The first thing Rania noticed was the smell.
Not the smell of a fine room, which was what the room appeared to be. Not beeswax candles or fresh-cut flowers or whatever expensive fragrance was supposed to come with ceilings that high. What she smelled was old paper. Dry and faintly musty, the particular scent of documents that have been read many times by many hands and then filed somewhere dark. The smell of a place where serious things get decided.
She had spent the last seven years of her life surrounded by that smell. She was oddly comforted by it.
Everything else was wrong.
The ceiling was too high. The bed was too heavy. The light coming through the tall windows was the wrong shade of afternoon, golden in a way Jakarta never quite managed. And standing at her bedside, with the patient stillness of someone who had been waiting for some time and had made his peace with it, was a man in a black coat holding a leather folder against his chest.
He was old. Not frail-old, but the kind of old that comes from a life spent being exactly this: composed, formal, and the bearer of news no one wants to hear.
"Your Grace," he said. "You have awakened."
Rania sat up. Her body felt fine, which was the strangest part. No headache, no stiffness. Just this room, this man, these windows, and a growing awareness that whatever had happened to her in the last six hours of her memory was going to require serious categorization before she could address any of it.
"Who are you," she said. Not a question, exactly. More of a starting point.
"Notary Oswin, Your Grace. Senior record-keeper to the Crown of Valdris, in service to your family for thirty-one years." He opened his folder with the brisk efficiency of a man who has been waiting to do this for some time. "I regret that circumstances require an immediate discussion of the estate's financial position."
"The estate." She looked around the room. The furniture was good. The curtains were heavy and embroidered. But there were rectangles of slightly darker stone on one wall where paintings used to hang, and the rug beside the bed had a faded patch that suggested something large and valuable had sat there until recently. "This estate is the kingdom."
"Yes, Your Grace."
"And I am—"
"The Heir of Valdris." He said it without inflection. "By the terms of the succession charter, ratified upon the passing of Lord Ashveil three weeks ago, the title and all associated obligations pass to you."
There was a knock at the door, and then without waiting for a response, three men filed into the room. They were dressed in varying shades of formal misery: formal collars, formal boots, formal expressions of formal distress. One of them was already crying. Not loudly. Just quietly, the way someone cries when they have been crying on and off all day and no longer have the energy to be embarrassed about it.
Rania observed them for a moment.
Then she looked back at Oswin. "How much."
He cleared his throat. "The combined outstanding liabilities of the Crown of Valdris, as of this morning's accounting—"
"The number, please."
A pause. The kind of pause that means the number is large enough that even the person delivering it needs a moment to remind themselves they are merely the messenger.
"Eight hundred and forty-seven million coins."
Silence.
One of the ministers made a soft, broken sound. The one who had already been crying pressed his hand over his eyes.
Rania sat very still on the edge of the bed and looked at a fixed point on the wall across the room. In another context, in another life, she had once sat in a conference room in front of a spreadsheet that showed a client's fund had lost sixty percent of its value overnight, and she had experienced a very similar stillness. Not shock. Not panic. Something more like the sensation of a vast problem arranging itself into legible components.
Eight hundred and forty-seven million.
Seven creditors. Oswin had mentioned seven. She had caught that much.
"I need paper," she said.
Oswin blinked. "Your Grace?"
"Paper. And something to write with. And I would like everyone to stop making noise while I think."
The crying minister actually stopped crying, mostly from surprise. The other two exchanged a glance. Oswin, to his considerable credit, simply reached into his coat and produced a small notebook and a pen, which he offered to her without comment.
She took them. Uncapped the pen. Wrote at the top of the page: 847M.
Then, below that, she wrote: Who is most afraid of losing their money?
It was not the question anyone in the room was expecting. She could feel them watching her write it. She did not explain. There would be time to explain things later, or not at all, depending on how things went. What mattered now was that she had the right question.
Because eight hundred and forty-seven million coins was not a number she could address directly. Nobody could. You did not pay down a number that large by finding savings or selling furniture. You paid it down by understanding the people on the other side of it, what they needed, what they feared, what they were willing to trade for something other than coin.
Creditors were not abstractions. They were people with specific problems. And people with specific problems could be negotiated with.
"Tell me about each creditor," she said. "Not the amounts. I'll look at those later. Tell me why they lent the money in the first place."
Oswin looked at her for a moment. Then he sat down in the chair beside the bed, which was not protocol, but Rania was not particularly interested in protocol at this juncture, and he seemed to understand that.
"That," he said slowly, "is an unusual first question."
"I'm an unusual person." She looked up from the notebook. "Start with whoever is most likely to do something drastic in the next thirty days."
Outside, the afternoon light shifted. Somewhere far below, the city of Valdris went on being a city: markets open, carts moving, people buying and selling things they needed with money they mostly didn't have, entirely unaware that the person now responsible for the debt written above their lives had, as of approximately forty minutes ago, never set foot in their world before.
Rania wrote two more lines in the notebook.
Then she asked for tea.