Thomas was a man of average height, average build, and apparently very above average emotional capacity.
I'd found him in the east corridor replacing the very curtain rod he'd taken down during his involuntary descent two days ago. He was up a new ladder — which, for the record, I had specifically stood away from, I was not a repeat offender — carefully threading the rod through new curtain rings with the focused energy of a man determined to reclaim his dignity through manual labor.
I respected that actually.
"Thomas," I said.
He looked down. Saw me. The curtain rod slipped. He caught it. Barely.
"Your — Your Highness."
"I want to apologize," I said. "What happened two days ago was my fault. You were doing your job and I was careless and you got hurt because of it. I'm sorry."
I meant it. Genuinely. In my past life I'd been the kind of person who took full responsibility for outcomes in his workspace — if something went wrong on my bench it was my problem, full stop. That hadn't changed.
Thomas stared at me from the ladder.
His chin wobbled.
Oh no, I thought.
"Your Highness," he said, voice already doing the thing, "that is — I — you didn't have to —"
"Thomas please don't—"
"You came all the way here to—"
"It was thirty meters down the corridor—"
"No one has ever—" his voice cracked "—a prince has never—"
"Thomas I am begging you—"
He was fully crying now. On the ladder. Curtain rod clutched to his chest. Tears running down a face that was cycling through approximately six colors.
I looked at Ren.
Ren was looking at the ceiling with the expression of a man trying to convert his laughter into something socially acceptable.
I am once again asking, I thought desperately, for someone in this situation to not cry.
Nobody listened.
It took four minutes. Four full minutes of Thomas cycling through gratitude and emotion while I stood there nodding and saying "yes Thomas, of course Thomas, please come down from the ladder Thomas" until he finally descended, blew his nose on a handkerchief, and straightened up with the composure of a man who had done his grieving and was ready to return to service.
"Thank you, Your Highness," he said with great dignity.
"Thank you for your patience, Thomas."
He nodded. Went back to the curtain rod. I turned and walked away at a pace that was definitely not a retreat.
"Not a word," I said to Ren.
"He cried more than last time," Ren said.
"Not. A. Word."
Phase 1 officially started that morning.
Not with explosions this time. With questions.
See, the thing about being a child in a castle is that nobody finds it strange when you wander. You're curious. You're young. You're supposed to be everywhere you shouldn't be. It was the single greatest tactical advantage of my current physical situation and I intended to use it until I was too old for it to work anymore.
I started with the blacksmith.
His name was Aldous. Built like a door that had been given opinions. Twenty years in Braveheart's service, hands that looked like they'd been carved from the same iron he worked, and a deep suspicion of everyone under forty — which included me but which I intended to overcome through the ancient art of asking good questions and listening to the answers.
"How much iron can you process in a week?" I asked, sitting on a barrel near his forge like I owned it.
He looked at me sideways. "Why's a prince asking about iron?"
"I'm curious about the kingdom's production capacity."
"You're eight."
I know, I thought. Everyone keeps telling me."My father says understanding the kingdom starts with understanding its resources."
My father had not said this. My father had said "eat your vegetables Nick" at breakfast. But the principle was sound and Aldous didn't need to know the sourcing.
He grunted. Went back to his work. But he answered.
I listened. Filed everything. Iron output per week, current tools, current orders, the supplier he used for raw ore from the eastern deposits, the fact that the eastern deposits were apparently larger than what the crown's official records stated because — and this was interesting — the previous steward had been underreporting them for fifteen years for reasons Aldous described as "above my pay grade and below my interest."
Corruption. In the resource records.
Noted, I thought.
From Aldous I went to the kitchens, where I charmed the head cook — a woman named Marta who had the energy of someone who had survived everything and found it mostly funny — into explaining Braveheart's agricultural situation over a bowl of soup. From the kitchens I went to the steward's office, where I asked to look at the supply ledgers under the guise of "practicing my numbers" and spent forty minutes reading six years of import and export records while the steward watched me with the expression of a man who wasn't sure if he should be proud or concerned.
Both, probably. Both was the correct answer.
By noon I had more data on Braveheart's actual resource situation than most of the people running it.
It's not much but it's honest work, I thought, sketching out my findings in the margins of a blueprint labeled CASTLE IMPROVEMENTS so it looked architectural. But it's enough. It's enough to start.
Ren walked beside me through all of it. Saying little. Watching everything. At one point he looked at my notes and said — "you know most eight year olds are playing outside right now."
"Most eight year olds aren't building an arms industry."
"That's fair."
Court was held in the early afternoon.
I hadn't attended before — not because I wasn't allowed, I was the prince, I could attend whenever I wanted — but because I'd assessed it as low value until I had a baseline understanding of the kingdom's resources. Now I had that. Now I needed the political picture.
I sat in the chair to the right of father's throne — slightly smaller, slightly lower, the junior position — and watched.
Court was — look, I'd played enough strategy games to understand the concept of court politics. Factions, alliances, resource competition, information asymmetry. I understood it academically.
Seeing it in person was something else.
The nobles were exactly what I expected — a collection of men and women who had inherited their positions and spent their careers protecting them. They spoke in careful language, said almost nothing, and communicated everything in the spaces between words. Father handled them well — better than I'd expected, actually. He was patient, fair, quietly firm when he needed to be. The kind of ruler people liked even when they disagreed with him.
He's beginning to believe, I thought, watching him navigate a land dispute between two minor lords with the practiced ease of someone who'd done it a thousand times. And they believe in him. That's actually — that's an asset I hadn't fully accounted for.
I filed it.
Then the doors at the far end of the hall opened and Ambassador Varro walked in and every calculation I'd been running quietly recalibrated.
He was — a lot.
Fat in the specific way of someone who ate well because he could and wanted everyone to know it. Dressed in Varantum colors — deep red and gold — with more fabric than was structurally necessary and rings on every finger that caught the light every time he moved his hands, which was constantly. He walked like a man who had decided long ago that rooms existed for him to enter.
He was smiling.
The smile never moved. Not when he greeted father — "Your Majesty, as gracious as ever" — not when he surveyed the court — "such a lively assembly today" — not when his eyes moved across the room and landed, briefly, on me.
I looked back.
The smile stayed exactly the same.
So this, I thought, is the middleman. The empire's babysitter. The living embodiment of a Terms and Conditions agreement that nobody read but everyone agreed to. The human equivalent of a subscription fee that auto-renews and is extremely difficult to cancel.
He was here for the monthly tribute discussion. I listened to the whole thing. Thirty minutes of diplomatic language that amounted to — Varantum wanted more, father negotiated it down slightly, Varro accepted with the grace of a man who had already gotten what he actually wanted before the meeting started.
It was the most politely conducted robbery I'd ever witnessed.
First level boss, I thought. Definitely first level boss.
After the formal business Varro circulated the room. Working it. A word here, a laugh there, a compliment that landed like a toll fee. I watched him move and tracked the pattern — he wasn't socializing, he was collecting. Every conversation was a transaction. Information in, goodwill out, network maintained.
He'd been doing this for six years in this specific court. He knew everyone. He knew their names, their families, their concerns, their weaknesses.
And then his eyes found me again. Across the room this time. And I realized — he'd been tracking me the same way I'd been tracking him.
Oh, I thought. Okay. So we're doing this.
He made his way over eventually. Unhurried. Stopping twice more before reaching us — not because he needed to, I was now fairly sure, but to not look like he was making a beeline.
"And this," he said, looking down at me with the smile, "must be the young prince. Nicholas, isn't it?"
"Nick," I said.
"Nick." He said it like he was filing it. "I don't believe we've met formally. You don't attend court often."
"I've been busy."
"Oh?" The smile remained. The eyes above it were doing something different. "Busy with what? If I may ask."
"Reading. Studying. Drawing."
"A scholarly prince." He glanced at father, who had appeared at my shoulder with the protective instinct of a man who wasn't sure he was needed but wanted to be present. "You must be very proud, Your Majesty."
"Every day," father said warmly. He put a hand on my shoulder. The proud dad hand. It was very heavy with sincerity.
Varro looked back at me.
I looked back at him.
Neither of us smiled.
"Well," he said finally. "I'm sure we'll have more opportunities to speak. I do so enjoy meeting the next generation."
He moved on.
I watched him go.
"He seems nice," father said.
"Mm," I said.
He caught me in the corridor afterward.
Not aggressively. Not obviously. Just — there, when I turned a corner, as if he happened to also be turning that corner at that exact moment. Ren was two steps behind me and I felt him go still.
"Nicholas," Varro said pleasantly. "Or Nick, forgive me."
"Ambassador."
"Heading back to your studies?"
"Yes."
He fell into step beside me which I hadn't invited but couldn't exactly refuse. His rings caught the corridor torchlight as he clasped his hands behind his back.
"I hear you've been quite active lately," he said conversationally. "Questions for the blacksmith, the kitchen staff, the steward's office. Very industrious for someone your age."
There it was.
Six years in this court. Six years of the staff treating him like furniture — present, permanent, not worth guarding your tongue around. Of course they talked to him. Of course they told him things. Not maliciously. Just — the way people talk to someone who's always there.
I need to fix that, I noted internally. Later. Right now — damage control.
My brain ran the options in approximately two seconds.
Option one — deny. "I was just curious." Weak. He already knew too much for casual curiosity to cover it.
Option two — deflect. Change the subject, give him nothing to grip. But he was smooth enough to redirect and I was eight years old and had to be careful about looking too smooth.
Option three — give him something true. Something small, specific, and completely unthreatening. Something that recontextualized everything he'd observed into a shape that made perfect sense and required no further investigation.
Spy Kids music starts playing.
"I want to be an architect," I said.
He glanced at me.
"I've been designing improvements for the castle," I continued, pulling out the blueprint I always kept folded in my jacket — the one labeled CASTLE IMPROVEMENTS, the one I'd been using to hide my actual notes in, which meant it genuinely looked like architectural drawings because the margins were full of measurements and structural notations. I held it out.
He took it. Looked at it. I watched his eyes move across the page — the columns, the arches, the load-bearing notations, the material quantities.
"This is quite detailed," he said.
"I like details."
"The material quantities here — sulfur, iron, specific alloys—"
"For the forge expansion," I said immediately. "The current blacksmith setup is inefficient. If we expand the forge capacity and improve the bellows system we can increase iron output by about forty percent. I've been calculating the material requirements."
A pause.
I kept my face completely neutral. Interested. Childlike. The expression of a boy who genuinely loved architecture and definitely wasn't running a cover story under pressure.
Varro looked at the blueprint for another moment. Then handed it back.
"Impressive," he said. And this time the smile reached slightly further than usual. "A prince who studies his kingdom's infrastructure. Your father should put you to work."
"Maybe when I'm older," I said.
He laughed. Small, polished. "Yes. Perhaps." He stopped walking — we'd reached a junction in the corridor. "Well. Don't let me keep you from your studies, Nick."
"Thank you, Ambassador."
I walked away. Steady pace. Not too fast.
Task failed successfully, I thought. The cover is planted. He bought it. Probably.
The probably was doing a lot of work in that sentence.
Back in the room.
Ren closed the door. Leaned against it. Let out a breath that he'd apparently been holding since the corridor.
"That was—"
"Close," I said. "Yeah."
I sat at the desk. Pulled out the real blueprint — the Phase 1 plan, the one that was decidedly not about castle architecture. Looked at it.
The architect cover was good. Clean. It explained the blueprints, the material questions, the measurements, the interest in the forge. It was true enough to hold up under casual scrutiny because I'd genuinely been doing all of those things — I just hadn't been doing them for the stated reason.
I needed props now. Actual castle improvement designs. Something I could show, discuss, point to. Something that made the story three dimensional.
I started writing.
Ren settled against the wall. The room was quiet. Outside the sun was going down over Braveheart, painting the courtyard in orange and long shadows. Somewhere in the castle Lily would be at dinner, telling mother something elaborate about her day with the absolute conviction of someone who found every hour of existence equally fascinating.
We're okay, I thought. Cover established. Resources mapped. Phase 1 is moving. We're okay.
Then Ren said — "He called his scribe."
I stopped writing.
"After the corridor," Ren continued, voice careful. "I doubled back to check. Varro went straight to his chambers and called for his personal scribe. The one he only uses for official Varantum correspondence."
The room was very quiet.
I looked at the door. Then at my blueprints. Then at the Phase 1 plan with its careful columns and timelines and production targets that would absolutely destroy any illusion of a harmless architect prince if they landed on the wrong desk.
That's sus, I thought. That is extremely, critically, historically sus.
"How long," I said slowly, "until the next Varantum courier?"
Ren thought about it. "Four days. They run on the first and fifteenth."
Four days.
I picked up my pencil.
Set it down.
Picked it up again.
"Then we have four days," I said, "to become the most boring, harmless, architecturally obsessed child in the history of this kingdom."
Ren stared at me.
"We're going to actually build something, aren't we," he said. It wasn't a question.
"We're going to actually build something."
"Something castle related."
"Something very visibly, very obviously, very boringly castle related."
"That has nothing to do with weapons."
"That has absolutely nothing to do with weapons."
A pause.
"And the flintlock?"
I looked at the loose floorboard.
"Goes deeper," I said.
Ren closed his eyes briefly. The expression of a man updating his risk assessment and not enjoying the new numbers. Then he opened them, straightened up, and nodded once.
"Four days," he said.
"Four days," I confirmed.
I began writing furiously. Real architectural plans this time — a genuine forge expansion, a drainage improvement for the east courtyard, a reinforced gate mechanism. Boring. Practical. Completely above board. The kind of thing an enthusiastic child architect would design.
The candle on my desk flickered.
Once.
Neither of us looked at it.
We both noticed.
Neither of us said anything.
Outside, somewhere in the castle, a courier was probably already being arranged. Four days away, in the capital of an empire that was rotting from the inside but still had enough teeth to be dangerous, someone would read whatever Varro wrote.
And they would either find it boring.
Or they wouldn't.
First level boss, I thought, pencil moving fast across the page. And he just made his first move.
My turn.