Chapter 437: A Silent Farewell
After Otto left the office, Nightingale stayed.
“What he told you wasn’t completely true—especially the part about his journey before he came here.”
“No surprise.” Roland refilled his cup. “He would have gone to King’s City and spoken with Timothy before coming west. That’s standard diplomacy. I’d have done the same in his position.”
“You mean they might not side with us?”
“They won’t rush to decide.” He set down the kettle. “Think about it—when the King of Dawn receives this news, how much of it do you think he’ll actually believe?”
Nightingale turned it over. After a moment: “I don’t know.”
“Neither do I.” She pinched his shoulder at that, and she was right not to let it pass. “But one thing is clear. A distant threat that might materialize in several years, with no date attached—that won’t move a king to action. The church’s danger, on the other hand, is immediate. He can see it from his borders. Given that the church may strike as early as this coming spring, the King of Dawn will almost certainly sit back and watch the war between Timothy and me. He’ll wait to see which of us survives, then deal with the winner. If he’s shrewd—and he probably is—he’ll cultivate warm relations with both sides in the meantime, keeping his options open.”
This was how politicians handled these calculations. Smooth gains over risky bets. Wars were profitable precisely when you watched them from outside, tipped the scales at the decisive moment, and claimed the reward without the cost. If there had been no demon problem—if this were purely a succession dispute—Roland would have been content to play the same game: set traps, collect returns, let others bleed. But the demon problem was real, and it was not a game, and the people who concentrated on the immediate board would find there was no board left.
“Was it wise to tell him at all?” Nightingale asked.
“The Kingdom of Dawn isn’t our enemy. And whatever the King of Dawn believes about the demons, the nobles of his court will spread the news about the church’s ambitions. That weakens the church’s standing everywhere—without popular support, they can’t draw on a kingdom’s full resources. Every crack in their authority costs them.”
He had told Otto about the demons, but not about the witches’ empire. Not about the two previous Battles of Divine Will. The former was already nearly unbelievable; the latter might be distorted—cast as a witches’ conspiracy by people who were already suspicious of witches—or it might simply destroy the will to fight. We have failed twice before. Why would this time be different? That was not a question he was ready to answer in a diplomatic briefing.
He had planted the seed. The rest would depend on the King of Dawn.
Three days later, Otto Luoxi returned to the office.
Roland could read the answer in his face before a word was spoken.
“Personally,” Otto said, “I favor the alliance. But the priority now is to bring this news to the Kingdom of Dawn as quickly as possible—not to finalize the details of the agreement. I’ve come to say goodbye.”
“Then I hope to hear from you with good news.”
Otto bow ed. He moved toward the door and then stopped with one hand on the frame.
“Your Highness—one personal request.”
“What is it?”
“Please look after Andrea Quinn.”
Andrea belongs to Sleeping Island, not Border Town. Tilly is the one you should ask. Roland kept the thought to himself. “I’ll do what I can.”
On the top of the castle, wind came in from the south, straight and cold.
Andrea stood at the parapet and faced it. Behind her, Shavi had pressed herself close to the wall and was shivering inside her invisible barrier.
“Aren’t you… going to the dock?” Shavi’s teeth were chattering. “I—I heard he’s leaving by boat. A childhood friend—you should go wish him a safe trip.”
“I can wish him one from here.”
“A-Ashes said he never stops thinking about you.”
“Don’t listen to anything Ashes says.” Andrea’s eyes stayed on the Redwater. “She praised that man to Lady Tilly’s face. A filthy mouth producing pleasant words doesn’t make them true.”
“Eh. Is—is that so?”
“Yes.” She watched the river. Something moved at the far bank—pale shapes rising, catching wind. Sails going up through the snow. Then, at the top of the mast, a small red flag unfurling. The sailing signal.
Good.
Time would do what it always did. It would move, and carry everything with it. Otto would go home to King’s City and find Oro still leaving flowers at a grave, and both of them would eventually understand that the woman they were mourning had not been real—she had been a role, a performance of noble grace, the product of a world that had discarded the actual person underneath.
Forgetting was better for everyone.
She did not believe, entirely, that she believed this. But the flag was up, the sails were filling, and the boat was turning in the current.
“Farewell,” she thought.
The hull shrank, then vanished in the grey.
With the diplomatic work concluded, Roland returned to Border Town’s construction.
The Tee Project—water supply, power supply, heating system, all three coordinated—had officially begun. Three sets of pipes would run through underground tunnels to reach every residential community. Every house had been designed from the start with openings in the walls; the adaptation work would be straightforward. The real decisions were in the placement of boilers and water towers.
To reduce material costs and transport losses, Roland had modified the original plan: instead of drawing water from the Redwater River, they would tap underground springs. Border Town sat over a shallow aquifer—wells were easy to sink, and at this stage of the world’s development there was no need to factor in groundwater contamination. With Sylvie’s help, he identified four access points that could serve both domestic use and the heating system.
The water supply and heating components had already been tested and were ready to build. His focus now was the power supply.
That was the genuinely new territory—for him and for the town. Karl Bate and the Mason Guild had no framework for electrical systems. Neither, if he was honest, did Roland, beyond what he had retained from secondary school. Which was why he was going to build a model in the castle courtyard first. Understand the circuit at small scale. Then explain it to the Ministry of Construction.
And the first thing he wanted to power—the symbol of electricity, the proof of concept that needed no translation—was a light bulb.
He put on his coat and went out to the courtyard on the North Slope Mountain.
With Nightingale’s mist, the walk that normally took a quarter hour took four minutes. Anna looked up from her work and nodded when he came in; Lucia rushed over.
“Good morning, Your Highness.”
“Good morning. Anna—what are you working on?”
“New gun barrels and the locking mechanism.” She pointed to a row of steel pipes on the bench. “Some of the drawings don’t work. I’ve been fixing them.”
He reached out to touch her hair and she swayed away. He coughed and withdrew his hand. “All right—do it your way.”
He didn’t mind. Anna’s instinct for fine detail was already sharper than his, and the gap was only going to widen. Her corrections would be better than his originals. He was sure of that in the way he was sure of load calculations—not as flattery, but as assessment.
After a while she finished and set down her tools. She walked to him and lowered her head. An offering, after all.
He ruffled her hair. She looked up, satisfied. “What are we making?”
“First—Lucia. How did the ore separation go?”
“Almost done.” Lucia handed him a stack of notebooks. “But testing the combinations against rolled steel will take a long time. There are too many elements.”
“It’s good work.” He leafed through the pages. This was his materials improvement program: rolled steel quality had already improved through carbon reduction and impurity elimination; now the ore varieties from the North Slope Mine needed to be characterized systematically. There were no shortcuts. One element at a time.
He scanned until he found what he was looking for—the entry with the highest recorded melting point. He tapped it. “Sample twelve. Where is it?”
Lucia found it quickly: a crude black stone and a bag of fine particles, both sealed.
Roland looked at the stone for a moment. I’ve seen this before. Something the alchemists had sent to his office, months ago. He’d handed it off and forgotten about it. And here it was again—the material with the highest melting point in the entire mine inventory.
The particles were silvery-white, like most metallic elements. Wolfram? He wasn’t certain. But the melting point was what mattered.
He had Anna draw the particles into fine wire. She shaped it into a spiral and fixed it to a glass shelf. The shelf went into a glass bulb. The filament was made.
The two remaining steps were the difficult ones: evacuating the bulb to prevent the filament from oxidizing at high temperature, and sealing it so no air could re-enter. Both required what only a witch could provide.
He thought of Agatha—but then a better solution presented itself. Nitrogen, being lighter than air, could be introduced through a simple downward exhaust method, displacing the oxygen without the complexity of creating a vacuum. Inert gas instead of vacuum, and a simpler process. When the exhaust end held pure nitrogen, Soraya sealed the bulb in a single motion.
The incandescent lamp sat in his palm, no bigger than a fist.
He turned it over, studying it. Outdated technology by any measure he had grown up with—yet also, in this moment, the most sophisticated manufactured object in the known world.
That evening, he summoned all of City Hall’s staff to the castle courtyard and had his guards extinguish every torch. In the dark and the snow, Roland closed the circuit.
At the center of the courtyard, a small orange light appeared.
It did not gutter in the wind. It did not flicker. It simply held, steady and absolute, indifferent to the gusts and the cold, casting a pale circle in the surrounding dark.
Nobody spoke.
He looked at the faces around him—the fixed eyes, the open mouths—and felt something he couldn’t quite name. Not pride, exactly. Something quieter.
The light held.