Chapter 1269: The Eye of Time
After the yard’s candles went out, Roland met the witch.
She looked sixteen, maybe seventeen — it was hard to be sure when someone had been hungry for years and it shows in their frame. The shower and the clean dress were recent; her tawny hair was still damp and tangled. What held his eye was the black mask covering half her face. Someone had given her a new one, but it sat slightly wrong — the kind of careful arrangement that can’t quite conceal that the arrangement itself is necessary.
“Your Majesty, this is Momo,” Wendy said.
The girl startled at the introduction, dropped to her knees and bowed with the exaggerated depth of someone who has learned through bad experience that not bowing low enough has consequences.
“Please,” Roland said, “help her up. There’s no need for ceremony — I only want to see your ability.”
Momo rose slowly, fear running through her like a fault line. “Your Majesty… I’m afraid of —”
“I know.” He kept his voice level and unhurried. “Not everyone reacts well to knowing when they’ll die. Some people make it your fault afterward. I won’t do that. Whatever you see, I promise.”
Normally he would have waited for Wendy’s full battery of tests before this conversation. But Wendy’s report had put language to the thing he’d half-suspected since the Battle of Soul against Zero, and the suspicion was not the sort he could file away. The outcome of that battle: the winner received everything the defeated possessed — knowledge, power, accumulated magic. He had won. He possessed magic now. But the old Prince Roland’s body had been the winning vessel. A body that had spent years in dedicated debauchery.
He needed to know how long it had.
Momo searched his face for some hidden trap. “You’re not… not frightened at all?”
He considered the honest answer. In his previous world, he had never thought seriously about when he would die — the question seemed designed to manufacture pointless dread. But a king’s death was not a private matter. It was a logistics problem and a succession problem and a morale problem and a timing problem all at once. If the number was bad, he needed to know now, while he could still shape things around it.
“Even if I were frightened,” Roland said, “the answer would still be there.”
Momo clenched her fists. A long pause — weight in it, the particular weight of someone deciding to trust someone again after trust has been used against them before. Then: “Since you insist. Please excuse my impertinence.”
“Your Majesty.” Wendy exhaled. “Please excuse me.”
Roland looked at her for a moment. “I thought you and Scroll wanted to know this more than anyone.”
“I can’t be as calm as you.” Her voice didn’t waver. “But like Scroll said — whatever the answer is, we’ll always be with you.”
She closed the door.
“What about you?” Roland asked.
Nightingale materialized from the Mist at his shoulder — and Momo, who had not known anyone else was in the room, flinched so hard she nearly fell.
“Do I have to answer?” Nightingale’s voice was gruff and she wasn’t looking at Momo. “I want to know everything about you. Good and bad.”
Roland was briefly, genuinely amused by how different the two women were.
“Then let’s begin.”
Momo’s gaze moved between Nightingale and Roland. Then she reached up and removed the mask.
When she looked up, the empty socket blazed.
It was not an eye. It was magic rendered visible — a point of red light burning in the hollow of carved-out bone, pulsing with the rhythm of something alive. Roland could imagine how it had looked when both eyes were present: the human eye and the magic eye side by side, one normal and one burning. In a world that knew what it was seeing, people would have found it beautiful. In this world, it had cost her an eye.
“Well? Do you see anything?”
Momo focused on Roland. The red light quavered — irregular, searching — the way a candle moves when there’s a draft too faint to feel. She went very still. The quavering intensified, the light guttering and restabilizing, guttering again.
Then it went out.
She took three steps back and sat down on the floor.
“She lost too much power,” Nightingale said, already moving, already crouching beside the girl and pulling her upright.
Roland crossed the room. “Can she only examine one person at a time?”
“No.” Momo was panting, a film of sweat across her face. “I’ve never seen anything like you. The numbers — there were so many of them, all flickering, different colors. It took a long time before they settled.”
“What did you see?”
Momo swallowed. Her voice, when she found it: “Seventeen. It’s red.”
Nightingale drew a breath.
Roland kept his face still.
Seventeen years. The pieces locked into place with the seamless, terrible logic of a mechanism he had not wanted to understand but now could not pretend not to. The winner of the Battle of Soul received magic only so long as magic remained present in the vessel. And magic, without a body designed to carry it, wore the body down. Old Prince Roland’s years of dissolution had already consumed the body’s reserves — and without magic, the lifespan reverted to what the flesh alone could sustain.
He had thought the body was weak. He had not thought it was this weak.
Seventeen years.
“Perhaps I should look again,” Momo said, struggling to rise.
“No. Rest.” His voice came out gentle. He didn’t have to perform it. “You’ll faint if you push past your limit now. And we don’t fully understand how your power functions yet — a second reading wouldn’t change anything I need to act on.” He watched her settle back, still pale. “Will you keep this between us?”
Momo looked at him for a long time — reading him, the way someone does when they’ve been lied to so often they’ve gotten very good at reading. Then she nodded.
Wendy collected her at the door.
Roland stood at the French window and watched the city’s lights.
Nightingale moved to his side. Not filling the silence, just being in it.
“Do you regret knowing?” he asked.
“Are you serious?” The gruffness covered something else. “I never regret. Now — what will you do? You have seventeen years.”
Outside: the docks lit in strings, the residential towers’ windows glowing in their stacked rows, the distant shape of ships in harbor. A city he’d built from 300 gold royals and a crumbling border outpost. Still building.
“It’s better to know now,” Roland said. “And this probably isn’t the final answer. The soul containers from Taquila can preserve a mind. Once we understand how magic power sustains a body — truly understand it — building a new vessel isn’t impossible.” He paused. “In principle.”
“That requires there being a future to work in,” Nightingale said.
“Exactly.” Roland turned from the window. Seventeen years, if the body held. Seventeen years to defeat the demons, to win the Battle of Divine Will, to build enough of the future that the future could take care of the rest. “So the first thing is to win.”
He had no retreat anymore. He had never, if he was honest, believed he did.