Chapter 14

"This is the spot." I said and stopped the direwolf as I looked down from a small hill.

The men riding behind me stopped as well and one of the men whom I had selected because of his literacy came in front of me and started looking at the area before he found out the exact location and made a black dot in the map and wrote down the description of the area.

"Which one is this my lord?" he asked after finishing the description on the parchment and I let a feral smile grace my lips and said.

"Silver."

"Silver my lord?" he asked in surprise and I smiled back at him.

"Yes. I had heard that Lord Manderly had two silver mines in his lands but had not thought that I would find some in my lands as well. Regardless. This is a pleasant surprise and a boon that I intend to take full benefit of." Then I looked back at the man once again "Make it a priority and send one third of our miners here. I want them to open a mine and start the extraction of silver ore as quickly as possible."

"Yes my lord." He said and bowed his head before writing down my instructions as I frowned and thought about the problems that were rising in front of me.

The biggest problem being a lack of miners.

So far, the Bolton lands only had two iron mines which were used to provide all the steel that their men needed.

But within the span of a month, I had managed to uncover 17 places with high ore deposit in the Bolton lands.

For now, we only had enough miners to open 3 more mines if we stretch the numbers. And I was under no illusion that the work would be slow.

I needed more miners, something that I can ask for from the other Great and minor neighbouring houses. Of course, I would have to pay a good amount of gold for that. Not to mention that the men I would need to recruit to work in the new mines would need to be paid a good amount of gold as well.

The Boltons had enough wealth to open half a dozen mines without decreasing the gold by a significant amount. After all, the Boltons may not be particularly rich but they were a great house with a history as long as the Starks. But that much wealth would not be enough to fund the larger projects that I had in mind.

And although I could simply transfigure dirt into gold, the transfiguration spell would break if someone damaged the coins too much. So I had no choice but to either borrow the gold from other sources. Or steal from others.

I decided that I would do both.

But in order to do that, I would have to either go to Kings Landing which had the largest amount of gold flowing through it at any given moment. Or go across the Narrow Sea and deal with either the Iron Bank or the other smaller Tyroshi banks.

It was time for me to step up and start travelling the world.

I also knew that ship travel during this era takes a significant amount of time so I wanted to start another one of my plans before I left.