The Great Hall of the Royal Palace was, Remus decided within the first ten seconds of walking into it, precisely as absurd as everything else about Newtown, marble patterned in swirls no human quarry had produced and columns thick enough to hide a small building behind, all of it, according to the story every guide in the city insisted on repeating, built by a full contingent of Dwarven masons borrowed from a Dwarf King who'd apparently had nothing better to do with his own people for several years running than gift a human king's ego a monument.
Andrea walked half a step behind him, entirely unmoved by the marble, entirely moved, if her expression was any guide, by the sheer number of guards stationed along the hall's length watching them both.
The King sat small on a throne clearly built for a much larger man, his mother standing close enough beside him that the arrangement read as custody rather than counsel, and it was the Queen-Mother who spoke first, exactly as Remus had expected she would.
"I'm surprised you'd come here," she said. "That's either very bold or very foolish of you."
"You've spent considerable time and gold trying to ruin my business," Remus said. "The least I can do is return the visit in person."
Her scowl flickered across her face and vanished in under a second, the reflex of a woman entirely unused to being answered rather than deferred to, and before she could say anything further the King raised one small hand and cut her off cold.
"Have you brought tribute?" the boy asked, voice still carrying the thin, unbroken register of a child. "I'd like your finest sword for my own collection. I'm told you studied every enchantment in my vault."
"Is that why you dismissed General Tacitus?" Remus asked.
"I dismissed no one," the King said, genuinely puzzled, and Remus watched the confusion cross his young face with something like real pity underneath the calculation, a boy who clearly hadn't been told the half of what was happening in his own name.
"Then who did, Your Highness?" Remus asked, and made a point, deliberately, of not looking at the King while he said it, keeping his eyes fixed instead on the Queen-Mother, whose expression cracked from contempt into something raw and afraid before she could stop it happening in front of the whole hall.
The King followed his gaze, and understood.
"Escort my mother to her chambers," he said, quiet, and something in his voice had gone entirely unchildlike in the space of a single sentence. "See that she doesn't leave them."
She tried to protest once, and fell silent the moment she realized her own son wasn't going to listen.
"As for you," the King said, turning back to Remus, "I won't have anyone in this kingdom mistaken for a rival to my own authority. You're banned from Oldtown and Newtown both, effective today. I'd suggest a great deal of caution from here on."
Remus took the advice at face value and left.
"I need a better position than the one I'm standing in," he told Tacitus that evening, back at Autumnshade, the two of them alone by the forge's last coals. "Who actually holds power in this kingdom, if not the King himself?"
"The Ruling Council," Tacitus said. "My replacement, General Caligula. Raasmus, High Priest of the Drowned Faith. Midas of the Banking Guild. Nimir of the Merchants. Old Pompey, of course. And Arthur, newly installed at the head of the Adventurer's Guild."
"Pompey's already mine," Remus said. "Nimir cares about nothing but margin, and I've already learned exactly how to speak that language to him. Midas and the Dwarves who run his guild are harder, they want prestige as much as profit, but I think I know a single proposal that solves both problems at once."
"How?" Tacitus asked.
"One word," Remus said. "Railroads."
Item Created: 1/8 Scale Train Model.
Three days later Nimir and Midas both sat across a workshop table from him, Nimir sharp-eyed and half-elven, leaning forward with obvious hunger, Midas a stout, grey-bearded dwarf whose entire manner suggested a man who'd spent decades assuming every proposal in front of him was secretly worse than it looked and had rarely been proven wrong.
"Gentlemen," Remus said, "I have a way to move goods and people across this entire kingdom faster and more comfortably than anything currently on any road, and a great deal of profit attached to doing it."
"Profit interests me considerably," Nimir said.
"Profit alone doesn't move me," Midas said, arms crossed. "What's in this for prestige, boy?"
Remus set the model on the table between them and let the small engine pull its eight tiny carriages twice around a short loop of track before he answered, watching both men's faces the whole time, cataloguing exactly which detail caught each of them.
"Imagine crossing between cities in the comfort of a fine hotel room instead of a jolting cart," Remus said. "And imagine your own Guild's name attached to the first line ever built in this kingdom's history, a monument that outlasts every one of us in this room, marble columns included. The Banking Guild provides the capital. The Merchant Guild provides the coal and iron, since I doubt Duke Corvath would deal with me directly given our history. I design and build everything myself. We split every coin of profit three ways."
Midas turned the model engine over once in his own thick fingers, weighing it the way Remus imagined the man weighed everything.
"I believe we have an agreement," he said.
"I concur," Nimir said.
Item Created: Train Engine. Item Created: Train Tracks. Item Created: Passenger Carriages. Item Created: Goods Carriages.
The line went up faster than any of the three of them had privately expected, connecting Oldtown's new hub outward to Quinoa, Ashcairn, and Dauru in turn, and within the month Remus found himself, almost incidentally, one of the wealthiest men in the entire kingdom, a fact that struck him as considerably less satisfying than he'd have guessed it would back when satisfaction was still theoretical.
Pompey brought him one final piece of news a week after the line's opening ceremony, delivered without preamble over a cup of tea neither of them particularly wanted. "The Queen-Mother's regency has been formally dissolved," the old dwarf said. "Quietly, no proclamation, no trial. The boy king had her moved to a family holding in the Northlands three days ago, a manor with excellent gardens and no seat on any council whatsoever. He didn't have her killed. I suspect that was the mercy he could afford to show her and the only one he was willing to."
Remus turned that over the way he turned over every ending that arrived secondhand instead of on the page in front of him, and found, somewhere underneath the relief, a small, uncomfortable flicker of recognition: a woman who'd spent her whole reign hoarding control rather than risking any of it, undone in the end by exactly the habit that had kept her in power for so long.
He didn't examine that thought for very long. Through the window behind him, a rider was already crossing the courtyard in Eastland colors, moving with an unhurried confidence that suggested he already knew exactly how unwelcome the letter in his satchel was about to be, and whatever quiet Remus thought he'd just earned himself was, visibly, already over.
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