Road to the Crown

9th April 1574contemporary romance

As much as I knew that escaping from the city in order to do some more development back in Tarnow might potentially anger Elia, there wasn't really that much choice that I could have. Considering how the primary beer business already provided for more than half of my current income, there was simply no way I could dare to waste such a great opportunity as my wedding to promote both the basic and the premium brand of my drinks!

While if in my shoes, someone else might just send some messenger to inform his wife-to-be about the sudden change of short-term plans, I decided to go personally, believing that taking the blame right away would at least alleviate some of Elia's anger later on.

Surprisingly, busy with her own, girly matters required to make this wedding as great of an event as she could from her side, my wifey didn't hold anything against my idea, most likely acknowledging the fact how profitable the beer market was, and how important it would be for the further development of our lands.

From the reaper guns, my most advanced project so far, now proudly guarding the main gates of the city despite all the ammo for it being safely stored away to prevent some overreacting guards from sending endless innocents to hell, through all the profits that Elia saw flowing down our pockets by herself when we visited Tarnow last time, at the spice powder and almost magical concrete that would revolutionalize their respective market fields ending, everything I touched, seemed to suddenly spike in advancement, overcoming all the obstacles that would prevent others from improving on it.

She had enough time to realise and get used to the fact that no matter what, the greatest priority of my rule as the noble of two cities would lay in modernising it to a never-seen degree, along with speeding the entire process up as much as I could through promoting and selling off the fruits of my already finished projects.

That was most likely the reason why rather than spending hours at convincing her about the feasibility of my idea, she simply listened to my request and limited herself to sending me off with a light kiss on a cheek.

This time, unbothered by all the hassle with carriages, with only my trusty Helga and Kalen to my side, covering the distance between the two cities took barely two hours, allowing me to drop myself into the madness of crafting, upgrading and expanding my so far, most important building in the entire domain.

While left almost entirely alone in the castle if I were to exclude the servants and garrison, Matsu did a great job at preparing the area for the festivities, along with procuring all the materials I could ever want. When I left my horse back in the Tarnowian stable and went to see the pile of resources she managed to buy off during just a few days of my absence, I even went as far as to start to suspect her to belong to some kind of secret, merchant society!

Stacked one against the other, huge piles of iron slabs, empty barrels of varying sizes put one into another just like Russian matryoshka dolls… And this was just a single aspect of her work, with more than two, big sheds already under construction in what used to be the private, lord's pasture located at the northern part of the hilltop.

Considering how I hailed from Tarnow in the first place, I never bothered with turning this part of the castle into proper stronghold nor fortification. I well better than anyone that outside of the internal strife that happened after the decline of the Tarnowian family, no one really bothered to siege this place in the entire history I knew! The first time when someone used it ever since the castle was razed down to the ground by the neighbouring major noble in their attempt to take over those lands, was during the second world war, when Nazis that occupied Poland at that time, turned the ruins into the nest for powerful anti-air batteries!

Rather than wasting a lot of the free space, hidden securely between the walls of the castle and untraversable, the northern slope of the Saint Martin hill, Matsu moved just a bit of manpower and resources around, turning more and more of what used to be a grazing field for the castle's herd, into one of the most developed areas in the entire world!

With my projects spanning far further than just a simple brewery, when taking the break from constructing the new, complicated brewing line, I took my time to outline the layout of the next, most important factory that would change the countryside status of this area, to the major province on its own!

The cement factory!

But this was where I – for the first time – found myself facing the opposition of this loyal and hardworking retainer of mine.

"My lord! So much space… With how this entire place is growing to become a gold mine in the eyes of anyone who learns about the new beer, how could we use nearly half of its size for just a single building?! Sir, with all due respect, money! Just by renting this land to the merchants, we could swim in more money than we could ever imagine!"

At this point, I had no heart to tell her that rather than being a factory proper, the borders of the new area I marked with a set of simple wooden poles forced into the ground, was actually to be used for nothing else than obtaining the stone materials required to make the cement in the first place!

In fact, I could procure them from literally any other part of the mountain, with some places being actually way easier to be adopted into the role of a makeshift quarry, but there was a single, insanely important point that I had to keep in mind at all time.

The way of turning the stone into the cement was actually quite simple!

Outside of the various technological challenges, one had to tackle while implementing it, starting with high-temperature furnaces and at the correct ratio of some small additions to the mix ending, as long as someone could overcome those hardships, creating the cement of similar quality to the one I would produce, wasn't anything to be proud of!

"I'm sorry, but this is something I can't compromise on. Look, when I started the brewery, I saw the looks that you sent me when you thought I wasn't looking, and you know the best out of the two of us, how profitable this place is now, with its prospects only showing a rising trend, considering how incredibly popular it will most likely become after the wedding, especially with the addition of the new, premium brand! Can't you just trust me on this point as well?"

While her arguments were valid since most of the merchants interested in stealing a part of my profits would love to rent the place beside the brewery in hopes of learning how the heck I managed to create such a fine brew, to me, the advantage of keeping the secret of the cement for myself for just a few years, was immense. Way more important than a few gold coins we could obtain just by letting this land waste away!

done.co