The World Dragon's Heir

Chapter 733: One Week In

By the end of the week, Dominic was beginning to think that things were beginning to run as intended, as his workload had dropped significantly, and Alexis was beginning to understand why most other noble women took a wet nurse.

In fact, she was considering it herself.

Keeping up with the infant feeding schedule left her no time for proper sleep, much less getting anything productive done.

The trolls had healed her body, but she still needed to get back in shape, and rebuild muscle tone that had been lost during the light training of her pregnancy. But when all you could feel was exhaustion, there wasn’t much else on your schedule.

Dominic was helping.

Or, at least he was trying to.

At the moment, he had Princess Katerina in his office, swinging happily in a makeshift hammock while he reviewed documents that the advisors had vetted for him.

She had just been fed and changed, as happy as she could possibly get, so Dominic wasn’t too worried about what she might get up to. However, the Advisors were regularly looking over as the little one giggled, growled and flailed her arms.

"Are you sure that she’s fine?" Jack finally asked.

"Pretty sure. She still sounds happy."

Dominic got up and picked up the baby to sit her on his lap while he worked. Now, he could be sure that she was fine, though he could see her if he just looked over.

"So, as we were saying, if you approve it, we will have Witheton added to the portal rotation. It will just need a matching array built in the Axbridge Capital, but we are certain that the King or the Crown Prince will approve it." Jack explained.

"Alright. I don’t see anything wrong with it. We can always lock it down if there are threats against the city, or the trade alliance begins to break down.

Keep in mind that soon we will be getting Nobles and Royals from all over coming here to ask for funds. The workers for the Investment Bank are working overtime, getting all set up."

The old soldier sighed. "Right, almost forgot about that monstrosity. Isn’t there anything that we can do about it?"

Dominic winked at him. "I’m going to gift them some flowers later. More specifically, the [Wall of Brambles] with an emphasis on flowering roses. If we cover the whole building in creeping vines, not only is it defended, but we don’t have to look at it."

"Well, that’s an elegant solution for the issue. Alright, we will wait for you to redecorate the building. For now, we will send a message to Crown Prince Fahad, and see if he will approve the building of a permanent portal array.

I’m thinking that we should make ours in sections so that we can have them all active at the same time without any of the portals overlapping.

We just need a place to put it.

Probably somewhere near the airship docks, so that caravans arrive in the industrial section of town.

But it’s also the arrival point for guests, so we don’t want to just dump it in the warehouse district."

"Alright, we can work on something. What about putting it toward the other edge of town? If we put it out there, we could build a park near it, and have those delivering into town enter via main street, while the rest circle the city to go to the warehouse district?

It would also give us an extra space for building a public attraction.

Something for the people to brag about to the new arrivals is always a good idea."

The advisors thought about it for a moment, then Lord Blackwell smiled.

"Actually, we have the perfect spot. We can put it in the park near the farmer’s market. They’ll have to pass all the best-looking parts of town to get to the market or the Inn, and it’s got a straight shot out of town, while also having a wide street straight to the Merchant’s Guild warehouses.

It will make traffic in town worse, but that’s not much of a price to pay for the way that it will push them toward the core of our business district.

Everything from the sales office for the automaker, to the forge, the bakery and three of the magitech shops are all in close proximity to the farmer’s market. Once they’re in the region, they’ll naturally want to shop.

And we will have an excuse to keep the market fully stocked every single day of the week, and not just on market day once a week.

That will let everyone in town do much smaller shopping trips for fresh produce."

"That will make Dave happy as well. Let’s go with that plan, unless there are objections?"

Katerina flailed her arms babbling happy incoherent nonsense, then tried to eat one of Dominic’s fingers.

"Well, that’s one more vote for fresh food."

Seeing the telltale signs that the little one was going to start demanding food soon, in the most vocal way possible, the nanny who had been chosen to help Alexis quickly collected the young Princess and took her away to where her mother was resting.

"We’ve got a bit of time now. So, let’s get through the last of this paperwork, and then we can get on to the hiring requests.

As near as we can guess, we’re thinking that four more staff for the Duchy, six for the duties of each Governorship, and then two full-time mages to facilitate moving them around.

That’s eighteen more people to keep up with everything, and a lot of travel for a few of them, so they’ll need to include at least one mechanic. That shouldn’t be too hard to fill, we can recruit them from all over, if we don’t have enough trained of our own.

In fact, we could just send them along with the soldiers instead.

They need to patrol the region anyhow, and the team in charge of keeping census and passing on edicts can do their jobs just fine accompanied by the Knights.

That will save us a lot of headaches, and a few people for the team.

So, make it fourteen total new hires, and your devoted advisors will take care of getting them all set up to do the worst of the paperwork."