APIBAGS Chapter 80

Because everyone had kept their distance, there was an open circle of space around Evangeline, and the trailing hem of her dress, dyed red, was visible with unusual clarity. Evangeline had her hand pressed over her mouth—but if she moved it, the corners of her lips would draw their arc—you could already see it coming.

"Lady Rohanson…."

Kinder called out her name and bit down hard on her lip. Unlike the others, whose gaze had been returned to them, Kinder was looking at Evangeline alone.

There was no way Lady Rohanson had killed the Crown Prince—and certainly not like this, staging it as if confessing to the crime herself. This was obviously a trap. It wasn't for nothing that Sir Gabriel—it wasn't for nothing that he'd left her that warning, all that restless unease of his. But who would even believe Kinder's word?

The white dress was stained red. The confrontation with Duke Hosaquin had been no small scene. She had nearly been drenched in wine because of it, but Gabriel had shielded Evangeline in her place, and so the white dress had caught only a few scattered drops.

Which meant: before the lights went out, the dress had been clean.

"I let my guard down."

Evangeline’s eyes flashed as she tossed the observation out with a breezy relish. Her tone was unsettlingly festive—in a way that made the flesh prickle.

The banquet hall doors opened—belatedly, when no one had noticed them closing in the first place. A few guests would later recall that the doors had still been wide open when Gabriel left to change his clothes. That was all they could say.

Through those doors came Muzeta—the Crown Prince's personal guard knight, the man who had forgotten his duty, vacated his post, and left his master to his death.

"Your—Your Highness!"

Muzeta set about managing the aftermath: he had the Crown Prince's body taken down and attended to. He dispatched a report to the Emperor about the Crown Prince's death. He ushered the shaken imperial grandchildren to safety.

The girl with the emerald stood dazed for a long time, as if her soul had left her, letting the blood dripping from the Crown Prince hanging from the chandelier to hit her, until she was led back to her quarters by her twin's hand.

The maid with the scarf below her nose watched without blinking as Evangeline drank every last drop of the wine. Only after she had taken back the emptied glasses from Evangeline and Lady Toten did she move on.

'How strange. The holy water hadn't worked on Evangeline Rohanson. So she isn't a demon?'

Watching the way she swallowed—without hesitation, all the way down—it was clear she hadn't used any trick. She had genuinely drunk the wine laced with holy water. The way she downed it in one go almost looked like a performance: look, this is proof holy water isn't my weakness. Saraka was still turning the empty glass in her hands when a supervising maid snapped at her.

"You there! What are you standing around for? There's no time to rest! Get back to serving the wine!"

She nodded and picked up her freshly plated tray. She added holy water to every glass. She had a few glasses lifted from her on her rounds, but she didn't try to stop it. Holy water wasn't poison—it didn't matter who drank it.

"I'll have a glass."

She reached her target before the tray was empty. Saraka passed a glass to Viscount Whikel and delivered her request.

Unlike his reputation suggested, Viscount Whikel was quick-witted and discreet—one of the pieces Saraka used most. Recently she had been putting him to work fostering his connection with Count Rohanson, which had proved quite useful.

"Oh? Just nudge Duke Hosaquin—quietly, from the side? Ha. Hm. How is it you always know right where to find a man's particular gift."

Duke Hosaquin had bad impulse control and an explosive temper—the more furious he became, the less rational his judgment. If she planted the right stimulus through Viscount Whikel, the Duke would take the bait and throw the glass at Evangeline without a second thought.

Drinking didn't work. So what about being doused? And what about contact with a wound? Saraka felt her heart beating as vividly as when she was handling the heretics in the underground cells.

Evangeline and Lady Toten approached Duke Hosaquin shortly after. The Duke smashed a good glass against the floor first, then seized a second and threw it. But she hadn't expected the knight commander to wrap himself around Evangeline and take the glass in her place. She had arranged through Sir Muzeta to have Gabriel absent for a little while—she hadn't expected him back this soon.

Viscount Whikel, sensing the slightly derailed plan, avoided Saraka's eyes. But in that moment, Saraka had no attention to spare for Whikel. Under the scarf, the scarred corners of her mouth split into a wide smile.

Viscount Whikel assumed the knight commander had been hit by the first glass—the ordinary one—but the second glass Duke Hosaquin threw had also been laced with holy water.

"Ouch!"

One of the maids clearing glass fragments from the floor had cut her hand. The girl herself wrote it off as clumsiness, but Saraka had watched the moment of the cut clearly. The holy water in the wine would have healed it immediately—and indeed it did. But the knight commander's wound showed no sign of healing even after taking a direct hit of the holy water.

Found…..

She had set out to expose Evangeline Rohanson's secret, and instead she had found the knight commander's weakness.

An unexpected harvest.

Evangeline had taken one look at Gabriel—wine-soaked, bleeding—and sent him off to change his clothes.

Saraka followed Gabriel out. Whether one maid slipped outside made no difference to anyone.

That was how it was with servants in this country—they were not treated as fellow human beings by the nobility. Even covering half her face with a scarf drew no suspicion whatsoever.

With one exception, of course: Lady Toten, who had gone out of her way to stop and ask how she was. That alone said everything about Lady Toten's character.

What a waste of a woman.

Had her son been anyone else, she would have made a perfect devotee of Lord Rahel—like something drawn. 

When Saraka thought back to the day she had, on His instruction—no, on Bishop Marik's instruction—forbidden the supply of holy water to Lady Toten, her chest ached. Though it was unavoidable: openly giving holy water to someone cursed would have made the temple look money-grubbing. It seemed that ever since, Lady Toten had come to despise Saraka—or more precisely, to despise the Bishop whom Saraka stood in for. But that was her right.

"Sir Gabriel! How ever did you end up drenched in wine like this?"

"There was reason enough. Could you bring me something to change into for a moment?"

"Yes, sir! I'll have it right away!"

One of the knights went off to find a change of clothes and returned promptly. Saraka stepped forward and extended her hand as if to offer to deliver them herself.

"You'll take them to Sir Gabriel? Then I'll leave it to you."

Saraka took the clothes and entered the room where Gabriel was waiting. He had already removed his upper garments—the soaked shirt gone from his shoulders.

"You're delivering them for me? My thanks."

Unlike the other knights, Gabriel spoke formally and accepted the clothes with courtesy. Saraka stole a glance at him and turned her face away, playing at shyness. In truth, the corners of her mouth had torn too wide—she couldn't risk being seen. She hurried out of the room before the sound of her heartbeat could give her away.

She had seen it clearly with both eyes. On Gabriel's chest, a round scar.

Once—before her breathing had faded to its current shallow thread, back when the Bishop could still speak clearly—Marik had paused mid-act of pressing Saraka's hand into the brazier and told her a story from long ago.

'Looking at the fire, I find myself remembering the old days. Haha—oh, not the time my family burned alive in a fire set by wicked heretics and I alone barely survived. Hm. Much later than that. Saraka—have you ever heard of the Emperor's youngest?'

The pain of pus weeping from the burns on her cheeks and jaw made even moving her mouth an agony, so Saraka had only shaken her head. Bishop Marik had kept Saraka's hand in the coals and continued without accounting for the screaming.

'People say the child died before its first cry. But that isn't true. How do I know? Because I was the one who spirited the prince away.'

Saraka had needed to receive everything the Bishop had to tell her. Even as her hand burned and she sobbed, she kept her ears open.

According to the Bishop, something known to the outside world was that members of the imperial family had a sigil marking the nobility of their blood inscribed on their bodies. It took the form of a dragon coiled in an uroboros—tail in its own mouth, body curved into a circle. The ouroboros was the symbol of infinity; it signified the eternal vitality of the imperial line.

The sigil was an honor to inscribe, and so the duty fell to the most trusted among the priests. In the reign of Emperor Mater, that honor had belonged to Bishop Marik.

The brand was seared onto the body of the newborn imperial child with fire, then treated with holy water and blessed. The flesh would close over at once—filling in, rising smooth—but the brand would remain, permanent as a tattoo

'But with the youngest prince, the holy water didn't take. Don't be frightened, Saraka. There are people in this world who are born like that from time to time. Pitiable, unfortunate, wretched creatures whose sins in their past life were so deep that even after being reborn, Rahel has turned away from them.'

Such people must be reborn time and again to atone, washed clean before they can at last be gathered into Rahel's embrace. Until then, one must never grant them compassion—not acknowledgment, not the basic allowance of being human. The youngest prince had been such a one. The boy of Lady Toten's had been such a one.

The Emperor had ordered the child killed, but rather than murder a newborn outright, the Bishop had entrusted it to a couple to raise in her stead. When the Emperor later discovered the infant had been spirited away and flew into a rage, the Bishop had said that keeping the child alive was not a matter of leverage.

'A creature must live and breathe and atone for as long as its fate endures, must it not?'

Only through that could it reach Rahel's love even a little sooner.

But the faithless, ignorant Emperor accused Bishop Marik of holding the child as blackmail, and sent knights in secret to kill the youngest prince. What they found instead was the couple who had abandoned the child and were living extravagantly on the stipend the Bishop had given them for its care. The child's whereabouts were never recovered, and in the end, all the Emperor killed was the couple.

People who are not blessed by Rahel mostly die young. The Bishop had saved even the couple for the child's sake, but it seemed the youngest prince had not escaped fate either. The Bishop prayed, she had said, that the child was still alive somewhere, still suffering.

'Now your hands have come to look just like mine.'

Drawing Saraka's hand from the coals, Bishop Marik looked at the hands that had become the same, and smiled with kindness. Saraka worked the burned corners of her mouth—small, wriggling efforts—into something like the Bishop's smile.

'Saraka—since your face and your hands now bear the same scars as mine, no one will be able to tell us apart. They will see only the lower face and the hands beneath the veil and take you for me.'

Holding Saraka's melted hands tenderly in her own, Bishop Marik had also told her the way to identify the prince. The mark that had failed to become a tattoo on the youngest prince would remain instead as a scar.

Exactly as the Bishop had said: on the knight commander's body lay the scar—the dragon that had not taken—wings severed, claws pulled out—left as a serpent rather than what it was meant to become. He had been abandoned young. He seemed not to know what the scar meant—which was why he had no hesitation about letting it be seen. 

Forcing her pounding heart to calm, Saraka turned not toward the banquet hall, but toward the room the imperial grandson had granted her. Inside the room given by the imperial grandson, a holy knight—looking every bit as devout as a saint—kept watch.