Short Story Intro (Draft) -- "I'm not an 'avenging angel', just a woman with some hungry neighbors."

And suddenly, I felt like I was twenty-seven again, headed to take care of Scipio Ciatore in the Rubatoian embassy in Bellavista, Florheim, only this time, no one had sent me. Unless, of course, you wanted to glorify things--wanted to say that the Rubatoians, frustrated over the decades of high tariffs, and food costs, and Cernilia's near-monopoly over some of our barest necessities, had finally sent me there for the emperor as a representative of my people's will. I wouldn't say all that. But then again, I'd rather not make it into the history books. I'd like this just to help my kids, and my kids' kids someday, without them ever realizing what their Mae had to do. Mae was a criminal--and she'll act like one again, for them. For home.

How this all started... the easiest way to know there's a problem in Rubato is to look at the capital, Blancwood. If the academy's having to go without Wednesday's chicken alfredo with cream sauce and Thursday's veal parmesan, you don't have to think hard to figure out what the rest of us are doing without. Clean water. Bread. Fruits and vegetables to make sure our children grow up healthy. Even now, when I may have a whole drawer of those proverbial "silver spoons" in my big house, I can't ignore the struggling of the people I grew up with. I still think of myself as one of them. But I also can't buy them all groceries all year, every year. So something has to change.

Anyway, away from the problem for a moment, back to the present. If you look at a map, it's only a dot, but Cittá is a bona fide citadel. It's been fortified like that since the last Blancwood-Cernilia war, only a handful of years ago. The guards are well-trained, and with their people only a few generations removed from being Rubatoians, there are many gypsies and mages of other kinds on their side as well. It's meant to be the ultimate roadblock for invaders of Cernilia. That's why a small force, myself and my suegro (father-in-law) that I... grudgingly took with me, should have been the best bet, I thought. Not a four-of-a-kind, but a full house maybe, something with a good chance of winning. He was to keep watch and distract any guards that might have noticed my entry into the imperial palace on that night.