Master of Coins' Chamber (98 AL)

Lord Reyne was indeed present, and his squire admitted Lyonel without delay. Reyne looked up. His hair was mostly grey now but he was still fit and healthy. "Lord Harroway," he said in welcome. "Please, will you take some wine?"

"I have several. I can highly recommend the eighty-three Arbor red, or the ninety-one gold," Lord Reyne suggested. "Would you care to try either of those, Lord Harroway?"

Lord Reyne ignored the cane as he poured the sweet red into two goblets, one each for himself and for his guest.

"I am sure this is not a social call, my lord. Please speak plain, I beg you. We are both too busy to waste time on the preliminaries. Both of us have to do that too often with foreign dignitaries and the like."

"Indeed? The crown is currently two million dragons in debt, I regret to say. Most of it to the Iron Bank of Braavos, though they have been most understanding of our difficulties. The debt was a great deal larger when Her Grace' father was king, but it will take time to pay off in full."

Lord Reyne explains that tariffs and duties collected on shipping into and out of the Blackwater Bay was a share of the crown's income to be sure, but the vast majority of it (90%) came from taxes paid by the Queen's various vassals and liegemen. As it stood currently, only a few lords were in arrears in their payments, most of them middle-sized Reach houses who had suffered most during the Uprising of the Faith Militant and who had been slow to recover since the war's end.

The lion's share of taxes to the crown are paid by House Stark, as the population of the North now rivaled that of some of several of the Southern Kingdoms. In the last two years, however, Lord Stark has been requiring more prompting to make his payments and has been paying in small increments, as minimally as he can get away with without directly defying the crown.

Afterwards, however, Lord Reyne said pointedly "Please do not worry yourself, my lord. It is for me to worry about the crown's income, not you."

"A guild?" Lord Reyne murmured. "Perhaps that is so, but no man will take that if he must pay and get nothing in return. Members of the guild would need to be granted special privileges besides the right to display a seal. Perhaps they might be offered extra rights, particularly with one another. Perhaps a guild in each of the major cities would serve, which would promote a sense of community among the tradesmen of each city."

Seeing Orys has arrived Lyonel makes polite good bye and limps away in thought.

Orys grins at Harroway with too many teeth, before entering the office. "Lord Reyne. Are you well? Healthy?" He takes a seat without being asked or even waiting for a response.

"I don't think we've ever spoken before. Not in great detail." He flips over the paper he's working on, and begins writing in symbols more familiar to the Master of Coin, to be presented momentarily.

He passes the sheet to him. On it are his yearly earnings and expenses. "I've been living in the Red Keep my entire life. My father was a king, my mother was a Lannister, I can literally shit gold on some days." He paused, before adding. "It's actually easier than it sounds." He gestured to the sheet. "I decided the rent was overdue."

Orys snorts in derision. "I'm an alchemist, not a knight. The Guild has more coin, should you need it. I simply woke up this morning and realized you'd been putting food on my table as far back as I could remember. I thought it was fair I put something on your table."