Jessica threw open the doors of the council room to find the king and his advisors discussing monster quotas and distant famines. Everyone paused when Jessica entered. She recognized one of them by his balding head and nasally voice.

  Chad cleared his throat. “Ahem. You are interrupting a council—”

  “Shut the fuck up. Your Majesty, I want to talk,” Jessica said.

  She was halfway across the room by the time his bodyguards leapt into action and leveled swords at her. She stopped at their tip and stared at King Capra.

  “This is unacceptable!” Chad said. “Adventurer or not, you do not have the authority to interrupt a council meeting. Least of all when you are the chief suspect in—”

  “The queen’s poisoning. I’m aware. And that’s fine, because I’m innocent. What I want to know is why the hell my retainers were arrested without cause?” Jessica said.

  “That was done under Warden Mystiferia’s orders,” Chad said, “and is consistent with how investigations of assassination attempts have been conducted in the past. Anyone in regular contact with the assassin is subject to interrogation until all threats are weeded out. Already we’ve found two co-conspirators. If you and your retainers are guilty, you will join them.”

  Jessica glanced at the king who seemed either uninterested or unwilling to join the conversation. She threw up her hands.

  “So why wasn’t I arrested!? Or are you about to tell me I am?”

  Chad sneered. “In effect. But Her Majesty, for her own… unassailable reasons, elected to continue receiving your dreadful medicine. In fact she was positively insistent. So while you may not be down in the dungeons with your two pets, your job duties are henceforth restricted to administering her morphine under close supervision. Needless to say, you are confined to the castle until your guilt can be ascertained.”

  Jessica bunched her riding breeches in her fists to keep them at her side.

  “Your Majesty, this is ridiculous! Mystiferia has no intention of conducting a fair interrogation. She arrested my retainers because she personally loathes me and knows the best way to hurt me is through Riza and Naga. So, if I may be so bold, I would like to petition for them to be released immediately.”

  The king raised his head and looked up at her for the first time. “It is not for no reason you’ve drawn Mystiferia’s ire. You have, after all, elected to hide the location of a monstress known as Morkal from us.”

  Glaciers migrated down Jessica’s spine. How stupid was she, thinking Mystiferia wouldn’t tell the king? She should’ve tried to pre-empt Mystiferia but it was too late now.

  Jessica set her jaw. “I know where one of Morkal’s bodies was, but she has almost certainly moved after adventurers attacked her lair in Barleyfield. If Your Majesty and the good warden would like to check yourselves I would be happy to lead you all there. But I neglected to mention Morkal because, if every adventurer in Elsifeya couldn’t catch her, your guards weren't going to either. Not when they can be defeated by a single lamia.”

  The king’s field marshal turned red in the face. He opened his mouth to blow up at her before the king waved him down.

  “I see your point, Jessica. However, whether you felt this information was worth sharing or not, this does not negate your close contact with this Morkal, who is known to have ties to the Demon King. Do not deny it. I have read the Adventurer’s Guild report. I am aware of this along with many other transgressions on your part,” King Capra said.

  Jessica felt the floor drop out from under her. Had Mystiferia been building this paper trail the entire time? If so, she had badly misjudged her by focusing too heavily on her sadism and not enough on her shrewdness. Mystiferia wouldn’t be content snaring Jessica with a blunt show of force, she wanted this to be technical. Procedural. She wanted her victory to be irreversible.

  And she nearly had it.

  “I… don’t deny any of it, Your Majesty,” Jessica said, “though my circumstances upon reincarnation were not ideal. There was the matter of Sir Hayek, as you know, but my encounter with Morkal involved her stealing my power system. Adventurers took me to be her accomplice and attacked us and I proceeded to defend myself. What you have heard of me was done in self-defense..”

  “It is the opinion of some that you were, and perhaps still are, brainwashed.”

  “I am not brainwashed and I would like to prove it. I learned during my trip to Fort Neusa that you’re plagued in the north by a group of rebels called the SSLA,” Jessica said, baffled by where her own words were coming from. “If I get them to cease their activities, would this count as proof of my loyalty and that I was not…”

  The next few words proved difficult to push out of her throat. She wanted to vindicate Galloway, but she was in no position to do so before securing herself and Riza and Naga.

  This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

  “…that I was not part of Master Galloway’s plot?”

  Chad snorted. “This is pointless, Your Majesty. If she’s innocent there’s no need to prove it with a trial. Warden Mystiferia will find out in due course.”

  Unfortunately for Chad, the king was already stroking his chin in thought. What Jessica learned from this was that the king was not necessarily beholden to his advisors but to whoever shouted an opinion at him loudest and most recently.

  “I will consider this,” King Capra said.

  Jessica glanced warily at the advisors circling him like crows before bowing and departing.

  As Jessica prepared the queen’s evening morphine, she debated what to do next. If she did nothing the advisors would convince him to ignore her plea and leave Riza and Naga in the dungeon. But if the trick was to have the final say…

  “Your Majesty,” Jessica said with a bow as she entered the queen’s sitting room.

  Wine bottles, half-eaten dainties, and forgotten fashion accessories littered the tables and floor. Presiding over the mess was Queen Samara looking frailer and more sickly than ever. She smiled when Jessica entered.

  “Ah! Here we are. Someone who hopefully won’t kill me. Do you plan to kill me?” Queen Samara asked in a tone Jessica wasn’t sure how to take. It almost seemed like a joke except there was something dangerous behind the queen’s eyes.

  “I will be much more attentive to your dosage, Your Majesty,” Jessica said.

  The queen clutched her arm uncomfortably tightly, the way an aunt who barely knew her might, and laughed. “Oh I know! I know Jessica, I’m just kidding! Just a little joke. You have to have humor about these things, you know. About death. I know you would never dream of such a thing. Why, the king’s advisors were proposing locking you up and I said, ‘Well that’s positively ridiculous!’ Simple-minded buffoons, I tell you. A shame it wasn’t one of them who tried instead of Galloway. Oh but please, my morphine.”

  In a flask Jessica mixed a slightly smaller dose of morphine than usual with a bit of wine to mask the flavor and handed it to the queen who drank greedily from it. Blood-red claret spilled from her lips which she wiped away with the back of her veiny hand.

  “Oh how I wish things were always as nice as when I take your medicine. It’s so… cheery,” the queen said, throwing her arm over her forehead. “I can see all of my problems before me. My neglecting husband, my irritating children, those… jackals who pass for noblewomen. It is enough to drive me insane. And to drink, certainly. It is the only way I can stand being around those parasites who only want what I can do for them.”

  Queen Samara stretched out from the couch to knock over an empty bottle of wine onto the glass table. The sound of glass on glass made Jessica wince.

  “When I’m on your medicine I feel how adventurers must feel all the time. I can see my problems, but they’re just so… so silly. So fun. All the stupid little social games become a comedy of errors. Getting my husband’s fickle attention becomes a noble quest I must go on. Your medicine makes me feel as though I am escaping into how the world ought to be instead of how it is. Like I am dying here and being reincarnated on Earth.”

  Oh boy, thought Jessica. She needed more opium antagonists before Queen Samara tried to isekai herself to Cleveland. But before any of that, Jessica also needed to put ideas in the queen’s head while she was going off about ‘jackals’ and ‘parasites’ exploiting her.

  “Perhaps you just need a project? Something to focus on. I find that helps me, your majesty,” Jessica said.

  The queen sat up. “A project? Like what?”

  Jessica stroked her chin in thought. “Hmm… You know, when I was down in Sawcone, they had set up a factory to manufacture something I invented called ‘flavor crystals.’ What if you helped set up a factory in Elsifeya? Maybe that would get you out of your slump?”

  “You were responsible for those flavor crystals? My…” the Queen grinned. “I should have known. They’re the culinary version of morphine. But I’m afraid I don’t see any reason to have them made here when we can import them from Sawcone.”

  “Well uh… it’d be cheaper, wouldn’t it? Plus, I saw their industrial processes and I think we could do much better with the same work force. Heck, you could save time by calling up Earl Heinrich’s serfs and—”

  Queen Samara gasped in horror. “I could never! You can no more steal your subjects’ serfs than their land. Doing so would be a recipe for rebellious nobles! Absolutely not.”

  Jessica bit her lip and curled it into a pained smile. “Of course not. Forgive me, Your Majesty. Clearly I don’t know enough to be suggesting such things just yet.”

  The queen yawned. “That’s quite alright. Quite alright. You adventurers don’t tend to come from noble stock in your world so I understand.”

  Her plan dashed, Jessica was forced to slog through another twenty agonizing minutes of being the queen’s surrogate therapist until she saw numb, narcotic bliss creep into her eyes. The morphine was kicking in. It was now or never.

  “You know, I noticed earlier that the king seems quite stressed about the bandits up north. The… what was their name, the something-or-other liberation army? I heard him complaining he didn’t have time for anything—or anyone—until they were dealt with. I offered to go handle them but… well, he was wishy-washy about it.”

  The queen grabbed Jessica’s arm again, digging her nails painfully deep.

  “What a marvelous idea! Oh, simply marvelous! It’s those baboons in his ears, you see. My husband does whatever they tell him. Can’t be bothered to think things through himself. I’ll tell you what, when I get up from my hhnng!—” the queen stretched like a cat over the entire couch then wiggled her butt into the cushions and shut her eyes “—nap, I’ll… mmm…”

  Jessica whispered a silent prayer that the queen would remember their conversation when she awoke. Being extra careful, she checked the queen’s pulse to make sure it was stable before leaving. And for extra points, she draped a quilted blanket over the slumbering queen.

  Queen Samara was callous and neglectful and privileged and decadent, but Jessica couldn’t bring herself to dislike the woman. It was, after all, her own fault that Samara had added ‘opioid addiction’ to her list of troubles. If her own situation wasn’t so dire, Jessica would have liked to solve the queen’s problems more elegantly in some kind of cozy, slice-of-life way. For now, however, the queen was a tool in her self-defense.