Heavy oak doors swung shut behind the last kitchen maids as they carried away the empty silver platters and earthenware soup tureens, bringing the noisy midnight banquet to a close.
Outside the tall, leaded-glass windows of the castle, the blizzard that had followed William's group down from the northern peaks was still howling across the valley. Inside the thick stone walls, however, the biting shock of the mountain freeze had finally yielded to the steady, dry heat of the roaring fireplaces, and the life-or-death tension of their escape had melted into bone-deep exhaustion.
Rather than handing the two newcomers over to the household servants, Prince Roland made a point of leading the way up the wide stone staircase himself to show Lightning and Diana Argus to their quarters.
As the small group walked along the second-floor corridor—where iron braziers filled with glowing charcoal sat in every corner alcove to keep the draft away—Diana couldn't stop her eyes from wandering across the high, vaulted ceiling and the polished timber paneling along the walls.
Even for a woman who had grown up in a baron's manor, the sheer scale of Border Town's keep was startling.
To the immense fortune of Roland's current plans, the feudal lords who had ruled this western outpost generations ago had suffered from a streak of architectural vanity that bordered on madness. Back when the North Slope Mine had first opened, those early governors had refused to live in a rough frontier timber fort. Instead, ignoring the muddy poverty of the miners' shanties outside, they had taxed the district dry to erect a castle built to the exact specifications of a wealthy interior city.
Spread across three massive stories, the main keep boasted nearly nine hundred square meters of interior floor space paved with cut flagstones and fitted with seasoned oak, guarded at the four outer corners by tall watchtowers whose curved slate roofs resembled eastern pagodas.
For a lonely bachelor prince, the building had been ridiculously empty.
For a ruler who planned to quietly shelter dozens of fugitive witches without the town gossips or Church spies noticing a crowd, all those unused guest wings were a godsend.
Stopping halfway down the eastern hallway, Roland rested his hand on the brass latch of a heavy, freshly oiled oak door and pushed it open to reveal a spacious bedroom warmed by a brick hearth and furnished with thick wool rugs on the floor.
— "This will be your room from tonight on, Lightning," — Roland said, smiling warmly as the short-haired blonde girl peeked past his elbow with wide, shining eyes.
He hadn't picked that door at random. Pointing across the ten-foot width of the carpeted hall, Roland indicated the closed door directly opposite.
— "Anna sleeps right across the hall from you, and little Nana's room is two doors down toward the stairs," — Roland explained gently. — "If you need anything during the night, or if you just want company your own age, all you have to do is knock."
After listening to Nightingale's grim report about the paranoia and terror inside Cara's cave, Roland figured the fastest way to help the young flyer settle in was to put her right next to two girls who had already found peace under his roof.
Lightning didn't even walk into the room; she floated six inches off the corridor floorboards, zoomed straight across the threshold, and dropped face-first onto the thick feather mattress with a muffled squeal of delight, rubbing her cheek against the clean linen sheets.
— "Real feathers! It doesn't smell like wet moss or bat droppings at all!" — Lightning cheered into the pillow, kicking her boots in the air. — "Thank you, Your Highness! You're the best prince in the whole kingdom!"
Chuckling under his breath, Roland pulled her door half-shut and walked four paces further down the hall, where Diana Argus stood waiting.
Unlike the energetic teenager, the twenty-four-year-old former noblewoman still looked as though she were walking through a dream she was terrified of waking up from, her frost-chapped hands wringing the hem of her borrowed wool shawl.
Opening the adjacent oak door, Roland stepped aside and gestured toward the warmly lit room within.
— "And this room belongs to you, Lady Diana," — Roland said, keeping his voice calm, polite, and entirely free of royal condescension. — "The maids have already left two pitchers of hot water by the washbasin and laid out fresh wool blankets on the bed. As you can see on the inside of the doorframe, there is a heavy iron bolt that locks from within. No servant, guard, or advisor is permitted to cross this threshold without your explicit permission. You are completely safe in my territory."
Diana looked at the thick iron sliding bolt on the inside of the heavy oak door, then up at the young prince's sincere gray eyes.
In the mountain cave, there had been no doors, no privacy, and no safety from Cara's snakes. Before that, on the run from her own family's estate, every locked door had been a cage meant to hold her until the priests arrived.
To be handed a lock that existed solely to keep the world out at her command was a simple, everyday dignity she had thought she would never experience again as long as she lived.
Her lower lip trembled slightly, and her honey-colored eyes filled with sudden, shining tears.
— "Thank you, Your Highness," — Diana whispered, sinking into a deep, graceful court curtsy despite her ragged dress. — "I will not forget this kindness."
An hour later, a deep, heavy silence settled over the stone corridors of the keep, broken only by the muffled, rhythmic crunch of sentry boots patrolling the outer ramparts and the distant whistle of the wind against the tower roofs.
Inside his private quarters in the western wing, however, Arthur was wide awake.
Lying flat on his back atop his narrow bed with his fingers laced neatly behind his head, the dark-haired strategist stared up at the wooden ceiling beams, watching the single tallow candle on his desk cast long, wavering shadows across the stone wall.
Even though his body was tired after twelve hours of managing recruitment ledgers and testing the new steam-powered boring mill in the yard, the inside of his skull was humming like a freshly oiled locomotive running at full steam.
Every single detail from the midnight supper—every expression, every tactical change in the timeline, and every word spoken around the oak table—was being sorted, weighed, and filed away behind his eyes.
Surprisingly enough, Arthur wasn't spending his midnight hours worrying about Mentor Cara's fanatical madness up on the mountain, nor was he dwelling on the fact that Wendy was still inside that cave. He already knew how to deal with Cara when the time came.
Instead, ninety percent of Arthur's commercial and strategic brainpower was locked onto a single person sitting two floors below him:
Diana Argus.
In the quiet gloom of the bedroom, Arthur's lips curved upward into a slow, almost predatory smile.
Earlier at the dinner table, when Roland had asked the two new arrivals to demonstrate their abilities so he could record them, little Lightning had proudly hovered above her chair with her cheeks full of garlic bread. Then, when it had been Diana's turn, the former baron's daughter had blushed with deep embarrassment, apologized for how "useless" her magic was compared to Anna's fire or William's strength, and hesitantly rested two fingers against the corner of her unbleached linen table napkin.
In the blink of an eye, the rough, dirty-gray fabric had transformed into a square of pure, luminous, breathtaking royal blue.
Arthur had seen the way Chief Knight Carter Lannis—who had been standing guard by the dining hall doors—had barely suppressed a scoff at the sight.
To a rough frontier soldier, an illiterate peasant, or even a short-sighted feudal warrior who only measured power by how many skulls it could crack on a battlefield, a witch whose only magic was changing the color of cloth to blue looked like a laughable parlor trick. In a freezing world overrun by demonic beasts and armored knights, what good was a girl who could dye a handkerchief without a bucket?
Ignorance really is bliss, Arthur thought, his dark eyes gleaming as he stared at the ceiling. If Carter or Barov had ever taken a single university course on pre-industrial economic history back on Earth, they would have dropped to their knees and kissed that woman's hands right there at the table.
Arthur didn't look at this medieval continent through the eyes of a knight; he looked at it through the cold, ruthless lens of twenty-first-century supply chains and market monopolies.
In the modern world he and William had come from, synthetic chemical dyes made every color of the rainbow dirt cheap; any kid could buy a bright blue cotton T-shirt for five dollars.
In a feudal, pre-industrial society, however, color wasn't just fashion. Color was wealth, power, and class warfare made visible—and at the very top of that pyramid sat the color blue.
During his walk through Border Town weeks ago, Arthur had noticed the exact same thing every historian knew about the Middle Ages: commoners lived in a world of mud. Because true blue pigment barely existed in nature in a form that clung to cloth, ninety-nine percent of peasants and townsfolk wore drab browns, sheep-grease grays, dull yellows, or faded forest greens.
Even for a wealthy merchant guild in King's City to dye a single bolt of wool a decent shade of blue required an agonizing, filthy, and astronomically expensive process.
Workers had to harvest woad or imported southern indigo plants, crush the leaves into heavy balls, dry them for weeks, and then ferment the mash inside massive wooden vats filled with rotting, sun-heated human urine for days on end just to break down the insoluble dye so it would bind to the fibers. The stench of a medieval dyer's quarter was so vile that kings passed laws forcing them to build their shops downwind of city walls—and even after all that labor, three washes in river water left the cloth looking faded and streaky.
And if a royal Duke or a high bishop of the Church wanted the ultimate shade—true, unfading ultramarine blue—plant vats weren't enough.
In our history, true ultramarine had to be ground by hand from raw lapis lazuli stone mined in the mountains of Afghanistan and shipped across thousands of miles of desert and sea, Arthur recalled, his pulse quickening slightly as he ran the profit margins in his head. Ounce for ounce, pure ultramarine pigment literally cost more than pure gold dust.
It was the color of obscene, untouchable power. Kings reserved it by law for royal coronation robes; cardinals hoarded it to paint the robes of the Virgin Mary in grand cathedrals. In the capital of Graycastle, simply walking into a noble salon wearing a velvet cloak of deep, flawless ultramarine was the equivalent of driving a custom ten-million-dollar hypercar down the street—it announced at a single glance that your family owned mines, ships, and private armies.
And Diana Argus had just bypassed that entire infernal global supply chain in half a second with a tap of her index finger.
She didn't need lapis lazuli mines. She didn't need indigo plantations, dangerous merchant shipping lanes, guild master secrets, or vats of fermenting urine.
More importantly, when Arthur had quietly leaned across the table after dinner to feel the napkin Diana had touched, he had realized her magic didn't just paint the surface of the fabric—it permanently altered the light-reflecting molecular structure of the fibers themselves. You could boil that napkin in lye soap for a week, and the radiant sapphire blue wouldn't fade by a single shade.
William thinks he just saved a helpless background character from freezing in the snow, Arthur thought, letting out a quiet, breathless laugh in the dark room. He didn't bring back a refugee. He just handed me a walking, breathing central bank.
With Diana sitting safely inside this castle, Arthur could buy tens of thousands of yards of the cheapest, scratchiest, two-copper-per-bolt unbleached linen or wool from Willow Town's weavers. Diana could walk down a warehouse aisle brushing her fingertips across the rolls while taking an afternoon stroll, and by sunset, those cheap rags would be transformed into "Imperial Sapphire Cloth" worth fifty gold royals a bolt!
While Duke Ryan and the Six Great Families of Longsong Stronghold were smugly waiting for Border Town to go bankrupt without iron-ore exports, Arthur was going to flood the luxury markets of Valencia, Clearwater, and King's City with royal blue textiles at a nine-thousand-percent profit margin.
Every vain count, every wealthy merchant's wife, and every corrupt noble in the kingdom would empty their family vaults into Roland's hands just to dress themselves in Border Town blue—and every single gold coin they spent would go straight into buying saltpeter, iron ore, and sixty-pounder artillery shells to blow their feudal castles off the map.
Two doors down the third-floor corridor from Arthur's room, the orange light of a coal hearth flickered softly against the stone walls of the royal bedchamber.
Closing the heavy oak door behind himself after coming up from the second floor, Roland Wimbledon let out a long, tired sigh and hooked two fingers inside the high collar of his dark wool tunic, loosening the clasp so he could breathe easier.
Walking over to the small oak cabinet in the corner of the room, the young prince unstopped a stoneware jug and poured himself a generous mug of dark, unrefined malt beer.
Carrying the pewter mug back to the fireplace, Roland sank down into his high-backed upholstered armchair, stretched his boots out toward the warm grate, and stared into the dancing yellow flames.
No battle plan ever survives first contact with the enemy, Roland thought dryly, swirling the dark liquid in his cup as the old military saying echoed inside his head. Whoever wrote that back on Earth knew what they were talking about.
Six days ago, when he had stood at the castle gates and watched William and Nightingale head into the northern mountains with sacks of food and steam-engine blueprints, Cheng Yan's modern, rational mind had pictured a very straightforward outcome.
He had known the witches of the Association were starving, freezing, and dying every time a girl turned eighteen. Logically, when Nightingale walked into that cave and offered them heated brick houses, legal protection, silver wages, and a proven scientific cure for the Demonic Bite, the entire camp should have packed their bags within an hour.
In his head, he had already been planning how to assign sixty new magical workers across his workshops, farms, and mines to vault Border Town straight into the nineteenth century before spring.
Never in his wildest calculations had he expected the greatest threat to the witches' survival to be the very woman who had founded their sanctuary.
Before tonight, Roland had pictured Mentor Cara as a tragic, perhaps overly cautious grandmother figure—a wise leader hardened by years of protecting her flock from the Church's pyres.
Instead, Nightingale's report had revealed a full-blown lunatic.
Cara didn't just hate the priests who burned witches or the lords who signed execution warrants; she hated every single non-magical human being breathing air on this continent. Worse still, in her obsession with the mythical Holy Mountain and her desire for absolute control over the camp, she had adopted the exact same brutality as the Church of Hermes—hanging a God's Stone around a sister's neck and holding a white-hot branding iron to her face just to silence a dissenting voice.
Roland raised the pewter mug to his lips and took a long swallow of the dark beer.
He grimaced slightly as the liquid went down. Brewed without modern temperature control or proper hops filtration, the medieval malt beer was cloudy, heavy, and left a harsh, roasted bitterness on the back of the tongue that couldn't hold a candle to the crisp craft lagers he used to drink after work back on Earth.
Still, the alcohol spread a pleasant warmth through his stomach, taking the sharp edge off the tension in his shoulders.
I was too naive about human nature, Roland admitted to himself, resting the mug on the arm of his chair. Because Anna is so pure and hardworking, and because Nightingale and Nana have good hearts, I subconsciously assumed that being persecuted made all witches righteous.
History didn't work like that. Extreme cruelty and decades of living like hunted animals didn't automatically turn victims into saints; half the time, it simply twisted the survivors into a different breed of monster. Clear-headed, compassionate women like Anna, Nightingale, and Wendy were precious exceptions that had to be protected—not the guaranteed rule.
Setting the philosophical headache aside, Roland leaned his head back against the cushioned headrest and shifted his engineer's brain to the practical assets sitting under his roof right now.
First: Lightning and Diana Argus.
At first glance during dinner, when the two newcomers had explained their powers, the mechanical engineer inside Cheng Yan had felt a brief pang of disappointment.
Unlike Anna's high-temperature fire, which could smelt steel and weld boilers,neither flying through the air nor turning a white napkin blue could help him cast cannon barrels, mine coal, or tighten a single bolt on a steam engine. In terms of heavy industrial manufacturing, their powers didn't fit on the assembly line at all.
Yet Roland wasn't just the chief engineer of a workshop anymore; he was the ruler of a rebellious territory about to go to war.
The moment he looked at Lightning through the eyes of a commander-in-chief, her value shot through the roof.
In medieval warfare—and even in nineteenth-century warfare—generals fought half-blind, relying on cavalry scouts who could easily ride straight into an ambush behind the next hill. Lightning, however, could fly hundreds of meters up in the clouds without burning stamina, moving faster than a falcon where no bowman or crossbowman on earth could ever touch her.
With a spyglass in her hands, she was a living reconnaissance aircraft. From the moment Duke Ryan's army marched out of Longsong Stronghold's gates, Roland and William would know their exact headcount, their marching speed, and where they camped every single night. And once Arthur's chemistry lab finished stabilizing nitroglycerin or black-powder ceramic grenades, a girl who could hover directly above an enemy command tent and drop bombs from the sky would be a flying nightmare.
As for Diana Argus?
Roland didn't even need to knock on Arthur's door to know that his calculating strategist was probably lying awake right now grinning like a fox over that blue napkin.
Back when the original Roland had lived in the palace in King's City, the royal wardrobe master had paid thirty gold royals just to have a single ceremonial doublet dyed in true, unfading sapphire blue for the King's birthday. Having a witch who could turn cheap frontier cloth into royal-grade blue fabric by touch meant Border Town now owned a private gold mine that required zero pickaxes.
One witch gave his army eyes in the sky; the other gave his treasury an endless stream of noble gold to pay for steel, grain, and gunpowder.
Taking another slow sip from his mug, Roland frowned as his thoughts drifted to the final, far more dangerous subject they had discussed at the end of dinner.
Before dismissing everyone for the night, Roland had asked Nightingale and Lightning to describe the exact magical abilities of the other witches still left inside Cara's mountain camp—especially Cara herself.
What they had told him was both fascinating and deeply unsettling.
Unlike Anna's heat manipulation or Wendy's wind gusts, which followed recognizable laws of physics and fluid dynamics, several abilities in the Association sounded wildly unpredictable.
Lightning had shuddered visibly at the table while describing Cara's power.
According to the young flyer, the founder of the Association didn't summon real snakes from the woods, nor did she project harmless optical illusions. Instead, Cara condensed pure Magical Power outside her body and shaped it into physical, scaly reptiles with solid mass, sharp fangs, and enough autonomous instinct to slither across a room and strike a target on command.
Worse still, Lightning swore she had seen Cara summon two distinct breeds of serpents during her time in the camp: dull, opaque black snakes whose venom instantly locked a victim's muscles and vocal cords in rigid paralysis—the exact breed that had ambushed Nightingale—and a second, far deadlier breed striped in midnight blue whose toxin caused slow, agonizing internal bleeding that rotted the organs within hours if left untreated.
It was a power built from the ground up for silent assassination and terror.
Yet as Roland had listened to Lightning explain how Cara fought, and compared it with how Nightingale, Anna, and even William used their powers, a sudden, vital pattern had clicked together in the engineer's head.
He had spotted the Achilles' heel of every witch in this world.
Range, Roland thought, setting his empty mug down on the side table with a soft clink as he stood up and walked over to his drafting desk. Their effective combat range is pitifully short!
Think about Cara's terrifying poison snakes. If Cara could sit comfortably inside her cave and send an army of venomous vipers slithering five miles down the mountain to bite her enemies in their sleep, she would be an unstoppable goddess of death.
She couldn't do that.
As Nightingale had confirmed at dinner, Cara's conjured snakes were like guard dogs tied to an invisible fifteen-meter leash. The instant a snake slithered beyond the immediate radius of Cara's mental control, the condensed magic lost its structure and dissolved into harmless gray mist. Even to ambush Nightingale in her own hall, Cara had needed to wait until Nightingale walked within a few paces of her hiding spot.
And the exact same physical law applied to everyone else.
Anna's emerald fire could melt cast iron in seconds, yet she couldn't project that flame much further than ten or fifteen paces before the heat dissipated into the cold air. Even Nightingale—the deadliest close-quarters killer in the Association—had to walk right up behind her target, drop out of the safety of the Mist World into the real physical plane, and stab them at arm's length with a steel dagger.
In modern military terms, the magic of this world isn't artillery or air power, Roland realized with crystal clarity, picking up a sharpened piece of willow charcoal between his fingers. Almost every witch on this continent is restricted to close-quarters combat!
That single limitation explained four hundred years of tragedy.
It explained why Nightingale and the combat witches of the Association always carried heavy steel crossbows strapped to their backs whenever they traveled. And it explained why witches, despite possessing supernatural powers that defied normal men, were consistently hunted down and slaughtered whenever the Church of Hermes deployed its Judgment Army.
When a battalion of Church templars marched onto a field in tight shield-wall formation, carrying pikes, heavy crossbows, and wearing God's Stones of Retaliation on their chests that created a magic-nullifying dead zone several meters wide, a witch couldn't even get close enough to cast a spell!
Before a witch could step within fifteen paces to throw fire or wind, either a crossbow bolt pierced her chest from eighty yards out, or she stepped inside the radius of the God's Stone, lost her magic instantly, and got hacked to pieces by ordinary soldiers with steel axes.
Facing an enemy that outranged them and turned off their powers up close, the witches had never stood a chance. For four centuries, their only option when spotting Church banners had been to turn around and run like rabbits in front of hunting hounds.
Unrolling a fresh sheet of pale parchment across his desk under the oil lamp, Roland pressed the tip of his charcoal stick against the paper.
— "If the gods gave you short arms," — Roland murmured to the quiet room, a sharp, cold glint lighting up his gray eyes, — "then I'll just have to build you longer ones."
A God's Stone of Retaliation could stop a magic spell within five paces.
It couldn't stop a half-ounce conical lead bullet spinning out of a rifled steel barrel at four hundred meters per second from three hundred yards away.
If he put precision-machined breech-loading rifles, telescopic sights, and high-explosive artillery into the hands of witches whose eyesight, reflexes, and magical support already surpassed ordinary men, the Church's terrifying Judgment Knights wouldn't even get within two hundred yards of his girls before being torn to shreds.
For the next two hours, completely forgetting his exhaustion and the late hour, the Fourth Prince of Graycastle stayed hunched over his glowing desk—drafting the barrel tolerances for the new rifled muskets on one sheet and writing out the legal statutes for Border Town's Witch Union on the next, while the logs in the hearth slowly burned down into a bed of fierce, glowing red embers against the winter night.