Rimelion: The Exploiter

The petitioner was explaining something about a well.

Or possibly a wall. Or a will. One of those W-words that meant two families had been screaming at each other for long enough that someone finally decided the Queen should hear about it, because apparently the Queen didn’t have enough things slowly killing her from the inside.

I sat on my throne of frozen misery, spine committing quiet treason against me, and nodded.

Lola’s assistant, an elven woman named Vessith who had inherited Lola’s clipboard energy without any of Lola’s warmth, stood at the base of the dais, addressing the petitioner with patience.

“The Aurenthil family’s claim to the eastern parcel predates the Mivani lease by fourteen years,” Vessith was saying, one finger tracing something on her tablet. “However, the Mivani family’s improvements to the irrigation—”

The petitioner, a middle-aged man with the posture of someone who had rehearsed his grievance in a mirror, cut in. “Improvements! She calls them improvements! They diverted the stream, Your Majesty. Diverted it! My grandfather’s orchard—”

“—has been fallow for nine years,” Vessith finished, without looking up.

I nodded again. Regal. Engaged. Definitely following every word.

I was thinking about Pearl.

Specifically, about the way she’d looked at Lucas in the changing room corridor. The moment after Lucas had stepped out in the sweater and stood there, pink-faced, quietly smiling at his own reflection, and Pearl had gone still.

Just for a second. Just long enough for the performance to drop and the real thing to show through.

I’d never seen Pearl that happy.

Not in this life, and not in the one before it.

And I’d known Pearl a long time. The previous timeline Pearl had been bright even then, but this was different. This was Pearl without the armor. Pearl, who had someone she could build something with instead of just surviving next to.

Lucas had changed.

That was the thing I kept circling back to, sitting on my frozen nightmare of a chair while Vessith explained property law to a man whose grandfather’s orchard hadn’t produced fruit in nearly a decade. Lucas had changed in ways I hadn’t expected, because in the old timeline, Lucas hadn’t changed at all.

He’d gotten worse.

We both had, if I was honest about it, which I mostly tried not to be.

I’d been an alcoholic. I drank because the world was broken and I couldn’t fix it, and sitting with that knowledge sober was like holding a hot coal with no place to set it down.

Lucas had been worse.

Well. Kind of. He’d been further gone, deeper in, with fewer people reaching for him. I’d had friends who dragged me out of it, eventually, or at least dragged me sideways into something that wasn’t dying as fast. Lucas had had Pearl, and Pearl had tried, and it hadn’t been enough, because some things aren’t fixable by one person loving you very hard.

But here. In this life. In this stupid, impossible, beautiful second chance, Lucas was standing in a shop, trying on a sweater. Not drinking copious amounts of vodka.

“—and furthermore,” the petitioner continued, voice rising, “the Mivani family’s eldest daughter has been—”

The doors to the Grand Hall slammed open. Not opened. Slammed. “QUEEN!”

Every head in the room turned.

Yuki stood in the doorway, golden-pink hair wild, fox ears bolt upright and trembling, three dawn-light tails fanned out behind her like she’d been sprinting and they hadn’t gotten the memo to stop. She was breathing hard, clutching a leather satchel to her chest with both arms, and her eyes were enormous.

Behind her, two guards skidded into view, looking harried and deeply conflicted about whether tackling someone with divine fox ears constituted a court-martialable offense.

“I FOUND HER!” Yuki announced to the entire Grand Hall, the words ringing off the vaulted ceiling.

Silence.

The petitioner stared. Vessith stared. The five tables of assistants stared. One of the assistants’ quills kept moving for a few seconds after the rest of her had stopped, scratching out a ghost-line of ink before going still.

The Custodian, standing near the front, turned to look at Yuki with the expression of a man watching someone track mud across a floor.

Yuki’s tails were vibrating.

“Stand down,” I said to the guards. They hesitated, glanced at each other, and stepped back. I looked at Yuki. She was practically bouncing, the satchel clutched to her like a newborn, ears swiveling independently.

Then I looked at the petitioner.

I had no idea what his problem was. None. Not even a little. But I’d been nodding for ten minutes, which meant I’d made a commitment to the bit, and I was going to see it through.

“I’m deeply sorry,” I said, and I put real weight behind it. “This situation sounds... painful.” The man’s expression softened. Good. “Vessith,” I continued, turning to Lola’s assistant. “I’m empowering you to resolve this on my behalf. Full authority. Whatever solution you’ve already figured out, implement it.”

Vessith’s stoic professional smile didn’t change, but something in her posture straightened. She inclined her head. “As you say, Your Majesty.”

The petitioner opened his mouth.

“The Crown takes your concerns seriously,” I said, standing up from the frozen abomination. My spine made a sound. “Vessith is among my most trusted. You’re in excellent hands.”

I was already moving.

Yuki fell into step beside me, tails streaming behind her. We crossed the Grand Hall toward the main doors, and I could feel the weight of the room watching us; the assistants, the Custodian, the petitioner with his unsolved well-wall-will problem.

Outside the doors, the corridor opened into the anteroom where the remaining petitioners waited.

There were about a dozen of them. Some sitting on the stone benches, some standing in small clusters, all of them wearing the specific expression of people who had been waiting long enough to develop opinions about it.

They looked up as I emerged.

I stopped.

“I’m sorry,” I said, and meant it. “Something has come up that requires my personal attention. I won’t be able to hold the audience today.”

A few frowns, murmurs. One woman in the back crossed her arms.

Nobody objected.

They’d all been in the city when I took it. I wasn’t threatening anyone; I was just standing there. But standing there was enough, apparently, because the anteroom emptied in under a minute with a speed that would have been impressive if it weren’t slightly depressing.

The doors closed behind the last of them.

I turned to Yuki.

She was vibrating. There was no other word for it. Her ears were doing independent rotations, her tails were swaying in three different rhythms, and her fingers were white-knuckled on the satchel strap. She looked like a scholar who had been told to hold in the most exciting discovery of her career for ninety consecutive seconds and was about to structurally fail.

“Okay,” I said. “Go.”

She exploded.

“So I started with the Altandai administrative archives, obviously, because Kia was a Senior Artificer and they kept employment records going back almost three hundred years, and they’re indexed by department so I found her file in the first hour, but then—oh!—the file cross-referenced a procurement ledger for the Thalvirea complex, and the ledger had requisition codes that didn’t match standard Altandai supply chains, and I followed those codes into the trade commission records, and that’s where it got interesting, because—”

She stopped, took a breath, and her tails resettled.

“The River Kingdom did it on purpose, Charlie.”

“The sabotage.”

“The sabotage! Kia was right, and I can prove it, I found the actual diplomatic correspondence—” She pulled a sheaf of papers from the satchel, nearly dropping two of them, catching one with her tail. “It was so satisfying, Charlie, because the evidence trail is—okay. Okay. Let me start from the beginning.”

“Please.”

“The Queen of the River Kingdom was sick.”

I waited.

“Like, really sick. Degenerative. The court physicians couldn’t treat it. But the best healers in the region—the best healers on the continent, actually, and this was documented in three separate sources so I’m very confident—were in Altandai.”

“Okay,” I said.

“But here’s the problem.” Yuki’s eyes were doing the thing they did when she was building toward a connection she found thrilling. “The Black Grandmaster of Altandai at the time—this would have been Grandmaster Phelion, who held the position for forty-one years, which is a long tenure even by Altandai modern standards—was jealous.”

“Of the River Kingdom?”

“Of their prized bust!” She said this as if it explained everything. “There was a sculpture—a famous one—carved by—”

I held up a hand.

“Yuki.”

She stopped.

Ears up.

Tails frozen mid-sway.

“Is this important? The bust?”

“Yes!” she said immediately, with the absolute conviction of someone who believed all historical context was important, always, without exception.

I looked at her.

“...It connects,” she said, slightly smaller. “I promise it connects.”

“Okay,” I said. “Keep going. But walk with me.”

I turned toward Queen’s Square. The late-afternoon light was doing something golden to the rooftops, the light that made even Altandai’s architecture look like it was trying to forgive itself.

The square was alive with the low hum of commerce, stalls and carts, and merchants.

Scamantha’s cart loomed at the far edge, three chimneys puffing their usual conspiracy of colored smoke. The cats were in their positions.

I steered us toward the cluster of smaller stalls nearby. Yuki kept pace, satchel bouncing against her hip, tails streaming.

“So the Queen was sick,” she continued, words coming faster, “and the Altandai healers were the best option. But Grandmaster Phelion refused to send them. Not officially—he didn’t deny the request, he just... stalled. Buried it in diplomatic procedure. Required seventeen forms of attestation. You know the type.”

Lola might like him.

“And the reason—the real reason, according to two separate court correspondence archives and one very gossipy trade envoy’s personal diary—was that the River Kingdom possessed a bust of the Architect Vaelith. Carved from living crystal. One of maybe four in existence.” Her voice dropped reverently. “It was magnificent, Charlie. The descriptions alone—”

“Yuki.”

“Right. So Phelion wanted the bust. He’d wanted it for years. And he saw the Queen’s illness as leverage.”

I stopped at a tea stall. A quiet one, wedged between a leather merchant and someone selling what appeared to be enchanted wind chimes. The vendor was an older woman with steady hands.

“Two cups,” I said, pointing at the nearest blend without reading the label. “Whatever this is.”

The vendor nodded and began pouring.

I turned back to Yuki. “So the Grandmaster held the healers hostage for a statue.”

“A bust,” Yuki corrected, as if the distinction mattered enormously, which to her it absolutely did. “And yes. Essentially. He created conditions that—well, because when he was younger—”

“Yuki.”

“—created conditions that were completely unreasonable,” Yuki said, the words tumbling out as she followed me to a bench near the tea stall. “He demanded the bust be delivered by a diplomatic envoy of no fewer than twelve ranked officials, accompanied by a formal written admission that Altandai’s cultural heritage was—and I’m quoting the actual document here—‘superior in permanence and artistic merit to the transient traditions of riverborne peoples.’”

“He wanted them to grovel.”

“He wanted them to grovel in writing.”

I sat down. The bench was stone, sun-warmed, and infinitely more comfortable than my throne. Yuki dropped beside me, satchel in her lap, tails arranging themselves around her as if they were settling in for a long lecture.

The vendor brought our tea. Two small cups, pale green, faintly steaming.

I took a sip.

Mint. Clean with something underneath, a warmth that wasn’t temperature. A tiny trace of mana woven into the brew, barely enough to notice, just enough to make the flavor feel like it was happening slightly more than normal. Like the tea was paying extra attention to being tea.

It was actually lovely.

I took another sip and let Yuki continue.

“So the River Kingdom refused. Obviously. The terms were humiliating. Months of back-and-forth, counter-proposals, diplomatic envoys getting increasingly passive-aggressive—I found six separate letters where the same River Kingdom ambassador used the phrase ‘with the deepest respect’ in a way that clearly meant the opposite—”

“Yuki.”

“Right.” She took a breath. Her ears flattened briefly, the universal Yuki signal for I know I’m doing it again. “Eventually... they agreed. They lent the bust. The full ceremony, the twelve officials, the written statement. All of it. They did everything Phelion asked.”

She paused.

“But it was too late.”

I looked at her.

“The Queen died,” Yuki said quietly. “Three days before the Altandai healers arrived. They’d stalled so long with the negotiations that by the time the conditions were met and the healers were finally dispatched...” She trailed off, then straightened. “The healers arrived on the same day as the funeral procession. The River Kingdom court sent them home at the gates.”

The mint lingered on my tongue.

“Phelion didn’t take it well,” Yuki continued, and there was an edge to her voice now. “He considered the rejection of the healers a diplomatic insult. Despite—and I want to be very clear about this—despite the fact that the entire situation was his fault. He used his trade connections to divert merchant routes away from the River Kingdom. Pressured allied city-states to renegotiate contracts.”

“So they hit back.”

“So they hit back. The mine sabotage was a message aimed at Altandai’s resource extraction operation.” She pulled a folded page from her satchel. “The corruption signatures Kia identified in her logs match exactly with the River Kingdom magitech patterns documented in border-dispute records from the same period.”

I held the tea in both hands and stared at the square. Merchants calling prices. Wind chimes singing in the breeze. Scamantha’s cart puffing lavender smoke. A city that had survived a hundred and sixty years of its own bad decisions and was still, somehow, trying.

“A queen died because a man wanted a statue,” I said.

“A bust,” Yuki corrected softly. “But yes.”

I exhaled. “And now the River Kingdom is gone.”

“Dissolved eighty years ago. Absorbed into a confederacy after a succession crisis.” She said this as if she were reading a footnote. “The bust is still in the Altandai cultural archive, actually. I checked.”

“And I’m the Queen of Altandai.”

“You’re the Queen of Altandai,” Yuki confirmed, as if this were simply the next item in a very long historical timeline.

I nodded slowly. Took another sip of the mana-laced tea. “And her sister?”

“Hm?” Yuki was already shuffling through another page.

“Kia’s sister. Tira.”

“Oh,” Yuki said it the way she said oh when someone asked about the present instead of the past. “She lives near the south farms.”

The cup stopped halfway to my mouth.

“What?”

Yuki looked up. Her ears tilted. “She lives near the south farms. Small homestead. She’s in the agricultural census from last decade, actually, which is how I found her. The census cross-referenced with the Eastern Quarter residency logs, and once I had the family name, it was straightforward to—”

“Yuki.” I set the cup down on the bench. “She’s alive?”

Yuki blinked at me. “Yes?”

“Tira is alive. Kia’s sister. The sister from the log. The spoon sister. She’s alive, and she lives here?”

“Well, near the south farms, technically, which is about ten minutes by—”

“Yuki!”

“Elven people live a long time,” Yuki said with a small shrug. Her tails swayed mildly.

“She’s alive,” I repeated.

Yuki nodded, already turning back to her satchel. “But you should know that the farm she owns was in the past owned by—”