8 Robert rebellion time 4
Unfortunately the new income came with new enemies or rather interested parties.
Thanks to my 'dreams' mother increased our forces and since we can afford it now we recruited additional 2000 soldiers in total and some knights and started building our informants network.
With the war ended there are many unemployed knights and homeless peasants.
When people see you as a perfect Lord it's easy to get information and our Inns and Pleasure houses are just perfect for that.
I take walks around the town with a smile and call small folk "uncle", "aunty", "grandma" etc. to build close connections. Always with a perfect, childish smile. They think heaven of me.
I'm still planning to start a standing, professional, unified army system. The motley crew that the lords are using is so unreliable!
They do not fight in teams, they do not support each other. It's like a big free for all fuckfest.
And yeah, take all the able bodied men from the small folk, away from their fields just to die. Brilliant.
We could have more forces but my stepfather took half of our original 1000 to aid in the rebellion. Maybe one in 10 will return after the battle of Trident, they are still not back yet.
We still are in the middle of Northern lords level with our army size but at least not in the bottom. For example before the war my mom's family had about 4.500 people and that's still not the best, we on the other hand only have 2.000. I'm not counting the 500 castle guards who are just responsible for guarding our "castle" and town, these are the original ones we had.
There's still House Stout but I don't trust them yet.
Next is 400 cavalry that I want to change into heavy cavalry later on. Procuring the horses was a bit challenging but nothing that money couldn't solve. They train in the group maneuvers like charging, retreating and all the things they usually do, 1400 infantry and 200 archers that we trained from scratch.
We will have to wait for their equipment a bit, but they can train for now.
We have some hedge knights in their ranks but we implemented solidified command chain so if you want to get promoted show us what you can do!
For now they are getting used to team work and training every day.
I'm aiming to establish military families system in the future. Something like in Sparta.
Thankfully my mom approved seeing the benefits of this and now every bard in our and neighboring lands sings how glorious it is to be a soldier loyal to the death to the Dustin lord, me. We have so many small folk willing to enlist so we can select only the best.
It's great as they are hard working, strong, not pampered and already know hunger, war and how hard life can be.
Discipline is really enforced thanks to our actions which means no raping or killing civilians and some of knight oath commandments.
They already can march in synch after training by the instructions I gave to the commanders based on Roman Legionaries system.
They looked at me as if I'm an idiot at the beginning thinking what good will long everyday marching with full equipment and for time in synchronized formation, coordination and invoking cohesion and group tactics, discipline or standing unmoved at attention among other things will give, but after seeing the effects of it, they think I'm a military genius! Bunch of badasses I tell you! Looking at them marching in a neat formations in our house yellow and black through the Barrowton and singing "Valiant" field March is so fucking awesome!
Even my mom was impressed observing them, the sound of unified footsteps made the buildings shake and as for the marching drums I "invented" and the song I gave them, we used horns and normal battle drums to compliment the marching drums to keep the rhythm for marching.
I had to change some words in the song so that it would change from invoking loyalty to the God to our family and me by extension, but that was necessary.
They had to sing it every time they went on long marches and those who passed the selection the training and gave the oath to my house were the real soldiers of House Dustin.
Since it was so hard to get into our house army, it became more of an honor and privilege to serve us! Exactly what I wanted!
Only the good seeds!
After selection, hard training and swearing the oath they only had to worry about improving their skills.
Food, pay, equipment and other necessities were provided by us and they earned more than they would with most of the other houses in Westeros. Oh, and they received their own brick house with toilets inside and heating as well as already furnished. Their family if they have one lives there when they served.
The oath they give is for life so they placed their bet and their future on us and will serve loyally till the end or retirement. These guys will later be the core of my army as people in command after learning how to write, count, read and everything they needed to lead effectively.
Now back to business.
The rest of the bricks are sold to other Lords via land route or our new fleet.
We managed to change a lot of unused land into proper farming fields with wheat and different vegetables and the harvest from them is bountiful, like really a lot.
Thanks to crop selection, fertilizers and tools it gets better and better with every harvest and for now we have more than enough for us, the rest what we don't store is sold up north.
Of course the tools are used by our trusted people after you make an appointment for a small fee, or you can pay after harvesting with a tiny part of your harvest after it's done.
Animal husbandry is hard but slowly it's getting there and we should see some good progress in the next 2 years.
Oh and we started breading horses thanks to my mom's family!
Chargers and Coursers for now as I wanted, but from this I've got a beautiful red Destrier Stalion from her on my fourth name day and I named him Warrior.
Cliche I know, but I don't care! It's a shame I still can't ride him but I like taking care of him. He's 2 years old, smart and temperamental bastard just like me, the best part is that I can feel his emotions easily! Didn't try to bond with him yet.
Lord Ryswell only wanted us to build some structures in exchange for the first batch of horses by using bricks every year for his towns and we did.
Everyone needs to hire us. They all can buy bricks but only we know how to make the lime mortar and what precautions to take in the specified environment while building. Learned on our mistakes we did.
You don't want to pay us to manage the building process? Then fuck you, go and stack your new bricks up or play domino's with them or something.
People tried recreating them but they can't get the small steps down right and the bricks were breaking easily so they gave up.
We earn a shitload of gold dragons and silver stags from selling and building especially after the war passed through a region, then we buy new land in the cities and build our own things. Rinse and repeat! We have our people building for other lords from Winterfell to Dorne and are even getting requests from Essos and Free Cities.
The same with books and clothes. The best part is that we still charge for the books as much as 1/2 of the original price and we have stacks of books in our possession.
Lords and maesters give us their libraries to copy as they are saying that our style is clearer, unified and easier to read and sooner or later they had to copy it not to lose the original we give them more discounts if they order more jobs. Idiots. We can say that in the year we've gathered books about everything from medicine, herbs, healing methods, sailing to war tactics and even stories about magic and dragons.
My mother already has people that started training as my future medics and doctors. The maester is furious but my mom gave him some books so he shut his mouth.
Of course we spend a little bit of effort to make the hard covers look extravagant but the printing itself is easy and fast and we always leave copies for ourselves.
No lord thinks that we do that as even finding someone who can write and read is hard and they think we still do it by hand. Ha!
