Chapter 1406: A Night in the Kingdom of Dawn
For most people, it was a rare night of respite.
The demon’s floating island was moving steadily toward Hermes — that much could not be changed — but the King of Dawn could not see it from here, and distance from the front line gave everyone a few hours of borrowed quiet. Soldiers departing for their various missions at first light made the silence more precious, not less.
When Andrea walked into the family courtyard, her father was already there.
“Welcome home, daughter.”
“Yes.” A small nod. It was her first return in more than a year, and she had come in through the main entrance with servants lined along the path — not the way she’d slipped in last time, on assignment, with a task to anchor her. Tilly’s side was where she would rather have been, if she were honest. But the invitation letter had unsettled something in her she hadn’t expected to find still unsettled, and in the end she’d accepted.
He could have simply told me directly after the meeting.
Perhaps he was afraid I would refuse.
If he had asked face to face, she would have been at a loss for an answer. That much, she could admit.
“You wanted to talk to me about something?” she asked, moving along the courtyard path.
“Quite a few things. What you’ve seen at the front, your companions, Mister Roland Wimbledon—”
“He’s an idiot, there’s nothing to—” She heard herself and stopped. “What I mean is—”
“I can see he is a remarkably tolerant lord.” Horford laughed quietly. “Relax. I know you may need time to settle into this. I was afraid it would be awkward with just the two of us, so I made an arrangement.”
“What arrangement?”
“Step inside and find out.” He stopped at the entrance to the main hall.
Andrea pushed open the doors. She had not finished taking stock of the room before a figure launched itself at her—
“I have missed you, Lady Quinn!”
Ah.
She opened her arms and laughed, already knowing before she looked who it was.
Belinda Luoxi clung to her, beaming. At the table beyond, two others sat watching with matching expressions of relieved emotion — Otto Luoxi, at a visible loss for how to hold his face, and Oro Tokat, whose enthusiasm made sitting still look like a physical challenge.
For a moment, without meaning to, Andrea was back in the years before her awakening. The same circle. The same particular texture of an evening that went nowhere in particular and was the better for it.
Belinda’s chatter and Oro’s energy dissolved whatever stiffness might have lingered, and her father — who rarely sat voluntarily with a younger generation — had settled in among them as though it cost him nothing.
All of this so he could say a few words to me. He really did think it through.
The small residue of resentment she hadn’t noticed carrying began, quietly, to dissolve.
“When the war is over, you must all come to Neverwinter,” Belinda announced, with the air of someone settling a matter they’d been considering for some time. “Then we’d see each other properly.”
Andrea raised an eyebrow. “You mean—”
“The three of us, of course!”
“Yes, yes!” Oro nodded with such vigor the table shifted.
“Wait.” Andrea looked at Otto with something approaching suspicion. “Aren’t Otto and Oro their families’ heirs? Will the dukes agree to an extended absence?” Is he the one who arranged this? That would be irresponsible.
“No — it’s not what it looks like.” Otto lifted both hands. “I mean, I do want to go, that much is true, but that’s only one part of it, and the rest is — it’s complicated — in short—”
“Allow me.” Belinda patted her brother’s shoulder in pity and turned to Andrea. “You’re rarely in Dawn, so you’ve missed what’s been happening among the nobles — particularly here in the City of Glow. There’s a rumor that’s taken hold: any noble family that remains completely ignorant of natural science is facing decline.”
“Natural science. You mean—”
“From Neverwinter, yes.” Belinda smiled. “It started with the Natural Science Theoretical Foundation, which has since branched into all manner of specialized fields. Some call it a new discipline of education. Others argue that alchemy and astrology are merely subsets of it. Whatever the argument, the books from Neverwinter are purchased at extraordinary prices the moment they arrive.”
“Father has absorbed this completely,” Oro shrugged, with the tone of a man personally delighted by the outcome regardless of the reasoning. “But being taught properly is better than stumbling through alone. Other families are already ahead. Father doesn’t want the Luoxi name to fall behind.” Belinda spread her hands. “So it isn’t irresponsibility — father even said he can hold his position for several more years without difficulty.”
“They’re excited about the planes and the steel ships,” Oro added. “But I would approve this with both hands simply because it means I get to travel.”
“That’s — essentially — what I was trying to say.” Otto let out the breath he’d been carrying. “And we were thinking of forming a study group.”
“What sort of group?”
“The natural science texts are substantial. Three of us isn’t enough to absorb everything.” Belinda extended her hands, sketching the shape of it. “So we thought of selecting a few merchants and citizens with the right aptitude and giving them access to the material. If they do well, we bring them into the household structure — one action accomplishes several purposes. What do you think?”
Andrea found herself without an answer.
She looked around the table — at Belinda’s enthusiasm, at Oro’s simple appetite for motion, at her father who sat quietly among people half his age as though he had always belonged there — and understood that change had been moving through everyone around her while she watched from somewhere else.
The Kingdom of Dawn she had grown up in viewed Graycastle as a kingdom to be kept at arm’s length: a place that harbored Witches and tolerated absurdities, that had stripped power from its nobility and called it progress. The upper class would sooner have burned those Neverwinter books than purchased them. And inviting commoners into the household? That was simply not done.
The line had not vanished. But it had blurred in ways she could no longer trace.
She looked at her father. Horford Quinn, who was making up for things he could not unmake, doing the work that remained.
The past can’t be rewritten. But the future can, at least, prevent the same mistakes from repeating.
Is that what you’re trying to say, Father?
In the days that followed, Graycastle and the Kingdom of Dawn conducted operations in concert.
Nobles established more than a hundred receiving points along the northwest stretch of the main road — tents, rations, warm fires where the refugees could stop shaking before they were asked to walk further. Under the protection of the God’s Punishment Witches, the First Army’s doctors moved from point to point treating the sick and injured. In the most crowded areas, music rose without announcement and held — gentle, deliberate, the kind of sound that found its way past a person’s defenses before they knew it had entered.
Even the most ragged and furious seemed to slow when they heard it.
Under the new Pope Isabella’s direction, patrols moved through the displaced crowds. The Church’s people were practiced in crisis — every significant test the world had thrown at them had sharpened their capacity to function in ruins — and among the exhausted and frightened, that kind of practiced calm carried weight that authority alone never could.
The panic, which had been spreading fast enough to threaten everything, was halted and contained before it reached the point of no return. The refugees could not go home yet; the affected territories remained dangerous. But the places untouched held steady.
And the First Army turned its attention to the air-drop rehearsals.