IWJACM Chapter 1

Prologue

Elise did not sleep through the night.

Today was the day. The day she left this castle.

For the past three months she had watched without ceasing for an opening, and three days ago she had finally understood: this was the only chance she would ever have.

Elise tried to fix in her memory—one last time—the large, solid warmth of the man's body holding her against him.

Perfectly sculpted muscle rose and fell with his shallow breathing. A body built powerfully enough to crush someone like her without effort.

At first, the sheer mass of him—thick and unyielding as rock-carved stone—had frightened her instinctively. Now she was accustomed to it. To the suffocating weight pressing down on her. Even to this chill that crept over her skin each time she pulled away from him.

Because he had fallen asleep with her locked in his arms, Elise had been held there through the entire night, forced to feel every inch of him against her.

He had been rougher than usual last night. It had been a while, after all.

'A while… to think that two weeks feels like a long time.'

A dry laugh escaped her. Elise turned over the days that had drifted past, senseless and irretrievable.

There had been a time when the fact that this man refused to touch her had driven her anxiety to its furthest edge. The full three months immediately after the wedding had been like that.

But from the night he finally came to her in full, he had conducted himself as though there were nothing left to hold back. Though she had been the one to want this arrangement, Elise had struggled for a while to truly receive him.

He was skilled, however, and her body was easily trained.

In the three months since then, Elise had learned that the human body is capable of bearing more than she would have thought. She had also learned, alongside that, that her own mouth was capable of producing sounds she would never have predicted. Last night too she had groaned like an animal against the pleasure that struck through her entire body like lightning.

She had grown accustomed to Rezet Kyrstan.

But she would never see him again now.

The faint scent of him—the warm masculine warmth of it, just barely touching her—pulled at her—briefly. Then the words he had spoken at the start of this impossible marriage rang through her:

'It is only a contract marriage. We use each other, by agreement.'

That low, indifferent voice pulled Elise back to reality. Each had used the other very effectively.

If one were to weigh it—she had taken the better end of the arrangement, unquestionably.

Elise had, in the end, failed to fulfill the terms he had set.

Her hand had moved to rest below her navel before she noticed. The stomach beneath her fingertips—barely skin over bone—was flat and nothing more.

Was this fortunate, or unfortunate?

Emptiness and relief washed over her in equal parts.

She had been examined by the physician a week ago. Still no sign of anything.

He had drawn a little blood, as routine required, but the physician's expression had not been particularly hopeful.

Somehow she was enduring him, but her womb was too fragile—she had only heard this repeated again and again: that it would be difficult for his seed to take root there. Compatibility was not all that was needed.

'I will bear your child.'

And yet she had offered terms as absurd as those, not knowing any of this.

Elise knew her husband well enough to know he was not a man who issued empty promises.

So, according to the terms of their contract, tomorrow—exactly six months to the day from their wedding—this man would inform his sovereign, the Emperor of Van Yela, of her lie.

An enraged Emperor would certainly have her head cut off and sent to the barbarian kingdom of Ughel.

So she had to run while the chance was here.

She gently pushed away the arm he had wrapped around her waist. This man—her false husband—had the habit, contrary to his appearance, of sleeping deeply, and so extracting herself from his arms was not difficult.

Besides, today he had good reason to be exhausted. Had he not returned from his campaign just last night? Even someone immune to bodily fatigue could not be tireless after waging battle day and night for two whole weeks.

If she had wanted to make this easy she should have left the territory before her husband returned. But she hadn't. Because if this was the last time, she had wanted to see his face at least once more before she went.

Elise could not take her eyes off his sleeping face for a long moment.

He was a cold man. And yet the attachment that kept surfacing in her was surely the fault of those incomprehensible words and actions he had shown her from time to time.

The blade-sharp tenderness he had always insisted was not affection. Not anything like it.

Something hollow stirred in her chest.

Elise traced her fingertips along the high ridge of his nose, the closed line of his lips.

Come to think of it—she had never kissed those lips. Night after night he had taken her apart completely and rebuilt her to fit himself, but as though he had decided there was a line he would not cross, not once since their wedding had he kissed her.

He had been wise. Elise pushed back the feeling rising at the edge of her heart.

'Thank you.'

Forget a troublesome wife and be free, Rezet.

She lifted her hand from his lips and carefully rose. She barely managed to swallow the groan that nearly escaped. Her whole body ached and there was an unpleasant stickiness between her thighs.

She needed to clean herself—but there was no time to wash before she left. Dawn was already breaking.

She took a clean cloth she had prepared and quickly wiped between her legs. Even that small task took far longer than it should have.

When she came out to the sitting room, Yvessa—who had come early to wait—hurried over and helped her dress.

"You must go immediately, Your Highness. I've heard that a messenger from the Imperial Court arrived at Kyrstan's border last night."

Someone sent from the Van Yela Imperial Court was coming. If they saw her in this state now, it would truly be the end.

"Yes. Let's go now."

Elise set down the note she had prepared on the table and slipped out of the room without a sound.

The contract marriage that had begun with an impossible lie—it was time for it to come to an end.

She did not look back.

⌜You said I could run at any time, once the promised half-year had passed.⌟

Rezet read the short note through in silence, again and again.

The bedchamber was cold—not a trace of warmth left in it.

Through the night—for the first time in their six months of marriage—she had held onto him without trembling. By morning she was gone without a trace.

As though she had never been there at all.

⌜You said it was only a contract marriage.⌟

Had he said that? A red cast flickered briefly in the man's deep, sharply drawn eyes.

Below that were a few more words—something about having been grateful, something about being sorry for failing to keep her promise. But they would not enter his mind.

Rezet glanced abruptly toward the window. They had married in spring.

The territory, which had been thick with vivid green, was now draped in opulent gold at some point he couldn't name.

Autumn. Yes. Autumn had come without his noticing.

Elizabetha Arzeika had gone so far as to fold the contract they had both signed half a year ago and leave it there neatly, as though showing him she could. The contract had a date on it, helpfully noted. The first of October. The arrangement had been valid through today.

Alfredo, Lothier Castle's chief steward, reported in poorly concealed agitation:

"Nothing has gone missing, Your Grace. She didn't even take a change of clothing—which means she almost certainly had someone helping her. If we begin with the household staff—"

He didn't hear it.

Rezet thought of the woman who had clung to him desperately until dawn, nearly in tears. The marks he left on her body during the night were not things that faded quickly.

Looking like that—with no time even to straighten her appearance—she had run? In a state that made it plainly evident she had just come from a man's arms?

Just as Rezet arrived, with some difficulty, at a hollow laugh at the sheer audacity of it—someone came rushing toward him with no regard for decorum.

"Your Grace!"

The castle's physician. He clearly had not yet sensed the mood in the air—the old man's face was overflowing with joy.

In that instant, a lightning-strike of intuition split Rezet's thoughts clean open.

There was no reason for the castle physician to come running with an expression like that. He had always been the sort to mumble one piece of discouraging news after another whenever the subject was her health.

For him to be this elated, there was only one explanation.

"Your Grace, allow me to offer my congratulations—!"

Too many eyes around him. The physician managed only that much.

But those few words explained everything.

Rezet looked down at the beaming physician with no expression at all. His gaze moved, slow and deliberate, back to the contract and the small note lying scattered across the table.

Facts that had felt blurred—wrapped in some dim, unclear haze—snapped suddenly into vivid reality.

His wife was gone.

She was carrying his bloodline within her.

His bloodline. His. A yon'gyn's….

At last, a fracture began to spread across Rezet's face.

"Ha."

He let out a hollow laugh.

Elise's escape. Her pregnancy. He could not tell which of the two facts was more significant.

The note she had left crumpled helplessly in his large hand.

'Gone?'

Gone where. There was still more than half a day remaining in the contract period.

Elizabetha Arzeika could not run anywhere—not here, not any other place—as long as she was not at his side. And carrying his seed, at that.

His vision went black and then came back. A cold spark snapped in his blue eyes.

This was a breach of contract.

"…Find her."

Rezet's voice, when he finally spoke, was strangely low. The knight waiting in barely concealed anxiety drew his shoulders sharply upright.

"Seal the territory. Her constitution is fragile—she won't have gotten far."

From his lord, who stood with his back turned, came the sound of teeth grinding. Rezet snatched up his cloak in one savage motion and swept past the knight with the force of a gust of wind.

"From this moment on, no one enters the territory and no one leaves. Divide the knights in every direction and search every inch of it. Every road a person could possibly travel—all of them."

"Yes—yes, Your Grace!"

No one dared ask whether he intended to go himself. No one dared remind him that the Imperial Court's envoys would arrive in a matter of hours.

They had witnessed the rational thread snap behind their lord's blue eyes.

Every hair on the back of their necks stood on end.

"Oh, Lord. Her Highness the Princess…"

What do you intend to do about the consequences!

A knight murmured under his breath, then hurried after him.

That day, a strange and relentless chase began between the vanished princess of Argan and the Grand Duke of Van Yela who pursued her.

Chapter 1: The Princess and the Knight

The Holy Empire of the Morning, Argan—land of mages who stood against the great dragon and defended the continent.

Its most exalted princess: Elizabetha.

That renown was reduced to less than dust when Argan was trampled utterly beneath the hooves of the barbarian kingdom of Ughel, which had driven south from the north.

The empire whose light had gone out was then carved apart mercilessly by the Northern Alliance, which had long sought to contain it.

Arganians were seized as quickly as they could be caught and sold like slaves to foreign lands. Most were offered up to the Ughel savages; the rest were dragged west-north to Van Yela or east to Teyr.

That Elise had managed to survive was because her brother—Argan's last Emperor—had disguised her as a commoner and smuggled her out of the Imperial Capital before the end.

'You have to go, Sister. Better to be a slave with breath in you than die a dog's death here.'

He had been right. Elise was the only surviving member of Argan's imperial bloodline aside from Andrei, who was both her younger brother and her Emperor. She had to survive at any cost, in any circumstance.

'If you are alive, Argan has not fallen. Remember that.'

Those were the last words before they parted.

Her gentle brother was likely dead—dead on the day the Imperial Capital fell.

That he had sent her away with words like those meant he had never intended to save himself.

To be captured was beneath the dignity of Andrei, this generation's Emperor of Argan. He would choose death before that.

Would it have been better to have stayed in the Imperial Capital with him, then?

Elise thought this, curled in a darkness so complete she could not see a hand in front of her face. Her hands and feet were bound. A gag was in her mouth. Filthy cloth was wrapped tight around her eyes.

She could not know where she was or what would become of her.

She had succeeded in crossing Argan's border with nothing in her hands. But while riding hard through the plains toward Regalo—the western nation that had been Argan's ally—she had been caught.

Unluckily, by the army of the Van Yela Empire—which had played a considerable part in bringing down Argan and its allied nations.

The three guards who had fled with her, disguised as commoners, had their throats cut on the spot. Only she survived.

The reason was simple. She was a young woman.

A woman from a fallen nation. And young. And beautiful.

The women of Argan were famous for their beauty—eight out of ten were sold into slavery rather than killed. Her situation would be no different.

Elise lay there, helpless, and thought. Wouldn't it be better to die by her own hand than be violated by the enemy?

But Andrei's final voice struck painfully through her.

'Sister, you must live. Live, and come build my grave.'

For the sake of that poor younger brother whose body she hadn't even recovered—no grave, no headstone—Elise could not die.

If she died, she would die on Argan's soil.

She opened her eyes. There was nothing to see through the cloth tied tightly around them—but because of it, every other sense had grown sharper.

Clack. Clack. Someone was approaching.

Her body tensed before she could stop it. Elise worked frantically at the rope binding her hands behind her back.

In Argan, a power was passed down through the direct bloodline—to no one else. A power that had long since faded from the rest of the continent—inexplicable, beyond what the world now knew.

In Argan's bloodline, every few generations, a mage was born. That this generation's Emperor was a mage was a fact already widely known across the continent.

Andrei—who had loved her fiercely—had personally inscribed several magical formulas into her body.

One deep in the flesh of her left forearm. One beneath her left shoulder blade. One along her spine. One each at her left ankle and behind her knee. Five magic circles were etched into her body. Andrei had told her only to touch the circle and speak his name.

But knowing the method was useless. With her hands bound like this, she could do nothing.

The footsteps approaching stopped dead. The presence of someone standing just outside the door was unmistakable.

And then the door opened with a skin-crawling creak.

"A woman from Argan, you said?"

"Yes. We caught her trying to flee near the border—no mistake."

"Take that blindfold off her. I need to see the face before I can make an assessment."

A crude exchange. Someone crossed the distance in two heavy strides and seized her jaw forcibly, tilting it up. A rough hand yanked down the blindfold.

The moment Elise's face was revealed, the air around her went instantly silent.

Then came a sharp exhale of stunned appreciation.

"…My God."

Elise stared up at the soldiers before her with bloodshot eyes. The gag was still in her mouth and she could not speak.

The man who had grabbed her jaw studied her face with undisguised admiration.

"Top quality."

He had a clean face and wore ornate armor. Clearly not an ordinary soldier. Elise twisted her head frantically to escape his hand.

"This one's mine."

The man gave a thin smile and cupped her cheek in his palm.

"Spirited too. Silver hair—just like a silver fox. Not too dirty, either. And the scent on her. Girls like this are the most satisfying to break."

You filth. Elise's eyes snapped up in fury. But the more she resisted, the more she fed his cruelty. The man straightened.

"Tonight—bring this one to my quarters."

With those few words, her fate seemed decided. One of countless Arganian women sold into slavery to Van Yela.

Night fell in an instant. Elise was shoved roughly into a tent.

'Just a few seconds—even a moment to move my arm—!'

The magic circle inscribed on her forearm. Just one second to press it. If she could buy even that much—

But the Van Yela knight had loosened neither the gag nor the restraints on her hands and feet. He had gone further than that: the hands that had been bound behind her back were pulled up over her head and secured somewhere above. The blindfold had been replaced.

"A month of eating nothing and then this feast. You're in luck."

"Mmph—mmph—!"

"A beauty like you—even a stone-cold Kyrstan would find it hard to remain unmoved. In more ways than one, you're lucky it was me who found you first."

Helplessness—the absolute inability to do anything—ground through Elise's mind and became fear. The man's hands on her body were revolting.

Andrei. Andrei. Foolish Elise repeated the name of her twin brother—already certainly dead—as though she were coughing up blood.

'Please. Help me. Anyone at all—'

It was at the exact moment the man grabbed her cloak and tore at it.

Something poured outward from inside her body—as if something had broken open.

"Hk."

The man made a sound like his throat was being cut off.

The blindfold still covered her eyes and Elise could not see what had happened. Something viscous with a strange thickness poured in a rush onto her shoulder.

"Hkk—hkk—."

The sharp, copper smell. Blood.

The rope binding her wrists cut free by itself.

Elise scrambled upright and tore the blindfold off first. She saw the man's front carved open in a clean crescent arc.

—!

The massive body collapsed over her. A final death that came without so much as a dying scream.

Elise set her teeth. She hadn't even activated the magic circles inscribed in her body. She had no idea how this had happened.

But she could not afford to stop and think about it any longer.

'Run.'

Elise barely managed to push the dead man aside and rolled off the side of the bed. The man had cleared the area around the tent as he brought her inside, which meant there were no sentries posted out front.

"Nngh—."

A whimper clawed up from somewhere below her throat. Elise wiped the tears from her face with a blood-soaked hand and ran.

'Get ahold of yourself.'

She had to get out of here before the soldiers spotted her. This was the front line of Van Yela. The camp of a nation that had come to tear out the last roots of Argan entirely—the brother kingdom of the barbarian nation, Ughel.

But her flight did not last long.

"Alert—aler-rt!"

Someone had found the dead knight's body.

'That fast—'

The sound of soldiers moving with swift, coordinated precision reached her. Far ahead, torchlight scattered and broke in every direction.

Elise threw herself into the nearest tent. It was the only one without soldiers posted around it.

The moment she pulled back the flap and ducked inside, her legs gave out beneath her.

"Ugh—ngh."

The smell of blood coming off her own body was enough to make the world go unsteady. Elise groped blindly along her forearm.

The magic Andrei had inscribed in her body were simple defensive and offensive formulas. He had said something as complex as a long-range transport array was too difficult to inscribe.

'I should have asked him to cover my back with one, no matter what it cost him.'

Elise listened to the soldiers' footsteps pounding past outside and rubbed the magic circle on the inside of her forearm. Tears kept coming.

"Your Grace!"

Someone called out loudly from directly outside the tent. The thread of her thought snapped clean.

There was a presence inside the tent. Elise forgot to breathe and went rigid.

The space she had assumed was empty—

It was not.

From the far corner of the tent, two pale blue eyes looked straight back at her.