Meredith
The war gallery had become her prison and her classroom. For three nights she stood over maps until her eyes burned, listening to captains argue about terrain and bloodlines while Kael absorbed their every word.
But tonight she was ready.
She reached into her memory—not of history lessons, but of late-night documentaries, high school science, fragments of knowledge she never thought mattered.
"The provinces cannot be starved," she began, tracing the borderlands with a stick of chalk. "But they can be bound. Look here—Veynar's soil is exhausted. They plant the same grains every year until the fields give nothing. Their harvests will fail within a decade, whether you burn them or not."
The captains blinked. Some frowned.
Kael tilted his head. "You speak prophecy?"
"No," she said, feeling a strange steadiness. "I speak of rotation. Plant different crops in cycles—grain, then legumes, then fallow. The soil breathes again. Yields rise. If you control the knowledge and the seeds, you control the breadbasket."
The room stilled. Men who had spent their lives with steel in hand suddenly looked at her as though she were speaking witchcraft.
Kael's eyes sharpened. "You would teach them?"
Meredith swallowed. "Teach enough to make them depend on you. Keep the best for the crown. Make them need you to survive, season by season."
The words tasted like ash. She was sealing their chains, link by link.
But her neck was in those chains too.
Kael
He watched her not as one watches a queen, but as one studies a commander. The lines she drew on the map were not idle. They shifted armies as surely as any sword.
And she spoke with the cold clarity of someone who understood fear. Not just fear of the enemy, but of the mob, of history, of the executioner's blade.
"Rotation," he repeated, testing the strange word.
It was foreign. Like her. And yet… it rang with a kind of truth.
The captains muttered, but Kael silenced them with a glance. He saw in their eyes what he himself felt: unease. She was no soldier, no noble, no heir. And yet she was shaping the war as surely as he was.
He should have resented it. But instead, something unexpected stirred—a recognition.
Not an equal. Not yet. But a partner.
"You will draw the orders," he said at last. "I will sign them. Let the kingdom whisper that their queen commands bread as well as crown."
Gasps followed. Some captains bowed their heads. Others stared in disbelief.
Meredith's eyes widened, then narrowed. She understood the danger. He was lifting her higher—and in doing so, tying her to him even tighter.
But she did not refuse. She placed the chalk down with deliberate care and met his gaze.
"Then we rise—or fall—together."
Meredith
Later, alone in her chambers, she could still feel the weight of Kael's words. She had just bound herself deeper to him, deeper to this throne. Her survival was no longer separate from his victories.
She pushed aside the maps and reached for the old tome again, its inked symbols glowing faintly in the candlelight.
Agriculture might keep her alive today. Strategy might keep her alive tomorrow.
But magic—magic might take her home.
Her fingers traced a sigil on the page. The candle guttered, and for a breath the air hummed, like a string plucked in the dark.
Meredith shivered.
Perhaps she had just taken her first step down a path as dangerous as Kael's crown.