Ethan set a small plate of dessert on the table and said, "I don't know, I don't care, I don't comment."
Talking about current events now and then was fine — in a quiet backwater village, information moved slowly, and anything he said would just get him labeled an eccentric by his neighbors at worst. But to sit around predicting political upheaval every day? That was dancing at the edge of a very large fire.
Vivienne seemed to read the hesitation on his face. She smiled faintly.
"Relax. This is just conversation. Nothing said here goes any further."
Ethan picked up a piece of honeycake, held it near his mouth for a long moment, then set it back down.
"Alright. You've been decent enough to me since I arrived. No harm in telling you."
Vivienne and Lily both sat up straighter. Lily quietly produced a small notebook and pen from somewhere and held it ready.
Ethan looked upward — thinking.
He ran through the plot in his head.
In the original novel, Gareth Dunmore — the Crown Prince of Ashenvale, and the story's sole protagonist — had traveled to the capital as a deliberate distraction, with a hundred assassins moving quietly behind him. He attended social events openly while his killers embedded themselves inside Chancellor Greymoor's estate. Greymoor survived the attempt, but barely — and the injury left him bedridden for months.
Without Greymoor at her side, Queen Vivienne had been visibly overwhelmed by the weight of governing alone.
Gareth had used that moment. He rallied court Officials behind him, pressing the Queen on the question of a consort — using her unmarried status as political leverage. At the same time, Ashenvale soldiers, disguised as refugees and bandits, had fanned out across Goldmere's territories and lit the countryside on fire.
Three pressures at once: a paralyzed Chancellor, a destabilized court, and a kingdom bleeding at the edges.
In half a year, Goldmere had fractured. The court divided — one faction behind the Queen, one behind the Duke of Ashenvale. In the end, the Queen lost. The kingdom changed hands. The Duke's family took the throne.
Gareth became Crown Prince.
As for Vivienne — she'd fought her way out through ten thousand soldiers on sheer cultivation alone. After that, the novel had made her the villain. Single-minded, relentless, focused entirely on destroying Gareth. But Gareth was the protagonist, and protagonists didn't lose — not permanently. In the end, she had lost to the man he'd become. Gareth had tried to take her into his household, and Vivienne, with the kind of pride that didn't bend, had ended her own life rather than submit.
A queen who had done nothing wrong. A story that called her the villain for it.
Ethan exhaled slowly.
"Goldmere's foundations are strong," he said. "If things go well, it has every chance of unifying the continent."
Vivienne's expression eased. "Then that's a good thing. Why the sigh?"
"I'm not sighing for Goldmere. I'm sighing for its Queen." He paused. "It's a strange coincidence — you share her name. You're both called Vivienne."
Vivienne let the second half of that pass without comment. Something quiet moved through her chest.
Lily had gone still, her pen hovering.
Was the Sage saying the Queen's fate was tragic?
"What about her?" Vivienne said, carefully.
Ethan said, "Her accomplishments in governance and combat are exceptional. Her cultivation is extraordinary. By any measure, she is a remarkable ruler." He paused. "But she moves too quickly."
"She doesn't see the true danger — because it has always been sleeping right beside her."
"Goldmere burns bright. But if it doesn't deal with the wolf in its own bed, then the kingdom that unifies the continent may still be Goldmere — just not under the same name."
He stood, using his cane like a pointer, directing it toward the northwest.
"The Duke of Ashenvale's ambitions are obvious enough, but he's smarter than he looks. His declared army numbers five hundred thousand. His actual force is closer to a million and a half — hidden, distributed, waiting. Beyond that, he has spent years cultivating loyalty among Officials — not the senior ones, which would be too visible, but the lower ranks. County administrators. Regional governors. Men stationed throughout the kingdom, far from the capital. When civil war breaks out, more than half of Goldmere's outer cities will change sides before anyone has time to react."
He turned his face toward Vivienne.
"If you were the Queen — how would you respond?"
Silence.
Vivienne sat with it for a moment. Lily had stopped writing entirely.
Neither of them had expected this. Ethan — who was, by all appearances, an ordinary young man with a quiet manner and a good hand in the kitchen — had just laid out the internal structure of a conspiracy that would take weeks of intelligence work to uncover.
Vivienne had never quite believed the Sage theory. She was wavering now.
She thought it through, then answered steadily:
"Send a royal decree calling the border armies back to the capital, securing the city's defenses. Then dispatch General Stormwall with five hundred thousand troops directly into Ashenvale — strike where the Duke cannot afford to ignore it. He would have to pull his hidden forces back to defend his own territory. The external threat collapses."
Ethan nodded with visible appreciation.
"Clean answer. Exactly right." He smiled. "If I didn't know better, I'd think you were the Queen yourself."
Something warm and strange moved through Vivienne's chest. Beside her, Lily pressed a hand over her mouth to contain a laugh.
Ethan shifted direction.
"What if Gareth managed to cripple Greymoor before the decree could go out — taking away one of her closest advisors — and then used her unmarried status to pressure her publicly? What then?"
Lily lost the battle and laughed outright.
"The Queen already has a consort," Vivienne said, with some awkwardness. "And as for Chancellor Greymoor — he's fine. The assassins were found before they could act."
Ethan went quiet.
He stood there for a long moment.
What?
The plot was wrong. The Queen was supposed to be without a consort — that was the whole pressure point. And Greymoor wasn't supposed to survive unscathed; the assassination attempt was supposed to succeed, at least partially. Without that, Gareth had no leverage and no opening.
"You're not joking," Ethan said, his tone careful.
"Anyone in the village could tell you the same. Why would I make that up?" Vivienne said.
"Right." Ethan pressed his fingers to his temple. "Don't say anything. Let me think."
Vivienne didn't interrupt. She rested her chin in one hand and watched him quietly, her amber eyes holding something different than before.
This was the first time in her life that she had felt something like the sensation of being able to lean on someone else.
If not for Ethan's deductions — laid out casually, over dessert, in a cottage kitchen — she might never have seen the full picture until it was too late.
The Duke had a million and a half soldiers. More than half the kingdom's outer administrators had already quietly changed their loyalty. Add Gareth's sabotage, add the pressure over the consort, add the coordinated military push — and working through the scenario honestly, she could see herself lasting three years at most before the kingdom changed names.
"Thank you," she said, quietly.
Ethan shook his head, smiling. "What for? I only answered your questions."
Vivienne felt an impulse she hadn't planned for, and followed it.
"What do you think of the Queen as a person?"
She wanted to know what evaluation she would receive from him — without the crown, without the court, without anyone performing deference.
"In terms of raw cultivation talent, few in any generation can match her. Twenty-one years old at the Moonlight Realm. That's almost without precedent." Ethan paused, then added privately to himself — though my own rate of growth over three years is arguably stranger.
"In terms of strategic ability: at thirteen, she led fifty thousand troops to rout a Loulan Kingdom force of three hundred thousand. In scholarship, she's accomplished across literature, music, and composition. In appearance—" he tilted his head slightly, "— by all accounts, she is someone whose beauty reshapes a room."
He had said all of this from memory, lifted straight from the novel's narration. Back when he'd first read it, the Queen had been the character he was half drawn to — before he discovered she'd been written as the villain.
"You're blind," Lily said, genuinely puzzled. "How do you know she's beautiful?"
"I'm still a man. Hearing the stories is enough to form a picture." Ethan said it without any embarrassment.
Vivienne felt the edge of a laugh trying to form.
You know the flawless Queen you're describing is sitting three feet away from you. And is, technically, your wife.
"What if I offered you a place in the Queen's household?" she said, her voice deliberately neutral.
Ethan shook his head immediately and completely.
"No. Absolutely not. No."
Pure self-preservation. Following the villain of the story meant standing directly in the path of the protagonist. Ethan had spent three years very carefully not doing that.
"All bark," Vivienne said, her expression cooling by a degree. "No bite."