Queen Herana didn't stay in Aseron for long. There was little common ground between us and thus little for us to discuss. I was glad when she left, her presence in Aseron was distracting me from things that I would have rather been focusing on. Brumli had managed to find a large deposit of iron ore in the west near the border with Erst that according to Brumli would provide us enough iron ore to last us well over a year. I was excited to see what he had found and left with Myra to meet him there as soon as Herana left.

"This is a long way from Galand," I said to Brumli when I touched down and climbed down from Myra.

"We'll probably have to build a whole new town here, transporting the ore from here to Galand is going to be a problem."

"How do you know that there's ore here?"

"Do you see that grey band there running across the mountain? That's where the iron is, and there's a lot of it."

Getting this mining operation underway was going to require a lot of work and it needed to be done fast, because with metalworkers across the kingdom producing higher quality metal products thanks to the skills that they were learning from the dwarves demand for everything from weapons to cookware to farm implements had exploded, with traders from other kingdoms coming to Aseron to purchase items in bulk. Aseron was fast becoming a kingdom known for its steel but all of that demand was causing our supply of iron ore to become tightly squeezed, and the steam locomotive that the dwarves were working on in Galand, work on which I had told them was to continue unabated, needed a lot of steel. The locomotive, Brumli explained to me, would work in the same way as a mine cart, just on a much larger scale. Large quantities of steel were needed for the locomotive's construction, construction of the boilers that would power it, and for manufacturing the tracks that it would run on. Steel production was proceeding at such a frenetic pace that Brumli was having to use the chick that I had given him, which he'd named Nelly, to run the furnaces in order to prolong our coal supplies.

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The steam locomotive held enormous promise and I was excited to see its development through to completion. I had no interest in contemplating war, which, according to Philip's ambassador, was a real possibility.

"Our ambassadors in Kandalar and Volstaff have informed us that Queen Herana has been making serious overtures to them. It seems that she is offering them economic support in exchange for political and military support. If she is successful we will have adversaries to our west in the form of Kandalar and Volstaff and to our south and east in the form of Theran and Erst," Ambassador Voran said to me.

"Would they be adversaries? We've done nothing to provoke them into launching a military campaign against us."

"What Queen Herana seems to have in mind is a new power structure in the realm with her alone at the center, and if she perceives either you or King Philip as a threat to what she's trying to accomplish she will take steps to nullify you as a threat."

"I made it clear to her, just like I made it clear to Philip, that I have no interest in getting involved the politics of the realm."

"Surely you're not so naive as to think that because you've said that you're not interested in being a part of any of this that you're just going to be ignored; you have ushered in an era of unparalleled prosperity here in Aseron, that makes you and your kingdom a threat."

"What about Philip?"

"Dranii is still recovering from the civil war, if he doesn't agree to support her she'll probably seek to take advantage of our present state of weakness by launching an attack from the west with the help of Kandalar and Volstaff."

"Could Dranii withstand such an offensive?"

"Not in our current state, no. The thing to remember about Dranii is that is hasn't been necessary for us to have a large military for a long time."

"So basically you're a sitting duck then?"

"That would be one way of putting it, yes."

I spent some time alone in my study after Ambassador Voran had left, thinking about the situation in the realm as he had described it to me. War in the immediate future seemed a remote possibility to me; Volstaff and Kandalar were still in a state of political and economic insecurity, not in any shape for a large scale military mobilization. My guess was that Herana was thinking long term, of how much value Kandalar and Volstaff could be to her once they had become more stable, in which case there was no need for us to panic, we had time to consider our options and craft a sensible countermeasure.