Title: The Audit of Rivers
Title: The Audit of Rivers
Year and Month: 111 AC, 8th Moon
The Royal Progress, or the Grand Audit as I privately termed it, departed from King's Landing on a crisp morning in the eighth moon. It was a serpent of immense size and splendour, its head the royal carriage containing Queen Lyanna and our two-year-old twins, its body a seemingly endless train of wagons, knights, servants, and officials. A moving city of five thousand souls, designed to project the power and overwhelming organizational capacity of my crown. I did not ride in the carriage. I rode at the head of the column, mounted on a black destrier, clad in practical black steel armor, my Valyrian sword Ledger at my hip. I wanted the people to see their King not as a distant, silken figure, but as a commander in the field, a man of purpose and action.
Our first destination, the first entry on the audit sheet, was the Riverlands. The great, fertile, and perpetually troubled heartland of the continent. It was a land of rich soil, life-giving rivers, and a hundred proud, quarrelsome lords who had spent more time fighting each other than any foreign foe. It was a region of immense potential and chronic mismanagement. My goal was not simply to receive the fealty of its lords, but to assess its infrastructure, mediate its most crippling disputes with finality, and implement a new, revolutionary project that would forever change the very nature of the land itself.
As the royal procession snaked its way along the Kingsroad, I undertook my own, more efficient form of travel. Each evening, as the camp was being made, I would retreat to my command tent. To my guards, I was retiring to review maps and reports. In reality, I was closing my eyes and soaring into the twilight sky.
The link with Balerion was now as natural as breathing.
Through his eyes, I saw the Riverlands as no king had ever seen them. I saw the great Trident and its tributaries, the Blue Fork, the Red Fork, and the Green Fork, not as borders or romantic waterways, but as a flawed, inefficient circulatory system. I saw the annual flooding that destroyed harvests and displaced villages. I saw the petty border squabbles between the Brackens and the Blackwoods, visible even from the sky in the burned-out crofts and fallow fields between their lands. I gathered my data, my mind collating the aerial intelligence with the economic reports Lord Beesbury had prepared for me. By the time my physical body arrived at a location, I already knew its problems with a god-like clarity.
Our first major stop was Lord Harroway's Town, where we were met by the lords of the eastern Trident. The welcome was lavish, the feasts long, but I cut through the pleasantries with surgical precision. I spent my days not in the tourney yard, but in a makeshift council chamber, listening to petitions. I did not offer vague royal assurances. I issued binding, final judgments.
"Lord Darry," I said, after listening to a long, tedious complaint about a rival lord's fishing weirs, "Your grievance is noted. However, my surveyors have determined that your own illegally constructed dam upstream has reduced the water flow by twenty percent, impacting every village downriver. You will dismantle your dam. You will compensate Lord Ryger for his lost catch. And you will both contribute to the Crown's new project for river management. My judgment is final."
The lords were stunned by the speed and specificity of my rulings. They had expected the slow, ponderous justice of my father's court. They were met with the swift, data-driven decisions of a CEO settling a departmental dispute.
The true purpose of my visit, however, was revealed when we reached the heart of the kingdom, the great castle of Riverrun, seat of the Lord Paramount of the Trident, the ancient and increasingly frail Lord Grover Tully.
Riverrun was a magnificent fortress, a triangular castle perched at the confluence of the Tumblestone and Red Fork rivers. Lord Grover, a man well into his seventies, received us with the stiff, formal pride of his house. He was a man of tradition, of "Family, Duty, Honor," and he was deeply unsettled by his strange, pragmatic king.
The welcome feast in his great hall was a tense affair. My wife, Lyanna, seated beside me, was an object of immense curiosity. The river lords and ladies looked at her northern dress, at the quiet, watchful way she held herself, and they did not know what to make of her. But she met their stares with a cool confidence that gave no purchase for insult. She was the Queen, and her quiet strength was as formidable as any army.
The day after our arrival, I summoned Lord Grover and his most powerful bannermen—Lord Blackwood, Lord Bracken, Lord Frey, Lord Mallister—to a council in the castle's great hall. Our twins, Jaehaerys and Visenya, were present, seated on cushions at the foot of my temporary throne, a clear and deliberate statement that this meeting was not just about the present, but about the future of their children and grandchildren.
"My lords," I began, once the formalities were dispensed with. "I have traveled through your lands. I have seen their beauty, their bounty. And their weakness."
A hostile murmur went through the assembled lords.
"You are a land of rivers," I continued, my voice cutting through their pride. "The Trident is the source of your life. It is also the source of your misery. It floods your fields, it washes away your villages, it limits your trade to the seasons of safe passage. You are slaves to the whims of your own waters. For a thousand years, your houses have fought over strips of muddy land, while the true enemy, the chaos of the rivers themselves, has stolen your prosperity year after year."
I signaled to my scribes, who unrolled a massive, detailed map of the entire Riverlands, a map so precise it showed every tributary, every floodplain.
"This mismanagement ends today," I declared. I picked up a long wooden pointer and began to outline my vision. "This is not just a collection of rivers. It is a hydraulic system. And it is a system we are going to control."
I laid out my grand project, the 'Trident Reclamation Authority,' as I had named it in my preliminary drafts. It was the single largest civil engineering project in the history of the Seven Kingdoms.
"Here," I said, pointing to a stretch of the Red Fork. "We will build a series of locks and dams. Not to block the river, but to regulate its flow. During the dry season, we will store water. During the spring floods, we will divert the excess into a new, parallel canal system, which will also serve as a protected, year-round shipping lane."
I pointed to the vast, marshy lands between the Green Fork and the Blue Fork. "These are the floodplains. Unproductive swampland. We will build a network of dikes and drainage canals, reclaiming hundreds of thousands of acres of what will become the richest farmland on the continent. This new land, reclaimed by the Crown's engineering, will be granted in tracts to the very soldiers who help build it, creating a new class of prosperous, landed freemen loyal directly to the throne."
Finally, I pointed to the confluence near Riverrun. "We will dredge the riverbeds, making them deeper and safer for larger trading barges. We will build new, stone-banked ports at key towns like Maidenpool and Lord Harroway's Town. We will connect the entire Riverlands, from the west to the east, with a network of canals and navigable rivers that will make trade and travel swift, safe, and profitable in every season."
I finished, and the hall was utterly silent. The lords of the Riverlands stared at the map, at the bold lines I had drawn across their ancestral lands, with expressions of sheer, uncomprehending shock. They had ruled these lands, fought and died for them for centuries. And I had just walked in and treated their entire kingdom as a single, massive engineering problem to be solved with dikes, dams, and canals.
Lord Grover Tully, his face pale, was the first to speak. "Your Grace… what you propose… it is the work of a generation. It would mean remaking the very landscape of our home."
"It is the work of a decade," I corrected him. "And it will create a prosperity that will last for a thousand years. Your house motto is 'Family, Duty, Honor.' Your duty is to your people. Does that duty not compel you to free them from the cycle of flood and famine? Your honor is in the strength of your house. Will your house not be stronger when it rules over the breadbasket of Westeros?"
Lord Blackwood, a grim, thoughtful man, spoke up. "And the cost, Your Grace? The cost in gold and labor would be… astronomical."
"The cost will be borne by the Crown, initially," I said. "It is an investment. I will fund the engineers, the initial supplies, the master stonemasons. The labor will be provided by you, my lords. Each of you will contribute a levy of men for a period of two years. They will be paid a royal wage. They will be fed from the royal granaries. This is not a feudal obligation. It is a paid contract. And when the project is complete, your own coffers will overflow with the taxes from the new farms and the tariffs from the new river trade."
I looked directly at Lord Bracken and Lord Blackwood, whose ancient feud was legendary. "Your houses have squabbled over Bitterbridge and the Blackwood Vale for five hundred years. I am offering you a chance to own vast new tracts of land a hundred times more fertile. The old quarrels are petty. They are bad for business. The future is in growth, not in grievance."
The sheer, audacious scale of my vision was beginning to sink in. I was not asking them to stop fighting. I was making their reasons for fighting obsolete. I was offering them a new game, with a prize so vast it made their ancient hatreds seem small and foolish.
My son, Prince Jaehaerys, who had been sitting quietly at my feet, chose that moment to stand up and toddle over to the map. He pointed a tiny finger at one of the rivers. "Water," he said, one of the few words he knew, his voice clear.
A ripple of affection went through the hall. Lyanna smiled, a proud mother's smile. But I saw the moment for what it was—another perfect, unplanned piece of salesmanship. The child prince, the future king, was pointing at the source of their future wealth.
"Yes, my son," I said, a rare, thin smile touching my lips. "Water. And from that water, under my guidance, will flow the future of the Riverlands."
I stood and addressed the stunned lords. "Lord Tully, as Lord Paramount, you will be the royal overseer of this project. You will work with my engineers. You will coordinate the levies from your bannermen. Your success in this will be noted and will define the relationship between your house and the throne for the next century."
I had given him a new purpose, a grand project that elevated his station beyond that of a mere regional lord. I had made him my project manager.
The Audit of Rivers was complete. I had assessed the territory, identified the core problem, and implemented a radical, transformative solution. The river lords were still reeling, their feudal world turned upside-tilted by a king who spoke of canals and crop yields instead of chivalry and combat. But they were also intelligent men. They could see the undeniable logic, the immense potential for profit.
As I left the great hall, Lyanna fell into step beside me, our children's hands in hers. "You have left them speechless," she murmured, a hint of admiration in her voice. "You did not ask for their loyalty. You simply made it the most profitable possible choice."
"Loyalty is a sentiment, my Queen," I replied, looking out at the swift-flowing Tumblestone. "And sentiment is a volatile market. I prefer to build my kingdom on more solid foundations."
Like stone, I thought. Like steel. Like the deep, controlled, and profitable flow of a river that has finally been bent to the will of its master.