Back to Charlie, a few days after Yuki’s adventure…

  The Grand Hall looked like someone had taken the concept of “authority” and beaten it to death with a chandelier.

  It wasn’t even subtle.

  They’d cleared the central aisle, dragged in banners that used to hang behind whatever Important Person had sat here before, and added new ones with my crest slapped onto them in a hurry. Someone had tried to be respectful about it… Like, we’re honoring the institution, your majesty, but all it did was make the place feel like a stage set built overnight by very enthusiastic amateurs who’d never met a minimalist in their lives.

  The worst part was the throne.

  Not because it was ugly.

  No, unfortunately, it was gorgeous.

  It sat on a raised dais that hadn’t been there yesterday, a sculpted slab of pale stone that had been scrubbed so hard it looked like it had been ashamed of itself. On top of it was a chair made of frozen water. Frozen water, as if that was a normal interior design choice, and it looked like a wave had been captured mid-crash, curled into a seat, then polished until it gleamed like glass.

  It was a throne that screamed legendary artifact and do not lick in equal part.

  And it was, without exaggeration, the most uncomfortable thing I’d ever had the displeasure of sitting on in my entire life. The cold bit through my sparse clothes as if it was insulted by the concept of “insulation.”

  This is what happens when you let people “make it grand.” They don’t make it grand. They make it dramatic. Like I’m about to deliver a villain monologue and throw a puppy off the balcony.

  Lola had told me that taking an audience was necessary. Her exact phrasing had been, “Morale needs a face, Lady. A symbol. Something that looks stable.”

  I had squinted at her and said, “I’m stable.”

  She had looked at me over her clipboard, expression flat. “You threatened to duel an entire Altandai tax office a few hours ago.”

  “In my defense, they started it.”

  “They started it by existing.”

  Anyway, she’d given me two options: a public audience in the Grand Hall or paperwork, and I’d chosen the public audience with the same enthusiasm a drowning person chose oxygen.

  Because paperwork was a mountain, and mountains didn’t care if you were queen or raccoon; they still sat on your chest and suffocated you.

  Now, the Grand Hall was full of motion. Not chaos exactly, my people had gotten frighteningly competent lately, but there was an organized bustle that came from ten different assistants trying to look like they belonged in a place that had once been reserved for people born into silk.

  There were five long tables off to the side, each one loaded with stacks of paper thick enough to stop an arrow. The assistants were arranged along them like scholars in a war room, quills moving, seals stamping, ledgers open, and every few seconds somebody hissed a question at somebody else like they were afraid the papers might hear and multiply out of spite.

  I’d seen battlefields with less terror.

  The Custodian, however, was thriving.

  He stood near the front, hands clasped behind his back, posture perfect, face lit with a smile that looked like it had been trapped there by joy. He wore the same tidy uniform he always wore, but today it looked like it fit him better, like the Grand Hall had been starving without someone like him in it.

  He glanced at me, beamed, then turned smoothly toward the great doors as if he could summon destiny with a polite cough.

  “Your Majesty,” he said, voice carrying the reverence of someone who’d spent his whole life delivering those words, “the next petitioner.”

  Petitioner. Right. We’re doing that.

  I tried to look regal, which mostly meant I stopped fidgeting and pretended the ice wasn’t freezing my spine into a new and deeply cursed posture. I rested my hands on the armrests, also ice, because apparently comfort was treason, and lifted my chin.

  The doors opened.

  The man who stepped inside didn’t look like a noble, or a merchant, or anyone who’d ever had time to worry about whether his boots matched his belt. He was normal in the most painfully human way, like he’d been pulled straight out of a field and dropped into a cathedral.

  His clothes were rough-spun and patched, the fabric faded and stained with old dirt, greenish-brown smears, and sun-bleached sweat. His hands were callused, fingers thick from work.

  His hair was cut short and uneven, like he’d done it himself with a knife and impatience. There were tiny cracks on his knuckles, the kind you got from cold mornings and hard labor. His boots were worn at the toe and damp at the edges, as if he’d walked through mud to get here and hadn’t had the luxury of caring.

  He held a bottle in both hands as if it was sacred.

  Not fancy glass, or polished label. Just a simple, dark vessel with a wax seal. He kept glancing at it like it might vanish if he looked away. He reached the halfway point of the aisle and stopped, eyes flicking up to me with something like panic and stubborn pride colliding in his chest.

  Before he could speak, one of my assistants peeled off from the side like a trained hawk. She moved fast, and she didn’t look impressed by the bottle or the man’s nervousness.

  She stopped in front of him and held out her hands, palms up. “Is that for the Queen?”

  The man blinked, swallowed, and nodded quickly.

  The assistant took the bottle without ceremony and carried it away as if she’d just collected a ledger. He watched it go with the expression of someone watching his child get taken into surgery.

  I’m about to drink something a stranger dragged out of a field. Cool. Love this for me.

  Of course, we weren’t idiots. …Not anymore.

  The assistant didn’t bring it directly to me. She handed it to another assistant at the edge of the dais, who traced a quick sigil in the air over the bottle. A pale shimmer ran across the glass, like a net of frost spreading and then evaporating. Another assistant followed with a second spell, a thin line of light that circled the neck and sank into the wax seal.

  I didn’t know the exact names of the spells, but I recognized the vibes: detect poison, detect curse, detect this is secretly a jar of bees.

  The bottle remained, tragically, not a jar of bees.

  When the last shimmer faded, the assistant climbed the steps and offered it to me with both hands. I took it, feeling the weight, the cold glass against my gloves, and the faint scent that leaked through the wax: warm, earthy-sweet, with something smoky underneath.

  The man cleared his throat. “Your Majesty,” he said, voice rough. “If… if you would. Taste.”

  He said it as if it mattered. Like it was a test, or a gift, or an offering to a god that might decide whether his village got rain.

  Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

  I tilted the bottle slightly, studying him. He stood straight, but his shoulders were tight, his jaw set, and his eyes had that raw, stubborn fear of people who’d spent their whole lives being ignored and didn’t quite believe the world could change.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  His expression brightened just a fraction, as if I’d thrown him a rope. “Sallén. Seven years old. Made here in Altandai, like my father made and his father before. Three hundred years, Your Majesty. Maybe more. It’s ours.”

  Sallén. The name rang with something old. Something that had been important long before I’d stumbled into this world and accidentally ended up wearing a crown like it was a helmet.

  I glanced down at the bottle and, out of habit, pinged the System.

  A faint overlay flickered in front of my eyes.

  [Bottle of Sallén]

  Quality: 3-rare

  Info: A blended spirit from Altandai, aged for seven years in sealed casks.

  I stared at the word Rare and felt my brain do that gamer thing where it tried to categorize everything by color and loot tables.

  Congratulations, Charlie. Your first royal audience gift is alcohol. Nice.

  I looked back at the man. “So it’s not poisoned, cursed, or full of bees,” I said, mostly to myself. A couple of assistants made sounds that were either polite laughter or distress at my lack of decorum. The man, bless him, didn’t know what to do with that, so he just nodded again, hard.

  “Fine,” I said, and lifted the bottle.

  The first sip hit like a warm slap.

  It wasn’t sweet or gentle. It had that sharp bite that tequila had, the clean, agave-like sting that shot straight up the back of your throat and made your eyes want to water out of principle, but it was layered with something deeper, darker, more patient. The finish rolled in like whiskey, smoky and oak-warm, with a faint spice that lingered on my tongue like a dare.

  It tasted like sunlight baked into wood and bottled with stubbornness.

  It tasted like a field at noon and a fire at night.

  It tasted… good.

  I swallowed, then took another sip because I wasn’t a coward and also because I was, apparently, a queen in a frozen chair who deserved a small joy.

  A grin tugged at my mouth before I could stop it. “Okay,” I admitted. “That’s actually amazing.”

  The man’s shoulders loosened so fast it was like he’d been holding his breath since he walked in. His eyes flashed, proud and relieved, and for a second he looked younger, like the weight of the hall wasn’t crushing him anymore.

  I lowered the bottle and leaned forward slightly. “So,” I said, “why are you here?”

  That question hit him harder than any spell.

  His smile faltered. He swallowed and his hands clenched and unclenched at his sides. Then he drew in a deep breath, like he was about to lift something heavy.

  “My family,” he began, voice steadying with effort, “has worked the fields outside Altandai for five generations. Under the sun. Under the overseers. Under… the ones who owned the land and the casks and the press. We grew what they told us to grow, harvested what they told us to harvest, and we were proud, because it was our work, even when it wasn’t our name on the bottle.”

  His gaze flicked to the bottle in my hands, then back to my face.

  “Now,” he said, “the old masters are gone.”

  The way he said gone was careful. Not celebratory or angry. Just… factual. Like he didn’t trust the world enough to gloat.

  “And the owners of Sallén fled the city,” he continued. “The storehouses. The fields. The casks. It… it fell into royal hands.” He swallowed again, and his eyes honed with something like desperation.

  I nodded slowly. “That tracks,” I said. “We’ve been finding a lot of ‘royal hands’ situations.”

  Lola had called it asset reclamation. The Custodian had called it restoration of lawful ownership. I’d called it oh my god, stop handing me keys to things I didn’t ask for.

  The man lifted his chin. “Your Majesty,” he said, “I beg you… do not turn the Sallén fields into tagrain farms.”

  The words landed in the hall with a strange heaviness.

  I blinked once.

  Then I turned my head slightly, because I had to confirm reality hadn’t just blue-screened.

  I looked at the nearest assistant, one one who’d been living in paperwork hell since I refused to, and my voice came out exactly as intelligent as I felt.

  “…What the hell is a tagrain farm?”

  The assistant froze as if I’d accused her of treason.

  Then she recovered, flipping through a stack of papers so fast it looked like she was trying to summon a demon out of bureaucracy. “It means reallocating agricultural land to staple crops,” she blurted. “Wheat, tarley, rye. For general food security, Your Majesty.”

  “Why would we do that?” I asked.

  Her eyes flicked toward the side tables.

  And I followed her gaze.

  Five tables. Each one buried under paper. Assistants hunched over like soldiers in a siege, ink-stained, tired-eyed, whispering over property claims, ration distribution, guard rosters, rebuilding orders, and probably the official legal definition of “what counts as a cursed statue and can we throw it into the river.”

  One of them had a stack so high it had to be held upright with a literal bookend.

  This is the real boss fight. Not Grandmasters nor traitors nor demon princes.

  Paper.

  The assistant cleared her throat. “There are proposals,” she said carefully, “for land optimization. Some estates were used for luxury crops or—”

  “Sallén,” the man cut in, voice cracking with urgency. “It’s not a luxury. It’s… it’s what we are. It’s what we do. It’s our craft. And if you turn the fields to grain, it will be gone. The yeast lines, the press schedules, the cask rotation—”

  He stopped, realizing he was rambling, and his face flushed. He bowed his head quickly. “Forgive me. I… I’m nervous.”

  I stared at him for a moment, then exhaled slowly. He was a man begging me not to delete three hundred years of tradition because someone needed a spreadsheet to look nice.

  I lifted a hand slightly. “Hold up,” I said, and my voice softened despite myself. “What’s your name?”

  He blinked, startled by the question. “M-my name?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Your name. The one you’ve had since birth. The one I’m guessing nobody in this hall has asked you.”

  He swallowed, then straightened as if he was bracing for punishment. “Gael,” he said. “I’m Gael. Gael—” He started to add something else, then shook his head quickly. “Just Gael, Your Majesty.”

  “Gael,” I repeated, tasting the name like it mattered, because it did.

  I glanced down at the bottle again, then took another sip, because timing was everything and also because I wanted the flavor in my mouth when I said the next part.

  I looked back at him and let the grin return. “Gael,” I said, “there is absolutely no way Sallén is getting turned into… tagrain farms.”

  A few people in the hall made confused noises at my wording, but Gael’s face did something incredible, his eyes widened, then his whole expression collapsed into relief so intense it looked like he might actually sit down on the floor.

  He didn’t, because pride and decades of being told not to take up space kept him upright, but his shoulders sagged like the world had finally loosened its grip on his throat.

  I watched the relief settle in properly. Good. That meant it mattered.

  I leaned back against the throne, immediately regretted that life choice, and cleared my throat. “Custodian,” I said, pitching my voice to carry.

  He straightened instantly. “Your Majesty?”

  “How many petitioners are left?”

  He consulted a small slate with an efficiency that bordered on ritual. “Three more, Majesty. Two property claims and one guild grievance.”

  I nodded once.

  Then I stood up.

  Well. Attempted to stand up.

  The throne clung to me as if it was offended I was leaving. There was a split second where I genuinely thought I’d frozen myself in a place like some kind of idiot ice-queen statue. Then I wrenched myself free, heels scraping against stone, cloak swishing, dignity suffering mild but survivable injuries.

  Several assistants gasped.

  One of them actually took a step forward like she was about to catch me if I fell, which was sweet and deeply insulting.

  I hopped down from the dais. Not gracefully, but decisively. The hall went quiet as I’d just broken a rule nobody had written down yet. “Those three are out of luck,” I said cheerfully, already walking. “They can come back tomorrow.”

  The Custodian blinked. “Majesty?”

  I kept going, passing the edge of the dais, the tables, the stacks of paper that looked like they might actually hiss if disturbed. “I’m done sitting on frozen furniture pretending I’m a decorative solution to systemic problems,” I added. “I’ve made my call for the day.”

  Gael turned slowly, confusion battling hope again. “Your Majesty?”

  I stopped in front of him and held up the bottle of Sallén. “You,” I said, pointing at him with it, “are taking me to see how this is made.”

  The effect was immediate.

  One assistant dropped her quill.

  Another made a strangled sound like she’d just swallowed a scheduling nightmare whole. “Majesty, w-we’ll need advance notice for an inspection—escorts—security assessments—”

  “I am the security assessment,” I said lightly. “And I’ve already had the drink. If it kills me, you can write a very dramatic report.”

  “That is not reassuring,” she whispered.

  I smiled at her. “It wasn’t meant to be.”

  I turned back to Gael. “You said seven years, right? Show me the casks. Show me the presses. Show me the parts nobody thinks matter until they’re gone.”

  His mouth opened. Closed. Then he bowed so deeply I thought his spine might lodge a formal complaint. “I—I will, Your Majesty. I swear it.”

  “Good,” I said. “Because I want to understand what I just saved.”

  Behind us, the assistants were quietly unraveling.

  “I’ll need to reschedule—”

  “Who’s covering the ledger—”

  “The grain projections—”

  “Someone get a cloak, she can’t go out like—”

  The Custodian raised a hand. It was a small gesture, but the noise died.

  He watched me for a moment, his eyes bright in a way that had nothing to do with protocol. When he spoke, his voice was steady, but there was something dangerously close to emotion underneath it.

  “I will inform the remaining petitioners,” he said, bowing. “It will be… encouraging to tell them that the Queen is personally honoring the traditions of the realm.”

  He straightened, smiling in a way that made him look ten years younger.

  “Go well, Your Majesty.”

  I paused, glanced back at the throne, still gleaming, still beautiful, still offensively cold, and then at the bottle in my hand.

  “Someone can melt that thing,” I said. “Or repurpose it. Ice sculpture. Weapon. I don’t care.”

  A few seconds later, I was walking out of the Grand Hall with a farmer, a rare bottle of alcohol, and a growing suspicion that this job involved way more field trips than I’d been promised.

  Behind me, paperwork trembled in fear.

  And honestly?

  Good.