“Can you brew it here?”
“Here? Now?” she searched my face. I just nodded, and she smiled. “My queen, the recipe is sweet, simple, an absolute darling; I have everything, I always have everything, you’ll see.”
She turned away, opened a drawer, opened another drawer, slammed a third. This seemed important, and she produced two small cauldrons. Each barely larger than a soup bowl, copper-bottomed, rune-etched along the rims. She set them on the counter side by side and went still, looking at them.
“Queen, do you realize one recipe takes two leaves?” She held up the twist of cloth. “So we can make only one.”
“That’s why we’re making two.”
She blinked at me.
“Hmmm,” she looked at the leaves. She looked at the cauldrons. The performance flickered, and the professional underneath came online. “...like the stat boosters.”
“Like the stat boosters.”
“Brew them in parallel, combine before the final reduction, and stick the system with the bill.” Her face split. “Queen. That one is a juicy exploit. Can I get the ring?”
I winked at her and leaned closer. “Cloudy will get angry if we do too many of them.”
She deflated on the spot. “Always ruining the fun…” She had already turned, sleeves shoved past her elbows, hair pulled back with a leather tie she produced from somewhere. The performance was gone. What remained was quiet, fast, and obviously good.
Burner stones lit under each pot.
A pinch of silver salt into the left, a pinch into the right. A vial of something pale green, which smelled faintly of cucumber, with a small glass jigger. Then a clear liquid that hissed on the surface. Then a finer powder, sifted through a tiny brass strainer over both pots, left, right, left, right, until the contents had taken on the same pale gold I’d seen in Korven’s teacup an hour ago.
She picked up the twist of cloth. “Half a leaf in each,” she said, mostly to herself.
“Oh,” I said. “Only the left one. Both leaves.”
She stopped and looked at me with suspicion. “Both leaves.”
“In the left one.”
“Both leaves. In one cauldron.” She gestured at the perfectly symmetrical setup she’d just spent four minutes establishing.
“I know.”
She held the cloth open. The two leaves sat on the dark fabric, color shifting as the light caught them, and Scamantha’s eyes tracked between them and me and the cauldrons. Then she shrugged, dropped both leaves into the left cauldron, and snapped the cloth shut.
“You’re the queen.”
I couldn’t help myself, and I giggled.
“You’re also insane.”
The left cauldron took the leaves and went deeper, pale gold to amber to something closer to honey. A thin column of vapor rose off it, faintly of crushed mint and of cold stone.
The right cauldron sat there still, waiting for the leaves that would never come.
Scamantha stirred the left clockwise three times, anticlockwise once, tapped the spoon against the rim. The vapor shifted toward silver. Her brow furrowed; she leaned in; I saw her mouth move with the count under her breath. “Nearly there,” she said. “But it’ll come weird. There’s too much mana from leaves.”
“That’s the important part.”
Her head came up. “What’s the important part?”
“Nearly there.”
She squinted at me, made an executive decision not to ask, and turned to her shelves. From a peg she lifted down a third cauldron and set it between the two minis. Then, without pausing, she lifted the left mini and the right mini in opposite hands, tilted them in toward the third, and poured both into the center simultaneously.
The combined liquid was wrong from the moment it hit the enamel.
The color was no longer pale gold. It was brighter, hotter, almost luminous, with a faint pulse at the center, and I didn’t need Scamantha’s frown to tell me that the pulse was the sound of something getting ready to disagree with the laws of brewing.
“Queen,” Scamantha said, level. “It’s going to—”
I froze it.
I reached for it as I had at Korven’s, except this time the frost was already there. Rimelion’s air carried magic; I only had to put a hand on the sheet and pull.
I poured my entire mana pool, and I tried to pull as much ambient mana as I could along with it. The light in the third cauldron seized.
The heat pulled back. The pulse stopped mid-pulse. The surface fixed in place, pale, frosted over, a fine crystallization spidering out from the center of the enamel. The vapor cracked into ice and fell as a thin dust of snow into the pot.
The cauldron made a small ticking sound as it settled.
Scamantha blinked. “Huh?” A notification flickered in the corner of my vision.
[ERROR!]
My stomach dropped a half-inch. “Whaat?” she said. “That’s—”
[Fixing...]
A pause that lasted longer than I liked. “Why?”
[Error fixed!]
Scamantha’s mouth opened. “What did you do?”
“I have no idea,” I said honestly. “Pour it into a bottle. Cork it.”
“My queen—”
“Bottle. Cork.”
She uncorked a heavy glass bottle from under the counter, set it on a thin stone trivet, and tipped the third cauldron over it. The frozen liquid came out as liquid again the moment it crossed the rim, pale and thick and faintly luminous, and it filled the bottle exactly to the shoulder. She corked it. She pressed warm wax around the cork with the small sealer she kept ready at the counter. She set it down.
She examined it.
Her eyes widened.
[Frozen Divine Liquid Mana]Quality: 9-godlyEffect: Vastly increases Queen Charlie’s divinity for 5 minutesInfo: Made by Queen Charlie and Scamantha™ by freezing an unfinished potion of mana purity Requirements: Queen Charlie
“What the fuck?!” Scamantha shouted. “It even isn’t the same potion category! What does it even mean?!”
I shrugged, because I’d come in with maybe sixty percent of an answer and had received the rest from the system one second ago.
“You made the left one with more leaves than the recipe called for,” I said. “So it was overloaded. Saturation past the cap. The right one had no leaves at all, so it was just a base. When you combined them, the system had two unfinished potions trying to occupy the same recipe slot, and the saturation differential wanted to release somewhere. It wanted to explode. So I froze it before it could. The freeze held the structure long enough for—” I gestured at the bottle— “—that to happen. The mana purity base accepted divinity instead of leaves, and then the divinity consumed the potion. Same concept as the void potion we’ll make one day.”
I shrugged again.
“I wanted to know if it would work. The staff is weird. I need this to help me. Also, divine show we’ll also help with masses, apparently.” I shuddered. “At least that’s what Lola said.”
Scamantha kept staring at the bottle. Then she looked at me. Then at the bottle. Then she made a small noise that started as a laugh and arrived as a delighted, professional sigh, and she bowed.
Hands flat. Knees bent. The whole Royal Alchemist set piece, complete with the small, tilted smile that meant she was about to bill me for the privilege.
“It’s an honor to serve, my queen.”
“Scamantha.”
“Truly. The cool shit you come up with, I am genuinely beside myself.”
I grinned.
“Goodbye, Scamantha.”
“My queen.”
I left.
—
The Queen’s Square was full to the edges and over them.
Every building on every side had grown a second skin of bodies. Roofs. Windowsills. Balconies bowing slightly under the weight. The streets that fed into the square had become their own miniature crowds, packed shoulder to shoulder back into alleys whose ends I couldn’t see.
I sat on a chair that had been built for someone with a longer spine.
Behind me, on the upper tier of the podium, the elites of the Rimebreak Army stood in three loose rows in dress uniform. Apparently, our new celebration guard.
On the lower tier, my friends, and only Scamantha was sulking.
I knew her well enough by now to read her at thirty paces. Lola had earlier predicted her plans, and we confiscated three enormous painted boards.
BUY SCAMANTHA’S POTIONS.
I made a mental note to apologize later. Not where she could hear me, because she would file the apology, frame it, and put it on the cart in place of the boards. Lola leaned in. Her hand cupped the side of her mouth, professional even in a whisper, ears very pink.
“Observer spells are live, my queen. Almost the entire Altandai is watching.”
I took a breath.
The hum of the square pressed against me. I curled my right hand into a fist, low and out of sight, and pressed my thumbnail into the soft place inside my wrist where the pencils would have been. Lola confiscated even Rimelion equivalents.
Then I stood.
I rubbed the ring of shouting against my palm. The murmur collapsed in layers. The front rows first, then the second, then the rows behind. The roofs went quiet last. By the time I reached the front of the podium, the square was so silent I could hear awnings moving in the wind.
I had a speech.
I had three drafts of it, in fact, written between two and four in the morning over the last week, each rejected by Lola for being too long, my queen, too philosophical my love, and, once, “what is happening on page ten of this, my pencil-thrower.” I did not have any of them with me. Lola had said this morning with the small smile she pulls when she’s already saved me from myself, that she’d read them all and decided the short version would do.
“Citizens of Altandai.” The ring carried it.
A small motion ran through the front rows. Heads tilting. Children were lifted onto shoulders. I let the silence settle, and then I let myself talk the way I talked across my breakfast, because that was the only voice I trusted on this many people.
“I’ll keep this short. I gave a long speech before. I’ll give another one in a year when I have something to say that isn’t paperwork. Today is paperwork.”
A laugh rippled through the front. I did not look at Lola. I knew exactly what her face was doing.
“First. The Altandai Republic, by the terms of conquest and the signed instrument of integration, is dissolved as of the moment I finish this sentence.”
I paused for dramatic effect and because I was the queen and could.
“It is dissolved.”
The murmur came up like the tide. I raised my hand, and it settled. “In its place, the County of Altandai is formed and is hereby incorporated into the Kingdom of Rimebreak as a sovereign county under the Crown.”
I turned to my right.
Eight chairs had been set on the eastern wing of the podium. Heavy, old, lifted out of storage from the Grandmaster’s storage.
In them sat the eight people I had spent the last week in negotiations with, each in the dress robes of their own kingdom: the steward of the Crystal Spire of Weyben, the council-prince of Larra-on-the-Hill, the silver-marked envoy from the Guresh, two ambassadors from kingdoms whose names I had genuinely needed flashcards for, the chancellor of the Free City of Cresnoch, the Speaker of the Faverk, and Lord Lestrel of Yrathfoor, ninety-two-year-old dwarf who had insisted on coming in person.
“We have before us officials from every northern kingdom that borders Altandai.” The ring carried it clean. “They have agreed to witness this occasion as neutral parties under their respective oaths.”
I made myself breathe.
“Do you witness our conquest as legitimate?”
Eight heads inclined. Lord Lestrel inclined his entire upper body. Larra’s prince did it with a long, careful nod.
“Do any of you have an objection to register? If so, please raise your hand now.”
I counted to three in my head. I counted to four for safety. No hands went up. Lord Lestrel’s chin came back up and he gave me, of all things, a faint wink, which I refused to acknowledge because I needed to keep my face composed and a wink from a ninety-two-year-old lord while standing in front of tens of thousand people was, frankly, designed to break me.
I did not let out the relieved breath I wanted to.
[Attention! Rimebreak Kingdom annexed Altandai Republic.]
The murmur came up again, louder this time, a low, broad sound that ran through the square and broke against the buildings. I let it. I had been warned. Lola had said the notification would push through everyone.
I raised my hand.
The square settled, slower this time, but it settled.
“With the formation of the County, the administration of the territory requires the ennoblement of those who will run it. As many of you have already noticed since the fall of Grandmasters—” I let a small, wry note into my voice because it was the only honest thing I had. “—your new Count is Dmitry.”
The reaction was not loud, but it was not silent. I had counted on it. So had Lola.
“He has been speaking in my name for the last three weeks. He is my extension in matters of administration, taxation, infrastructure, and the boring half of governance. He will continue to be.”
I turned to the lower tier.
“Count Dmitry. Please.”
Dmitry stood.
He crossed the podium and stopped at the line Lola had marked in chalk under the runner, and he went down on one knee, and the black coat fell around him beautifully.
I raised my hand.
“Dmitry of the Vainqueurs Imbattables, by the authority of the Crown of Rimebreak and the formation of the County of Altandai, I name you Dmitry, Count of Altandai.”
I let the frost go.
It was a small effort here; the ice came clean. It rose from the podium at our feet in a thin braided spiral, two ribbons of pale blue curling around us, climbing past my shoulder, past the canopy, into the sun, where it caught the light and fractured it into a slow falling glitter that came down across the front rows like snow.
The crowd inhaled.
Beneath the bowed head, Dmitry’s mouth did something I caught and the back rows did not. The faintest possible smile.
He rose. He bowed once to me, then once to the witnesses, then once, a flourish Lola had not requested, to the crowd. The crowd answered with a sound I had not heard them make yet today, low and approving. He walked back to his seat. Katherine slapped him on the shoulder hard enough that I heard it from the podium.
I turned to my left.
“With the new structure, the status of the towns within the county has also changed. The senates of the major settlements are reorganized as baronies under the Count, and the former mayors—those of you who have agreed to the transition—are hereby raised to the rank of Baron.”
I lifted my hand again.
“Former Mayor of Thalvirea. Please.”
The mayor I had met during the mine trip stepped from the lower tier. He went down on one knee at the chalk line. “By the authority of the Crown and the formation of the County of Altandai, I name you Baron of Thalvirea.”
The frost spiral rose. I had thought in the planning meetings that the second one would feel like less. It did not. The ice came up out of the podium the same way, twined the same way, climbed past us both, fractured into the same falling glitter, and the crowd inhaled the same way.
He rose. He bowed. He returned to his seat.
I called the next mayor. And the next. The towns of the county walked up one at a time and went down on one knee, and each time the ice came up out of the podium and climbed the air, and each time the crowd made the same small intake of breath. By the fifth, I had stopped expecting them to stop doing it. By the seventh, the mana cost arrived in my forearms.
When the last baron walked back to his seat, I turned, at the end, to my left, where Luna and Lisa sat. Lisa nodded and walked toward me with a staff in her hand.
“People of Altandai, this staff tells a sad storty,” I said as I took the staff.
[Veranthos’ Sealed Staff]Quality: 8-myticalRestriction: Unknown properties until unlocked
“And I’ll show you its power.”
Author's note: Soon, we'll be heading for another adventure with Charlie. Really important one, we can't decide to fail. I always roll D20 for fights, so it really matters :D
She needs 6 other with her, but who? We have 22 options, I'll let you decide! We need at least one tank, two dps, one support, with Charlie filling the role of off-dps and off-support.
You can vote for more than one, pick anyone you want and we'll go with 6 with most of votes.
PS: Dmitry and his assistant Mirael can't come because they have to stay in Altandai.