Chapter 560: Uncovering the Truth
A guard appeared in the office doorway. “Your Majesty, the ambassadors of the Northern Region have requested an audience.”
One day. Roland set down his pen. They’re either going to decline in person or something has changed.
“Bring them to the drawing room.” He paused. “Also—ask Carter to close off the exits from the Foreign Affairs Building. No one in the delegation leaves.”
“Yes, Your Majesty.”
He had said this yesterday morning, when the first meeting ended. He said it again now to cover the possibility that they intended to refuse him and ride back north. If they refused without consulting the Duke first, detaining them was the cleaner option.
When Roland entered the drawing room, the seating had changed.
The woman who had sat beside Cole as an assistant now occupied the guest-of-honor chair. Cole was beside her with a book open in his lap, sitting with the easy posture of someone who has relinquished responsibility and is quietly relieved about it.
The woman rose and performed a curtsy—not merely competent, but exact, every element in precise proportion. “Your Majesty. I am Edith Kant, first daughter of the Duke of the City of Evernight, and Cole’s sister. The Kant Family sends its warmest regards. I apologize that Cole did not introduce me properly at our first meeting.”
“Calvin’s daughter.” Roland was genuinely intrigued. “Then you’re the real leader of the delegation?”
“Yes.” Her hand rested over her heart. “My father has authorized me to act on his behalf in all matters concerning this visit, and has given me his seal.”
It was unusual. A young woman—clearly young, clearly possessed of the particular composure that either described a genuinely capable person or someone very practiced at appearing to be one—conducting state negotiations for a regional duke in an era when political authority was almost exclusively male. And her confidence was not performed. It was structural, the way a wall was confident rather than the way a performance was confident.
The trick to conceal her identity—it wasn’t deception. It was a sounding. Roland saw it now. She had wanted to observe him before he observed her. Entirely reasonable.
“Your father will follow your advice?” Roland asked.
“Yes, Your Majesty.” She met his eyes steadily. “More precisely: he will follow my recommendation.”
Cole, beside her, scratched the back of his head.
Roland settled into his chair. Good. Let’s find out how much she understood from last time.
He had expected either a polite refusal or a diplomatic counter-argument designed to delay. He did not expect her to reach into her bag and lay the pamphlet flat on the table between them—his own promotional manual, the one he had written to explain the new regulations, the one Cole had been given at the end of yesterday’s meeting.
“I have questions,” she said. “You argued that feudal nobility will become obsolete as centralized power develops. How do you intend to guarantee effective governance of all local authorities in the kingdom without noble intermediaries?”
She wants to discuss policy. Roland looked at her face and confirmed she was serious.
It had been a long time since anyone had asked him that question in good faith.
“People,” he said, “and technology.”
“Free men?” Her head tilted slightly. “What do you mean by ‘technology’ in this context?”
He spent the next hour explaining: a management apparatus trained, salaried, and deployed by the City Hall—people who did not need private land or inherited wealth to maintain their station, who were accountable to the institution rather than to family obligation; promotion through demonstrated competence rather than birth; the practical mechanisms by which technology extended administrative reach over long distances without requiring a semi-autonomous lord at every junction.
She listened without interrupting more than a few times, each interruption a precise question that cut directly to the next structural problem:
“How do you prevent dereliction among administrators appointed from the king’s city, once they’re established in regional posts?”
“After the kingdom is unified, how does trade distribution work? Are regional economies allowed to specialize, or do you centrally allocate production?”
“Can productivity genuinely be used as a performance metric for governance? What unit of measurement do you apply?”
The last one gave him pause. He answered it as honestly as he could.
By noon, she settled back in her chair and let the breath out slowly. “I see. You did think this through before writing the opening statement.”
Roland drank his tea. As someone who had not formally studied political science, he had told her everything he reliably knew on the subject.
“Thank you for answering in such detail,” she said. “I didn’t expect you would.”
“The basic requirement of a City Hall in the new order is transparency. Policies explained, understood, and implementable—not handed down from above and obeyed because they must be. That’s how things actually get done.”
She gave a small, approving nod, then shifted register entirely. “Could the Northern Region receive equipment and workers for manufacturing steam engines?”
“Workers, no. The City of Neverwinter is short on skilled labor. But you’re welcome to send men here to study—provided the Northern Region’s nobles have relinquished feudal rights and agreed to City Hall supervision.”
“Paddle steamer construction as well?”
“Yes. Gold royals accepted. I should be honest with you—moving a full production line north without witch assistance is not practical in the near term. The infrastructure requirements alone would take time.”
“I appreciate your honesty.” She was quiet for a moment. “One more question, and I mean it genuinely.” She looked at him. “Based on your own projection, you can unify the Kingdom of Graycastle within ten years. By then, the new policies won’t face meaningful opposition—you won’t need anyone’s cooperation. So why implement the regulations now, before that position is secure? You’re accepting resistance you don’t have to accept yet.”
Roland was still.
It was a good question. It was, in fact, the question.
“Do you really want the answer?” he said.
She heard the change in his voice. Her posture adjusted—not stiffening, but clarifying, the way a person becomes attentive when the conversation turns from interesting to real.
“Yes,” she said.
“Then follow me.” Roland rose. “There’s something I need to show you.”
The backyard olive grove in afternoon shade. The wooden shed at its center, surrounded by Leaf’s living hedge, the door ajar.
Inside: a limb-amputated demon lying on a long table, surrounded by vials and flasks and containers. Agatha was at the workbench taking blood samples, her back to the door, completing the last stage of her preparation.
Edith’s sharp intake of breath was involuntary and very quiet. She was not afraid. Roland noticed this—she was shocked, which was different and in some ways more interesting.
“Close the shed,” Agatha said without turning around. Her voice had the tone of someone whose concentration is being interrupted. “And tell me you’re not planning to let civilians watch the Sigil manufacture. If I were integrating the God’s Stone right now I would have already failed.”
“We won’t be long,” Roland said, and coughed. He turned to Edith. “The creature on the table is of a different race. What you’ve heard referred to as a demon. They live north of the Impassable Mountain Range. They are the greatest threat humanity faces—not a regional conflict, not a dynastic struggle. A war for existence itself, with no negotiable settlement.”
“A demon.” Edith’s voice was level, absorbing. “A war for existence.”
“It is a long story the Church has been keeping secret. It goes back a thousand years. In the old tongue, it was called the Battle of Divine Will.”
She looked at the creature on the table—at its blue-black skin, its severed limbs, the alien architecture of its body—and Roland watched her face as she revised every assumption she had walked into the city with.