Heh, no, I totally missed the rain of stones incident I'm afraid. Lucky you for having a smart pretender
As for the cash, The turn after you first cast raging hearts on Pythium - pritty much forcing me to drop taxes to 0 -, wich happened to be the same turn you took a couple of provinces, my income was about 150g higher than my upkeep... Since that turn I didn't manage to buy much anymore...
Before that I had some ups and down on cashflow, but keep in mind that you probably had about 3 times as many mages to pay upkeep for as I did (rough estimate, but I don't think I'll be far wrong there) - and at no time did I even come close to even seriously consider saving up to build a new castle...
Well, time to go check out how mistform saved you from my earthquake.
P.S. I just took a look at rain of stones in the manual- If you have a way to protect your own mages (or just send in the one mage with a small bodyguard to cast it a couple of times and retreat) it looks really nice.