Jessica awoke from a light and uncomfortable sleep to a knock at her door. She moved to untangle herself from snake coils before remembering she didn’t need to.

  “His Majesty would like to see you,” said the page boy at the door.

  “I’ll bet he would,” she mumbled.

  After so many days of blissful sleep, Jessica was back to operating at grad school levels. This time without coffee. Some things sadly could not be synthesized, like the smell and taste of a nice, thick, tarry cup of budget coffee. She could synthesize caffeine in a pinch, but it required literal urine so it was not high on her priority list.

  Tucking away her plans for urea-based synthetic coffee, Jessica tidied herself up and headed for the throne room.

  “My concubine, after careful deliberation and thought, I have decided to appoint you the head of an expedition to exterminate the rebels and bandits calling themselves the Slave and Serf Liberation Army. If you come back with proof that they will permanently cease their raids, you and your retainers will be given a full pardon,” the King proclaimed in his booming voice.

  Queen Samara—looking thoroughly hungover—whispered something in his ear.

  “And it would behoove you to remember that your harem members’ lives will be forfeit should you attempt to flee.”

  Jessica nodded. After that came the matter of what this expedition would actually entail. Even though she was the originator, Jessica had no idea. She’d proposed it to help free Riza and Naga. The details were supposed to come later. It was now, sadly, later.

  “You have no idea what you’re doing, do you?” Chad asked, Adam's apple dipping up and down his papery throat like an excited turkey.

  “I do, but my plan is to negotiate directly with them. That’s why I said ‘get them to stop’ rather than ‘exterminate’.”

  Chad laughed uproariously which drew a few chuckles from the other advisors.

  “You’re going to ask these bandits politely to stop? Why, I’d never thought of that! Perhaps we should’ve tried that with the Demon King,” Chad said.

  Jessica folded her arms. “There’s an adventurer leading them. I’m certain of it. No one from Tushita would come up with a name that sounds like it belongs to an African warlord’s personal militia. If I can get in contact with them I can likely talk sense into them. Is that a good enough plan, cue ball?”

  The folds of Chad’s bald head wrinkled but before he could fire back at her King Capra rapped his knuckles against his throne.

  “This would entail the least loss of life. If Jessica is correct and these are indeed the affairs of adventurers, we would do well to stay out of them. No good has ever come from Tushitans inserting themselves between adventurers. And, assuming she is wrong, we will have time to prepare military action,” the King said in a rare moment of good sense.

  “And if she betrays us, Your Majesty, what then?” Chad replied. “Suppose she knows we’ll discover her guilt and plans to retaliate by way of the SSLA?”

  “If she does, we will execute her harem members.”

  “Believe me, I have no interest in larping as a warlord,” Jessica added.

  Given there were people who reincarnated in Tushitan and only wanted to farm or blacksmith, it stood to reason there were some who wanted the exact opposite. Probably some edgy teenager who got reincarnated in 2012 and had Kony on the brain. She wasn’t sure how to convince someone like that to listen to her, but getting into their camp would at least allow her to report back on any weaknesses she found.

  After this was settled, it was determined Jessica should have a military escort up to Fort Neusa, at which point she would take off on her own so as not to spook the bandits. And since the fort could be made in a day, she was to set off immediately.

  There were, however, two items of business to finish before she could leave. The first was training a replacement pharmacist to administer the queen’s morphine in the correct dosage. Jessica made sure to choose a butler she neither knew nor cared about. She was leaving no weak spots for Mystiferia to target.

  The second item was figuring out what to do with John. Her first thought was to leave him in hiding in the hopes he would pass under Mystiferia’s radar.

  Jessica thought this over while she packed and saddled Burnish, plying the stallion with as many mint candies as she could spare for riding him so hard the past few days. While doing so, she heard footsteps behind her.

  “Headed out to capture some bandits, I heard?” Mystiferia said.

  Jessica’s neck tightened. She spun around to face the elf warden but fury robbed her of anything to say. While she glared silently, Mystiferia sauntered over to Burnish and stroked the horse along his head and neck. Her long pink nails left imprints in his blood-orange coat.

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  “You wouldn’t have to go to so much trouble if you tell me where Morkal is,” she said, her tone soft and pleasant. “That’s all you have to do.”

  “As I already told the king, Morkal’s body in Barleyfield has probably moved on. I haven’t been in contact with her for at least a month now.”

  Mystiferia reached up and pinched both of Jessica’s cheeks. “Ooh! We both know that’s not true, don’t we?”

  Jessica wanted to shove her away, but she’d had enough practice yesterday controlling her anger to let the impulse pass. Instead, she reached up to Mystiferia’s dainty wrists and pulled them away from her cheeks, though her untrimmed nails might have gotten in on the action just a bit.

  “So rough today! Is something the matter?” Mystiferia asked. “It’s not the late Master Galloway, is it? Just a word of advice, I wouldn’t look too distraught about an executed traitor. People might get the wrong impression.”

  “He had a granddaughter!”

  Mystiferia smiled. “I know. I used to watch Bonnie run around the courtyard playing adventurer. She’ll be very distraught when she learns what her dear grandpa has done.”

  Jessica stared in disbelief. Not even amongst the most dead-eyed, sociopathic defense contractor recruiters had she seen such naked evil. The fact that Mystiferia convinced everyone else not to see it was an unbelievable feat of social manipulation.

  “I see the cat’s got your tongue so I’ll be off. Oh! Before I forget, I have a little parting gift for you.”

  Mystiferia held out a small pink box tied closed with a purple ribbon. Something about the box made her skin crawl. She accepted it the way she would a dead lizard from a cat. She was about to throw it away when Mystiferia tutted.

  “I wouldn’t do that if I were you. You should at least open it,” she said.

  Suppressing her urge to throw it away, Jessica unbound the ribbon and opened the box, aiming it toward Mystiferia in case it was a trap. When nothing sprung out, she looked inside. There, nestled into pink satin, was a severed finger. Bile rose in her throat. The sharp, blue-white nail at the end could belong to no one but Riza.

  Underneath the finger was a blood-spattered chibi drawing of Mystiferia sticking her tongue out and flashing a peace sign. Jessica shut the box. Knowing Mystiferia wanted a reaction, she kept her face stone cold, tucked the box into her saddlebags, and mounted Burnish.

  “Don’t worry, I won’t make you wait long to regret that,” Jessica said as she left.

  The two castle guards comprising Jessica’s escort joined her at the castle gate and together they rode up to the city. As soon as they were out of the tunnel, however, Jessica stopped to throw up in some bushes.

  “You alright?” one of the escorts asked.

  “Nope. But thanks for asking,” she said, spitting out the rest and re-filling her mouth with mint candies. There was no way she could leave John behind now.

  “Why are we stopping here?” her escorts asked when she pulled up to the inn.

  “Business,” Jessica replied.

  Within two minutes she had John in tow behind her. The look on her face as she hauled him up onto Burnish told both guards not to ask about it.

  “What’s going on?” John said as they turned back onto the King’s Road.

  “Long story. I’ll give you the short version now and the rest later,” Jessica said.

  The short version was everything except Morkal and Mystiferia. She planned to tell him about them too, but only after they ditched the guards.

  John glanced between her two escorts. “You’re not in trouble, are you?”

  “Not any more than I already was,” she lied.

  Taking the hint that they weren’t amongst friends, John stayed quiet. Jessica wasn’t certain who was a mole for Mystiferia and who wasn’t, but until she crossed into Kantai, north of the Elsifeyan border, she was operating under the assumption it was everyone. That meant Mystiferia knew about John already.

  A few times during the journey the escorts attempted small talk. Mostly they wanted to know about Earth and what being a concubine was like and how the queen’s medicine worked. Jessica replied with one word answers and eventually they gave up.

  In the silence that followed she tried her best not to imagine what was happening to Riza and Naga right now. For the sake of her sanity she had to believe Mystiferia had some limits on her authority, that she couldn’t just tear her charges apart limb from limb. Or, at the very least, she had to believe Mystiferia wouldn’t maim her bargaining chips.

  Even Burnish was in a sour mood from having to slow his pace to that of the two non-war horses the guards were riding. When they arrived at Fort Neusa that evening, the entire party had an air of gloom over it that perplexed the soldiers who came to greet them.

  “Ya look like ya bring ill-tides,” said a soldier standing outside the stable door.

  “And you look like you need to open that goddamned door right now,” Jessica replied.

  The soldier snorted. “Alright, alright. Calm your horses! Well, he looks plenty calm. Maybe you oughta calm yourself inste— agh!”

  Jessica grabbed his padded shirt and squeezed Burnish’s sides to kick the horse into a trot. After dragging the guard along for a few seconds, she dropped him in the dirt. He promptly opened the stable doors for her.

  In preparation for tomorrow they were put up in the barracks. A special exception was given to Jessica on account of being a woman and she was given a room to herself at a nearby inn. At her insistence John was permitted to join her. She didn’t even care about the scandalous looks. All that mattered was that she had him in her sights.

  “A-Are are you sure this is okay?” John asked as she shut the door. “Being in a—”

  “John, we slept in the same room for almost a month,” she said, throwing her bags on the floor and kicking off her riding boots.

  “Well sure, but ma’ and pa’ were there and this—”

  Before he finished the sentence Jessica sat down on the bed and started crying.