“You stand over there and tell me that we should trust this foreign Queen, this riff raff from the belly of a whore with the future of our country! Did she not just get so many of our people killed at her own sham of a coronation?!’ Winston Churbull shouted at the Prime Minister, “It was her inadequate security that was to blame for that! How little must she value the lives of Albinians that a handful of extra guards is ‘not worth the expense’ to her?!”

The assembly rumbled, not a few men swore and cursed, to bring order was no small thing, but Prime Minister David Lloyd George would bow to no wit or accusation without a fight, and he leveled the same accusing finger back at the Secretary of the Populii. “I say she saved lives. Her quick action, even harboring the wounded in the royal palace, is the kind of leadership and courage this country needs right now! Yes, she does come from a foreign land, a rival Empire, even. But I remind you, Mr. Churbull, that the reason she was born abroad as opposed to here in the home island, was because of the hostility you encouraged! Were it not for the warmongers among us, eager to spend the blood of the young on wholly pointless salleys, the Queen would have been raised here!” He thrust his pointed finger down at the floor beneath his feet.

“And how dare you speak against the security of the coronation! It was, if anything, stronger than that of her predecessor, god save her soul, but even so, did she not send the wounded to the hospital, and visit them there, and secure them all comforts?!” The Prime Minister’s nostrils flared, and Churbull chewed on his cigar with fury.

“Anyone can visit a hospital, but I much prefer the wisdom to keep people from needing one in the first place.” Churbull replied with snark, he took a long puff on his cigar and said, “How are we to believe anything she says, when she has said nothing at all about the state of the armistice or how to prosecute the war, or even if we should!” He snapped, it was nonsense, of course, and he knew it. Had she grown up within her position, ready to take it on, she would have come to the throne with measures prepared and ready to propose for the betterment of the Commonwealth, but she was new to all of it, therefore needed time to learn her role and status, a lot for any mere ten year old child to manage.

But it would play well, ‘The unprepared and indifferent Queen’ would play well to the population.

“Nonsense!” David retorted, “I’ll have you know that a telegram was sent to the OFF of the Empire just this morning, inviting the Kaiser himself to come to the Commonwealth to negotiate a long term peace! I spoke with Her Majesty and she suggested a prisoner exchange, a measured return of territory, and a reduction of border forces for both sides so that neither can easily invade the lands of the other!”

Whatever Winston had to say was lost in the chaos as waving hats and angry gestures were accompanied by a horrendous cacophony of noise as the parliament of houses erupted in chaos. “The Kaiser?! Here?!” Winston bellowed. “Blood, toil, tears and sweat are the only things he should find, other than many shortcomings, mistakes, and disappointments if he should choose less than favorable terms to offer!”

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“It’s easy to say that when it is not your sweat, blood, or tears that you’re suggesting we offer.” David retorted, “As of this morning, I received an official invitation to the Queen’s home for a banquet. If you haven’t received your own as of this morning, I expect that you’ll see it waiting on your return. There we will outline the terms of proposed peace, and what’s more!” He leveled his finger out and swept it before him over the many levels of seats, “You’ll hear from her own lips what her proposals will be for peace, and for how to better our country! I can only hope that we will be Confederates across both aisles, for the sake of the future of the Commonwealth, we can afford to be nothing less!”

Doubting murmurs were a dull roar, but with the promise of hearing it for themselves, at least for the moment, speculation died down. ‘I’ll have to hope that we can keep her ‘named mage’ status quiet for a little while longer. Thankfully with travel restricted between here and the Empire we don’t have any press running over there and asking uncomfortable questions, but if we do achieve peace, that won’t last long.’

Churbull, however, was not done, David’s brief relief died as the Secretary of the Populii raised his voice again.

“I for one am very curious to know how, even considering her magic, she knows enough about war to use a rifle so effectively. But I’m sure it’s nothing, it couldn’t possibly be that she’s an imperial plant meant to undermine our country with shady deals that will destroy us from within!”

“Correct, she is not.” David kept his answer short and icy, if he were any judge, the rest of Parliament was recalling the same photos he was, or more likely in most of their cases, recalling what they saw with their own eyes.

In Ireland they were already calling her ‘The Bloody Queen’ though whether it was really Irish liberation behind the attack or a few rogue men of Irish blood who worked for another, nobody anywhere seemed to know. For their part, the various Irish groups seemed to be keeping a low profile since the coronation. ‘Which probably means they’re not involved, otherwise they’d be capitalizing on it.’

Even if they weren’t though, it wasn’t lost on him that a great many people wouldn’t have minded if the Queen perished and there was no royal family left at the center of the culture.

If there was one attempt, there would almost assuredly be another. Only who could say where the threat would come from?

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Pruss lay on his belly and took aim at the distant target. His heart rate was slow and steady, his pulse was even, and the creatures around him, birds, insects, the occasional fox, ceased to consider him a threat. ‘Fire.’ He told himself just as a bird chirped on a branch just over his head.

He squeezed the trigger as he activated his spell and a bullet flew from the rifle’s barrel and toward a distant target the aura of magic surrounded it and the single bullet became five. His targets were a set of stones far, far out of range in other circumstances, and once they were struck…

The stones themselves exploded like grenades, sending shrapnel in all directions. Each one of them was the size of a person’s head. ‘I was never as good a shot as this before the blessing of God. But now? I think I’m ready for a smaller target.’ Once he could shoot a grape from a stem at a thousand meters… ‘The devil will die.’