Seven months had passed since Groleau's death. A mere blink of an eye on the scale of King's Landing, but an eternity for Flea Bottom. The quarter was no longer quite the same. The stench was still there, stubborn, embedded in the oozing walls and the eternal mud, but it had changed. Less acrid, less desperate. It was now rivaled by other scents: the sharp perfume of pine and mint wafting from the soap workshops, the almost sugary aroma of freshly sawn wood from the carpentry yards, and even, when the wind blew from the Street of Steel, a metallic tang, hot and potent, like that of a forge laboring at an infernal rhythm.
The most striking change was the noise. The anguished silence that had followed the massacre of the Black Hounds had given way to a new cacophony, that of industry. The steady rumble of the "Brewers" along the banks of the Blackwater Rush now mingled with the hammering of mallets on wood, the screech of saws, the clatter of gears from the machines being built, and the barked orders of improvised foremen. Flea Bottom no longer slept. It worked.
Tony Stark had kept his word. More than that, he had exceeded all expectations, including his own. The "Vale Credit Notes," initially met with skepticism tinged with fear, had become the most profitable investment in the city. Not only had Tony repaid every loan in full after just three months, but he had added a substantial "confidence bonus," turning his reluctant creditors into cautious allies, even enthusiasts. Money flowed freely through Flea Bottom now, no longer through extortion, but through wages.
The "Brewer" industry was still riding its phenomenal growth curve. Demand far outstripped production capacity. The washerwomen's guilds across King's Landing fought to secure a machine, willing to pay months of rent in advance. The smaller, more luxurious domestic models sold like hotcakes at exorbitant prices—literally, often paid in gold dragons—by stewards of the great houses, becoming a symbol of status as much as a practical tool.
But the true revolution, the one only just beginning to unfold its effects, was that of soap. The "Docker's Cleaner," with its pine scent and cleansing power, had become indispensable. Washerwomen swore by it alone. Artisans bought it by the crate. Just a month ago, he had launched his premium line: "The Blossom." A creamy soap made from purified rapeseed oil, enriched with donkey's milk and honey for softness, and delicately scented with essences of lavender, rose, or sandalwood imported at great expense from the Reach and sometimes from Essos.
The success was instantaneous and staggering. Sold in small engraved wooden boxes, "The Blossom" became the object of desire for every lady at court and the wealthy merchant wives. It commanded an outrageous price, but it offered a sensation of cleanliness and softness unmatched by anything else. Demand was so overwhelming that Tony had to triple production in a matter of weeks.
With this windfall, Tony did not content himself with amassing wealth. He reinvested massively. He became the largest landowner in Flea Bottom, buying up crumbling hovels, abandoned warehouses, and trash-strewn vacant lots one by one. Not to speculate, but to rebuild. Under his direction, teams of laborers—paid decently and led by Jem—began sanitizing, roughly paving certain alleys, digging gutters for wastewater drainage, demolishing the most hazardous structures to replace them with sturdier workshops, better lit and ventilated.
The most dazzling symbol of this transformation was Theron's new forge. The old cramped workshop on the Street of Steel had been abandoned. Tony had bought a vast disused warehouse near the docks and turned it into an industrial complex without equal in King's Landing. Theron was no longer a solitary smith. He was the Master-Founder, director of a factory employing two dozen men and apprentices. Gone was the small bloomery. Under Tony's guidance, he had built a much larger furnace, inspired by the techniques the boy had described to him, capable of reaching higher temperatures and producing steel in greater quantities and consistent quality. Primitive hydraulic bellows, powered by the Blackwater Rush via a diverted channel, fed air to the fire. Rudimentary overhead cranes handled the heavy loads. It wasn't Bessemer yet, but it was a technological leap of centuries. Theron, his face alight with rediscovered pride, oversaw the pouring of steel destined for the Brewers' frames, the axles of the rope-making machines (a venture he had only just begun), and, secretly, the components of the future "Black Widows," whose production had never truly ceased. He had even moved, leaving his tiny room above the old forge for a comfortable apartment in one of the first buildings Tony had renovated, right next to the factory.
The original Midges, too, had seen their lives utterly transformed. They no longer lived in the squalid lair. Tony, ever mindful of their safety and eager to extract them from Flea Bottom's toxic environment, had used part of his early profits to buy a large abandoned property on the slopes of Visenya's Hill—an old manor burned during the Sack. He had it roughly renovated, turning it into a sort of comfortable boarding house or barracks. There they slept, ate, and received their afternoon education. Kael had his own small fine-woodworking shop. Elara was officially his secretary, handling his paperwork. Jem and Lira had their own apartments. But every morning, they descended back to Flea Bottom, their workplace, their kingdom. They were the executives, the foremen, the eyes and ears of Tony. Their loyalty to him was absolute, forged in blood, steel, and newfound prosperity.
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Meanwhile, in his quarters at the East Barracks, Captain Valerius gazed at the latest weekly delivery with growing dread. On his table lay not the meager pouch of copper and silver coins from Groleau's days, but a small lacquered wooden box. Inside, neatly aligned, rested ten gold dragons. It was more than his annual captain's salary. It was indecent wealth, dangerous.
His sergeant Hake, who had just set down the box, cleared his throat. "Another... more than last week, Captain. The boy... his businesses are doing well. Very well."
Valerius did not reply. He stared at the gold, fascinated and terrified. He had wanted a profitable investment. He found himself a shareholder in an erupting volcano. The boy's expansion was exponential, uncontrollable. In six months, he had gone from local gang leader to industrial magnate whose products flew off the shelves as far as the Red Keep. He had turned the city's most wretched quarter into a productive hive, employing hundreds.
And that was the heart of Valerius's problem. Tony had become untouchable. How could he justify a Guard raid in a quarter where crime rates had plummeted dramatically? How could he arrest a man who provided work to a population that, without him, would relapse into banditry and sedition? How could he strike at the benefactor of thousands of souls without sparking a riot that would set the city ablaze? Tony no longer ruled by the fear of his crossbows (had he ever, truly?), but by the economic dependence of an entire ecosystem. He held Flea Bottom in his grip, and it shielded him in return.
And then there was the money. This gold that burned his fingers. Gold every week, these past months. How to justify such a sudden rise in his standard of living? His superiors were already asking questions; his rivals whispered accusations of corruption, claiming he was handsomely shaking down Flea Bottom's merchants. The boy had trapped him. By stuffing him with gold, he had made him vulnerable. If he tried to move against Tony now, the boy need only leak word of their "arrangements," and Valerius would be finished. Accused of large-scale corruption, of diverting Crown taxes to his own pockets. And certainly complicit in the Black Hounds' massacre—the crossbow was useless at this point. Money was the sinew of the world; who would care about a mere weapon?
The final piece of the puzzle clicked into place in Valerius's mind with unwelcome clarity as he brooded. The boy showed himself almost never. Contracts were signed by artisans who worked for him. Deliveries were made by anonymous foremen. The "enterprises"—the Soapworks, the Ropewalk, the Brewer Workshops—were registered as independent artisan guilds, with no apparent legal ties between them, and above all, no visible link to Tony himself. On paper, the boy did not exist. He was a ghost, a faceless mind pulling strings from Flea Bottom's shadows.
Valerius snapped the box shut with a sharp click. He had thought himself clever in raising his cut from the boy. He had believed he held him with the secret of the crossbow hidden in his strongbox. What naïveté. He had not invested in a petty prodigy. He had unleashed a genius, a monster of ambition and intellect that dwarfed him utterly. He had underestimated not just his capacity to create, but his ability to calculate, to plan long-term. The boy was not playing the same game as him. He was redrawing the board. And Valerius was just a pawn, a suddenly wealthy pawn, to be sure, but a pawn nonetheless. The only question was how long the player would leave him on the board. He would have to renegotiate their deal, and he held no leverage.