Rosslyn dreamt.

She knew she was dreaming and that the visions that presented themselves before her eyes did not represent her reality, nor even, as far as she could tell, her own past lives. She remembered fighting a group of assassins and losing vision in one eye. She remembered her life from before this great sleep.

Instinctively, she felt more and more, the longer the visions went on, that something must be wrong. Although time was always distorted in sleep, she was almost certain that she had been dreaming for longer than she ever had before.

My body must be consuming a great deal of energy to heal itself. So much so that it refuses to regain consciousness. Otherwise, how would I have time to witness so many events from the history of my country?

This was the substance of Rosslyn’s visions. Scenes of days gone by. Moments that had been formative in the national life of Claustria.

She barely recognized some of the earlier scenes, and perhaps her sleep had been deeper at the time those scenes had appeared, because they had a haze around them that made them feel dreamier than some of the more recent scenes.

There was an encounter between a man and a magical butterfly. The human seemed ordinary to Rosslyn—he was dressed like a peasant—but there was a certain cast to his jaw that she recognized. Her father's jawline was similar. The creature whispered secrets in the man’s ear, and he attempted to do magic following the butterfly’s instructions. The initial attempts failed—and then the vision was fading.

The second vision showed another man, in another time, with another butterfly. The human wore a tunic of high quality silk wrought in an ancient style, but Rosslyn recognized this too was one of her ancestors. At some point, they had made the jump from peasantry to nobility. The man and the butterfly stood before the walls of a small, crude city, and the nobleman spoke animatedly to the butterfly, flailing his arms. He looked highly agitated. The butterfly flew high above the city, its body glowing with Mana, and before Rosslyn’s eyes, the city vanished. As Rosslyn watched, the butterfly flew down until it entered the space where the border of the illusion—for the butterfly must have created an illusion—was located. Then the creature also disappeared. A few minutes later, Rosslyn saw an army appear in the distance. These were humans, though Rosslyn could not recognize the nation. They rode chariots in the direction of the city, passing right by it without being able to see their apparent target. Then this vision faded too.

Further visions showed Rosslyn key moments in history, only a fraction of which involved butterflies in any way. Most of them were moments of politics or warfare. Conquest of neighboring regions. Marriages for alliance. The expansion of the city, which she gradually came to recognize as Wayn. The Claustrian Duchy’s elevation to the status of Kingdom by decree of the High Priest of the Goddess—which was essentially just recognition of the facts on the ground by that point, coupled with a desire to inspire stronger, united opposition against the rising Demon Empire.

The leaps and bounds of history began to slow to a crawl with the birth of an only child, a girl. Rosslyn quickly recognized her from the descriptions and illustrations in her history books.

Warrior Queen Maud.

Rosslyn’s visions followed the Warrior Queen’s life much more closely than they had the stories of any other moment in Claustrian history. She saw how Maud grew up a solitary child, neglected by her parents. How the Princess’s father spent most of his time trying to conceive a son to replace her as his heir. How Maud’s impressive physical and magical power frustrated her parents rather than pleasing them, because her natural gifts showed how powerful their son might be, if they could only conceive one.

Claustria had only rarely had ruling Queens before, a total of three in its long history. Two of them were assessed by historians as disastrous. Both law and nobility opposed it.

The King divorced his wife with the blessing of the High Priest of the Goddess. He ignored how his daughter withdrew further and further into herself, only emerging from her bedroom for physical and magical training. Instead of paying attention to the child he had, he began looking for the woman who would solve his fertility problem—and finally give him the son that custom demanded.

But his quest was unsuccessful.

The King died of a heart attack in bed with his new young wife—Rosslyn avoided witnessing any of the details of their activities by simply refusing to look—and he left the thirteen-year-old Maud all alone in the world.

The child who had been neglected suddenly came to the throne. Shy, gawky, and unsure of herself, she had little idea of what to do with the power she now held.

The court nobles who surrounded her began issuing commands in Maud’s name without consulting her, while another faction in the western half of the country gathered around her cousin Lachlan and began conspiring to place him on the throne.

Rosslyn bounced back and forth between the two settings as the rebellious nobles whispered flattery and anti-Maud poison in Lachlan’s ear and the corrupt nobles made more reckless and self-serving decisions in Maud’s name, raising taxes on the common folk and neglecting critical duties such as enforcing the law and maintaining the military while they looted the treasury.

Some of the most affected common folk began to turn against Maud.

And Duke Cornelis of Galton began conspiring with Lachlan’s faction of nobles while secretly maneuvering to take advantage of any civil strife in Claustria to expand his own holdings.

But even as nobles on both sides of the political divide brought the country closer to ruin, Maud was growing older and watching carefully. Learning.

When she turned seventeen, Maud hosted a banquet for the nobles who had been most instrumental in the misrule of Claustria. She invited members of Lachlan’s faction, too, but none came. By this time, they were already discounting her and discussing who would perform which roles on Lachlan’s ruling council.

At the dinner, Maud’s other cousin, nineteen-year-old Count Brian, proposed a toast.

“To the wise and learned officials who have ruled in my dear cousin’s stead all these years!”

Some people raised their wine glasses with jubilant expressions, while others looked askance at each other.

One could almost hear them thinking, What do you mean, ruled in her stead all these years? Is this brat trying to say that there is some change coming?

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But none had the chance to voice that objection.

While some at the table were draining their glasses, the serving men were barring the doors.

A few of the nobles seated began to object.

“What is the meaning of this?”

“Your Majesty, why have the doors been barred?”

Then several of their number began convulsing, their bodies responding quickly to the poisoned wine. The supposed servants—in fact, elite knights in disguise—drew swords and axes and slaughtered everyone at the table but Brian and Maud. When a few of the more powerful nobles were able to defend themselves effectively, despite the poison in their bellies, the Queen and her cousin took up arms and helped finish the slaughter.

Afterward, Maud’s enemies would speak of that occasion as the Black Banquet and say that Black Brian—for so they called him after this—had clouded the Queen’s judgment and caused her to authorize the murder of her loyal supporters.

But Rosslyn saw everything in the vision.

Maud had asked for her cousin’s help to organize the coup, so she could finally be out from under the thumb of the high nobility of Wayn, and she had approved every detail of the evening personally, down to the music. And Rosslyn thought that it was far from the criminal undertaking that Maud’s enemies—and some historians—had tried to make it out to be.

The Queen’s courts were not her own, her supposed advisors held all the power, and if she had not tried this approach, she might never have obtained her independence. She had had little choice but to throw off their influence for the good of the country.

This nevertheless provided a casus belli for the other faction of nobles.

The Queen’s counselors had been murdered, they claimed to anyone who would listen. Either the Queen had fallen under the influence of an evil man, or her own mind must be poisoned. She had become a tyrant. They whispered coarser slanders, too. That she had been seduced by her cousin. That she was a nymphomaniac who took a different lover from among her knights every night, the better to bind them to her.

The reality, as Rosslyn observed, was that Maud remained as awkward around the opposite sex as she had been as a girl. She lacked the social skills—and perhaps also the desire—to obtain male companionship.

What she did enjoy was battle.

Maud had not simply withdrawn into herself in all the years she had been alone. She had been reading books. Military histories and accounts of great battles were the romances of her girlhood. And with her control over Wayn now secured, she wasted no time in reversing the policies of her advisors and strengthening the country’s institutions—particularly the military, which she chose to lead personally, making Brian her chief of domestic matters.

When Lachlan’s forces mobilized and marched across Claustria to Wayn, Queen Maud gathered her own army and headed them off before they could approach the city. Leading them from the front, she killed hundreds of men with her own hands, alternately cutting them down with her sword and with concentrated beams of light. As it became obvious that he was outmatched, and the carnage grew more intense, Lachlan fled, destroying the morale of the attacking force.

When the enemy’s strength broke, and they began running, Maud restrained her army from giving chase.

In her eyes, these were all still her countrymen.

In the aftermath, she tried to recruit as many of Lachlan’s soldiers as she could into her own force. She even wrote letters to him as she marched west, begging him to surrender and allow the country’s divisions to be healed.

Perhaps recalling the Black Banquet, Lachlan chose instead to flee to Galton. Initially, they gave him sanctuary in secret.

But when Maud chose not to request Lachlan’s return, the Galtons betrothed him to a member of their ruling family and raised their own army with the aim of placing him as a puppet king on the Claustrian throne.

As the rumors of this reached the now twenty-year-old Maud, she marched at the head of her own forces again, preemptively invading Galton.

This was a much more brutal war than the short succession battle had been. Galton was a real country with an established military, not a handful of nobles with puffed up ideas about their own significance. They fought to the last man in several battles and scorched the earth whenever they actually retreated, to leave Maud’s forces no food to eat or wood for siege engines. Then they retreated into their fortifications.

Maud’s army was reduced to robbing the peasantry for provisions, though at least the war was fought on Galton’s soil, so it was Duke Cornelis’s peasants rather than Maud’s who were starved as a result.

Ultimately, they managed to besiege the capital of Galton, Yelloway, and prevent any supplies from entering for several months until the city’s food supplies were exhausted and some discontented soldiers opened the gate in exchange for Black Brian’s promise that they and their families would not be harmed.

Maud kept her right hand man’s promise. She allowed anyone who was capable of moving to leave the city with as much of their worldly goods as they could carry in their hands. She gave strict orders to her soldiers that the civilians be left unmolested, on pain of death.

Then she allowed the army to sack what was left, burned the surviving buildings to the ground, executed the sitting ruler, and negotiated the marriage of one of her young female cousins to the new Duke, a twelve-year-old boy who she brought back with her to Wayn as a hostage to ensure the Duchy’s good behavior.

Lachlan escaped again, however.

Even the Galtons did not seem to know where he had fled, though Maud had several key advisors and the former Duchess put to the question to find out. She was much less interested in forgiving her cousin now that she had been forced to wage a second war to fend off his ambition to rule.

The vision cut to some years in the future.

Rosslyn observed the Warrior Queen as ruler, the vision intercutting between seemingly almost random scenes of the ruler simply governing.

Queen Maud remained in firm control of her country, with her loyal cousin Count Brian ruling by her side. Rosslyn remembered from the history books that she had encouraged him to marry one of their distant cousins as a way of tamping down the rumors that still circulated about the two of them.

Rosslyn thought the rumors were a bit ridiculous, especially now that she could see—at least a version of—the historical events that gave rise to them. The way that Maud looked at Brian was affectionate, but in a familial sense. The gossips could not possibly be basing their talk on any kind of honest firsthand reporting of the pair’s interactions.

Though Rosslyn thought the Count might have had some romantic interest in the Queen in years past, she could tell Maud’s tastes seemed to run in a very different direction. To Rosslyn’s surprise—this was not commonly accepted in Claustria—the Warrior Queen seemed to prefer women, though Rosslyn could only guess it from Maud’s lingering looks at certain noble ladies in her circle.

Despite having assumed absolute power, the Queen was just as chaste now as she had been as a teenager. The rumor in Rosslyn’s own time had been that the Queen did not want to share power with a husband, so she died without ever knowing a lover’s touch.

The scene shifted again, to a room Rosslyn recognized as the great chamber of the palace she herself had grown up in.

Brian was in dialogue with Maud about the movements of the Demon Empire, which had been behaving aggressively toward Ursabia. His young son Aulay was sitting in on the meeting.

Rosslyn thought the boy had intelligent eyes. She also noticed the same distinct jawline as her father and the ancestor who had first encountered the magic butterfly.

This is my ancestor, she thought.

It was a shame that the Warrior Queen had never married and produced children, though Rosslyn thought that she now understood at least a part of why.

A man in messenger’s uniform burst into the room, interrupting the conversation.

“Please forgive the intrusion, Your Majesty,” the man said breathlessly. “I have urgent news.”