Abruptly alone, Giddon didn’t know what to do with himself. He was so exhausted that while he was trying to decide, he began to fall asleep in the big chair. He’d just made it across the room and fallen onto the bed when she knocked again, then came storming in without waiting for his answer. She stopped in the middle of the room and stood there with her eyes on fire and her fists clenched, and Giddon was amazed, as he always was when she was angry, at how much power, fury, and force her person could convey.

“Do you know,” she said, “that a number of different Keepish importers have been buying the rock detritus from my silver mines for the past three years, for almost no money?”

“What?” said Giddon blearily, stupidly, but then he understood.

She pulled a piece of paper out of a pocket and waved it at him. “I thought it was odd,” she said, her voice rising, “but I’ve been too busy to focus on it. I figured they used it for some building process. Winterkeep doesn’t have our mountains, they don’t have our rock.”

“Of course,” said Giddon. “It was natural for you not to focus on it.”

“They have been stealing our zilfium!” she practically yelled, her body electric with rage. “They’ve been taking advantage of our ignorance of a resource far more valuable than silver! Tricking me, our miners, our scientists. You should see the names on this list! It’s practically every important family in Ledra! Balava Importing. Tima Importing. There’s even a Cavenda company on this list, probably some horrible relation of Katu’s! What kind of people do this? What kind of nation? My kingdom can’t help its backwardness,” she cried. “We were trapped under the reign of a psychopath who made monuments to himself and buried science and burned books and murdered anyone who tried to break free of it, for thirty-five years! Winterkeep has airships and brilliant schools and brilliant industries and I can’t even teach my people to read! And they saw that, and they saw my silver mines, and they decided to trick me out of wealth I had that I could’ve used. To fund a school, one as brilliant as the Winterkeep Academy!”

Giddon knew the tears running down her face were tears of fury. At the Keepish; at her father, King Leck; at her life; on behalf of the lives of everyone in Monsea who’d suffered. He went to her and put his arms around her.

“Tell me whom to kill,” he said.

That made her laugh, and the laughter transitioned her to the other kind of crying. The harder kind for Giddon, because it was about her grief, and he couldn’t lessen that.

“You’re doing everything any human being could do for Monsea,” he said. “More. You are being amazing.”