The campsite was set up soon after, and the four remaining members of my group sat around the fire pit in the center of camp. I had set up a rotisserie above the fire pit, and an elongated spark of Hellfire cooked a large plucked chicken that David had “found” back in Etron.

  “Can I get a bit more heat?” David asked as he manually rotated the rotisserie.

  “I’m a mage, not an oven,” I said as the Hellfire spark blazed a little bit brighter.

  “It’s your fault for being so oven-like,” David said with a smirk.

  I looked around at the camp, making sure there was nothing left to do. All the tents had been set up, the horses had been hitched, and the chicken wouldn’t be cooked for another fifteen minutes.

  “This seems like as good a time as any to bring it up,” I said. “When we get to town, I will start spreading rumors of my engagement to Haydith Thorn.”

  David immediately looked over to Haydith before turning back to me with a conspiratorial smile on his face. “You sly dog. Didn’t you two meet like three days ago? You work fast, old man. Maybe I should ask you for some pointers.”

  “It’s not like that,” Haydith said, her cheeks turning red. “It’s just, uh, you know…”

  “A political marriage,” Miriam said, finishing Haydith’s sentence. “You intend to use this engagement to signal House Feldrast’s cooperation with Haydith’s claim to the throne. Is that right, Thale?”

  I was surprised that Miriam was the first one to understand the situation. She was the one of us most familiar with the power politics of Etronian nobles. To them, using marriage for political purposes was not outside the realm of normalcy.

  “That’s the idea, though it was Haydith’s idea, not mine,” I said with crossed arms. “We’ll set the marriage to take place in a year so that the declaration of Haydith’s status as a princess will be released just as the controversy hits its peak.”

  With an excited smile on her face, Miriam said, “Congratulations on your engagement, Thale, Haydith.”

  I couldn’t stop myself from smiling. “Thank you, Miriam. Though I feel the need to tell you that this is merely a political marriage.”

  “Yes,” Haydith said hastily. “For now, we’re just doing this to make the battle for the throne easier. This isn’t a real engagement.”

  “For now…?” David said with one eyebrow ticked upward, prompting Haydith to smack his armored shoulder. I’m pretty sure she hurt herself more than David with that blow.

  Miriam put a finger to her lips before saying, “I don’t mean to sound rude, but I don’t see how this isn’t a real engagement. Nobles enter into political betrothals that may or may not end in marriage all the time. I mean…” a light laugh escaped through Miriam’s lips before she stopped herself. “Excuse me, I apologize. Before I left home, Solana had received more than a dozen marriage proposals, and I had received three. Thale, you don’t want to know how many you’ve received.”

  “That’s the nature of Etronian politics,” I said, realizing that Miriam was completely correct.

  “If I may ask, Thale,” Miriam said, looking at me directly, “what comes next? There is no doubt in my mind that you will be able to put Haydith on the throne. What will you do then? Do you intend to marry her?”

  Hearing my wallflower of a sister talk about marriage with such casualness unsettled me. I remembered when she would shrink back at the mention of butchered pigs or suffering dogs that had to be put down. If a little blood was enough to unsettle her, how could she treat marriage so flippantly?

  Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

  I blinked. Perhaps it was me who had the skewed priorities. Two days before, I had killed nine people, and yet the thought of marriage and sex was enough to make me blush like a schoolgirl.

  “I don’t know,” I said, coughing to cover up my embarrassment. “We’ll see when we get there.”

  That was partially a lie. For my plan to work, I would need to occupy a conspicuous place in the bureaucracy of Etronia, and the threat of my wide-range 9-Point Sorceries would need to be ever present. The nobles would need to know that I could destroy their homes at any time. I could best perform that duty at the side of the Queen of Etronia.

  “For now…” David said, chuckling to himself. “Sure, bud.”

  That time, I kicked David. It had even less effect than Haydith’s attack.

  “Anyway,” I said, forcefully changing the subject, “everybody should get ready for combat tomorrow. We’ll start our training regimen in a few hours. I plan for all of us to gain a few levels before we reach Fulvang.”

  “How?” David asked. “We’re in the middle of nowhere. There’s nothing to fight out here.”

  “You’ll see. Tomorrow, I’ll show all of you the best way to grind levels,” I said.

  With my [Hellfire] and David’s cooking skill, the rotisserie chicken was cooked to perfection. It turned out that years on a war footing with a hundred other soldiers had made David into a great cook.

  “Wait, I have something for this,” I said after taking the first bite of chicken. I walked over to my carriage and retrieved a large glass flask filled with a dark brown liquid, a large bronze bowl, and a small bag of sugar.

  After returning to the area around the fire pit, I dumped the brown liquid in the bowl and added a few hundred grams of sugar to the concoction. With a small wooden ladle, I mixed the sugar into the liquid as my three adventuring companions looked at me with confusion in their faces.

  “What are you doing?” David asked.

  “When we were in Etron, the other guy picked up some stuff while I was asleep. Here, taste this,” I said, holding the ladle out to David.

  “No way. That looks like…” he paused as the ladle got close enough for him to smell the concoction contained within. “Wait, is this…?”

  David quickly took the ladle from my hand and poured the liquid inside into his mouth.

  “It’s chocolate!” David called out as soon as he swallowed.

  “What is chocolate?” Miriam asked.

  “Chocolate?” Haydith said. “But I heard that chocolate doesn’t exist in Ferrum.”

  “That’s the thing,” I said. “Cocoa beans don’t grow in Rubigo or Saxum, but they do grow in Caligo. It’s really hard to get, but the other guy found it.”

  Haydith took a sip of the chocolate drink, and a quiet vocalization of pleasure escaped through her lips.

  “Why is it liquid?” David asked.

  “Chocolate is naturally liquid,” I explained while Miriam took a drink. She blinked, unsure of whether or not she liked the taste. “The tempering process to make it solid hasn’t been invented yet.”

  For the first time, I took a sip of my chocolate concoction. Immediately, I was reminded of the last time I had tasted a chocolate shake. That uncanny, nostalgic taste threatened to pull me back to my past life.

  “It reminds you of Earth, doesn’t it,” I said quietly.

  “Only the good parts,” David said.

  Haydith, David, and I drank all of the chocolate concoction in a few minutes. Miriam politely declined to drink any more.

  Once the chocolate was gone, Miriam asked, “Did you often eat chocolate on Earth?”

  Miriam pronounced the words “chocolate” and “Earth” with the uncertainty of someone who had only recently learned the words.

  “It was in everything,” Haydith said with a smile. “Almost all sweets used chocolate to some extent.”

  “Hmm,” Miriam said thoughtfully. “Did you all live in your world’s equivalent of Caligo?”

  “No,” I said, thinking about it for a second. “It might take a while to explain, but it’s really easy to move things thousands of miles on Earth. You can send packages to the other side of the world in a day, and you can send a letter in less than a second. Almost everything I ate or wore on Earth was made on the other side of…”

  Something about the taste of the chocolate concoction made me think of Earth, so I spent the next hour telling Miriam about Earth. I doubted she understood most of it, but she listened patiently.

  Soon after, I retired to my tent and fell asleep.