The eastern merchants left the Red Keep wearing the kind of satisfied smiles only men who had just locked in a fortune could manage.
Gaemon had turned his monopoly on Snow Salt into a single afternoon of outrageously profitable business.
Some might wonder why he went to the foreign traders instead of the Westerosi merchants who already sailed the Narrow Sea. The answer was simple: long-distance trade paid better. A pound of Snow Salt sold in the Free Cities or farther east could fetch three or four times what it brought in King's Landing. With limited supply right now, every jar had to travel the longest route possible.
That one meeting also crystallized something Gaemon had been turning over in his mind for weeks. Trade and farming alone would never make his domain bloom fast enough. He needed real industry—multiple industries—pulling in gold, creating jobs, and drawing people like a lodestone. Once the money flowed, the people would follow.
So he adjusted the plan.
A few days later, back at the Wendwater, he gathered the newest wave of settlers and marched them straight to the coast. The first proper salt works would rise here, and around it he would plant his very first town. He had already picked the name: Snowsalt Town.
The name said everything. This place would live and die by salt.
In the future, the entire domain would be dotted with specialized towns—Snowsalt for salt and fish, others for timber, shipbuilding, weaving, whatever the land and the market demanded. That was how real cities were born.
They started small. Just fifty acres for the first phase.
Gaemon chose a stretch of shoreline not far from the river mouth, flat enough, sunny enough, and close enough to the tides. Bahamut swept low once, and a single controlled breath of platinum fire scorched the ground clean of grass and brush, leaving a broad black scar along the coast.
The settlers—still half-terrified of the dragon—moved in under Jon Connington's shouted orders. They raked up the ash for fertilizer, hauled away every rock the flames couldn't burn, and began shaping the land.
Each acre became its own shallow pan.
Closest to the sea: the brine reservoir.
Next: the primary evaporation beds—shallow pits barely a foot deep.
Then the crystallization pans—deeper, lined with wooden planks to speed the process.
Finally, the harvest area—wooden troughs and stone bins raised high enough to stay dry even in heavy rain.
From the air the whole layout looked like a giant triangle tightening inland. A network of ditches and wooden pipes would carry seawater from the reservoir to every pan. When the tide rose, the sea itself would do the heavy lifting.
The plan was brutally simple and brutally effective.
It still took a full month just to level the ground and dig the first fifty acres. When the second wave of two thousand new hands arrived, the work finally accelerated. The entire first phase of the salt works was declared finished in the third moon of 80 AC—five long, back-breaking months after breaking ground.
While Gaemon had been knee-deep in mud and brine, the royal family had welcomed its newest member.
In late 79 AC, Queen Alysanne—now forty-four—had given birth to a tiny, pale girl. Gaemon had already known it would be a daughter. He named her Gaerys Targaryen, the Winter Child, and placed a pure-white dragon egg in her cradle the same hour she drew her first breath.
The babe had come into the world frighteningly small and frail. Alysanne, terrified, had come to Gaemon begging him to use blood magic to save her. But Gaemon had already examined the infant with his own magic and simply smiled.
"She looks weak, Mother, but there's a dragon's fire burning inside her. No sacrifice is needed. She'll live."
Only then had the Queen finally allowed herself to breathe easy—though she still hovered over little Gaerys like a mother hen.
With his new sister safe, Gaemon returned to his salt pans the very next day.
The first real harvest came with the first warm breath of summer in 80 AC. The sun climbed higher, the sea wind blew steady, and evaporation turned ferocious.
In a single week the crystallization pans filled with thick white crusts.
Gaemon stood on the raised walkway between the pans, hands on his hips, watching hundreds of workers in linen tunics moving like ants across the glittering white fields. Jon Connington came jogging up, ledger in hand, grinning like a fool.
"Your Grace! We've tallied the first sweep. Fifteen pounds of coarse salt per acre—seven hundred fifty pounds total from the fifty acres. Once it's refined, we should clear five hundred pounds of Snow Salt after losses."
Jon's grin widened. "At sixteen hundred copper pennies a pound on the street, that's eight hundred thousand coppers—sixty-eight gold dragons for one week's work. Four sweeps a month means two hundred seventy-two dragons monthly. Three thousand two hundred sixty a year from this one field alone. If the weather stays kind and we expand, we're looking at five to six thousand dragons gross per year. After taxes and wages for the salt workers… we'll still pocket around two thousand dragons clear profit."
Gaemon nodded, satisfaction settling deep in his chest.
"Good. Double the workforce. I want three hundred acres ready by year's end."
Jon snapped a crisp salute. "At once, Your Grace."
The platinum dragon circling lazily overhead let out a single proud cry, as if Bahamut himself approved of the new empire rising from the salt and the sea.
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