Remus traveled to Ashcairn, the Eastlands capital, to meet Duke Corvath in person. The fastest route ran south from Quinoa by boat, across to an Eastland port, then a hard climb up and a fast descent on the far side of the hills that had earned the city its old nickname, the sunken city, ringed on every side by the very slopes that fed its wealth in coal and iron.
Remus felt out of place from the moment he stepped through the castle gates. He hadn't expected Duke Corvath himself to be quite so heavy, verging on the shape of a man carrying a second person somewhere under his robes, seated on a throne raised high enough on its dais that he looked down on everyone in the hall, guests included, from a genuine physical elevation.
Remus had never once seen his own father sit on anything resembling a throne, and found himself, absurdly, wondering how long it took a man that size to climb up there each morning and come back down each night. The woman beside Corvath, he'd initially assumed, must be some much younger wife, until a whispered correction from an attendant informed him she was in fact the Duchess, and simply aged harder than her husband had, her face settled into a permanent, practiced scowl that looked as though it had been carved there years ago and never quite relaxed since.
"Duke Corvath. My name is Remus," he said, keeping his voice level. "I'm negotiating on behalf of my father, Duke Ferron of House Draymoor."
"I heard what happened to him," Corvath said, and Remus watched the concern on the man's face for exactly as long as it took to notice how thin it was stretched, false all the way through. "What a tragedy. Please, send him my regards."
Remus caught the flicker of the Duchess's scowl loosening, for just a second, into something closer to a satisfied smile, and filed that away too, alongside everything else he was learning to notice about the people in this world who thought their faces gave nothing away.
"I'd like to negotiate a trade," Remus said. "Three units of grain for one unit of iron, one unit of grain for one unit of coal. I want to leave here today with a thousand units of iron and five hundred of coal, delivered in advance of the grain."
The Duke's expression shifted toward something amused, almost delighted.
"You'll need to offer me something substantial for that," he said. "What is it?"
"The whole Kingdom's farms are overworked. Every duchy's had a poor season," Remus said. "When harvest comes, grain will fall short of demand, and the price will climb close to iron's own price. I'm offering you priority on my grain, ahead of every other buyer in the Kingdom."
Something in Corvath's posture sharpened, interest replacing amusement.
"You're sharper than most Southlanders I've met," he said. "But there's a flaw in your plan. You already owe the Banking Guild ten thousand silver. What happens if you can't pay us both?"
"If I default on my debt to you," Remus said, "I'll relinquish my family's title and hand our dukedom to you outright."
Corvath's whole body seemed to light up at that, an actual giddy energy passing through him hard enough that he half-rose from the throne.
"I want that in writing," he said, practically vibrating with satisfaction, "sealed with a royal standard, before you leave this hall."
The moment Remus was gone, the Duchess leaned in close to her husband's ear.
"My dear husband, that's a considerable share of our iron output to gamble," she murmured. "Is it wise to wager it on a boy's promise?"
"My dear wife," Corvath said, settling back into the throne with the satisfied look of a man who'd already spent the winnings in his head, "it will be worth every unit, to finally hold the Southlands under our banner and see our borders grow. You know the law as well as I do. Whoever holds the Southlands' title when the King dies inherits his crown. I mean for that to be us."
"I understand the stakes," she said. "But consider the other outcome. What if the boy actually manages full payment, in grain, on schedule?"
"He won't," Corvath said, flat and certain. "I'll see to it he has no grain left, come harvest."
He drew up a letter at his writing table, sealed it in red wax, then pressed his signet ring into the wax while it was still soft, leaving behind the mark of two crossed hammers.
"Get this to Corbett," he told the waiting messenger, "as quickly as your horse will carry you. Before the boy makes it back to Quinoa."
Before dawn the next morning, a band of armed men descended on the fields of the Southlands under cover of darkness and rode straight into a curtain of wooden bolts. Those who weren't dropped outright were rounded up and disarmed by the waiting Southland soldiers, including their leader, caught alive, a lean, hard-eyed man who gave his name, once questioned, as Corbett.
Remus arrived back in Quinoa at midday and heard the whole story from Captain Ed, who reported it with the same flat, procedural precision he used for everything, casualty counts and formation results laid out one after another like a briefing.
"The one thing I don't follow," Ed said, once he'd finished, "is how you knew to expect them, and precisely when."
"I stacked every incentive in his favor," Remus said. "A man as ruthless as Duke Corvath wasn't going to pass up a chance to burn our crops before we could repay either debt. It was too clean a move for him to resist."
"That took real forethought," Ed said, "and no small willingness to gamble the whole harvest on your read of one man's character being correct. Good outcome. I won't pretend I love the method behind it." A short pause, precise as ever. "Logging that as a mixed result. Effective. Noted for review."
"On that note," Remus said, turning toward the manor, "I need to find Julius."
He crossed back to the Draymoor manor grounds, and the moment Julius spotted him, the old man came limping over at a pace faster than his usual, gray with worry.
"We've got a problem," Julius said, breathless. "Couldn't scrounge up even half the hands needed to bring in the whole field before it spoils."
"I'll handle it," Remus said. "Craft. Tractor."
Item Crafted: Tractor!
A squat steam-powered machine flared into existence in a burst of light, brass fittings gleaming, a low chimney already ticking with residual warmth as if it had been running for hours somewhere else before it appeared here. Within a matter of hours, working through the night with a lantern strapped to its own frame, it had cleared field after field, grain piling up in the silo far faster than any crew of laborers could have managed by hand.
After the long day of labor, Remus returned to his father's office and summoned Andrea to join him.
"Master Remus, you wanted me?" she asked, stepping in and pulling the door shut behind her without being asked, a small habit he'd noticed she'd developed for their more sensitive conversations.
He was seated behind the desk that had, somewhere in the last few weeks, quietly become his own.
"I've just worked something out," he said, "and you're the only person in this house I felt like telling."
She crossed the room and came to a stop standing over the desk, close enough that he had to look up to meet her eyes.
"What is it you'd like to tell me?"
"I've had painful practice, once, learning how to spot a spy," Remus said, and something in his own voice, hearing it, surprised him with how steady it stayed, given what the words underneath it were actually doing to him.
He let himself, for one unguarded second, go back to it properly instead of just referencing it in passing. He was standing at a window again, in his mind, watching a woman with fake blue eyes tell him she'd never let anything happen to him. He was watching her kiss another man in a parking garage two floors below where he stood, both kisses identical, both convincing, no way to have told from the outside which one was real, because neither one had been. He'd handed her the locker number himself. He'd trusted the wrong thing entirely, and it had cost him his life, and somewhere out there, unless someone had already found it, a hard drive full of real, working blueprints was probably still sitting exactly where he'd actually hidden it, untouched, because Liz had never once asked him where the real copy was. She'd only ever asked him for the decoy. Whether anyone ever worked that out, whether his death had bought his old world anything at all or simply been wasted, was a question he was never going to get an answer to now, and the not-knowing sat in him like a splinter too deep to dig out cleanly. It was the first time since waking up in this body that he'd let himself sit with it that long, and he made himself stop before it showed on his face.
"The only reason I haven't outed you," he went on, voice level again, "is that I don't think you belong to Duke Corvath. Not the King, either, or any of the Guilds. You're serving someone else entirely. Someone with a genuine interest in who rules the Southlands."
She went very still, staring at him.
"That's a serious accusation," she said finally. "What else, besides whatever happened to you before, makes you say it?"
"What are the odds," Remus said, "that I happen to meet a servant who can read, understands the kingdom's economy well enough to price grain to the coin, and has intelligence on my enemy, all in the same person, in a duchy this poor and this unimportant? I'm not that lucky. Whatever the Southlands look like from the outside, someone thinks it's worth planting a top-tier agent here."
She held his gaze a long moment, and then, slowly, her expression eased into something almost amused.
"The Southlands matter more than you realize," she said. "My brother wants to control whoever ends up ruling it. Your father hasn't much time left, and his eldest son is a fool who's already left. That leaves you."
"Then tell me what you are," Remus said. "And your real name. Not this one."
Andrea smiled, and said two words that changed the shape of the room around her.
"Change form."
Physical Form Changed: Default!
A pair of black horns curled up out of the sides of her head, small and sharp, unmistakably not human.
"I'm a demon," she said. "My name is Lilith. There's something I've been wanting to ask you for a while now."
"I'm listening."
"I wear a mask everywhere I go. I'm good at it, because I've had hundreds of years to practice," she said. "I've gotten very good, too, at spotting other people's masks. I've been watching you do it since the day I called you down to have Leo check your class."
"I'm human," Remus said, and it was strange, saying it out loud for the first time to someone who might actually understand what it meant. "My name is Yoshi. I died in another world, and woke up in Remus's body."
She leaned down until her face was level with his, close enough that he could see her eyes were a real, unnatural catlike green, slitted like a hunting animal's.
"Nice to meet you, Yoshi," she said.
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