Chapter 102 – Are You Happy, Princess? (9)
Day Five: Underneath
Olivia
The stew was a liar.
It looked rich and comforting, deep red with strips of meat and softened vegetables, steam rising in gentle curls. It smelled intense, yes, but not like a challenge, just like food that cared about existing.
Tamara ate hers with quiet focus, only a thin sheen of sweat on her brow. Noelle sniffled and fanned her face, but every time her eyes watered she just muttered something rude about Erynd and took another spoonful. Lyra ate with that slow, controlled pace she had even in fights, jaw set, eyes half lidded, as if she was not about to let a bowl of stew win anything.
Olivia watched them, then looked at her own bowl.
You sat at the end of his bed and watched him last night, she reminded herself. You do not get to be afraid of breakfast.
She had sat at the end of the bed. Not in the doorway, not hiding, not pretending she had just wandered past by accident.
At the end of the bed.
The mattress had dipped under her weight while Tamara lay on her back, hair spread on the sheets, breathing in broken little pulls. Noelle had been somewhere to Olivia's left, face flushed, words falling apart between laughter and those gasping noises she had only ever heard through walls before. Lyra had been very close to Erynd, not smiling, but with that tight, intense look that meant she was losing and enjoying it.
Olivia's hands had been clenched in the blanket at the foot, knuckles white, watching his back move, watching his mouth on other people's skin, feeling the heat gather between her own legs like a betrayal.
He had not touched her.
He had not told her to leave either.
He had simply let her sit there, breathing too fast at the end of the bed, a safe distance away and not safe at all.
She had not done anything but watch.
So now, this morning, she was not going to be beaten by soup.
She took the first spoonful.
It was hot.
Second spoonful.
Hotter.
By the fifth, there was no longer a word for it. The stew did not feel like food. It felt like punishment. Her tongue burned. Her lips tingled. Her throat felt as if she had swallowed a small forge.
She tried not to gasp.
Erynd finished his bowl like it was nothing special, wiped his mouth, and stood.
"I will get something from the back," he said.
Then he left.
He did not comment on the way her eyes were watering. He did not smirk at her red face or ask if it was too much. He just walked away, assuming she would either manage or quit.
Tamara spoke first.
"You do not have to finish," she said quietly. "Spice tolerance is not a measure of character."
"It is this morning," Olivia croaked. "He cooked."
Noelle burst into a half laugh, half cough, and grabbed her cup. "If I die because of this, tell people it was because he was trying to impress us, not because I was stupid."
Lyra lifted an eyebrow at all of them and ate another spoonful. The only sign the stew was affecting her was the way she pressed her lips together for a heartbeat after swallowing, as if refusing to react.
Olivia took another mouthful.
Her pride and her tongue took turns screaming.
By the time she scraped the bottom of the bowl clean, she could not feel the shape of her own mouth. Her eyes were leaking stubborn tears. Her breath came in tight little pulls through her nose because opening it any wider made the burn flare.
Erynd came back.
He was carrying a tray.
On it were four tall glasses, pale liquid inside, their surfaces beaded with cold. Ribbons of golden color spun lazily through the thickness.
He set one down in front of her first.
"Here," he said.
She stared at it. Cold drops ran down the side and touched her fingers. They felt like tiny miracles.
"What is this?" she rasped.
"Vanilla milkshake," he said. "With honey. The cold and the fat and the sugar and the viscosity work together to strip capsaicin off your tongue and throat."
She blinked.
"Cap… what?"
"Capsaicin," he repeated, patient. "The compound that makes things spicy. It binds to heat receptors on your nerves. This helps break that connection."
Of course he would casually talk about receptors while she considered dying from stew.
"And you made this because…?"
"Because you look like you are reconsidering your life choices," he said. "Drink."
She obeyed.
The first sip hit like throwing a bucket of snow into a fire.
Cold wrapped her tongue in heavy, creamy softness. The milkshake was thick enough to cling, smooth enough to slide over every burning surface. The honey threaded through it, sweet in a way that felt gentle rather than cloying.
The burn retreated.
Not all at once. It pulled back in stuttering steps, receding from her lips and the sides of her tongue, then from the back of her throat. The relief was so sharp she almost groaned.
She closed her eyes.
If last night had been heat she was not allowed to reach for, this was the opposite. A comfort she was invited to take.
When she opened them, Erynd was watching her.
"Better?" he asked.
"Yes," she said, voice softer. "You made this… for me?"
"I made the first one for the person suffering most," he said. "Which is you. The others are not far behind."
He turned and set a glass in front of Tamara, then Noelle, then Lyra.
"All of you," he said, louder. "I need tongues that can still speak clearly."
Noelle raised her glass at him. "To not dying from breakfast."
"An interesting strategic priority," Tamara murmured, but she smiled and tasted hers.
Lyra eyed the glass with suspicion, then took a sip. Some of the tension left her shoulders at once. "I will admit this is better than bleeding my tongue into a bucket."
"High praise," Erynd said.
Olivia wrapped both hands around her glass.
The cold seeped into her palms. Her mouth finally stopped feeling like it was being peeled.
He had noticed her suffering. Gone away. Thought. Done something. Come back with a solution. Not only for her, but starting with her.
She was not special. She was also not invisible.
Her chest did something complicated.
Erynd watched the four of them for a moment, as if checking some invisible gauge. When he seemed satisfied, his gaze came back to her.
"If you are done," he said, the tone shifting, "come with me."
Her fingers tightened around the glass.
"Where?" she asked.
"You will see," he said.
Which always meant he was hiding something because he wanted to see her reaction live.
She finished the milkshake, cold sweetness chasing the last ghosts of spice. Her legs felt steadier when she stood, even though her thoughts were not.
Tamara gave her a little nod. Noelle wiggled her eyebrows in completely unhelpful encouragement. Lyra just watched, assessing, filing information away like always.
Olivia followed Erynd out.
***
The lift looked exactly as it always had.
Polished panel. Numbered buttons for the known floors. No hint that the tower held anything more exotic than what she had already seen.
Erynd reached into his coat and pulled out a small, thin object. It looked like a sliver of metal, etched with tight runes and a tiny Yggdrasil sigil where most people would never think to look.
He held it against the panel, close to the seam where metal met stone.
There was a soft, precise click.
Light shimmered under the surface, then a new symbol appeared at the very bottom of the button array. A circle with a downward arrow threaded through it.
"That was not there yesterday," Olivia said.
"It is not there for most people," he replied. "The lift only shows this to Yggdrasil tokens."
"Only Yggdrasil members can see it," she repeated, then added, "and the dwarves?"
"And certain dwarves," he confirmed. "The clans whose old tunnels touched our shafts. They earned a few keys when they agreed not to collapse everything out of spite."
He pressed the new symbol.
The doors closed.
The drop felt different almost immediately. Normal rides were short, a brief dip between floors that still felt like part of the same world. This felt deeper. The sort of descent that carried more meaning than simple distance.
Numbers ticked down. One. Ground. Sub-levels she knew from maps. Then they slid past those and changed into symbols she did not recognize at all.
"Erynd," she said, watching the lights. "Where are we going?"
"To Meltèn," he said.
She stared at him.
"Meltèn is three weeks away," she said slowly. "By carriage. Longer if you are unlucky. It is a desert kingdom. Half the travel reports from there read like curses."
"Above ground," he agreed.
"You cannot just say that as if we are visiting the next district," she insisted.
He smiled. A little one. The kind that said he knew something and was going to enjoy the moment she realized it.
"You wanted to see how things work beneath the stories you were told," he said. "Consider this lesson one."
"That is not a proper answer," she muttered.
"It is the start of one," he replied.
The lift kept sinking.
She felt it when the material around them changed. Not visually, but in that subtle, unsettling way the air shifted. The pressure in her ears. The faint dulling of sound.
"Is this… deeper than the academy training levels?" she asked.
"Much," he said.
"Should I be worried?"
"That depends," he said. "Do you trust my engineering more than you trust your father's road planners?"
She opened her mouth to say yes.
Hesitated.
He watched her pause and for once did not press.
The lift chimed.
***
Erynd
Deepslate was stubborn in all the ways he respected.
Regular bedrock could be persuaded with enough brute force. Fire. Pressure. Repeated spells. It yielded eventually, groaning and cracking.
Deepslate was different. Denser. Less inclined to deform under stress. Sound moved through it in strange ways. Magic did too.
It was an excellent foundation and an excellent problem.
The first time he had proposed running a rail through it, three separate senior engineers had told him it would kill dozens of mages and bankrupt any sponsor insane enough to try.
The Ethan Boring Mark series was his answer to that.
Mark One had been a wildly unsafe proof of concept. Mark Two had nearly buried a test crew when the reinforcing feedback loop lagged behind the cutting. Mark Three was ugly, but it worked.
The device sat at the front of the tunnel like a patient carnivore, teeth made of heat and runes. It did not smash stone. It convinced a very specific volume of deepslate to remember a slightly softer version of itself for a fraction of a moment, let enchanted blades cut through, then pushed the energy of that cut back into the surrounding walls to stitch cracks shut and thicken weak points.
No exhausted mage circles. No constant sacrifice of human bodies into the pit.
Magic did not tire. People did.
He had built the system so more of the latter could live long enough to complain about his methods.
The lift doors slid open onto the main station.
Noise met them.
The space was wide, carved into deepslate that gleamed with a faint sheen. Rails ran in clean lines along platforms, the metal humming quietly with stored mana. Stalls had grown along the sides like barnacles on a ship, wood and metal bolted onto permanent stone.
Dwarves dominated the place.
Broad shoulders, thick arms, beards braided and tied to stay out of the way. Their clothes were built for work, not show. Heavy fabrics, reinforced boots, leather aprons stained with oil and soot. Sigils burned into metal cuffs and tools marked their clans.
Interspersed among them were humans. Every one of them wore some small sign. A Yggdrasil pin. A certain cut of coat. A pattern on a belt. Something that said, to those who knew, that they belonged.
No nobles in silk. No surface merchants wandering by chance. No tourists.
Only Yggdrasil, and dwarves whose old tunnels had accidentally intersected his first experimental bore.
Most rulers would have sent soldiers to seal those tunnels. Or torches.
He had sent negotiators. Then gone himself.
Over on the right, near a stall stacked with metal fittings, Grum's cousin Bragg spotted him.
"Erynd!" Bragg roared, raising a pair of tongs as big as some men's legs. "You still trusting my bolts or have you gone soft with surface toys?"
"When I need something to stay attached to reality, I still buy from you," Erynd called back. "I let the surface toys break on their own."
Bragg barked a laugh so loud it startled a nearby apprentice into dropping a crate.
Erynd left it there. This was not a day for long conversations.
He looked at Olivia.
She was staring like someone had pulled the floor off her idea of the world and shown her the beams underneath.
"What is this place?" she asked quietly.
He guided her out of the lift and toward a bench near the platform edge, out of the direct traffic but with a clear view.
"It is a station," he said. "For the under-rail network."
"That is just a word," she said. "What is it really?"
"An artery," he said. "For Yggdrasil. For some dwarven clans. For parts of this kingdom that cannot afford to wait three weeks every time they need something from the capital. We move grain, steel, medicine, personnel. Occasionally information. All without asking your father's permission."
"And nobody knows?" she asked.
"Yggdrasil knows," he said. "The party leaders, the people who run the rails, a few of the more practical dwarven elders. Some of the wider council suspects something, because results appear that should not be possible by their maps. But they do not know details. Your father's court does not know this station exists. They think our 'logistics advantage' is good horses and bad sleep schedules."
She watched a group of dwarves exchange crates near a freight carriage, movements efficient and practiced.
"You built a second kingdom under ours," she said.
"No," he said. "I built infrastructure under a kingdom that refused to grow out of its own history."
Her jaw tightened.
Above them, she had been taught that kingship was about control. Here, control looked like quietly making sure people did not starve because a caravan got swept off a road.
Her eyes drifted up to the signs hanging over the far platforms.
The boards were painted cleanly.
"Northern Meltèn," she read. "Meltèn. Zelia. Morel."
Under Zelia's sign, finer script carried smaller truths about branch lines that connected to the three southern kingdoms.
"You can go from Zelia to all three southern kingdoms," she whispered.
"Yes," he said.
And from here, she thought, to Zelia.
And from here, to Meltèn.
From the capital, under everything she had been taught, rails were carrying people and goods faster than her tutors had ever claimed was possible.
A low rumble began somewhere far down the tunnel.
It crawled through the rails, turned into a tremor under her boots, climbed into her bones like someone knocking from far away.
"What is that?" she asked, although she already knew.
"Train," Erynd said.
The rumble grew.
It turned into something with teeth. The rails sang, a high, thin sound riding on top of the bass. The air picked up the vibration and shook it along the roof. Deepslate warped it, bounced it, amplified it.
When the high-speed train hit the outer mouth of the station tunnel, sound stopped being background.
It screamed.
The noise did not feel like something she heard. It felt like something that struck her. A long, metal shriek as enchanted steel and compressed air and contained magic ripped toward them. It clawed her ears, pressed heavy hands on her chest, shot down her spine and set every instinct she had on alert.
She flinched back on the bench.
"Gods," she hissed.
"This is a conservative entry profile," Erynd said. "We keep the louder tests out of major stations."
"That was conservative?" she demanded.
He almost smiled. "We found that if the trains arrived whisper quiet, people forgot to respect them. This helps them remember."
She wanted to hit him for that and also understood it in her gut.
The train burst into view.
It hugged the rails, long body blurred by speed, runes flaring along its length in a pattern that proved someone had sat down and calculated every fraction. The screaming dropped in pitch as it decelerated. It went from attacking motion to controlled glide over the span of a few heartbeats.
By the time it drew level with their platform, the sound had settled into a heavy, constant hum. Her ears still rang with the earlier violence.
"Only Yggdrasil and selected dwarves use this line," Erynd said. "No surface passengers. No tourists."
She swallowed.
"And we are getting on that," she said.
"Yes," he said, stood, and offered her his hand.
Her fingers slid into his before she could overthink it.
His grip was solid and warm, steadying in a way that annoyed her because she wanted not to need it.
They joined the small stream of people heading toward the doors that hissed open with a rush of cooler air.
***
Olivia
The inside of the carriage was less frightening at first glance.
Rows of seats, padded and practical. Overhead rails for holding on if you preferred to stand. Windows, large and slightly curved, took up most of the upper wall, the glass faintly shimmering with warding.
The air smelled of metal, faint oil, and bodies that worked for a living.
Everyone inside wore something she now recognized as a marker. A Yggdrasil badge here, a dwarven clan token there. No one looked lost. No one was gawking the way she probably was.
"Sit," Erynd said softly.
She chose a seat by the window. He took the one beside her.
"What do you call this?" she asked. "In words I can say to someone else without sounding like a lunatic."
"High-speed rail carriage," he replied. "Mana engine powered, rail guided, ward stabilized."
"Your words are not helping," she muttered.
"Very fast carriage, no horses, only rails," he translated. "The stations act as anchor points and recharging nodes."
"Better," she said, although her brain still insisted on imagining invisible magic chew on everything.
The doors slid shut with a decisive hiss.
The carriage gave a small, almost polite shudder, as if testing its own weight, then began to move.
The station outside drifted by at first. Dwarves, cargo, platform pillars. For a heartbeat, she could pretend this was just some deep version of the city transport.
Then the carriage leaned into its speed.
Acceleration pressed her back into the seat. The hum under her feet grew teeth again, though less sharp than before. The tunnel walls outside blurred, lanterns streaking into brief flashes.
Olivia's fingers dug into the edge of the seat.
"It is too fast," she whispered.
"It is within design limits," Erynd said.
"That is not comforting."
"Would you like me to lie?"
"Yes."
"We are drifting serenely through the earth," he said deadpan. "Like a feather."
She gave a short, strangled laugh.
The earlier scream in the station echoed in her memory and made every vibration feel like a threat. Intellectually, she knew the wards were there to keep them safe. Emotionally, she felt like she was sitting inside the throat of something that had learned to sing in metal.
Her hand shook.
Erynd saw.
Without drawing attention, he reached over and took her hand, weaving his fingers through hers.
"Breathe," he murmured. "In through your nose. Out through your mouth. Let your body learn the rhythm."
"It is not my body that is complaining," she said, but she tried.
In.
Out.
In.
Out.
The train's hum settled into a background heartbeat. Her heart started to sync with it.
Beside her, Erynd was a steady line of warmth. His thumb moved once along the side of her hand, not quite a rub, more a reminder that he was there.
It was ridiculous that she felt safer with him.
This was the same man whose hands had been on Tamara's hips, whose mouth had been at Lyra's throat, whose fingers had wrung those desperate, breathless sounds out of Noelle last night while Olivia sat at the end of the bed and watched, heat pooling between her thighs and nowhere to put it.
She had gone back to her own room after, legs a little unsteady, heart pounding like she had run.
She had not touched herself.
She had wanted to.
She had not.
She was not sure if that made her strong or just scared.
Now she sat next to him in a screaming metal tube deep under the earth, and he was the one anchoring her.
"High-speed," she muttered, mostly to distract herself. "How long to… Meltèn. Actually."
"Approximately two hours," he said. "We stop once, at Northern Meltèn. A junction station. We do not get off there."
"Two hours," she repeated.
Three weeks above. Two hours below.
She wondered if anyone in the palace had the faintest idea that, under their polished floors, the kingdom had grown a second nervous system.
She doubted it.
The motion of the train became almost hypnotic. Constant, relentless. The flashes of light outside the window came at regular intervals. Her head began to nod despite herself.
"You can sleep," Erynd said quietly. "I will wake you at Northern Meltèn, and again when we arrive in the city."
"And if you forget?" she asked thickly.
"Then you will wake up in some maintenance depot with dwarves using your carriage as a lunch table," he said. "They will feed you, at least."
She tried to glare. It came out as a blink.
Her head drifted sideways.
His shoulder was there, solid, and her body, treacherous thing, chose it without waiting for permission.
He did not move away.
Olivia let the darkness and the vibration and the ghost of last night's sounds carry her under.
***
She woke to a slowing.
The pressure on her chest eased. The hum shifted pitch. Her stomach did its little protest lurch.
Her head was still on Erynd's shoulder.
She jerked upright, almost head butting him.
"Is this it?" she blurted. "Meltèn?"
"No," he said, amused. "Northern Meltèn. First junction."
She squinted at the sign sliding past the window. The letters lined up with his words.
The platform outside was smaller than the capital station's. More cargo than people. Dwarves working in practiced, efficient silence. Yggdrasil agents walked along the train, checking markers on certain carriages.
She watched as the last two cars were decoupled and shunted onto a side track. Freight for branch lines, she guessed. Farther outposts. Maybe straight into the southern kingdoms.
"You said we do not get off here," she said.
"We do not," he confirmed.
"Could you have mentioned it before I woke up like some panicked tourist?"
"I forgot how the scream feels the first few times," he said. "I usually tune it out."
"You are impossible," she muttered.
He inclined his head, accepting the charge.
The train rolled out of the junction.
The next stretch felt shorter. The speed remained brutal, but her body had already adapted. The earlier terror dulled into a continuous, low-grade unease.
She did not fall asleep again. She watched the tunnel instead, even though there was nothing to see but stone and light.
Eventually, the vibration changed again. Slowed. The hum dropped.
"This is Meltèn," Erynd said.
Her pulse picked up.
***
The city station was functional.
No market stalls, no crowd. Just platforms, rails, reinforced walls. A handful of dwarves. A handful of humans. Doors marked with barely visible sigils led off to storage and maintenance.
"Surface exit," Erynd said quietly, nodding toward a plain lift in the far wall.
They took it.
This one was small. No secret symbols. Just a simple panel with two buttons: station and surface.
He pressed surface.
The ride was short compared to the descent earlier. Her ears popped once.
When the doors opened, they stepped into a house.
It was not a grand residence. More like a storage building. Bare walls. A table. Stacked sacks that probably were grain in some ledger, even if the real stores lay below.
"Is this actually a storage house?" she asked.
"On paper," he said. "We keep a token amount here to make it look right if someone snoops. The neighbors think we are very dedicated to moving bags from one corner to another."
He walked to the front door and opened it.
Heat punched her in the face.
Not the heavy, wet heat of the capital's worst summers. This was dry, full of sand and intent. Every breath scraped her throat just a little.
Light flooded in, brutal and honest. It poured over stone streets, over walls the color of bread crust, over cloth awnings stretched tight between buildings to carve out strips of shade.
Meltèn lived out there.
People moved in currents. Loose garments in sun-touched colors. Whites, creams, rich browns, deep reds, desert blues. Headscarves and veils shielded faces. Fabric wrapped cleverly to let air pass and block sand.
Their skin glowed.
Not like polished marble. Like earth that had loved the sun for years. Bronze, copper, all the shades her father's court poets stole for metaphors and never actually saw.
She stepped out after him and felt the sun seize her whole body.
Within three heartbeats, sweat started at the back of her neck.
"Here," Erynd said, handing her a wrapped bundle. "Put this on."
She looked down at the cloth. Lighter than what she wore, different weave.
"What is it?" she asked, even though she knew.
"Desert outfit," he said. "Cut to let heat escape and keep sand out of your eyes and mouth. If you walk around in your current dress, you will cook and draw attention."
"To do what?" she asked. "Why are we here, Erynd?"
He studied her for a moment.
"To see the parts of your kingdom your father's maps do not show properly," he said. "To see the people whose lives get reduced to trade numbers on council reports. To see how much weight you can carry outside your palace without anyone bowing before you speak."
His gaze slipped, briefly, in a way that remembered last night, remembered her at the end of the bed, remembered the way she had not looked away.
"And to see," he added, "what you do when the world is not arranged to protect your illusions."
Her throat felt dry in a way that had nothing to do with the desert.
Behind them, the station-throat of the house waited. Beneath them, rails hummed far under the stone, a second skeleton for a kingdom that insisted it was still walking on the old one.
Around them, Meltèn went on. A woman leaned over a balcony, laughing as she poured water into a basin. A man adjusted his headscarf and pulled his partner close for a brief, unapologetic kiss in the shadow of a doorway. A child kicked a ball of tightly bound rags across a patch of hot stone, bare feet slapping.
Nothing here was softened.
"Fine," Olivia said, lifting her chin. "Turn around so I can change without starting a small riot."
Erynd actually did as she asked, turning his back to the street and the door, giving her the wall and the thin strip of shade between house and sun.
"And if I peek?" he asked, voice lighter but with an edge.
"Then I scream that a strange man is harassing a visitor in the middle of Meltèn," she said. "We will see how well your secret tunnels save you from angry locals."
"Point taken," he said.
She unwrapped the bundle.
The fabric was unfamiliar. Softer, lighter, but closely woven. The cuts were simple on first glance, then revealed their cleverness as she explored them: ties in the right places, panels meant to be layered, openings designed to close against blowing sand.
She stripped out of her capital clothes in the cramped slice of shade, the air brushing bare skin that normally only met water and towels. Heat stroked her thighs, her stomach, the small of her back.
She pulled on the desert garments.
They settled around her. Trousers loose yet secure at the ankles. A long, split tunic. A sash. A wrap for her head and face she could raise or lower. Once she tied everything properly, she felt less like a foreign object and more like she could pass in a crowd if no one looked too closely at her eyes.
"Erynd," she said.
"Yes?"
"Do I look ridiculous?" she asked.
He turned.
For a few seconds, he just looked.
"No," he said. "You look like you belong on this street more than half the caravaneers that stumble in here for the first time."
She let out a breath she had not realized she was holding.
Last night, she had sat at the end of his bed and watched him turn five women inside out, her own body burning without a single touch. This morning, she had nearly died from stew out of sheer pride. Now she stood in a city that was supposed to be three weeks away, dressed in clothes meant for a life she had never been taught to imagine.
"Are you happy, Princess?" his voice asked in her memory.
She still did not know.
But as she stepped fully out into the street of Meltèn, sun hitting her new clothes, sand whispering underfoot, rails humming somewhere far below, she knew one thing clearly.
Whatever answer she found, it was not going to be in a throne room.
It was going to be out here.
With dirty air, screaming trains, stubborn dwarves, secret networks, and a man who handed her cold sweetness when she hurt and then showed her the bones of a kingdom that had lied to her since birth.
Olivia squared her shoulders, adjusted her headscarf, and walked forward.