Rossetta stood by the tall arched window of her private floor in the Moonlight Merchant. The bustle of trade carried faintly from below — the clinking of coins, the rustle of fabrics, the hum of bartered promises. Yet her gaze was fixed on one figure.
Marian.
The girl's laughter floated up, light as a breeze, as she haggled with a traveling merchant twice her age. Her hands moved animatedly, pointing at bolts of cloth, correcting prices with that stubborn spark in her eyes.
Rossetta's lips curved, almost against her will. A rare, fleeting smile — gone the moment she caught herself wearing it.
Her fingers tightened on the window frame. How strange, she thought. To feel a flicker of warmth in this cold world again. And as Marian's voice carried through the courtyard, Rossetta's mind pulled her backward, to the moment it had all begun —
Four centuries ago, the world smelled different. Witches walked open roads; markets rang with song; lords and commoners traded favors in plain daylight. It was not peace so much as an uneasy choreography—an agreement written in glances and old debts. Rossetta remembered it like a lullaby with sharp notes: warm, familiar, and edged with iron.
She was already older than most called true at the time, though youth sat lightly on her face. Born a duchess, she could have worn jewels and walked courts like a blade in silk. Instead she learned the soft languages—how soil read feet, how wind answered commands, how gold floated without noise if you sent it by Moonlight's right hands. The Moonlight Merchant Guild bore her fingerprints, but its ledgers never showed her name. She kept that secret like a prayer.
He was small in the king's shadow then—an overlooked prince who laughed too rarely and listened too long. Court whisperers called him "paper king," but Rossetta saw the uncut stone beneath. They met by accident: a hunting ground, a broken cart, a pair of hands that steadied a stumble. He returned the favor later, many times over, by trusting when others sneered.
"You don't have to follow me into the mud," he told her once, exhausted from drills and a dozen slights.
She wiped blood from a knuckle and offered him a grin that was entirely without mercy.
"Someone has to teach you how to stand when the world decides to step on your toes."
He listened.
That was what mattered. He soaked up tactics like a thirsty field. She taught him to read the battlefield as if it were a page—tells in the enemy's footwork, the way wind carries the scent of cavalry. She taught him to trust the quiet parts of people; she taught him where to place mercy so it wouldn't be mistaken for weakness.
Rossetta did not wear her title to training grounds. She traded it for a soldier's gambeson and a simpler name. The knight-squad that accepted her thought her a witch-soldier—unusual, fierce, useful. She let them believe what they needed. What she did not tell them, not even the prince, was that she had built merchants to feed whole villages in secret, that coin could be moved like water so no basin overflowed toward greed. The Moonlight Guild was a shadow in daylight—charity that looked like poverty by design. She did it to protect the fragile thing she saw forming in him: a ruler who could be kind without being crushed.
War taught her faster than any book. Where others saw chaos, Rossetta counted patterns. On the field she became something else: method made visible. Her command bent winds, more legend than miracle, and men learned to follow the witch who knew how to make a river look like a road. They called her the Witch of War—not with reverence so much as with an addict's quiet awe.
Victory after victory pushed the prince forward. Each campaign annotated his rise: a reclaimed border here, a city held there. It was not that Rossetta wanted him to owe her—she refused debts as a rule—but every triumph laid a stone under his name until people began to speak as if his crown were inevitable. He remained steady where others might have buckled under praise. He credited his soldiers and shuffled compliments like a careful gardener. He never once asked who made the moonlight coins that paid for rations, and that was how she liked it.
But the court smells of hunger and thin patience. Admiration curdled easily. Where common folk gave thanks, courtiers catalogued slights.
"If the prince cannot lead without a witch," they muttered,
"what use is his blood?" Appetites change a man; envy turns it into a profession.
Rossetta watched the smiles around the throne like a watchful moon. She had seen this slow rot before—friends becoming maps for knives.
The prince didn't notice at first; he was full of plans for bridges and schools and seeding orchards where none had grown before. He trusted, in the naked way of those who had once been overlooked. Rossetta guarded that trust by lying small. She played the poor witch in alleys, shuffled coins through unmarked merchants, and let the prince walk under the sun without knowing the hands that cupped his rise.
If someone loved him enough to set a crown on his head, she would be the one to show him how to rule it without bleeding from every new cut. That was the promise she made herself, and for a while, it looked like it might be kept.
Until the court decided that a king should not be indebted to shadows.