[ WP ] The hero was killed , the princess was sacrificed , and the evil king rules the land . For the average citizen , though , things have taken a turn for the better .

Infanta Karela's blood ran down the stone into a glass crucible. 
 
 `` Alight.'' 
 
 At a word of El Rey, Jorge del Castillo-Estrada, the blood and glass burst into flames. 
 
 
 The blood of the dead princess ended the civil war. The fire set by the king's magic called rain, rain that broke the drought, broke the famine, broke the back of the war that had been tearing apart the country for almost a decade. The resistance, damaged by the famine and dispirited with the execution of Senor de Compostela, fell apart into bits and pieces, straggling here and there through a country no longer buckling under its weight. 
 
 Maria counted the coins in her lock-box and sighed. 
 
 La Infanta was forty years old when she died, thirty years old and unmarried and by all accounts simple. She was also the oldest child of two sisters and the heir to the throne, a throne everyone with two eyes knew she would never inherit. 
 
 Del Castillo had married Ysabel, the younger sister, when she was seventeen. He kept her in comfort and in style and in a constant state of childbearing, pushing out a baby a year. This was all common knowledge. If La Infanta never bore a living child, and to date nobody had either married her or even tried to breed her, Del Castillo's children would be next in line for the throne. Together they had heirs and abundant spares, twelve all together so far. 
 
 In her more ungrateful moments, Maria blamed the Reina Ysabel and her excess fertility for the starvation wrought upon the peasantry. She knew it was neither true nor fair: grass for goats and grain for bread did n't grow when the rain did n't fall, for rich or poor alike. Still, seeing her with all twelve of her children living when all of Maria's children had died of hunger made for a sour taste in her mouth. 
 
 Still, with the death of the Infanta, the death of Compostela, and the ending of the battles, Del Castillo's infantry walked the streets of the country passing out grain and dried roots. If he used black magic to bring back the rain, did it matter? Did it matter to the ones who were already dead, their souls and their bones rotting away in the freshly-slaked earth? Did it matter if the living could count their fingers on their hands and know they had more days on the earth than fingers, for the first time in years? 
 
 Maria closed the lock-box and shoved it back into its place. Perhaps her immortal soul was forever stained, perhaps her relief at having food was doomed by the stain. 
 
 She pushed those thoughts to the back of her mind as she mixed flour and water for bread.
