Word of Lord Jason, the Earl of Starfire, spread through the countryside like a wildfire. Rumors of the peculiar goods from the north—fine paper, pens, and soaps—were intriguing, but it was the promise of work that truly captured the people's attention. He was recruiting laborers, offering free food for them and their families, and paying a monthly salary of ten silver stags.
For the impoverished farmers of the Riverlands, who struggled daily just to feed their children, this was an unbelievable opportunity. The news ignited a spark of hope, and soon, families began to sneak away in the dead of night, daring the long journey north. Even the most timid, seeing their neighbors leave, couldn't resist the urge to follow and try their luck.
Within a month, a quiet panic began to ripple through the Riverlands.
The local lords were the first to feel it. The people fleeing their lands were not just peasants; they were the labor force that tilled their fields and the soldiers they would call upon in times of war. To a lord, his people were his most important asset, more valuable than livestock.
In response, they dispatched knights and soldiers to patrol the villages within their fiefs. They issued stern warnings and threats, trying to intimidate the common folk into staying. They spread tales of the bitter, deadly cold of the North and claimed the recruitment was a lie, a trap to enslave them. The timid and uneducated farmers were easily frightened, and for a time, the lords' tactics worked.
At the logging camp, Marb and Bud noticed the change. The steady stream of new workers had slowed to a trickle. They heard whispers of the lords' scare tactics but felt powerless to counter them directly.
It was Maester Qyburn who offered a solution. He proposed that instead of sending their own men, they should send some of the Riverlands workers back to their own villages. "Their words will be trusted," he argued. "They can prove the promises are real."
Marb and Bud agreed it was a clever plan. They selected dozens of the sharpest men from among the thousands of workers, men who had been with them for nearly a month.
"Be careful when you go back," Bud instructed the eager group standing before him. He laid out the plan Qyburn had devised. "Don't let the lords' men discover you. Find those willing to come north and bring them back here. Tell them the truth you've seen with your own eyes: if one person in a family works for us, their whole family eats for free, and every worker earns a salary of ten silver stags a month."
The men, who had experienced this generosity firsthand, nodded enthusiastically. They knew the treatment here was better than anything they could have dreamed of and had no doubt their fellow villagers would jump at the chance. After a few more words of caution about the local lords, Bud watched as they filled their satchels with white bread and bacon, then quietly departed the logging camp to begin their secret journey home.
Meanwhile, at Sailor's Lake, Jason was orchestrating a project of immense scale. Over the past month, another three thousand people had arrived from the logging camp, swelling the population of the construction site to over sixteen thousand.
To manage the work, Old Man Torrent had traveled to White Harbor, four hundred kilometers to the east, and recruited more than a hundred skilled masons. Now, with nearly two hundred masons on-site, they commanded the vast workforce with growing efficiency.
Excluding Jon's soldiers—a force of one thousand spearmen, five hundred archers, and one hundred cavalry—every able-bodied person was put to work. The young and strong men mixed concrete, lifted steel bars, erected wooden formwork, and transported stone. The women, elderly, and older children were tasked with gathering smaller stones from the riverbanks, which were then used in the concrete mixture.
Because Jason was supplying tens of thousands of tons of modern cement and rebar, the construction was moving at an unprecedented pace. In less than a month, the main dock of the port had already taken shape, its long, reinforced concrete pier extending out into the calm waters of Sailor's Lake. A sturdy port like this was more than enough for the freshwater lake. While two-thirds of the workers focused on the port, the other third had already begun building a city wall on a stretch of high ground a kilometer away.
The progress, however, was attracting unwanted attention. Jon and McCann reported to Jason that they had been spotting strangers near the camp—men who were clearly not merchants or local farmers, watching from a distance. More alarmingly, a group of workers felling trees in a distant forest had been attacked by robbers. Fortunately, Jason had assigned soldiers to escort the logging parties, and they had successfully fought off the attackers.
The incident served as a stark reminder for Jason. A camp with nearly twenty thousand people and a steady supply of food and materials was a tempting target for the robbers and wildlings who roamed the North. Carriages arrived daily from White Harbor, laden with grain and vegetables, advertising their prosperity to anyone who might be watching.
He couldn't afford to be careless. He ordered Jon to increase patrols around the camp's perimeter and immediately sent a rider to Winterfell to purchase more warhorses. In the vast wilderness of the North, cavalry offered superior mobility, and he intended to expand Jon's battalion to its full complement of five hundred horsemen.
To ensure the safety of his people, he decided to accelerate the construction of the city wall, so everyone could be protected within its perimeter at night. He worried that these small attacks were just the beginning, that they would attract more and larger groups of predators.
A sense of paranoia crept in, but he felt it was justified. He was sitting on a fortune of over seven hundred thousand gold dragons. If word of that wealth got out, he couldn't be certain his sixteen hundred soldiers could fend off a truly determined enemy. It was better to build the wall as quickly as possible. Once it was complete, they could hide behind it and fight off any danger. A ten-meter-high wall would be enough to handle any foe they were likely to face.
Thousands of workers were now building the four city walls simultaneously. The sound of mixing concrete, tying steel rebar, and hammering wooden formwork filled the air. With so many hands, the two-meter-thick walls rose with astonishing speed, a testament to the power of organized labor and modern materials.
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