic decline based on present-day tax policy! Jaehaerys, no maester in the Citadel could do such a thing. This is not a vision. This is not a dream. This is an order of intellect that is… unnatural."

"He was correct?" my father's voice was a low rumble.

"I have spent the last six hours reviewing the numbers and cross-referencing them with trade reports from my agents in Lannisport," Barth replied. "The prince is right. The price of goods is slowly rising. Two major shipping guilds have postponed plans for expansion. The signs are all there, plain as day, now that he has shown me where to look. We have been praising Tyland Lannister for his loyalty when we should have been cautioning him for his short-sightedness."

There was a long pause. I could picture my father pacing the room, his mind grappling with the implications. I was no longer just a magical oracle who could find disgraced knights or predict family scandals. I was a strategic advisor. I had just provided actionable financial intelligence that could save the Crown from future loss and strengthen the realm. I had made myself indispensable in a new, more tangible way.

"What did he say when you asked him how he knew?" Jaehaerys asked.

"He said the numbers told him the story," Barth answered. There was a rustle of parchment. "And then… he did this."

Barth had given me a fresh piece of parchment and a quill to "practice my letters" after our discussion. While Gael drew a lopsided picture of our mother's dragon, Silverwing, I had done something else. In precise, perfect script that no child should have been able to master, I had drafted a short memorandum. It wasn't signed. It was simply a series of bullet points.

 * Proposal: Introduce a tiered system of taxation for major ports based on gross trade volume.

 * Incentive: Offer a one-percent tax reduction for reinvestment in commercial infrastructure (new ships, warehouses, docks).

 * Objective: Foster long-term, sustainable economic growth over short-term revenue collection.

 * Projected Outcome: A temporary (1-2 year) dip in revenue, followed by a 5-10 year period of increased, stable tax income.

I heard my father take a sharp breath.

"He wrote this?" Jaehaerys demanded. "A child of five wrote this?"

"His hand is steady. His letters are perfect. He did not ask for help with spelling. He simply… wrote it. As if he were drafting a grocery list," Barth said, his voice laced with awe.

The document was a test. A demonstration of my capabilities. I had given them the problem, the analysis, and now the solution. It was a complete package, a corporate strategy proposal. I was showing them not just what I could see, but what I could do. I was making a bid for a seat at the table.

"This… this changes things," Jaehaerys said, his voice heavy. "Barth, we must control this. No one can know. The boy's education must continue, in secret. Bring him the ledgers. Bring him the histories, the law books. Let us see what else he knows. Let us see what else he can do."

"And what do we do about the Lannisters?" Barth asked.

"We act on the intelligence," the King replied, his voice firming, the strategist taking over from the shocked father. "I will draft a royal decree. We will announce a reform of port taxation for the entire kingdom, framed as a measure to encourage trade. We will act as if this was our own idea, born of our own wisdom. Tyland Lannister will be praised for his loyalty, but his tax burden will be subtly lessened by the new structure. He will save face, the merchants will prosper, and the Crown will be richer for it in the end."

He paused. I could feel his gaze, even from afar, as if he were looking out the window and up into the night sky where I hid.

"He is my son," Jaehaerys murmured, almost to himself. "But by the gods, Barth… what have we created?"

I pulled my consciousness back from the bond, sinking back into my small body in the now-silent nursery. Gael was fast asleep, her drawn pony lying on the floor beside her cradle. I felt a surge of cold, triumphant satisfaction. 'Created?' My father had it wrong. I wasn't their creation. I was the new management. And I had just successfully restructured my first department. The Prince's Ledger, as I had mentally titled my memorandum, was my official entry into the game of thrones, not as a future player, but as a current, active, and utterly secret kingmaker.