Lydia's warning stayed with her, an incessant echo in her mind. Your veil is thin. Mind the wind. The wind could be Kaelen's suspicion, Vivel's maneuvering, or the truth itself, blowing ever stronger. To protect herself, she needed to act with Anya's ruthless decisiveness. And that meant moving the first real piece on her board: the Thorne silver mines.
The journey to the Highlands took three days. Elara led a small party: her guard, some treasury officials, and, by order of the Council, Commander Kaelen, whose lands bordered the region.
His presence was torture. Every glance exchanged on the road, every clipped conversation about routes and security, was charged with that unasked question that never left the air between them. She remained distant, imperial, buried in maps and production reports she did not see.
The landscape changed. The fertility of the royal valley gave way to arid, rocky hills cut by deep gorges. The air grew colder and carried a constant scent of turned earth, broken stone, and something metallic and sour. The smell of silver. And also the smell of sweat and desperation.
The mining complex was an open wound in the mountainside. A series of dark entrances, hungry mouths gouged into the rock, surrounded by rotting wooden sheds, primitive forges, and slag heaps that looked like graves. Workers—men, women, young faces—moved like exhausted ants, their thin bodies coated in a grey dust that made them seem like ghosts. Most were Magicless, displaced from their lands, now bound in contract servitude.
The Duke of Thorne, a large man with small eyes and a smile full of gold teeth, greeted her with a pomp that clashed with the place. Expensive carpets laid over bare dirt. Elara ignored him, demanding to see the shafts, the ledgers, the smelters.
It was inside the Main Shaft that the air shifted. The workers' resigned weariness hardened into a silent tension. They clustered, eyes downcast but with a sullen glint, watching the clean-mantled empress surrounded by gleaming soldiers.
And then he appeared.
Not as the observing mercenary from the Field of Mars, but as one of them. Face smeared with soot, clothes torn, but with the same shrewd green eyes. Soren stepped forward from a group hauling timber.
"Fine visit we've got, mates!"
His voice echoed in the shaft, cutting the thick air.
"The very architect of our yoke come to inspect the foundations!"
Elara's guards tensed. Kaelen, beside her, moved half a step forward, an instinctive barrier.
"Silence!" the Duke of Thorne snarled. "Back to work!"
"What work?"
Soren shot back, spreading his arms.
"Digging your wealth with our fingernails while our children eat rock-dust and bran? Breathing this dust that eats us from the inside for coppers that won't buy bread?"
He turned directly to Elara. The look was not reverence. It was a challenge.
"And you, 'Great Founder.' You who forge empires with decrees. Have you ever gone down one of these tunnels? Felt the ceiling groan over your head? Seen a man crushed by rock because the foreman demanded one more cart before dark?"
Elara felt each word like a blow. She knew of the exploitation. It was the fuel for the empire she herself would help consolidate. The resistance Soren would one day lead was born in places like this. She stood face-to-face with the suffering her historical machine required.
To maintain Anya, she had to crush it.
"Do you have a name?"
Her voice came out cold as the surrounding stone.
"They call me Soren. And I speak for those too tired to speak."
"Then listen, Soren, who speaks for others," she said, projecting each word with an icy authority that made her tremble inside. "This complex fuels the realm's economy. The silver pays the soldiers guarding our borders. The labor law is clear. Contracts are signed."
"Contracts written by men who've never swung a pick!"
A shout came from the crowd.
She saw Kaelen look at her, his face a mask, but his eyes searching for something. Compassion? Repression? She could show neither.
"Law is the backbone of order," she declared. "Insubordination is a cancer. Captain."
She turned to the captain of Thorne's guard.
"Detain this man. Those others inciting this unrest will have their rations halved for a week. An example must be made."
The order left her lips like iron shavings. Inside, something broke. She saw Soren's eyes, not with fear, but with a cold, calculated hatred. He let himself be taken without a fight, his green gaze fixed on her as if etching every line of her face.
The tension in the shaft dissolved into an oppressive, rancor-filled silence. Work resumed, slower, heavier. The smell of fear mixed with the dust.
The walk back to the Duke's pavilion was silent. Elara felt the weight of Kaelen's gaze on her back. When they were momentarily alone, in the shadow of a shed, he spoke, his voice low.
"Quick repression can smother a spark, Your Highness. But smoldering coal under ash can flare later. With greater force."
She turned to him.
"You suggest I should have been lenient? Bargained with an insurgent before a hundred others?"
"No," he said, his grey eyes dark. "I suggest smoldering coal needs a vent, not more weight. Cutting the rations of families already starving… that is not order. It is cruelty."
The word hung between them. Cruelty. The same she had associated with the historical Anya. And she had ordered it.
"Strength must be demonstrated, Commander," she replied, her voice hollow. "Or all will challenge it."
He merely nodded, a slow movement, and his gaze shifted away from her, fixing on the slag heaps, on the misery around them. He said nothing more, but the space between them, in that moment, seemed wider than the gorge splitting the mountains.
That night, in the opulent quarters Thorne had arranged, Elara did not sleep. Soren's face, the hatred in the workers' eyes, Kaelen's word cruelty—all spun in her head. She had acted as Anya. She had to. But the princess Elara, the one who had studied ethics and wept over lesser injustices, was screaming inside her.
She could not undo the order. It would be a fatal show of weakness. But perhaps…
By candlelight, her handwriting subtly shifting to something less angular, closer to her princess script, she wrote a letter. She used no official parchment or her seal. Simple paper, folded, common wax.
It was addressed to the Monastery of Saint Aldric, an order known for discreet charity. The letter, anonymous but urgent, pleaded for them to use funds to purchase food and medicine for the families of the Thorne mine workers, especially the injured or those with rations cut. The donation was to be attributed to a "penitent anonymous benefactor."
It was a risk. A tenuous thread of atonement. But she had to cast it. To plant this small seed of compassion in the field of ash she was creating.
She sent the letter with a night messenger, under orders of discretion.
In the morning, as they prepared to depart, the atmosphere in the mines was still icy. The workers shrank back, eyes down, but she felt the hatred in the air, mixed with the dust.
As she mounted up, an older worker, a man with a face scarred and ingrained with grime, broke from the line to heave a sack near the retinue. His eyes, red and weary, met hers.
He did not bow. He did not look away. And he spat the words in a hoarse whisper only she and Kaelen, beside her, could hear:
"You'll pay for this, witch."
Then he turned his back and blended into the grey dust, disappearing like a ghost among the sheds.
Kaelen stood motionless beside her, his expression impenetrable. Elara gathered her reins, giving the signal to move out, her face a mask of granite.
But inside her chest, where Elara's heart beat beneath Anya's armor, the man's words echoed, mingling with Lydia's whisper and Vivel's calculating gaze. She was sowing the wind. And the first gusts were already beginning to howl, laden with the dust of her own actions and the hatred of those she was forced to oppress to save a future.