11 The first step

IMPORTANT: Before reading this chapter go back to the previous one because I modified it, this means in substance that the idea of manure had been abandoned for the moment and that another one had been used.

(Sorry for the wait by the way.)

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[3 years later, 270]

[Hoster's POV]

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Before my rule, the Tullys couldn't boast of having more gold than the Mootons and those damn Freys...

As for the Brackens, the Blackwoods, the Vances, the Mallisters (and the Freys again), we couldn't deny that their armies were each more impressive than ours.

Having the status of the third wealthiest House in the Riverlands as well as the sixth in terms of army was very respectable when one was taking into account the fact that our territory was far from being the largest in the region, that we owned no port (since we didn't have an access to a sea), no city of consequent size, nor something similar to the Twins (like a certain weasel), not that Riverrun was giving us a reason to be jealous of them, to charge an exorbitant toll to those who had the displeasure of having to pass through them...

[The Twins which are also called 'the Crossing' are the twin castles of House Frey; I will post a picture here.]

[While we are at it, I will also post a picture of a map of the Riverlands.]

However, all of that was much less respectable considering that House Tully was supposed to be the Great House ruling the Riverlands…

As such, being anything other than the most powerful House in the Riverlands to even hope to control them was unacceptable, for it was partially our inability to exert economic and military pressure on our bannermen that made some of them disrespected us (a disrespect that in the most extreme cases manifested itself in tax payments that were rather suspicious to say the least).

When my father stepped down as Lord of our House and of the Riverlands, I made it my goal to make of House Tully a great House on par with the others before the end of my rule...

Quite an immature and unreal wish if you ask me.

Behind my words, the reality was that there was no way we could become as wealthy as the Lannisters or the Tyrrells in such a short time, just as we couldn't become as respected by our bannermen as the Starks, the Arryns and the Martells were...

And yet, the more time was passing, the less humorous it was to make fun of the powerlessness of the trouts.

Those who despised us before were now jealous of us, those who were ignoring us were no longer indifferent to us, and all of this was due to William.

The mind of this child was as fascinating as it was frightening, more than I was willing to admit.

Three years ago, when William made me taste his chocolate, I had immediately seen the potential behind it but my enthusiasm was immediately tempered when he told me that he had used sugar in the preparation.

I explained to him that sugar was a product whose export was a monopoly of several free cities and that it was coming from the sugar cane which was a plant that didn't grow here...

I thought that by telling him this he would be disappointed and dejected, but it was the opposite effect that occurred.

William rubbed his hands together with an expression that I couldn't describe as anything other than demonic and he told me 'don't worry Uncle, give me some time and I will come back with a solution'.

A fortnight later he was standing in front of me with a white beet root in his hands and told me that it was his solution…

With so little context I didn't understand so he explained to me what he was getting at; according to him, producing sugar from this beet root was possible and from what he explained to me not excessively complicated…

Having eaten white beet root before I knew he had put the finger on something as the taste of it was extremely sugary, however, I didn't have the same faith in him then as I do now, so it was only after seeing with Maester Corwyn how applicable what he was saying was that I trusted him.

According to Maester Corwyn, although William never studied the subject, the process he described was exactly the same as that of extracting sugar from sugar cane with only one exception; at the beginning of the treatment of sugar cane it was crushed and then pressed to extract a sugary juice from it (which would then be transformed into the sugar I knew after successive steps whose descriptions were too complicated for me to remember), while in the case of white beet root, William claimed that at the beginning of the treatment we could obtain that same sugary juice by cutting the root into thin strips which were then heated in water...

[I have simplified the explanation of this process here but in practice it's more complicated, if you want to learn more you can google 'sugar beet diffusion'. Diffusion being the step where the sugar contained in the beet goes from the beet to the water.]

It was a big investment, but I took the risk and I didn't regret it (well, I did for a short moment because when I saw that the sugar we were getting was white, I thought it was a failure).

[Cane sugar is brown unless it is refined.]

Now that we had sugar to sell, we had to find buyers, and frankly it wasn't that difficult again thanks to William and Father...

Eager to get a return on my investment, I wanted to directly sell our sugar on a large scale, but both of them raised several problems that made me realize that it was a terrible idea.

The sugar we were making hadn't yet prove itself and didn't have the same appearance as the sugar coming from sugar cane, this implied that many people would be reluctant to buy it (especially at the price we were about to demand)...

In order to overcome this issue, William suggested giving small free samples of our sugar to potential buyers before selling it (which would also give us more time to organize the production and build up stocks), although it pained me to lose even more gold at the time, my avidity didn't prevent me from seeing that it was a small harm for a way greater good.

It took almost 4 moons for us to earn back the gold we had spent on this project, it was slow but we expected it, what mattered was that during this period many Lords had realized that they could buy sugar from us at two thirds of the price that the cheapest supplier in Essos could offer, and in a much shorter time (no transport by ship to do from Essos to Westeros).

After that, the amount of requests for trade that were knocking at our door as well as the gold that we were earning from sugar only increased exponentially over time...

Given that for our buyers supplying themselves from us was technically the same as saving gold, the only losers in the story were some free cities of Essos, and no one in Westeros had a problem with that because everyone here viewed our dependence on our eastern neighbors for certain products in a negative light.

Making us rich was one thing, doing it in such a way that those with whom we were trading were paying our products with a smile was another and it's what William had managed to accomplish...

He had a gift for this, just as he had a gift for knowing how to avoid retaliation.

As I said, the losers in the story were some of the free cities of Essos and since everyone knew that they were very sore losers we didn't wait for threats, commercial sanctions, or worse to act.

Pentos, and to a lesser extent Tyrosh were the main exporters of sugar to Westeros [not canon, but a logical conclusion from the information I have gathered], which also made them the ones we offended by our actions...

There were two ways to deal with them in order to avoid making enemies of them; showing them that they would lose more than we would if they antagonized us or showing them that what they had lost was nothing compared to what they could gain if they had us as friends.

The first option was immediately discarded because in the current state of things we would lose much more than them, as for the second one, we had to find the right way to carry it out...

At the beginning I thought we could appease them by offering them a preferential price on our chocolate, which we were about to start selling at that time, but William reminded me that it wasn't a product we could export to Essos since the temperatures there would make it melt.

In the end it took a long time of pondering before someone came up with something that was both feasible and clever...

William (him again) proposed that we stop exporting to Braavos since Pentos wasn't on good terms with it and for the same reason but this time in the case of Tyrosh, he also proposed that we stop exporting to Lys, Myr and Volantis.

It seemed extreme in appearance, but in reality not that much; the only thing House Tully used to export to these cities was wheat, and not in very large quantities, in place of our grain they could buy that of the Tyrells...

We could very well sell our wheat to the North instead, although we weren't going to obtain a very good price for it in comparison and that would make that old shit Walder richer in the process [if one wants to go North from the Riverlands, the Twins are one of the rare passages] it would at least strengthen our relationship with the Northerners (anyway the losses we were going to suffer because of that were going to be largely compensated by the gold we were gaining)...

We applied this strategy and until today we haven't suffered any reprisals related to this issue, which was almost surprising given how much the people of Tyrosh were known for their arrogance and greed.

In parallel to this we finally began to sell our chocolate after offering small free samples of it like we did for sugar as well as recipes to not only gain the trust of our buyers but also to give them several ways to use our chocolate so that they would want to buy it even more...

It was a product that no one knew about, so even more than for our sugar we needed this promotional process.

Currently, the gold we were earning from chocolate was about 70 % of what we were earning from sugar, these two products were the pillars of our House and the base with which we intended to further grow, because yes, we were far from being satisfied with what we had...

With our gold we bought what we needed to equip a larger army and to provide our peasants with more tools so that we could hope for bigger harvests...

We also invested in other ways to earn gold but which required more time and infrastructure to be successful.

Gold was entering my hands and leaving them the next moment, but I didn't worry, William and I had the same ambition and with his mind at the service of our House I knew that our future could only be bright...

Frankly, I was almost hoping that the child Minisa was carrying wasn't a son because it had become clear that it would be a waste to leave my succession to someone other than William.

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[William's POV]

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270, the year of my seven name days, a year even more promising than the previous three for the development of House Tully, and yet, a year that I already hated even though it had only just begun...

Minisa was going to give birth to Edmure in a few moons, which would mark a significant decline in her already fragile health, and the second person I was closest to, my grandfather, was on his deathbed; I didn't need to say more to make you understand why I was approaching this year with pessimism.