She’d stared at him, and he’d looked up at the long silence, raising an eyebrow at her.
“You’d do that for me?” she’d said then, her voice soft. Neither her father or her brother wanted to give her access to the Rakhmonov regiment, telling her ideas wereunproven, dangerous, unstable, just a bunch of scholars and crazy artificers encouraging you to spend your gold on their harebrained schemes, why can’t you just stay at home and scribble in your books like your mother, why do you need to rebel against your place in the world, don’t you know when to stop pushing?
Luka had just looked up absentmindedly with half an eyeroll, as if her question had been superfluous.
“Of course, Maya. I trust you.”
And that had been that. Within the week, Maya and her team of mages—some who had been working on their ideas for years without ever getting a chance to put them into practice—had gotten Luka’s sign off to work on the outdated weaponry of his regiment.
So now, as Maya walked down the halls of the Tsar’s castle, she was making plans in her head. She would need to find a mage to write out the spells she wanted to put onto the Stoneheart’s trebuchets.
Maya shuffled the papers she’d drawn up with her plans, hoping to submit them to Lord Yarek tonight. She’d even included the mage-powered crossbows she’d sketched out designs for, on a whim.
As the head of the war effort against Telluria, Lord Yarek was the one who would sign off on bringing her mage powered armaments into actual battle. They’d been tested enough and had proven themselves to her satisfaction, but in the end, it all came down to what Lord Yarek thought.
He’d agreed to giving her team an office at Rurik Castle so she could keep abreast of the war efforts—and so that he could keep an eye on the artificers working with her. It showed that Yarek had confidence in the team, but having an office where they worked out ideas and sketched their designs was still a long way away from putting their ideas into the field.
Still, it felt good to be given a seat at the metaphorical table. Maya knew her colleagues had been working on mage-powered weaponry for far longer than she had, butshehad the benefit of a noble name, and the advantage of being friends with the Second Prince to ensure that their ideas were suddenly granted a legitimate hearing, instead of being dismissed as the unrealistic theories of armchair bound academics.
It rankled a little, the idea that she had been chosen to join this team of artificers simply because of her last name, but she was confident that she had proven her worth in the three years she’d been with them. Just last week, her mentor Mister Utsev, had praised her idea for mage-powered trebuchets and suggested that she submit her plans to Lord Yarek.
She’d bribed Lord Yarek’s aide to place her plans on the top of the pile on the Commander’s desk, hoping Luka’s uncle would agree to a field test of her prototype. That had been a week ago, and she was expecting to hear back from him any day now.
Maya clenched a fist. He had to agree. He had to. She would do everything she could to make sure her friends came home safely.
The long, bitter border feud with Telluria had erupted into true bloodshed two weeks previously, and there was talk of regiments being sent to the front. This was the time for her ideas to be put into motion.
It was also the time for her to say goodbye to another one of her best friends as he rode off for war. Volkov had already left with his family regiment, the Volkonsky Wolves, under the command of his uncle. They’d shipped out to the front lines nearly a month ago, and every day, Maya lived with the anxiety bubbling in the back of her mind that Luka would be ordered to follow him to war.
Luka was eager to prove himself, eager to outshine his sister and her showing at the head of the Engelhart troops three years ago. The Crown Princess had never faced true battle, only a few border skirmishes where she’d emerged the victor. Luka was sure he would do better, ‘the princess never even sawtruebattle,’ he’d often scoffed.
As the heir to the throne, the princess was to remain safe at Rurik castle. Similarly, Nikolai had remained in Rakhmonov with their father, while her uncle had taken the regiment to join the others at the front lines.
Volkov, cousin to the heir to the Volkov province, had shipped out two weeks before.
Volkov had written to her only once since he’d been posted out, and she’d sensed, behind his overly cheerful words and his sprawling script across the pages, that there was more to the realities of war than what had been taught to them at the academy.
She’d always known it, of course, and once, she would have welcomed the chance to find out for herself as she joined the Rakhmonov regiment, but ever since she’d made her decision to shift focus to developing mage-powered weaponry, the thought of war had slipped to the back of her mind. Especially since there had not been a true war with Telluria for decades.
But now, suddenly, all her classmates were being pressed into service, and her best friends were being sent off to war. There was a part of her that missed it, the idea of sharing this experience with her friends, but there was a larger part of her that raged at the fact that she would be left waiting for her friends while they left her behind, and she would have no way of knowing what was happening on the front lines.
There had to be a better way of getting messages back to capital, better than messenger hawks and carrier pigeons, at least. Mage-teleportation spells were too much effort to send simple letters back and forth, not when mana exhaustion could mean the difference between victory and defeat.
Well, if there was no way, she would find one. She was an inventor, after all.
Shaking away her anxieties about Volkov on the front lines, Maya hastened her walk down to Luka’s office. Maybe he was free to have tea with her and look over her list with her.
There was also the other project she was working on, her secret project, a set of mage powered armor for Luka. It was still a prototype, and it took more magical power to keep the strength protections running than she had hoped, but if it all worked out, it would help Luka be more protected on the frontlines. The body armor could take more impact than a normal set of armor. Once it was a success, she’d make one more for Volkov, of course.
She’d worked with Mister Utsev to customize the spells on Luka’s armor to be easy for a stone mage like him to use, one of the first things her mage colleagues had taught her was that it was easier for magic users to speak incantations of their own element.
Maya was confident to eventually make pieces of armor that could be customized individually, but until then, she would stick to working on keeping her best friends safe.
Luka had tried to get her to reveal her secret project, sneaking looks at her notes, trying to pry it out of her colleagues, but Maya had thwarted him at every turn, giggling gleefully to herself at the thought of Luka’s face when he finally saw what she’d made for him.
Maya was just going over it again in her head, making lists of what she wanted to have ready for Luka before he was called to war, when she caught movement out of the corner of her eye.
She turned her head and saw the Second Queen in the royal sitting room. Luka was standing at the window, his back to his mother. Frowning, she entered the room.
