Kael POV
I find her in the workshop at midnight, covered in sawdust and blood.
She doesn't notice me at first. Too focused on the massive wooden frame she's building with three terrified apprentices. Her burned hands grip a hammer—she should be in bed screaming in pain, but instead she's measuring angles and shouting instructions.
"No, no! The support beam goes HERE!" She points with the hammer. "If you put it there, the whole thing collapses when we add the counterweight!"
"But Lady Aria, that's not how we usually—"
"Your usual way doesn't work! That's why I'm here!" She wipes sweat from her forehead, leaving a streak of dirt. "Trust me. Please. I know this looks crazy but the math is solid."
The apprentice hesitates, then nods. They adjust the beam.
I should announce myself. But something stops me. I just... watch. She moves like a dancer between the workstations—checking measurements, correcting mistakes, her mind clearly five steps ahead of everyone else. This isn't someone faking knowledge. This is mastery.
And it terrifies me.
"Your Highness." Rhys appears beside me in the shadows. He's learned to move silently after twenty years of war. "You should be resting. Your father needs you in the morning."
"My father is sedated and under guard. He'll live." I don't take my eyes off Aria. "What did you learn about the note?"
"The handwriting doesn't match anyone in the palace records. The paper is expensive—noble quality. And the phrase 'the ones who sent you here' suggests conspiracy." Rhys pauses. "Your Highness, what if she truly is a spy? What if this is all an elaborate trap?"
"Then it's the most complicated trap I've ever seen." I gesture toward Aria, who's now explaining something about 'gravitational force' to a confused Master Garrett. "Look at her. She's not pretending. She genuinely understands these concepts."
"Which makes her more dangerous, not less."
He's right. I know he's right. But I can't shake the memory of her face when she told me about being from the future. She wasn't lying—I've interrogated enough prisoners to know the difference. She believed what she was saying. Completely.
Which means either she's insane, or something impossible is happening.
"Double her guard," I say finally. "But let her work. I want to see what she builds."
Rhys sighs but bows. "As you command."
He leaves and I stay in the shadows, watching this impossible woman work through the night.
At three in the morning, her apprentices collapse from exhaustion. But Aria keeps going. Her hands shake. Her face is pale. But she doesn't stop measuring, calculating, adjusting.
I step out of the shadows. "You should rest."
She jumps, nearly dropping her compass. When she sees me, something flickers across her face. Fear? No—recognition. Like she's seeing something in me that I don't show anyone else.
"Can't rest," she says, turning back to her work. "I have six days left and this frame needs to be perfect or the whole system fails."
"You're injured. You were nearly burned alive eight hours ago."
"And I'll be definitely dead in six days if I don't finish this." She hammers a joint into place. "So which would you prefer, Your Highness? A rested corpse or a functioning siege weapon?"
I almost smile. Almost. "You're different from this morning."
"This morning I was terrified and trying not to show it. Now I'm too tired to be scared." She sets down her hammer and finally looks at me. Really looks. "Your father—how is he?"
"Why do you care?"
"Because you rode through fire to save me, then immediately rode into another fire to save him. That's not nothing." She sits on a wooden crate, wincing. "In my world, we'd call that trauma bonding. Or heroic stupidity. Sometimes both."
"Your world." I move closer. "You really believe you're from the future."
"I don't believe it. I know it." She meets my eyes without flinching. "And before you ask—no, I can't prove it in a way you'd accept. I can't show you my driver's license or pull up Google on my phone. All I can do is build things that shouldn't exist yet and hope you don't kill me for witchcraft."
"Are you a witch?"
"I'm a doctor of aerospace engineering with three patents and a photographic memory." She laughs bitterly. "In your time, yes. That makes me a witch."
I study her face—exhausted, determined, haunted. "If you truly are from the future, why are you here? Why now?"
"I don't know." For the first time, her voice cracks. "One minute I was celebrating the biggest achievement of my life. The next, I woke up on an execution platform in someone else's body. I don't know why. I don't know how. And I definitely don't know how to get home."
She sounds so lost. So human. Not like a spy or a witch. Just like someone who's terrified and trying very hard not to show it.
Like me, after my mother died and everyone expected me to be strong.
"The note you found," I say carefully. "It mentioned 'the ones who sent you here.' What does that mean?"
"It means I'm not the only time traveler." She stands, her face pale. "Someone from my era is here. In your time. And they either sent me back on purpose, or they followed me. Either way, they want me dead before I figure out why."
"That's impossible."
"So is a woman doing trajectory calculations in her head. So is antibiotics from moldy bread. So is crop rotation that could end your kingdom's famine." She steps closer, her amber eyes blazing. "Your Highness, I need you to accept something: The impossible is happening. And it's going to keep happening until we figure out what's really going on."
Before I can respond, the workshop door crashes open. A guard stumbles in, gasping. "Your Highness! Emergency! Prince Damian—he's escaped from the dungeons!"
My blood runs cold. "What? How?"
"Someone helped him, sir! They killed three guards and blasted through the cell wall with—" The guard swallows hard. "With some kind of explosive. Nothing we've ever seen before. It melted the iron bars like they were butter."
Aria goes white as a sheet. "Thermite," she whispers. "They used thermite. That's a chemical reaction that burns at four thousand degrees. It won't be invented for eight hundred years."
I stare at her. Then at the guard. Then back at her.
"Whoever helped Damian escape," Aria continues, her voice shaking, "they're from my time. They have modern technology. And they just armed your brother—the man everyone thinks I seduced—with weapons that could level this entire castle."
The guard looks at me desperately. "Your Highness, what are your orders?"
I open my mouth to answer but Aria grabs my arm. Her fingers are ice-cold.
"Kael, listen to me." She never uses my first name. "If Damian teams up with whoever has that technology, they could kill everyone in the palace before sunrise. We need to—"
An explosion rocks the workshop. The ground shakes. Windows shatter. Aria falls and I catch her, pulling her against my chest as debris rains down around us.
When the dust clears, I look outside and see flames. Massive flames engulfing the east wing of the palace. The same wing where the earlier catapult almost fired.
And standing in the courtyard, silhouetted against the fire, is my brother Damian. He's holding something that looks like a metal tube. Something that shouldn't exist.
He points it at the palace and fires. Another explosion. Another section of wall crumbles.
Aria's voice is barely a whisper in my ear. "That's a rocket launcher. Military-grade. If he has that, he probably has assault rifles, grenades, maybe even C4." She looks up at me, her face desperate. "Your Highness, we're not fighting a medieval conspiracy anymore. We're fighting World War Three with swords and arrows."
I stare at the burning palace. At my brother wielding impossible weapons. At the woman in my arms who knows things she shouldn't know.
And I realize with absolute certainty: Everything I thought I knew about this world just became worthless.
"Master Garrett!" I shout. "Evacuate the workshop! Get everyone to the safe houses!"
"But Your Highness, the weapon—"
"Forget the weapon! We need to survive tonight first!" I turn to Aria. "How do we fight technology we don't understand?"
She looks at the rocket launcher. At Damian. At the burning palace. Then she smiles—cold and sharp and absolutely terrifying.
"We build our own," she says. "And we build it better."