MB Chapter 14

【Past】

"What—?"

Entzi Bethelgius asked again. Ekser repeated what he had said, his expression settled into an even, laden stillness.

"Lady Goiyo Rubiette is dead."

"Wait. Dead, you said—"

His face contracted. A structure that had been almost complete collapsed into nothing in an instant. He held the feeling back with his back teeth and asked, flatly:

"Did Therio Alte finally put his hands on her?"

"No. By all accounts it was an accident."

"'An accident.' How convenient that the language should be exactly the same as what happened in Bethelgius."

As though it were arranged. Entzi's mouth pulled sideways, once, and was still.

"What was the cause."

"She had been taking Silverbell as a blood pressure medication. A cardiac event followed as a side effect. There was nothing to be done in time."

"Why was she seeking treatment for blood pressure."

"She had been taking an oral contraceptive. The Snowdrop preparation. The blood pressure elevation is a known side effect."

The fingers tapping against the desk stopped.

A contraceptive causing blood pressure to rise was not unusual. Treating elevated blood pressure with Silverbell was a plausible enough response.

But if the contraceptive had been Snowdrop, and the agent taken to lower her pressure had been Silverbell—

A name moved across Entzi's mind without stopping.

"Snowdrop together with Silverbell, and a cardiac event as the side effect. Am I expected to call this a coincidence?"

"No one in Solaris knows, my lord. Topeche and Solaris are a long way apart, and even in Topeche those who know of it are few. It has been a matter we ourselves have kept concealed."

"Your intelligence is, as I've known for some time, poor. What I did not know was that it had cured into stone."

In Ekser’s own terms, it was probably concern. In Entzi’s, it was interference. He had kept his counsel to avoid having to explain himself, and what that had produced was apparently the most singularly idiotic subordinate alive.

Could the man not simply do what he was told. An inward click of the tongue.

"Do you know who Goiyo Rubiette's mother was?"

"Arzla Rubiette—you mean?"

"Precisely. Her name before her marriage was Arzla Balverdi. From Topeche. Of House Balverdi. And the stated cause of Arzla's death was also an accidental overdose of Silverbell."

Balverdi!? Ekser's mouth fell open.

With the weight of a nail driven home, Entzi said:

"This was not a coincidence. And it was not an accident."

Goiyo Rubiette had taken her own life. To the outside world the story was accident—as Arzla Rubiette's had been. Had the truth of how Arzla died reached her daughter's ears? Had Arzla told the child herself, when she was barely thirteen years old?

To tell a child that age you were choosing to die—that was a cruelty beyond the ordinary kind. Entzi swallowed a small sympathy and moved on.

"In any case, the situation has knotted itself thoroughly. Another few months and it would have resolved. I cannot account for why she chose to do it here, now, but—"

He narrowed his eyes.

He could not be certain how much she had understood when she acted. Likely she had known that the combination would stop her heart. Whether she had known anything beyond that, he doubted—Arzla herself had probably not known the full picture.

Her death was a setback. That it had been Silverbell—that, at least, was a fortunate development.

He rose and shrugged into his coat.

"I'll go and receive the body from House Alte."

"The body, my lord?"

"Ekser. You ask too many questions. Would you like to be the one holding Balverdi? I am almost prepared to arrange it."

Ekser closed his mouth. The apology was better left unsaid—he knew that by now.

Entzi finished preparing to leave.

The plan had gone sideways. That was not cause to abandon it. There might yet be another way to bring it around.

The Bethelgius Grand Duke's eyes went flat and still. Whatever happened—a promise had been made. It would be kept. Even if that meant discarding every last thing he had built toward.

The funeral rites at House Alte were over. Therio stood over the coffin and could not move away from it.

The day for interring Goiyo Alte in the Alte family grounds was approaching, and Therio could not bring himself to send the body away.

He had stood over her every day, several times each day—looking at a face that did not decompose, held unchanged by preservation magic—and to send her somewhere he could never reach again was, in itself, a grief that could not be reasoned with.

She was gone. That much had been established. The grief was irrational.

The grief did not care.

Therio's eyes were filling again when the noise outside grew louder.

"You cannot go in, my lord—"

"Call for reinforcement, now—"

For something like this to be happening here, at this particular—he frowned and moved toward the door to see what was occurring, when it opened of its own accord.

The person who stepped through should not have been there. Copper-red hair. The Grand Duke of Bethelgius.

The grief inside Therio's chest lit. Grief had been in his chest up to this moment; now there was fire alongside it.

"What sort of disrespect is this, Grand Duke."

"I came to pay my respects. And I have something to speak with you about."

"I have not given you permission to enter this place. Leave. Now."

"It doesn't seem to me as though the permission required is yours."

The deceased is not a member of your household, after all. The contempt in the words was overt. Therio could not hold himself back—he drew his sword. The blade turned cold and bright.

The guards who had failed to stop Entzi came running in numbers, and stopped outside the entrance, unable to do anything, their faces set.

"That is the last I'll say it. Go."

"I find it difficult to understand. Such dismissiveness in life, such coldness—and now, having stayed here for days with your arms around a coffin, weeping—"

"Do not speak of Goiyo that way—"

"The one dishonoring her is not me."

He walked forward through the room, unhurried, as though the sword pointed in his direction was not there.

The guards, denied entry into the hall, burned in silence. Therio, past the end of his patience, brought the blade across. The small mercy in it was that he didn't aim for the man's neck.

The sword broke at the hilt without touching him.

Therio stared. Entzi Bethelgius had a reputation. Therio had always thought it somewhat overstated—the man’s real capability was probably close to his own, or a little under it. There had never seemed to be any reason to think otherwise.

He had not seen the moment his blade was destroyed. He had not seen anything at all. The gap between them was not what he had assumed.

It was not close.

"How did you—"

"Maids who gave no care to their duties and used a mistress's name as they pleased. A steward of Topeche descent who knew the outcome and brought poison to his master regardless."

The thing Entzi said stopped Therio's feet.

"A man who courted a woman, led her all the way to marriage, and then decided his feelings had changed—to the younger sister, of all people, while managing to hold his guilt tightly enough not to say a word directly. And to place the cause of Melishi Rubiette's death at Goiyo Rubiette's feet, and call it her fault."

You couldn't even bring yourself to say it to her face.

The final steps brought him to Goiyo Rubiette's coffin. Entzi bent and placed a single white lily on the lid.

The name engraved there—Goiyo Alte. He looked at the name on the lid and found it funny. Then, openly, he looked back at Therio Alte with no expression at all.

"That you can put the word 'dishonor' in your mouth is, frankly, remarkable."

"Don't touch her—You intend to humiliate her again, now that she's dead, because she was a Rubiette—!?"

"That is your work, not mine."

His fingertip moved across the engraved name on the coffin lid, tracing the letters of Alte. They vanished as though the name had always been a lie. What remained were two characters: Goiyo.

"Speaking of which—you ought to be somewhere, shouldn't you? You've been shut up in here for some time."

"What nonsense are you—"

"Elly. She must be waiting for you quite anxiously."

The ground shifted under Therio's feet.

How does the Grand Duke know about that. He could not keep the disruption off his face.

"What do you mean."

"About the things that happened to Goiyo Rubiette. About Elly. How you know—that's what you're asking me?"

"How do you know—how can you possibly know—"

"Because my memory is reasonably good. At first I thought she was common-looking. Then I realised Melishi Rubiette's face was actually rather rare, which made the search take longer than I'd have liked."

That means——

"In the end I did find her. Though the eyes were the wrong color, which I had worried about—but it seems that wasn't much of an obstacle for you, was it."

"You—you had the nerve to—"

"You will not raise your voice. I am not a small enough person to deserve 'nerve' from you."

Therio, reason gone, snatched a blade from the guard beside him and threw himself forward—and was knocked effortlessly sideways, landing against the wall. Something cracked in his ribs. Drawing breath became work.

Several of the more loyal knights, white with fury, tried to force their way into the hall—and were stopped by nothing visible, as though a wall had been erected between the door and the room's interior. The sound of teeth grinding against each other rose from several places at once.

The finger that had erased the name tapped once against the side of the coffin.

"To fall in love because someone resembled another person—frankly, it was almost boring, how easily it worked. Whether that counts as love, or whether it was something closer to fixation on a thing he had never managed to hold—"

"Why—why would you do something like that—why—"

"To separate you from Goiyo Rubiette."

Therio's face broke apart.

For something as petty as that, he had been given someone who looked like Melishi. For something so meaningless, Goiyo Alte had arrived at her death.

That it had been Therio Alte himself who was led around by a reason as trivial as that—that was also a fact. But if the cause had not existed, the effect would not have followed.

If Entzi had not arranged it, if Elly had not approached him—

A target for his fury had arrived. It burned without decency, without self-awareness, indifferent to proportion.

"I thought that if you found a new attachment, a divorce could be arranged without friction. That is, after all, what you do—change your mind, and when you do, discard without hesitation. She had nowhere to go back to, so removing her from House Alte would have been straightforward enough."

I didn't anticipate this. He kept the rest of that to himself and moved one shoulder, the slightest degree.

He had talked long enough. If he stayed any longer, matters would become inconvenient. Entzi Bethelgius decided to bring the substance of it to a close.

"In any case, what's done is done. So I'll take the body."

Take the—

Before Therio had fully processed the words, the coffin where Goiyo lay was simply no longer there. Therio stared at the empty floor of the reception hall.

Then he threw himself toward the door, toward the place she had been—and found that he too was now stopped by the invisible boundary.

His hands beat against it. They found nothing.

He could not move one step closer to where she had been.

He pulled the sword from the guard beside him. He poured everything into the swing.

The barrier held.

He could do nothing.

Therio Alte screamed.

"Give her back—give her back to me. Please. Please—"

"Wasn't it you who cast her off."

He looked at the man who had shattered him with that single clause, without visible feeling, and said it the way he might state the time.

"Better by any measure to come into my hands and have something done for her than to rot in the arms of someone with neither the standing nor the right."

"Do you mean to make an enemy of Alte—!? You've already brought down Rubiette, and you think you can make an enemy of Alte as well and survive for long—"

"I don't spend time on that sort of concern. The whole board is going to be overturned anyway—which means everything will become as though it never happened. That everything I've worked for will come to nothing as well is something I find genuinely unfortunate."

'Come to nothing'—what does he mean by—Therio's eyes shook with the question, but the Grand Duke had no intention of answering it.

"I am, unlike you, rather serious about keeping promises. That's all I have to tell you."

Then goodbye.

Those quiet words were the last thing, and Entzi Bethelgius was also gone.

Only then could Therio and the knights of House Alte set foot inside the hall again. But there was nothing left to do with the fact.

Therio's trembling hands pressed against nothing.