White Harbor was even more full of people when seen from a ground level than from Featherball eye view. Behind its forty-foot walls of white stone, broad avenues with narrow side streets cut though rows of whitewashed buildings in a familiar style. If the ancient tombs and other ruins of the Barrowlands were reminiscent of ancient Mycenaean architecture, then the building style of the North's sole chartered city was closer to Classical Ionian Greek style than anything I'd ever seen outside my homeland. Statues and decorations that would not have been out of place in the Aegean lined the avenues and plazas, all depicting sea life both mundane and fantastic. The mermaid statues lining the Castle Stair, the city's main avenue linking the New Castle with the Wolf's Den, held stone bowls in their arms, ready to be filled with whale oil to light the street overnight. If that extravagant expense wasn't a sign of House Manderly's prosperity, nothing would be.
Before the Seal Gate in the inner walls linking the marketplace with the harbor proper, was a cobbled square with a fountain at its center. The fountain had a twenty-foot-tall statue of whom the locals knew as the symbol of House Manderly but in ancient Greece would have been Triton, son of Poseidon and god of the sea. The stone statue was ancient and weathered, its beard covered in lichen that coloured it a dark green, and one of the tines of its trident had broken long ago. Unlike the mermaid statues of white marble, it was a pale grey granite that must once have looked magnificent but after more than a millennium in the open it was slowly ground away. Restoring it to its old glory, fixing its cracks, filling the missing bits and making it even more resistant to further wear and tear would be the work of hours, maybe a day or two at most. Perhaps I'd offer my services to the Manderlys after I gained some renown. Nobody was going to trust a random, no-name girl without such recognition.
To that end, I walked towards the massive, boxy stone edifice with the iron-bound oaken doors that was the Old Mint. The building was currently sealed as the Manderlys and the North had no need to cut new coins. It wasn't my target; that would be the much smaller customs office between it and the wool and sheep factors guildhouse. The place was ever crowded, with lines of merchants and other foreigners waiting their turn to be heard by House Manderly's customs men. It turns out that medieval death world or no, bureaucracy was thriving; licensing, guild fees, taxes and other such complications had to be dealt with before anyone could sell anything in the city's markets - at least to any significant amounts.
The line moved at a crawl and though I'd entered the city early in the morning, it was almost midday by the time my turn came. Where elsewhere my presence and height alone had sufficed to open a path through the crowds, here even my openly carried weapons and unusual features did not draw more than passing glances. The linen sack loaded with the fruit of my craftsmanship grew heavier with the time as even peak human stamina didn't let me easily carry two hundred pounds of art for hours on end. I carefully let it down only when necessary, all too aware of the fragility of glass even with tougher materials available. Not that breakage was the only problem; I became the target of thieves twice while waiting. The urchin attempting to snatch my purse I threw aside with a light slap. The man that tried to cut my backpack open with a knife I disarmed by breaking his arm; no other thieves targeted the unescorted foreign girl after that.
Once inside the customs office things moved faster and soon I stood before a bored customs officer asking me questions. Unfortunately, that soon devolved into an argument.
"You expect me to believe you came to White Harbor on foot?" The middle-aged, slightly portly man demanded. "Someone with your hair and eyes?"
"Yes? I came through the North Gate just this morning." What was his problem with my looks anyway?
"Don't waste my time, girl," he scoffed. "You have Valyrian looks and want to sell glasswork, you're obviously Myrish." He crossed his arms and scowled. "Now, which ship did you come in? The Bride in Azure or the Bountiful Harvest."
"Neither. I came from the south via the Kingsroad, stopped at the Barrowlands crossroad before coming here on foot."
"Really? Do you expect me to believe you also carried your merchandise on foot?" he growled. "This is the worst attempt of tariff evasion I've seen in twenty years."
"You can check with those ships' captains. I did not travel with them, or any other ship." Because claiming to have made two hundred pounds of glasswork art just outside the city over the past few days would be, admittedly, even less believable that bringing them overland.
"No. I'm not entertaining your amateur tax evasion any longer. Pay the tariff now!" he raised his voice angrily.
"You're not even going to check? Confirming where the goods come from is your job!" We were both shouting now, me more in frustration than anything else. The other merchants and workers were giving us a wide berth, slowly stepping back as the stubborn idiot refused to believe me. "Enough of this. If that's how White Harbor treats new merchants, I'll take my business elsewhere." And with that, I lifted my bag and turned around to leave.
"Guards!" the customs man shouted and the quartet of men in chainmail and armed with swords and cudgels that had been standing at the building's entrance came our way. "Arrest this woman for tariff evasion, attempted smuggling, and insulting House Manderly!"
Well, shit.
xxxx
The pair of huge black rats moved silently through the narrow stone corridor, passing door after barred door in the gloom until they reached the guardpost. Three men were in the small room, all of them too busy playing dice and eating bread and salted fish to stand watch properly. After all, what danger could find them in the depths of the Wolf Den in the heart of House Manderly's power?
Suddenly, both torches and hearth were snuffed out as if by an unseen wind, leaving the underground chamber in total darkness. The guards cursed and tried to scramble for something to do, but humans could not see in the dark and none of them had a way to light a fire quickly. Giant rats on the other hand were far more accustomed to such conditions. The dog-sized rodents assaulted the guardpost with unnatural speed and coordination. One of them bit into the pot of salted fish and carried it away, the other did the same with a roll of cheese. By the time the guards managed to get some light to see by, the rats were long gone.
xxxx
A quartet of huge black rats moved silently through the narrow stone corridor, passing door after barred door in the gloom until they reached the guardpost once more. The three men were far more alert than they'd been hours before and they had twice the number of lit torches. It hardly made a difference, the torches all being snuffed out in a handful of seconds. The men yelled and blindly fumbled in the dark, shouting of shades and ghosts. The rats largely ignored the panicking defenders of the Wolf's Den and ran straight for the pantry.
The darkness was no hindrance to them; even mundane rat species had vastly superior low-light vision to humans and the mutant breed living in the Wolf Den's forgotten tunnels could see well into the infrared. They ripped the pantry's wooden cover with absurd ease and pilfered its contents. Bread, salted fish, beer, even smoked ham; it was amazing how much rats the size of dogs could carry when coordinated and guided by a human mind.
xxxx
Three guards had turned into a dozen as alerts of the two prior attacks went out. All of them stood by their own lit torch as well as a supply of pitch and flint to relight them in case the odd attacks were repeated. All of the men were nervous now, sending furtive glances at the ancient keep's dark passages. The Wolf's Den had once been the seat of House Manderly in exile before the New Castle had been built and in more recent times had been turned into both barracks and prison. Like all ancient castles built by the First Men and most prisons, the Den was a dark place but unlike other such places in the North it had surprisingly few rumours and superstitions associated with it. Or at least that had been the case until tonight.
The men didn't know how they were being attacked or who was responsible, but that the attacks were as deliberate as they were inhuman was clear enough. Nobody could have sneaked up to them in the bare stone corridors, nobody could have come through the prison's sealed gates undetected, nothing they could think of could have snuffed out their lights. The old veteran Bartimus, a crippled knight that had saved Lord Manderly's life in the Rebellion and been awarded the Keep as a reward, had everyone on high alert. They would get to the bottom of this. They had to.
"Not again!" one of the younger guards shouted when the torches started going out one by one. As the light dwindled, the men scrambled for some enemy to fight, for the source of their distress... and found nothing.
"Relight them!" an older sergeant shouted. "Quickly now!"
"FUCK!" the guard that had reached for the flint quickly let the stone fall with a curse, cradling his hand. "It burned me!" Another guard picked up a flintstone with gauntlets instead of his bare hands but the moment he tried to use it the little stone broke and crumbled to bits in his grasp. By then it was too late to try again, the whole place falling into darkness.
"I don't wanna die!" someone cried as many somethings could be heard scurrying in, closer an closer. "I am too young to- URGH!"
"Jed!" another guard shouted amid the yells and blind fumbling. "What happened to Jed?!"
"AAAAGH! HELP! Help! Help!" Another soldier's panicked screams faded, their source further and further away until it fell silent. Fled, taken, or slain, none of them could say.
"Retreat!" the sergeant shouted. "Back to the ground level!"
The panicked guards scrambled up the stairs the best they could in the darkness...
xxxx
I was through my fifth attempt at frying cheese with magic when a large group of heavily armed guards marched through the corridor and stopped outside my cell. Unlike the prison's standard guards, these were heavily armored in plate and armed with hammers, spears, shields and crossbows, men meant for open war or defense of very important people rather than mere guardsmen. They came to a stop with practiced coordination, but though they stood perfectly still their nervousness was obvious. The rats hiding in the corners could smell their fear.
A fat, rose-cheeked man, with thick lips, and a head of golden curls walked through them until he was standing before th door of my cell, staring at me and my two... visitors through the bars. He was dressed in elaborate robes of white and red with stripes of gold, a chain of many different metals hanging from his neck. He stood there for a good five minutes, his blue eyes taking in every detail available to him in the gloom.
"Why are these two guardsmen in the cell with you?" he demanded after it became obvious I would not be opening the conversation myself. Said men did not answer him of course; they just stood there in silence, as good guards should.
"They expressed their interest in getting to know me better," I said and took a bite of fried cheese. It was good without either being partially burned or tasting like congealed blood. Fifth time was the charm, it would seem. "Since they were so enthusiastic and... hands-on while I was stripped of my possessions and thrown in here I thought I'd invite them." I looked at the two men that still shook in fear and smelled of piss and worse. "The visit doesn't seem to be to their liking... and neither is it to mine; they stink."
"I see..." the fat maybe-Maester nodded. "The men spoke of witchcraft. Over a dozen of them, loyal people with a good head on their shoulders, started spreading crazy rumours within hours of yours arrest."
"Such things happen when corrupt officials don't do their jobs and confiscate goods without good reason," I told him with a shrug and took a sip of beer from a gleaming crystal goblet.
"I looked into the matter," the fat man informed me with a frown. "The customs officer was overly hasty, yes, but not corrupt. You must admit your story was rather unbelievable."
"The truth often is," I shot back and kept on with my meal. "Why did you come here? I doubt my complaints about the Keep's hospitality were the only reason." Though they certainly helped, for a high official to arrive so soon.
"Do you claim to be a witch?" he demanded instead of answering my question.
"I came to White Harbor to sell my glasswork," I told him drily. "That's what caused problems, not whether I'm a witch. Which I made no claims about." My abilities in witchcraft were basically nonexistent.
"Ya can't believe her, Maester Theomore!" one of the guards interrupted. "She's a witch! A witch I tell ya!"
"Don't be an idiot," I told the scared man. "Witches are mostly amateurs with some mundane skills and maybe a hint of the higher mysteries. You think one of them could have a dozen men fearfully fumbling in the dark from inside a locked cell?"
"No, I-"
"Silence!" the fat Theomore guy ordered, before turning back to me. "I checked your story personally. None of the ships from Myr admitted to carrying you and your glasswork, and they would have." He searched in one of his robe's very deep pockets and came out with an orb of perfectly clear crystal with a red rose caught in it. "No Myrish glassworker made this. None of their works I've seen in all my years had this level of clarity, not to mention its contents. Then you, a complete unknown, came into White Harbor with forty of them."
"Two and forty, actually. Plus twenty mirrors." And I'd better get all of them back along with the rest of my belongings or a few tricks with rats and torches would be the least of these peoples' problems.
"Yes, them," the Maester said, almost eagerly. "What are they made of? How did you even make something like that?"
"I'm not discussing the secrets of glassworking from inside a prison cell," I told him then chased down the last of my fried cheese with some beer. It really was very good beer, nine out of ten, I'd steal it again. "Get me out of here, return my property and then we could talk."
And that marked the end of my first time in prison..The broad street of the Castle Stair was pebbled with white stones and had steps that lead up from the Wolf's Den by the harbors to the New Castle on top of the city's hill. Marble mermaids lit the way, bowls of burning whale oil cradled in their arms. From the top there was a view down to both the inner and outer harbor. An escort of a dozen guards in Manderly colors surrounded me and Maester Theomore, all of them in armor of chain and scale and wielding varied weapons, from a flanged mace to a longspear. Not city guards then; individually armed and trained armsmen. Since we were in White Harbor, the only place in the North where the faith of the Seven was prevalent, a couple of them might even be knights.
My traveling leathers had been returned to me but after a brief stint in the unwashed rags they had for prisoners my skin itched for a good bath. There was no lice or other bugs - attempts to control such via Greensight had deliberately fried them across most of the Wolf's Den - but the grime had still been there and I felt dirty even though I was much less so than I'd been in the Neck at times. My weapons hadn't been returned, not even my knife; the pair of guards bringing up the rear were carrying them instead. It was as insulting as it was useless; at this close range I could burn Theomore with a touch then escape in the darkness faster than the guards could run me down but why would I do so? Maybe they didn't know? Oh well. If they hadn't considered the implications of torches and hearths being smothered, it wasn't my job to educate them.
Sending out my awareness as we walked closer to New Castle up the hill, I found Featherball very well fed and feeling smug about it. Remnants of the spoils from her most recent raid lay strewn on the rooftop she was perched on, fishbones and clams and bits of tentacle from what must have been an octopus. The barest glimpses of daring raids and angry merchants came to me, but that was the limit of my skill with Greensight; sharing memories with animals in addition to senses was still a distant goal, at least outside dreaming.
I prodded the winged glutton with a question and she turned her head towards New Castle, her superhuman vision cutting through the hundreds of yards of distance to a tower with larger than normal windows behind which cages could be seen. Within the cages there were ravens, the ones Maester Theomore must have been keeping as messenger birds. Very slowly at first due to the distance and second-hand line of sight, but increasingly faster as we got closer to New Castle, I started working on establishing a mental link to the ravens. Featherball sent back her annoyance and disdain through our link and a mental image of her intercepting the tiny and nearly blind (according to her) ravens and tearing them apart with her claws. I sent back an image of the ravens catching small animals and delivering them to Featherball as tribute instead. She blinked and hooted disdainfully but her annoyance subsided.
Now... how did I find which raven was trained to fly to which destination?
xxxxNew Castle was built of pale stone, mostly grey granite, and sat atop a hill rising above White Harbor's white walls, the merman sigil of House Manderly flying from its towers. There was a clear view of both of the city's harbors from the hilltop as we came upon the iron-bound oak gate, a sign of great city planning even a millennium before. The rulers of King's Landing could get lessons from this place; the city had a functional sewer system even.
The large and airy interior of the castle was finely furnished; lath and plaster to make the walls smooth, Myrish carpets and Northern tapestries to decorate them, faded banners, broken shields and rusted swords from ancient victories, and wooden figures from the prows of ships to commemorate House Manderly's triumphs. One of the rooms we passed by was their strategy room, with a great oaken table with beeswax candles and a very detailed sheepskin map of the North hanging on the back wall. I marked its location and not just because of the map, but what hid behind it.
Theomore led us to a grand hall whose floor was made of wooden planks notched cunningly together and decorated with all the creatures of the sea. At one end was the entrance, and at the other stood a dais with a large cushioned throne. The floor had painted crabs and clams and starfish, half-hidden amongst twisting black fronds of seaweed and the bones of drowned sailors. On the walls were pale sharks prowling painted blue-green depths, whilst eels and octopods slithered amongst rocks and sunken ships. Shoals of herring and great codfish swam between the tall, arched windows. Higher up, near where the old fishing nets drooped down from the rafters, the surface of the sea was depicted. To the right a war galley rested serenely against the rising sun; to the left, a battered old cog raced before a storm, her sails in rags. Behind the dais a kraken and a grey leviathan were locked in battle beneath the painted waves. Everything combined into a grand work of art like the most elaborate rooms of palaces I'd seen in Rome and Paris, great skill paired with good taste, both of which had been sorely lacking from the modern world of my past life.
No less grand was the throne's occupant, a man nearly sixty years old, with a massive belly and fingers the size of sausages. He had pale blue eyes and a silvery beard which only partly hid his four chins. He was so fat I doubted he could ride a horse and probably had to be carried in a litter everywhere he went. He wore rich clothing, including a velvet blue-green doublet embroidered with golden thread, and a fur-trimmed grey-blue mantle. A golden trident pinned said mantle to his shoulders, which were still broad and strong despite his age and weight. His face sported an easy smile and laugh lines and a mirthful gleam in his eyes made him seem approachable and easygoing. If I did not know better I might have been deceived by his appearance and the mockery it inspired in the city's populace into thinking him a fool.
"You stand before Wyman Manderly, Lord of White Harbor and Warden of the White Knife, Shield of the Faith, Defender of the Dispossessed, Lord Marshal of the Mander, a Knight of the Order of the Green Hand!" Maester Theomore thundered. Then, in a more even tone, he continued. "In the Merman's Court, it is customary for vassals and petitioners to kneel."
"Oh, let the girl stand, Theomore," Lord Manderly said, his smile widening genially. "I daresay we've bothered her enough already." He picked a piece of pie from a disc full of foodstuffs at his side and took a large bite before washing it down with wine.
"As you wish sire," the Maester said and at his signal most of the guards retreated to unobtrusive positions. Since at least four of them that I could see now held loaded crossbows, they had just become a great deal more dangerous. At the same time, servants brought in a table and chairs and set it before Lord Manderly's throne. I noted how the table was just wide enough to make lunging across it impossible and also somewhat blocked direct approaches to the throne. The guards that carried my weapons brought them up to the dais for Lord Manderly to examine while the food was being brought in.
"Remarkable craftsmanship," the over-sized lord noted as he handled my spear with ease belying his bulk then took an arrow out of the quiver and examined it closely. "Of Crannogman make and of the highest quality, do they sell these to outsiders, Theomore?"
"No, sire," the Maester confirmed what his lord obviously already knew. "They do bear a mark but of what artisan or House only a Crannogman could tell you. They keep their secrets well."
"So either our guest did come from the Neck or she slew one of their nobles and claimed their arms," the older man said and nodded. "There is a good way to check. If you would get this back to the lady," he told the guard, handing over my bow to him. The man did and the aging but shrewd lord smiled at me. "If you would string this bow for me, my dear? I do so dislike misunderstandings."
I smiled back. He did, didn't he? I bent the bowstave in my arms and strung it, looked it over for flaws or tampering then lifted and drew it fully before relaxing the tension slowly and unstringing it. Wyman Manderly nodded, his eyes having taken in my familiarity with the weapon, the ease with which I went through the maneuver, the length and size of the warbow being made for someone with my height and reach or a bit larger.
"And with that nasty business cleared up, let's feast!" he proposed with an easy laugh. "Sit, sit! Accept this as my apologies for your mistreatment."
I did and so did Theomore and the next half-hour passed almost wordlessly as we enjoyed boiled eggs, cheeses of various kinds, fried eels and lampreys, pork pies, porridge, and sausages. My plate was more heavy with sausages, cheeses and pie than seafood for beyond its great quality pork was one of the many foods I'd missed in my years in the Neck. Salad was mostly absent but to my surprise they did have tomatoes.
"We import these from the Summer Isles," Lord Manderly told me with the air of a grandfather educating his young granddaughter as he noted my interest. "The Summer Islanders call them love-apples even though they aren't nearly as sweet and don't grow on trees."
"Yes, I know, they are a type of berry," I said and Theomore stared at me with a frown. "They are part of the Nightshade family, same as Dragon Peppers." And that got me wondering. Westeros had corn and rice in general, Dorne had chilli peppers, the Summer Islands had sugarcane and tomatoes. Did potatoes exist as well and they simply hadn't been discovered, or were they entirely absent?
"Oho. Better not share that with Dorne then, or they'll corner yet another market," the older man chortled.
"Sire, maybe we should turn this discussion to more important matters?" Theomore asked with a bit of annoyance.
"Ah yes, the glass," Wyman Manderly's face got serious as he presented another one of my decorative glass spheres, this one with a pink Camellia blossom at its heart. "When Theomore showed the confiscated goods to me I was surprised by their clarity as much as he was. I daresay only the highest quality Myrish crystal comes close. The double mirrors were exquisite but this..." he lifted the orb of fused quartz in his thick fingers before lowering his voice to a mock whisper. "Theomore was embarassed. He couldn't explain how flowers were caught in glass as if it were amber, see."
Wyman Manderly was a very easy man to take at face value; fat and possibly craven from how he avoided battle or even travel, genial and naive from the way he was friendly to most, maybe even stupid. But with the benefit of foreknowledge I could see how he was trying to endear himself to a young woman by treating her well and praising her skills while subtly disparaging the Maester he did not like and could not trust with the pretense of a funny anekdote told to said young guest. There was not a single hint of duplicity or falseness in his mannerisms and expressions.
"I made it using pure flint," I said, deciding on honesty and openness. In the end, I had little reason to hide things from the Starks' most reliable ally.
"Flint is grey and opaque," the blond Maester interrupted with a scowl. "I don't see how it could be made into..." he waved at the sphere, "...this."
"It is and it isn't. Flint is actually almost pure quartz, rock crystal," I explained. "Its opacity comes from its crystals being very tiny, scattering and diffusing incoming light too many times as well as some impurities. But if you melt it and cool it slowly, it forms a non-crystalline form while the few impurities are dissolved and in the end you have a perfectly clear material. It is so clear it is actually not useful in glass houses."
"Oh?" Lord Manderly asked with interest. "Why not?"
"Glass houses function because common glass is transparent to light visible by humans but opaque to heat. Sunlight, however little there might be in winter, comes in through the glass, is absorbed by everything inside and turned to heat then the heat is slow to leave," I told them. "This particular glass though is not opaque to heat so it would not have this effect."
"I see, I see. A very well-stated explanation," the aging lord nodded happily while the Maester gave me a frown. "I suppose you know how to make both normal glass and this perfectly clear one then? You said it is just flint? I didn't know flint could melt."
"Melting it is pretty hard. To give you an idea we'd first need a thermometer." They both gave me a look of confusion.
"What is a... thermometer?" Theomore asked.
"It's a device that measures temperature and its variation," I told them with some surprise. "I guess you don't have one of those?"
"No..." the Maester's voice trailed off for a time. "Do the Myrish have them?"
"I wouldn't know but if you'd hand over that tall glass cup, a dish and a candle, I could show you."
Theomore did so with a dubious expression and I got to work. I cut an inch of the candle with a breadknife, stuck it upright in the middle of the plate, filled the plate with the wine in the glass and lit the candle nub with another, already lit candle. No giving the Maester an excuse to discount my efforts by using magic. Then I put the tall glass over the lit candle upside-down, forming an airtigh seal with the wine in the plate. Naturally, the candle nub consumed the oxygen trapped within, pulling in wine from the plate and converted it to denser carbon dioxide until the wine rose high enough to snuff it out.
"And thus we have some air trapped in a transparent container, with the wine serving as an easily visible marker," I told the two men much as I'd done to hundreds of students in my old life. "Now watch what happens as we heat that air up." I put the lit candle close to the upside-down class, close enough to heat it but not actually touching to avoid shattering. As the glass grew hotter, the air inside expanded, pushing the level of the wine down. "Almost all substances expand when heated and contract when cooled, but that is most evident in gases. By measuring how much the volume of a given gas expands one can tell how much the temperature changed but other materials can be used as well."
"That is ingenious," Wyman Manderly marveled at my crude efforts before glancing at his poleaxed Maester with a smirk the younger man missed. "Wouldn't you say so, Theomore?"
"Yes... yes! This could be..." he sighed and took on a dreamy look, "...revolutionary."
"To return to the matter of glass, once you have thermometers making a measuring scale for temperature is very useful for mathematically describing many natural processes. For ease of reference, the one I use sets the freezing temperature of water as zero and its boiling temperature as a hundred but the scale is arbitrary, you could use whatever you wanted." I sat back and ate another sausage. Teaching had always been hungry work to me. "If boiling water is a hundred, melting lead is around three hundred and thirty, most bronzes melt around nine hundred, pure iron melts at fifteen hundred and flint, like most quartz, melts at eighteen hundred."
"That sounds... exceedingly high," Theomore noted immediately, showing he'd been paying attention and had a working mind. "Forges can't melt pure iron, they use fluxes."
"Yes. Much as saltwater remains a fluid in lower temperatures than both salt and water, some additives can lower the melting temperature of a given mixture, including metals and stones," I explained for Lord Manderly's benefit who didn't have a metallurgy link like Maester Theomore. "In fact, such additions to quartz is how normal glass is produced at much lower temperatures than melting pure quartz."
"And what would those materials be?" Lord Manderly asked before Theomore or I could divert the discussion to more complex matters.
"You'd start with grey river sand as the base material as it is mostly ground quartz and presumably you wouldn't want to put the effort into crushing flint." He nodded. "Then you'd add wood ash, preferably from beech logs that grew in lime-heavy soil as flux, one measure of wood ash to three measures of river sand. Finally, you add ground limestone or marble in equal amounts to the wood ash. That mixture you heat to a temperature thirteen hundred to get the glass."
"Those materials do not seem rare at all," the aging lord noted. "In fact, you could find them in very large quantities all over the North!"
"Yes, that is one of the reasons I came to White Harbor with this." Bolstering the North's economy would help a lot in the long run. "Just don't expect to make glass of the same quality as Myr; they use the ash of specially bred plants that wouldn't grow anywhere in the North and there is a very long list of tricks of the glassmaking trade their skilled workers know that yours won't. Expect the resuts to be yellow or green, but for windows, glass houses and even mid-quality mirrors, they will do."
"I doubt the people will complain if it comes at half the price," Theomore noted and all of us laughed. "But how did you make the glass spheres if they're pure quartz? How did you capture flowers in them?"
"I thought that was obvious?" I snarked at the Maester. "I used magic."
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