Chapter Two; Sneak Peek #7

It has been an absolute pain in the posterior trying to balance the pacing between the three critical variants. I love to use POV cuts and strategically placed time skips to maintain the drama and tension throughout a chapter and to keep the reader informed of the entire situation.

This has, however, led to a small issue: whose POV to I cut to--and when? And what if that character is dead in this variant?

I've set up various POV swap sections, where I write exactly where a POV change should happen, and then I select a character according to who is alive and relevant in that variant. Where Vedran would get a POV if he was alive, Obren will instead if he is dead. Or if you are the usurper, the exiled Elya will get a POV, and so on and so forth.

Here is one such POV change: Elya meeting her mysterious benefactor for the first time.

Elya had never even heard of Lord Krupic before today. And while his estate is certainly grand, he seemed to belong to a certain character of Kantonian families: the families whose wealth far exceeded their glory and their fame.

His dining room is much smaller and more intimate than the enormous main hall of Wrido's palace. It is instead a room on a distant wing of the manor house, scarcely large enough to fit thirty people comfortably.

From wall to wall, the room is decorated with elaborate suits of armor and tapestries and religious icons. Elya feels uncomfortable at the table, stared down at by the unblinking eyes of saints and the equally unsettling eyes of Lord Krupic and his son.

The elder is perhaps a decade older than Sobik, while the child is a few years younger than Elya herself. They are both dressed as befitting men of wealth receiving their queen, and the dishes arrayed before them were similarly extravagant.

Idly, Elya wonders about her brother. She hadn't seen him since they arrived earlier that day. She is not afraid for his safety--not by any means--but the fact that he wasn't present at this meeting put an uneasy feeling in her stomach.

"I trust my people have treated you well, Your Majesty?" prompts the elder Krupic.

"They have been most polite and you have been most generous," she answers as neutrally as she can. "And the food is delicious, thank you."

Elya cannot allow herself to become too indebted to this man on the other end of the room, she knows this. But in this moment, hunger overwhelms good sense, and she becomes acutely aware of how poorly fed she was during their flight.

Krupic smiles. "I apologize for the rough conditions. I had very little time to prepare your rescue, and finding men who were willing to take the risk was very difficult."

"You have my gratitude."

He maintains his smile, even as Elya's palpable skepticism bleeds into the room and puts a tension in the air. He sets down his fork and his knife and he folds his hands on the table, leaning forward in his chair and planting his elbows on the wood.

"Your Majesty," he says, "I have a... proposition for you."