The door locked. The Advisor's footsteps faded down the marble corridor. The immediate threat was neutralized, but the operational environment remained hostile.
I leaned against the heavy oak door, letting out a breath that tasted of charred wood and bile. My heart rate was stabilizing, the arrhythmia smoothing out as my borrowed liver processed the last of the toxin. I was alive. That was the baseline. Now, I needed data.
I turned to the maid. Lena.
She was pressed against the far wall, clutching the brass basin filled with my vomit like a shield. Her eyes were wide, darting from my pale face to my pitch-black mouth. In her eyes, I wasn't Prince Valian, the disappointing fourth son. I was something new, something terrifying that had just cheated death with dirt.
"Put the basin down," I said. My voice was rough, like gears grinding without oil.
She obeyed instantly, setting it on a rug with a dull clatter.
"Stop shaking. Panic burns energy, and you're going to need it." I walked past her to the small writing desk near the window. I needed to sit. My legs felt like lead pipes. "We have perhaps an hour before the morning council session begins. Before I walk into that room, I need to know the lay of the land."
I pulled out the heavy wooden chair and sat, turning to face her. I pointed a charcoal-stained finger at the floor directly in front of me. "Sit. On the floor. Look at me."
She sank to the flagstones, her hands clasped tightly in her lap, looking up at me like a supplicant before an angry god.
"Let's establish the parameters of our new relationship, Lena," I said coldly. "By all rights, the Advisor should have killed you to silence you. The only reason you are breathing is because I calculated that you are currently more useful as a live asset than a dead variable. You are my eyes and ears in a palace that wants me dead. Lie to me once, omit one crucial detail, and I will let Corvin have you. Do we understand each other?"
Tears spilled down her cheeks, but she nodded fiercely. "Yes. Yes, Your Highness. I belong to you. I swear it."
"Good. Now, stop crying and start talking. I need a sit-rep on the Royal Family. Who are the players? What are their specs?"
She blinked, confused by the terminology.
"My siblings," I clarified impatiently. "Who is trying to kill whom, and with whose money?"
Lena took a shivering breath, wiping her nose on her sleeve. She was a palace maid; she was part of the invisible infrastructure that heard everything.
"The... the First Prince, Kaelen," she started, her voice trembling. "He is the warrior. The Golden Sun, they call him. He has the backing of the General Staff and the Knights' Orders. His mother's family owns the southern vineyards. He is loud, brave, and... he hates secrets. He thinks you are a stain on the family honor because you read books instead of riding horses."
Threat Level: Moderate. Predictable. Kaelen was a brute force instrument. He wouldn't use poison; he'd use a sword in broad daylight.
"Next. Princess Lyra."
Lena shivered visibly. "The Second Princess. She... she spends her time in the Arcane Tower. The Court Mages favor her. They say she whispers to shadows. Her backing is the Church and the magical aristocracy. Everyone fears her, Your Highness. Even the King listens when she speaks softly."
"Stop."
The word cracked like a whip. I sat forward, the wood of the chair groaning. The previous data—swords, knights, politics—I could process. That was just anthropology. But she had said a word that threatened to break my entire understanding of reality.
"Magic," I said, the word tasting strange on my tongue. My heart hammered a frantic rhythm against my ribs. "You speak of it as a casual variable. Explain the mechanism."
Lena blinked, tears still wet on her cheeks. "The... mechanism, My Lord?"
"Is it illusion? Chemistry? Sleight of hand?" I demanded, my voice rising. "Or are you telling me she manipulates matter and energy without a physical catalyst?"
"It is... it is the gift of the Elements," Lena stammered, shrinking back. "Fire, Water, Wind, Earth. The Mages pull it from the world."
I stared at her. If energy could be created or manipulated by biological will, the Laws of Thermodynamics were trash. But if this world had different physics, I needed the constraints. Every system has constraints.
"Limitations," I snapped. "If Lyra can whisper to shadows, can she call down a thunderstorm? Can she burn this castle from her tower?"
"Oh, no, My Lord!" Lena shook her head frantically. "No mage is that strong. The power... it fades as it leaves the skin."
"Fades? Define the fall-off."
Lena looked lost, so I simplified. "Range. How far can a mage throw a fireball before it fizzles?"
"Perhaps... three tall men's height," she whispered. "Five meters, maybe a bit more for a High Mage. Beyond that, the fire goes cold, the wind dies. It is why the Battle Mages are so feared—they must get close."
"Five meters," I murmured, the panic subsiding into cold calculation.
It wasn't omnipotence; it was a localized field projection. It followed an aggressive inverse-square law. If the energy dissipated that quickly, it meant the atmosphere of this world acted as a high-resistance insulator against magical energy.
"So they use it to enhance," I theorized aloud. "They don't throw the magic; they coat weapons in it."
"Yes," Lena nodded eagerly, happy to provide a right answer. "The Battle Mages... they wreathe their swords in flame or harden their skin like stone. They can embed the power into arrows, but only for a few seconds of flight. It creates a shock when it hits. Your sister... Princess Lyra is a High Class Mage. She can freeze a cup of wine just by holding it, or make the shadows cling to her to hide her movement."
I leaned back, steepled my charcoal-stained fingers.
Thermodynamic manipulation (freezing/heating) and photon absorption (shadows). It was terrifying, yes. But it was limited. A sniper rifle would still beat a mage at 500 yards. They were close-quarters combatants with high energy output, not gods.
Threat Level: High. Unpredictable. Magic users were variables I couldn't model yet. Poison was her style. She was the prime suspect for last night's tonic.
"And Prince Orin?" I asked, returning to the script.
"The Third Prince. The Merchant. His mother is from the Free Cities across the sea. He controls the ports and the trade guilds. He buys loyalty. He thinks everything has a price."
Threat Level: Low physically, high politically. He wouldn't kill me; he'd bribe someone else to do it.
I leaned back. A meathead, a witch constrained by physics, and a crooked accountant. They were fighting a zero-sum game for the throne, a centralized seat of power in a capital city rife with spies.
Staying here was inefficient. It was a logistical nightmare of constant threat assessment. I needed to relocate the project.
"The borders," I said suddenly. "Tell me about the edges of the Kingdom."
Lena blinked. "The... edges, my lord?"
"If I wanted to leave this palace and never come back, where are the places the King sends people he wants to forget? The trash heaps. The failures."
She hesitated. "Well... there is the Western Coast. It is rainy and full of pirate raids. The nobles there are poor."
"Too accessible to Orin's trade routes. Too much traffic. What else?"
"The Eastern Marshes. Full of fever and lizard-folk. No one goes there."
"Useless terrain. Difficult to build infrastructure on swamp. Give me another option."
Lena swallowed hard, looking down at the floor. "There is... the North, Your Highness. The Duchy of Boreas."
"Describe it."
"It is called the Ice Tomb," she whispered. "It is winter for nine months of the year. The soil is rock; nothing grows but scrub pine. The barbarians from the Frostwastes raid across the mountains every thaw. The last three Dukes the King sent there died within a year. Two by axes, one by the cold."
Perfect. It sounded like a location with zero political value. The siblings wouldn't fight me for it. The King would be relieved to send me there to die.
But an engineer hears different things when someone says "rocky" and "cold."
"Mountains," I mused. "Natural choke points for defensive structures. Cold weather is a logistical hurdle, but it also deters large invading armies who can't supply themselves."
I looked sharply at Lena. "Resources. Why was there a Duchy there in the first place? People don't build castles on rock for nothing."
"There... there used to be mines, my lord. Old iron mines deep in the mountains. But they say they are cursed."
My interest sharpened to a razor point. "Cursed how?"
"The miners kept dying. They said the mountain breathed 'bad air' that killed them without a mark. And then... the deeper they dug, the water came. Black, freezing water that drowned the shafts. They abandoned them fifty years ago.
Now, only the penal colony blacksmiths and the 'Iron Witch' use the surface scraps."
"The Iron Witch?" I asked. "Elaborate."
Lena hesitated, wringing her hands. "Tessa. She is a failed mage from the slums. A reject. They say her magic is broken. She has trouble holding things, especially metal. A spoon might fly from her hand across the room, or a hammer might stick to her palm so fast it bruises the skin."
She shivered slightly. "But her 'curse' is strange. If she presses two pieces of iron together in frustration, they bind. Not welded with heat, but... stuck. Instantly. Even she cannot pull them apart later. The Master Smiths hate her because she ruins the tools by making them stick to the anvil."
I sat back, the gears in my mind spinning so fast they nearly smoked.
Variable polarity.
She wasn't welding them with heat. She was aligning the magnetic domains of the metal so perfectly that the magnetic attraction became absolute—essentially cold-welding the materials through sheer electromagnetic force. And her "clumsiness"? That was uncontrolled magnetic flux. She was repelling objects when she meant to grab them, and attracting them when she meant to let go.
"She doesn't ruin the tools," I whispered, the realization hitting me like a physical blow. "She magnetizes them. She's a living dipole with broken polarity controls."
I looked at Lena, my black smile returning. "This 'failed' mage... is she still there?"
"Yes, My Lord. She works the bellows because she cannot be trusted with the iron."
"Good," I said. "We're taking her."
I almost smiled. It would have been gruesome with my black teeth, so I suppressed it.
Bad air. Methane or carbon monoxide. Coal seams often ran near iron deposits. Black water. They hit the water table below the frost line.
They didn't stop mining because it was empty. They stopped because they lacked the technology to ventilate the shafts and pump the water.
They were sitting on iron, coal, infinite hydraulic pressure, and now, a living electromagnetic generator. It wasn't a trash heap. It was an untapped industrial paradise disguised as a frozen hell.
I almost smiled. It would have been gruesome with my black teeth, so I suppressed it.
Bad air. Methane or carbon monoxide. Coal seams often ran near iron deposits. Black water. They hit the water table below the frost line.
They didn't stop mining because it was empty. They stopped because they lacked the technology to ventilate the shafts and pump the water.
They were sitting on iron, coal, and infinite hydraulic pressure. It wasn't a trash heap. It was an untapped industrial paradise disguised as a frozen hell.
"Boreas," I said, testing the name on my charcoal-gritty tongue. "That's the one."
I stood up. The dizziness was gone, replaced by the cold hum of a plan forming.
"Get up, Lena. Find me clothes that aren't covered in vomit. Something dark. Severe. I need to look like a man who has given up on joy."
She scrambled to her feet, curtseying awkwardly. "Yes, my lord. Are... are we going to the council now?"
I walked to the mirror, using a wet cloth to wipe the worst of the black sludge from around my mouth, though my teeth remained terrifyingly dark.
"We are," I said, staring at my grim reflection. "I'm going to go ask my father for a worthless piece of rock, and he's going to think he won the negotiation."