Chapter 819: A Graceful Lady
Lorgar added Maggie to her mental register and ranked her among the upper tier — formidable in direct combat, best avoided for other reasons.
“What about the witches who wear God’s Stones of Retaliation?”
It was the more relevant category. A witch wearing one could suppress abilities in anyone nearby, which meant that Lorgar’s own capacity to transform would be significantly reduced. Under those conditions she would still be a capable fighter — her training was real, her instincts tested — but she would not be the fighter she was when her full range was available to her. Against a plain desert warrior this was acceptable. Against an Extraordinary who also happened to be immune to the Stone’s effects, she had no path to victory.
For that reason she had ranked Ashes first by default.
The Extraordinary considered the question in silence before answering. “Say there’s someone whose speed and strength are no worse than an Extraordinary’s — and who also has an essentially unlimited lifespan, and who cannot be permanently harmed by any injury. Even fatal wounds. Given enough time, she heals completely.” She let the words settle. “How strong would a fighter like that be?”
Lorgar exhaled.
She understood this in the way you understood things that touched your own craft.
In the holy duels of the Iron Sand City, the fighters who were hardest to beat were not the young ones at the peak of their physical power. They were the veterans in their thirties — the backbone of any clan, often serving simultaneously as combat supervisors and tutors for newer fighters. These warriors had not only strength approaching the young fighters’ but something that could not be acquired quickly: the accumulated weight of real encounters, the reflexes that come from having survived decisions in situations where the wrong decision ends you. They could not be read easily, and they were not rattled, and their experience gave them more angles of approach than a younger fighter could anticipate.
After forty, the body began to accumulate its debts. Speed declined. Old wounds reasserted themselves. The skills grew more refined as the body became less reliable, and eventually the gap between skill and physical capacity became too wide to bridge.
But a fighter who kept the body of someone in their prime indefinitely — and who had centuries to refine the skill to match it — was something the dueling tradition had never produced, because it was not biologically possible.
Until apparently it was.
Part of the reason Lorgar had made this journey was that she’d heard Neverwinter had a healing witch who could mend any injury. That alone had seemed worth pursuing. A fighter who could train without accumulating permanent damage could theoretically keep developing well past the usual ceiling. Now she was being told there was something further than that: a witch who healed all damage automatically and never aged.
Scared was the wrong word.
Excited was closer. But she didn’t want to look naive, so she kept her face level.
“Is she real? In Neverwinter?”
“Yes. Her name is Phyllis.” A slight hesitation. “I’ve never fought her, but—”
“But what?”
“Once, when I was practicing in the castle gardens, she passed by and offered a few suggestions. I followed them. My sword strokes improved in ways I could feel immediately.” Ashes paused. “I left Neverwinter not long after, so I never had another opportunity to ask her for more.”
Lorgar’s tail was moving without her deciding to move it. The detail was telling. Most experienced teachers needed an exchange of actual blows to identify what a student was doing wrong — especially a student of Ashes’ level, where the errors would not be elementary ones and would not be visible to most observers. A fighter who could spot defects in an Extraordinary’s technique after watching a brief practice session was not simply experienced. She was operating on a different level of analysis entirely.
Which revised the ranking.
God’s Stone of Retaliation was the deciding factor in any direct confrontation between combatants who depended on magical ability. Phyllis, by all appearances, did not depend on it in the way that Leaf or Anna did. Her advantage was structural: the body that could never be worn down, the mind that had centuries to learn from. No stone could negate either of those things.
Ashes as second was still correct, because Ashes’ Extraordinary status was similarly independent of ability suppression. But Phyllis was clearly first.
Lorgar couldn’t wait.
“Over 100 God’s Punishment Witches,” Ashes added, almost as an afterthought — then watched Lorgar’s expression with the private amusement of someone who had been holding this back deliberately. “Like Phyllis. In Neverwinter.”
“What?”
“Come on.” She smiled — the curling, contained kind. “You’ll have no shortage of opponents. You’ll never have to worry about that again.”
In addition to Ashes, Lorgar occasionally encountered Andrea.
She had seen Andrea on the Burning Stage — the precise, devastating efficiency of the Magic Longbow, capable of producing pressure that went far beyond any conventional weapon. Ashes had been right about her: she was a noble, and she moved like one, with the unconscious ease of someone who had never had to perform status because status had simply always been there. She carried it in the angle of her shoulders and the length of her pauses.
Lorgar felt the distance from her. Not hostility — something more like two people standing on different ground who could see each other clearly but could not quite cross the gap by ordinary means. She watched Andrea talk to the construction workers, gaze out across the bay by herself, and both activities had the same quality to them: composed, self-contained, decorative in the way that a sword in a fine scabbard is decorative without ceasing to be a weapon.
Eventually Lorgar decided simply to approach her.
The greeting was received without warmth and without coldness — evenly, at the precise temperature that a trained aristocrat defaults to with strangers. Not unfriendly. Not open. But when Lorgar asked the question that Ashes had declined to answer — why is the king building a city in the Endless Cape when he could simply buy Blackwater from Iron Sand City? — Andrea’s manner changed.
Something came alive in her.
“Of course Ashes couldn’t answer that. Muscle has its uses.” She sat down and picked up a stick without ceremony. “Are you certain you want to hear this? It’s considerably harder than combat.”
“Yes.” Lorgar sat. “My father always said that any field of knowledge can improve your fighting, if you understand it deeply enough.”
“That’s obviously nonsense,” said Andrea, and then explained anyway.
She drew a circle in the ground. “If the king simply purchased Blackwater with gold royals — assuming every transaction went perfectly, one hundred percent of the time — then twenty years from now he would have spent a large quantity of gold royals and would have nothing to show for it except Blackwater. The gold is gone.”
“All transactions work that way,” Lorgar said.
Andrea drew smaller circles inside the larger one. “Now look at the actual plan. The Mojin immigrants who settle in the Southern Territory receive wages for their labor. Those wages are spent on goods and services produced in Neverwinter, which means the money circulates back through the kingdom’s economy rather than leaving it. This is the circular flow of income. Over time — and over twenty years specifically — the total wealth circulating through the kingdom grows substantially. His Majesty’s initial investment is not a loss because the wealth is never actually leaving his domain. It’s moving within it.”
Lorgar studied the circles. “But to maintain that circulation, he has to keep investing. So there’s still wealth that isn’t in his hands at any given moment.”
Andrea looked at her with a slightly different expression — surprise, she thought, though Andrea controlled it quickly. “Yes. That’s the part that took me a while to see clearly.” She drew a much larger circle around all the others. “Most nobles regard their domain as a box. The wealth inside the box is theirs; the wealth outside it isn’t. They defend the box. But from the very beginning, His Majesty has regarded the entire kingdom as one domain — not the city he happens to sit in, but all of Graycastle. Which means that wherever wealth accumulates within those borders, it still belongs to him.”
“But he’s the king. Isn’t that how it’s supposed to work?”
“When the Wildflame clan was at its strongest, did you control the clans in the Silver Stream Oasis? Could you even control the other clans within Iron Sand City?” Andrea tilted her head. “The Four Kingdoms have the same structure. The nobles are clan chiefs. They do not permit interference in their lands. They do not consider another noble’s domain as part of their homeland. The king’s claim extends only as far as his actual ability to enforce it — and building that ability is the whole mechanism.”
”…” Lorgar sat with this. “You can’t simply think of people as yours and have that make it true.”
“Exactly.” Andrea patted her shoulder, and for the first time the contact felt genuine rather than performative. “You’re considerably more perceptive than Ashes. Keep your distance from her or your brain will fill with silt.” She set down the stick. “The combination is what makes it work: military force sufficient to stop the nobles from resisting, and policy that gradually centralizes power so that the force becomes less necessary. His Majesty had this running from the first days in Border Town. It took me years of observation to trace the full shape of it.”
“It’s complicated,” Lorgar admitted. She was also slightly astonished that the composed and self-contained blonde witch had explained all of this to her with visible enthusiasm. Perhaps she had been holding the analysis for a long time and had simply not found anyone capable of receiving it.
“Politics is ten thousand times more complicated than fighting,” Andrea said, with a pride that was mostly professional rather than personal. “And that’s only one dimension. The other dimension is that he’s acquiring more than just wealth — he’s acquiring people.”
“Us?”
“Simple enough. When Mojin immigrants receive food and housing through work, they enter the circulation. They begin to use wages to purchase the goods and comforts that Graycastle produces. This process is self-reinforcing — once you’re accustomed to that level of security and convenience, you cannot easily abandon it. Over time, you become a genuine subject of the kingdom.” She drove the stick upright into the ground. “The oases are shrinking. The desert cannot sustain all the clans indefinitely. The king is offering a path that doesn’t require fighting for water. More and more Mojins will take it — because the alternative is the old arrangement, which is becoming untenable. Twenty years from now, His Majesty will have the Blackwater, the wealth, and most of the Mojin people of the Southernmost Region. Would you still say purchasing Blackwater from Iron Sand City directly was the better option?”
Lorgar did not answer immediately.
What had shaken her was not the analysis itself but the manner of its delivery — Andrea had explained this not as a warning, she realized, but as a simple statement of what was already determined. She had not told Lorgar this because she trusted her to resist it. She had told her because no Mojin could reverse it. The information was safe.
She found she admired both Andrea and Roland, in different registers. Roland for designing something this intricate and patient, and executing it from the very beginning. Andrea for tracing its architecture without resentment and explaining it with the clean pleasure of someone in love with the elegance of the thing.
And perhaps for herself, if her father was correct: understanding the pattern was itself a kind of training.
“Thank you,” Lorgar said. “I feel my fighting skills have improved.”
“My pleasure. As long as you—” Andrea paused. “Wait. Did you just say fighting skills?”
“Yes. I’ll go practice now.” She rose. “Please excuse me.”
She was already moving toward the nearby dune and the open gravelly ground she had noticed earlier — good footing for training, clear sight lines — before Andrea finished calling after her.
“So you turned out to be just like Ashes. An idiot.”
Lorgar could still hear her at a hundred paces.
But the voice, she noticed, had lost most of its cold edge.