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Chapter 1495: Different Paths

Tangen blinked.

He could place her, he was nearly certain. Not her face—the shades blocked that—but the category of person. The clothes were Neverwinter quality even without a logo. The manner of getting into a taxi, the automatic scan of the city through glass, the question framed not as is the castle still there but as it hasn’t been torn down, has it—the slight incredulity of someone who has been gone long enough that they are genuinely checking. Two years on this route had taught him to read passengers the way he had once read weather, and this woman read as a Neverwinter native who had been living elsewhere for a while. Long enough to feel the gap.

But she didn’t seem to know the city. That was the contradiction he couldn’t square.

“Torn down?” He laughed and pulled out of the queue. “Who would dare tear down the kingdom’s castle. If anything, the Administrative Office has been after Her Majesty for years to expand it—wanted to make it as large as King’s City itself—but she refused outright. It was on the news. The land became a war memorial garden instead. You’ve been away?”

“For a while.” She was still watching the streets, cataloguing things. “Sounds like Her Majesty knows how to empathize with her people.”

“She does.” The words came out with feeling because they were true. Tangen still remembered what he had been before—a small merchant running pelts north on bad roads—and what he was now. If not for the Queen’s post-war policy, none of it existed. “People had their doubts when Her Majesty Wendy took the throne, said she was young, said a woman couldn’t hold the seat. But a Wimbledon is a Wimbledon, and she’s proven it.”

“Heh.” The woman smiled at the glass. “Tell me more about her.”

The smile was not reverence. It was not the forced appreciation of someone speaking about a sovereign who could have them jailed. It was the tone of someone recalling an old acquaintance—fond and slightly amused, with no distance in it at all.

Hold on. Why does she sound like that?

Tangen had heard enough cautionary tales at the driver’s depot to know that worry was not always paranoia. The Battle of Divine Will was over, yes. The Kingdom of Dawn had bent the knee and Graycastle’s reach covered the continent. But none of that meant the continent was content. The old nobility of the Kingdom of Dawn had been vocal about their displeasure. The Duke of Longsong, who had been pardoned and promptly left for the Fjords, was exactly the sort of person who collected resentments. And then there was the former King’s illegitimate son—a child now, but children grew.

If there were people working against the Wimbledon line, they would need eyes inside the city. Eyes with reasons to visit the castle directly.

Tangen picked a few light, inconsequential topics and let the conversation breathe while he watched her in the mirror. Memorize the face, he told himself. Report it after if something feels wrong.

But her face kept getting in the way of his suspicion.

Pitch-black hair, smooth and straight and very long. A height that would put most men to shame. And behind the shades—he caught it twice in the mirror—eyes the color of old gold. The kind of eyes a person remembered without trying. If someone wanted a spy who would pass unnoticed, they had made a peculiar choice.

The castle’s outer walls came into view.

“Here we are.” He coughed. “One hundred and twenty.”

She handed over the bills, pulled her briefcase out, and walked toward Graycastle without looking back.

That’s the walk of someone who intends to get in. Tangen watched her go. And if she’s walking that directly toward the witches’ castle with ill intent—

He let it go. The castle held witches more perceptive and more capable than any police officer he could flag down. If this woman meant harm, she would not find harm easy to accomplish. And if she didn’t—

He felt, inexplicably and without any good reason, that he hoped she didn’t.

He bit his lip and drove on.

“Can we not address the question of wider access to magic power in a single, comprehensive step?”

Isabella had been three paces behind Agatha since the meeting ended, and she was not letting the question drop.

The debate in the Administrative Office had run for most of the afternoon. At its center: how to establish meaningful contact between the Awakened and the ordinary population, how to make magic power something the world could actually use and not merely marvel at. The Quest Society, having spent years integrating the technological legacies of every surviving civilization, had laid out two preliminary paths.

The first path: installations that replicated magical function mechanically. Safer. Fewer side effects. But installations without witches were inert—they required an Awakened operator, and Awakened were scarce, and the talent required to use the installations was scarcer still. Built out far enough, the system would become a tool for whoever held the installations. Which was always the upper echelon.

The second path was riskier and stranger. It had emerged from Eleanor’s research—Eleanor, who as a Mother of Soul had been cultivating a method of embedding Cargarde magic stones into the human body itself. Hands, legs, nose, ears, even the brow. Two volunteers had gone through the full process and survived. They could not approach what a witch could do; they could not fully drive even low-grade magic stones. But they could use magic-powered installations independently. Without a witch. Without an Awakened intermediary.

The committee had opposed it in near-unanimity. Barov had argued so intensely for its classification as forbidden technology that Agatha had been briefly afraid he would refuse to leave the room. The fundamental principles governing the interaction between magic power and the human body were still poorly understood. No one knew what prolonged fusion would do.

But Agatha knew where Isabella’s impatience truly pointed. Not the first path, not the second. A third, which only the Quest Society knew enough to contemplate: transformation of humanity itself. The Battle of Divine Will had demonstrated that life could evolve, accumulate magic power, refine its relationship with the forces that ran through the Cradle. If those processes could be replicated deliberately—if the distinction between Awakened and ordinary could be dissolved at the root, if every child born arrived already capable—

That was not a research proposal anyone was ready to hear. It would need trials measured in generations. It would need containment so rigorous that even a whisper outside the Society would set off a firestorm. Agatha had not even begun assembling the team. The idea lived, for now, in a locked drawer of her mind.

“I understand the frustration,” she said. “But you saw the room. Humanity’s receptivity to magic power has not reached the level this kind of work requires. The new Quest Society is young—we need to bring results, build trust, show people what magic power offers them before we ask them to accept what it costs. We can’t repeat Lady Alice’s mistake.”

“The old guard opposed the second path as well,” Isabella said, the sulk in her voice just barely dignified. “Without magic users backing the installations, how are we supposed to spread them beyond Neverwinter?”

“We aren’t out of options.” Agatha opened her hand.

In her palm, a small slip of paper—Edith had pressed it on her as they were filing out of the meeting room.

Seven tonight. Gold Jade White Horse Banquet. I hope you and Miss Isabella will honor us with your presence.

Revolution always meant the same thing at its root: the reorganization of interests, the redistribution of what flowed and what didn’t, who benefited and who waited. The question of magic power had stopped being purely technical. It was political now.

She missed the years when Roland was here. When a decision, once made at the top, simply became reality—not because the logic was airtight, but because the momentum of one sure mind could carry an entire city through the gap between the possible and the done. Everyone had moved in the same direction. It had felt, at the time, like something close to easy.

She caught herself.

No. That was a trap. He had led them out of the worst of it. The rest was theirs to carry—the mess and the compromise and the slow, grinding business of building something that did not require a king to hold it together. That was the work. It had always been the work.

She straightened and took two quick steps to catch up to Isabella.

A woman walked past her.

Agatha stopped.

The sensation was not recognition exactly—it was more like a hook in the sternum, a pull in some direction she could not name. She turned. The woman was already past her—black hair, striking height, moving with the unhurried deliberateness of someone who always knew where she was going.

“What is it?” Isabella looked back. “Did you drop something?”

Two meters already between them. Three. The crowd was thick and the woman was moving with it.

“No.” Agatha blinked, searched, lost the figure between bodies. “I thought I saw someone familiar.”

“Someone familiar?”

“Perhaps I was mistaken.” She turned and matched Isabella’s pace. “Back to the Spellcaster Tower. We have work to do.”

The battle for magic power—for who it belonged to, what it meant, what kind of future it made possible—was not going to win itself.

She had already decided she would win it.

That much had not changed.

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