After the family’s beds are taken out of the horse pocket and placed around the central fire pit, where the family’s cauldron is placed, rain starts pouring in the forest outside. So while their log cabin still smells like turpentine, she also takes the chair out of the horse pocket.

  Once the chair is taken out, she also takes out the kalemtras (knife used to maintain quills) so that she can engrave the ridge beam with two talismans centered on wafqs (magic squares) before she can apply the ink. Which catches Vincent’s eye:

  “Honey, what are you doing to the ridge beam?” he asks her.

  “I’m engraving our safety talismans onto the ridge beams. It’s a little complicated so I need all the focus I can get!”

  Her brain goes on overdrive as she starts calculating the values of the letters to use to engrave to ensure that the two talismans, under ilm al-huruf (letterism), will function as intended. However, the more critical of the two is the Muggle-repellent talisman.

  A lot of wizards would be tempted to maximize the range of a Muggle-repellent talisman, but I know that it could draw the ayans’ attention in ways I might not want! Maybe ten meters around the cabin would be enough to achieve the level of safety I want: locals tend to be superstitious around deep woods anyway, Nurcan muses.

  “You’re wracking your mind, honey…” Vincent makes his observation while the kids are asleep.

  “Honey? There’s no deli bal (mad honey) left at this time of the year! Deli bal might have made the Muggle repellent cover too wide an area and attract unwanted attention!” Nurcan retorts.

  “But maybe I could go sell analgesic potions during the winter. That way I could just buy food and firewood on market days…”

  “In that case, just pass off the analgesic potion as a French potion. But don’t sell too much of it, or you might make our home not mewat anymore, and we can no longer hide here!” Nurcan warns him.

  “Don’t worry: my analgesic potions were just superstitions at court. Selling too much of it would cause a breach of the Statute…”

  The engraving of the talismans resume, first with the Muggle repellent, and later, the anti-theft one. Which she later uses her self-inking quill in reed to write inside the engravings she leaves inside the ridge beam.

  By the time the process ends, it’s well past nightfall and her mental energy is running low. She looks high and low for the spruce sap she saw Vincent collect from duplicated shingles.

  “The spruce sap, please…” Nurcan asks Vincent after locating a vial of spruce sap.

  “What did you just do to the ridge beam?“ Vincent asks her, while looking up to the roof’s ridge beam.

  “It might look like art to you, and you probably heard about letterism through your customers at the Sublime Porte, but this is what a letterism-made talisman looks like…”

  “What do you want spruce sap for?”

  “Ensuring the ink on the talismans won’t fade, and the talismans will remain effective!”

  Vincent then hands her a vial of spruce sap, which she then applies on the talismans. Luckily for her, it didn’t consume that much, and the vial still contains some amount of it.

  Once the vial is back in Vincent’s horse pocket, Nurcan stows the chair back in it, too, along with the quill and the kalemtras.

  “Between the retreat of the Nizam-I Cedid, the Sultan’s political abandonment of the Irad-I Cedid, you’re the main sweet thing I have left!” Nurcan then leans on Vincent to kiss him before she goes to sleep.

  “You saw past my family’s dark legacy, especially post-Reign of Terror, that was a life saver for me!”

  When I fled the Reign of Terror in France, I settled down in Istanbul, and I met her again when she bought an analgesic potion right in front of me in Topkapi Palace, I couldn’t help but feel for her, even if she was a little cold at times, Vincent starts thinking of how he met her again in Istanbul, while kissing her.

  After the kiss ends, the two, tired, go to their respective beds, feeling that they can finally start living their life away from the yeniceri threat, protected by Muggle-repelling and anti-theft talismans.

  However, during the night, Nurcan rolls in her bed, trapped by nightmares of past figures:

  Suleimaniye Mosque, Istanbul. Several figures from both the Siege of Acre and the Nizam-I Cedid were assembled around Nurcan, with one of them, a Nizam-I Cedid deserter, speaking first.

  “Why did you prey upon these poor Muggles?” The deserter, clad in a red vest and fez, along with blue pants, turned to the next figure, al-Jazzar. “You wasted our money, you were allowed to spend from our funds only to the extent they were directly attributable to our battle expenses!”

  “May I remind you, sir, that, without these expenditures, there may not even be an Empire left!” al-Jazzar retorted. “You might say that I wasted the Irad-I Cedid’s money by overbilling supplies, siege premiums to the rest of the garrison, or expediting repairs to the citadel, but I had no choice if I wanted to keep the city’s garrison fed, and able to fight Napoleon back!”

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  Nurcan had a flashback of all these ledgers from that era, about the cost of victory and how al-Jazzar repeatedly claimed that the French might have exploded ammunition caches in failed assaults, and paying siege premiums was required to prevent desertions.

  At this time, she froze in place, realizing that, if the deserter was correct, the legitimate portion of what al-Jazzar billed the Irad-I Cedid was only a small fraction of the total cost.

  And two more figures entered the mosque’s door: Taalia, a geomancer she knew from her school days, and her dad.

  “I feel like you didn’t answer the guard’s question!” Taalia yelled at her.

  “You should feel ashamed! We thought you were a spy; now you’re accused of preying upon these poor little… Muggles!” her dad added his voice to the cacophony of yells.

  “I didn’t prey upon these… poor little Muggles to pay for al-Jazzar’s embezzlement; Serif, my Muggle predecessor, started doing it before I could even take office, or Bekir, who officially replaced him! He implemented these rusumats (consumption taxes) before corruption was rooted out!” Nurcan responded to her dad first, then turned to the deserter. “For the past twelve years, I fought the abuses of iltizam and muafiyets! I didn’t steal from the people, only from those who stole from it!”

  Upon arriving at the mosque, al-Jazzar’s treasurer, Haim, began to build up rage as his disfigured face turned red. “Where did this wave of musaderes and abuse crackdowns lead your precious little Nizam-I Cedid? It ended up funding an army that gave up without a fight! At least the cash I stole from the Irad-I Cedid, and from these… Muggles, as you call them, in Sidon and Damascus eyalets beat Napoleon!”

  Taalia turned to al-Jazzar. “I worked with you on the Kabri Aqueduct after the siege, until you died! But Nurcan saw that you gave her time to save the Empire from corruption!”

  Nurcan, frozen in place by al-Jazzar telling her the cold, hard truth about Nizam-I Cedid deployment during the Edirne Incident, recovered her spirits. “Speaking of corruption, officially, Bekir was fired as defterdar of the Irad-I Cedid after the Convention of El-Arish failed because of he mishandled you, al-Jazzar! But, to ensure the Statute of Secrecy would hold, I had no choice but to take a mal-I maktu (fixed share) of one percent on recovered sums off abusers, brought down to a quarter of a percent when the Siege of Alexandria began!”

  “Siege?” al-Jazzar retorted. “Alexandria fell in one day!”

  Alejandra, her old friend from her exchanges at Beauxbatons, entered the mosque. “What did I hear just outside the mosque?” she gasped.

  Nurcan then turned to Alejandra entering the mosque. “I forgive you for not knowing that aspect of muggle Ottoman society, but sometimes the best way to maintain the Statute of Secrecy is to adopt muggle practices. If I didn’t take a cut off recovered sums from muggle tax abusers under the Irad-I Cedid, I’d be suspected of being a witch; the muggle Sublime Porte culture demands it for any courtier in the civil service to even survive!”

  “What do you mean?” a perplex Alejandra asked the ex-defterdar.

  “To them, a civil servant that doesn’t take a cut, or charge fees, is either a saintly wizard or a foreign spy! In Istanbul, that’s something you don’t want to be! That is a breach of the Statute waiting to happen!”

  Unless you were a magical diplomat or merchant, no wizard in Madrid would know what the Irad-I Cedid is. And even I understood the Irad-I Cedid only as some plan to act upon the 1789 French cahiers and that’s because Nurcan was the only other witch who saw the cahiers’ implications as clearly as I did! Alejandra mused, while frozen in place by the declarations of her old friend. I’d never have believed her to succumb to corruption as implied by the cahiers! She’d never do this unless it’s necessary to maintain magical secrecy! But perhaps it was necessary…

  Taalia resumed the talks. “And yet, you were awarded the Order of Magical Distinction, Grand Chelengk, after the Convention of El-Arish, for your role in drafting the Irad-I Cedid, bridging the gaps between the Muggle and magical worlds…”

  “Especially fighting the abuses of iltizam and muafiyets! Esame abuses were much more cumbersome than iltizam and muafiyet ones to fight, for much less of a result! But I never wore the grand chelengk outside of major state functions because it would make me an attractive target for theft!”

  Speaking of esame, there were yeniceris at the mosque’s door, yelling all over the place, and threatening to force its doors down. As they swung their sabers against the doors’ locks, they flood through the mosque:

  Haim turned to Nurcan. “Don’t forget: your gold comes from al-Jazzar’s crimes!”

  “Give us Ahmed!” the yeniceris yelled once inside the mosque, referring to the Muggle defterdar of the Irad-I Cedid.

  “I’m afraid Ahmed isn’t here!” Nurcan told the angry yeniceris as they attempted to flush her out.

  Al-Jazzar shoved Nurcan out of the mosque, while everyone else got to the second floor’s gallery. However, it’s only then that a yeniceri sharpshooter fired a captured Charleville 1777 at her head, at point-blank, while she was about to cast a spell.

  Is this the end? Shot down by a mere merchant… Nurcan’s head bled, just outside the mosque’s main door, while the Nizam-I Cedid deserter had to fend off the yeniceris, and Alejandra used magic to remove the bullet from her head. By doing so, however…

  Nurcan awakens with the sound of a branch falling close to her home, whose fall sounds like a Charleville 1777 being fired. She’s also terrified by the dream she just had: yeniceri hunted her down while facing ghosts from his past, namely those from the War of the Second Coalition. But this nightmare causes her to awaken to a grim reality. And Vincent, too.

  “What happened, honey?” Vincent asks her, also awakened by the branch falling.

  “I had a bad dream, made worse by a branch sounding like a gunfight!”

  “Honey, your mind works way too hard, even when asleep…”

  “So, while the yeniceri might not be able to get to me physically, here it’s clear that just hiding from them won’t be enough to calm me down!” She feels a little dazed. “Here I feel like hiding in this mewat forest is not quite what it seemed like last night… Was the terrible price paid by the Irad-I Cedid at Acre seven years ago worth it?”

  “Please, this is history by now…”

  “Yet, I’m here because of the consequences of angry yeniceri and ayans having lost privileges and wealth because of me!”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah, no need to repeat the mechanisms through which ayans and yeniceri abused iltizam and muafiyets! They overtaxed these poor Muggles!”

  “And this victory at Acre, while it might have saved the Empire, left the Irad-I Cedid in a perpetual structural deficit since!”

  “But why do you think as though you were still the Irad-I Cedid Defterdar?”

  “One does not simply forget about one’s old job overnight, especially not when what you did at work was the reason for your flight!

  Took the Irad-i Cedid five years to finally get some of the embezzled money back. After Bekir was fired after the El-Arish Convention because of his incompetence, I never spoke to him again, not even when musadere was decreed against al-Jazzar’s estate. Yet, Bekir and I were at each other’s throats after Acre, about how to deal with the shortfall, Nurcan has another memory resurface about Bekir, before returning to bed.