IWJACM Chapter 1

Prologue

Elise hadn't slept, not once through the whole of the night before dawn.

It was today. The day she finally left this castle.

These past three months she'd watched ceaselessly for her chance, and three days ago she'd finally known: now was the one chance to leave.

Elise tried, one last time, to carve into memory the large, firm embrace of the man holding her.

Perfectly wrought muscle rose and fell with each shallow breath. A body strong enough to crush a thing like her without even trying.

At first, that body—thick and solid as something hewn from rock—had scared her half to death before he'd even touched her. Now the suffocating weight pressing down on her was familiar. Even that cold, hollow feeling when she pulled free of him—even that.

He'd fallen asleep with her caged in his arms as if snared there, and so Elise had lain pinned the whole night through, forced to feel the whole of him against the whole of her.

Last night he'd been rougher than usual. Probably because it had been a while.

'A while'… as if a mere fortnight could feel like 'a while.'

A dry, hollow laugh escaped her. Elise traced back through the days that had drained away, impermanent as they'd been.

There'd been a time his refusal to touch her had driven her nerves to their limit. The whole three months right after the wedding had been exactly that.

But once the true wedding night had properly passed, he took her as if nothing could hold him back. Even though it was the arrangement she herself had wanted, Elise floundered at first, her body failing to properly take him in.

But he was practiced at it, and her body was tamed easily enough.

From that point until now—three more months—she had discovered that a person's body can endure more than the mind expects. She also learned that wanton little sounds could tear out of her own mouth, whether she willed it or not. Last night too, pleasure had torn through her whole body like a lightning strike, and she'd whimpered like an animal.

And so she had become accustomed to Rezet Kyrstan.

But there'd be no reason to see him again after this, probably.

His scent, faintly tickling her nose, shook her heart for only a moment before the words he'd spoken at the start of this absurd marriage rang through her head

'It's nothing but a contract marriage. One where we use each other, by mutual agreement.'

That low, indifferent voice hauled her back up into reality. Both of them, him and her alike, had used each other very efficiently.

If anyone could be said to have come out ahead, it was certainly her.

She had ultimately failed to fulfill the condition Rezet had staked to this contract.

Without thinking, her hand drifted to rest above her navel. Her belly was flat, nothing to it but skin stretched thin.

Was that fortunate, or was it not?

A hollow feeling came, and relief with it, in roughly equal parts.

A week ago her physician had examined her. Still nothing. Still no sign.

He had drawn a small amount of blood, as he always did, but his expression had not been hopeful.

She'd only heard the same thing repeated again: that she was somehow managing to endure this man well enough, but her womb wasn't strong, and his seed was unlikely to take root there. Compatibility was not sufficient on its own.

'I—I'll bear your child for you.'

And she hadn't even known that, when she staked that absurd condition.

Elise was well aware that Rezet Kyrstan did not make empty promises.

And so, per the terms of their contract: tomorrow, exactly six months from the day of their marriage, this man would report her lie to his sovereign, the Emperor of Van Yela.

The Emperor, enraged, would surely have her head struck off and sent to the savage kingdom of Ughel.

So she had to run, now that the chance had come.

She pressed her hands carefully against his arm—the one locked around her waist—and eased it away from her. This man—her sham husband—slept deeply, despite all appearances, so slipping free of his arms had never been hard.

And tonight of all nights he had reason to be tired—hadn't he only just ridden back from the campaign last night? Even a man who'd never known bodily exhaustion couldn't have waged a fortnight's suppression campaign, day and night, and come out of it untouched.

To make things easy on herself, she should have left the territory before her husband returned. But she hadn't. Because if this was the last time, she'd wanted to see his face, just once more….

For a long moment she could not look away from him sleeping.

A cold man. And yet she kept finding things she could not let go of—all those incomprehensible words and gestures he had occasionally shown her throughout. A blade-edged tenderness he'd nailed down, again and again, as nothing of the sort—as if calling it anything like love were beneath him—a tenderness that only confused her more, precisely because he insisted on denying it.

Something moved through her, hollow and unquiet.

Elise trailed her fingertip along the high bridge of his nose, over the closed seam of his mouth.

She had never kissed that mouth. Every night the man shattered her to pieces and put her back together to his own liking, and yet he had never once kissed her—not since the wedding—as if it were a line he'd drawn for himself and meant never to cross.

He was wise, as always. Elise forced herself to turn away from the emotion boiling up at the gate of her heart.

'Thank you, for everything.'

Now forget a headache of a wife like me, and be free, Rezet.

She felt the words form and held them where they were.

Elise took her hand from his lips and eased herself up carefully. A groan almost tore loose from her—she barely choked it back. Every muscle ached. The insides of her thighs were damp and uncomfortable.

She needed to wash, but there was no time to bathe before leaving. Dawn was already breaking.

She took a clean cloth she had prepared and dealt with herself as quickly as she could. Even that took too long. Light was already beginning to show at the edge of the dark.

When she came through to the receiving room, Yvessa was already there, waiting. The lady's maid moved quickly and began dressing her.

"You must go now, Your Highness. Word came last night—an imperial envoy from Van Yela entered the border of the territory."

Imperial envoys from Van Yela. If they saw her now, in this state—it was over.

"Yes. Now."

Elise set the note she had prepared on the table, moved through the door without a sound, and was gone.

The contract marriage that had begun with an outrageous lie—its curtain was falling now.

She didn't look back.

「You said I could run away whenever I wanted, once the promised half year had passed.」

Rezet said nothing, only read the short letter over and over for a long while.

The bedroom was cold, not a trace of warmth left in it.

The woman who had stopped trembling and lay in his arms for the first time in six months of marriage—by morning she was gone without a trace.

As though she had never been there.

「It was just a contract marriage, you said.」

Had he said that? A flash of red flickered, unbidden, through the man's dark, sharply drawn eyes.

Beneath that line were a few more sentences—something about gratitude, something about failing to keep her promise—but they did not reach him.

Rezet turned to the window, all at once. They'd married in spring.

The territory, once thick with lush green growth, had somewhere along the way put on a rich, golden coat.

Autumn. Right. Autumn had come without his even noticing.

Elizabetha Arzeika had—as though making a point—left the contract they had both signed six months ago, neatly folded alongside the note. She had been considerate enough to include the date.

The first of October. The term of the contract ended today.

Alfredo, the chief steward of Lothier Castle, shifted from foot to foot and reported.

"Nothing is missing, Your Grace. She didn't even take a change of clothes—there must have been someone helping her. If we start by questioning the servants…"

He did not hear it.

Rezet thought of the woman who had clung to him through the night until dawn, desperate, half-sobbing.

The raw marks he carved into her body during their intimacy—those weren't the kind that faded quickly. Looking like that—she'd fled without even a moment to straighten herself out? In a state that made it unmistakably plain she'd just been bedded by a man?

Rezet, utterly dumbfounded, had just barely managed a hollow laugh when it happened.

Someone came running toward him, heedless and giddy. It was Lothier Castle's physician. The old healer's face was brimming over with joy, as if he hadn't caught the mood hanging over the castle at all.

In that instant, some thunderbolt of intuition crashed down on him as if to split the crown of his skull wide open.

There was no reason for the castle physician to come running with a face like that, brimming with joy. This was a man who always hemmed and hawed his way through unhappy reports on her condition. For him to arrive with that face, there was exactly one explanation.

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

With so many eyes on him, that was all the physician dared cry out. But that one line explained everything.

Rezet looked down at the beaming physician, expressionless. His gaze moved slowly back to the table. The contract, folded. The small letter, opened, its pages scattered in disarray.

The facts that had lain wrapped in a hazy fog, unclear, all at once put on the weight of reality.

His wife had vanished.

With his bloodline cradled in her womb.

His bloodline. His. A yon'gyn's…

Cracks finally began spreading across the whole of Rezet's face.

"Ha." A hollow, mirthless laugh burst out of him.

Elise's flight. And her conceiving his child. He couldn't tell which of the two mattered more.

The note crumpled, wretched, in his huge hand.

'Leave?'

Leave where. There were still more than half a day's hours remaining in the contract's term.

Which meant Elizabetha Arzeika couldn't flee anywhere that wasn't by his side. That was the contract. Let alone while carrying his seed?

The world before his eyes dyed itself pitch-black, then came back. A cold spark snapped alight in his blue eyes.

This was a breach of contract.

"…Find her."

When Rezet finally opened his mouth after a long silence, his voice came out eerily low. The knight, who'd been waiting on edge with his heart in his throat, felt his shoulders shoot straight up.

"Seal the territory. She is fragile—she cannot have gone far."

From where his lord stood with his back turned came the grate of teeth grinding together. Rezet snatched his cloak up with a savage jerk and swept past the knight like a gust of wind, striding hard away.

"From this instant, let no one in or out of the territory—not one soul. Split the knights in every direction, comb through every corner of it. Every path a person could walk—all of it."

"Yes—yes, Your Grace!"

No one dared ask whether he intended to go himself. No one dared remind him that the Van Yela imperial envoys would arrive within a few hours.

It was because they'd witnessed the leash of reason snapped clean through behind their lord's blue eyes.

The down at the back of his neck bristled and stood on end.

'Oh, heavens. Her Highness the Princess—'

However will she manage what comes after this!

The knight, sighing low under his breath, hurried after his lord.

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

1. Princess and Knight

The nation of mages who had held the continent against the Mad Dragon—Argan, the Holy Empire of the Morning.

Elizabetha, most noble princess of that great empire.

That renown was reduced to less than dust the day Argan was mercilessly trampled under the hooves of Ughel, the barbarian kingdom advancing from the north.

The empire, its light extinguished, was dismembered without mercy by the northern alliance that had spent decades checking its power.

Every single Arganian who was captured, without exception, was sold off to foreign lands into a fate no different from slavery. Most were offered up like tribute to the Ughel savages, while the rest were dragged off northwest to Van Yela or east to Teyr.

Elise had survived because the last Emperor of Argan—her younger brother—had disguised her as a commoner and slipped her out through the palace gates before the walls fell.

'You have to go, sister. Better to live on as a slave than die a dog's death here for nothing.'

He had been right. Elise was the last remaining member of Argan's imperial bloodline after Andrei himself—the only heir to what remained of the throne. She was the one who had to survive, first and foremost, no matter the circumstance.

'As long as you're alive, Argan hasn't fallen. Remember that.'

Those were the last words he said before they parted.

Her gentle brother was almost certainly dead. The day Argan's palace fell, he had died with it.

To push his own sister out the door with words like that—it meant he'd never intended to save his own life.

Choosing death over capture—that had been the pride of Andrei, this generation's Emperor of Argan.

Should she have stayed with Andrei in the palace instead?

Elise thought this, crouched in a darkness so total she couldn't see an inch in front of her. Her hands and feet were bound, a gag stuffed in her mouth, a filthy rag wound around her eyes.

She had no idea where she was. She had no idea what would happen to her.

She'd made it across Argan's border with nothing clutched in her two empty hands. From there she had made for Regalo, Argan's ally in the west, riding hard across open ground—only to be caught.

Unluckily, caught of all things by the army of Van Yela, the very empire that had done so much to help crush Argan's allies.

The three guards who'd fled with her, disguised as commoners, had their throats sawed through on the spot. She alone was left alive.

The reason was simple. Young. Female.

A woman from a fallen nation. Young, too, and beautiful, at that.

Argan's women, renowned across the continent for their looks, were sold into slavery in eight cases out of ten rather than killed. Her fate, surely, would be no different.

Elise lay there limp, helpless, thinking: wouldn't it be better to end her own life now than to be raped by the enemy like this?

But Andrei's last words stabbed into her heart, aching.

'You have to live, Sister. Live—and come to build my grave.'

Even for the sake of her poor brother—whose body she hadn't even managed to recover, let alone raise a headstone for—Elise could not die.

Even if she had to die, she had to die on Argan's own soil.

Elise opened the eyes she'd kept shut. The cloth bound tight, round and round over them, let her see nothing—but that only sharpened every other sense in her body instead.

Thud, thud. The sense of someone approaching reached her.

Her tensed body clenched taut on its own. Elise moved her hands, bound behind her back, desperately.

In Argan, there was a power passed down only through the direct bloodline. A power unreal and inexplicable, one that had long since grown faint across the continent.

In the bloodline, every few generations, a mage was born. That the current Emperor of Argan was a mage—this was already common knowledge across the continent.

Andrei, who had cherished his sister to an almost frightening degree, had carved several magic formulas into her body with his own hands.

One deep in the left forearm. One beneath the left shoulder blade. One along the spine. One at the left ankle, and one behind the left knee. Five circuits in all, written into her skin. Andrei had told her: just lay a hand on the circle and chant his name.

But what good was knowing the method, if she couldn't even use it? Hands and feet bound like this, there was nothing she could do….

The footsteps drawing closer cut off abruptly. The sense of someone standing right outside the door was palpable.

Then the door creaked open—a long, skin-crawling sound.

"A woman from Argan, they say?"

"Yes. Caught her fleeing near the border. No question about it."

"Take the blindfold off, at least. I need to see her face before I can give you a number."

A vulgar exchange. Long, hard strides. In just two steps someone was in front of Elise, gripping her jaw and forcing it up roughly. Rough hands dragged the blindfold down off her eyes.

The instant Elise's face was revealed, the whole room fell silent in a flash.

Then a gasp of astonishment broke out.

"Wow… This, really...."

She glared at the soldiers before her with bloodshot eyes. The gag still stuffed in her mouth kept her from speaking.

The man gripping her jaw picked her face apart with his eyes, admiration plain on his face.

"Top-grade goods, this one."

His face was clean-featured, his armor elaborate. Not a common soldier.

Elise twisted her head like something gone mad, trying to wrench free of his hand.

"This one's mine."

"Feisty, too." The man smirked—a filthy, leering grin—and grabbed her cheek in his fist. "Silver hair, huh. Just like a silver fox. Not bad, this one—not even that dirty. Smells good too. Breaking a bitch like this is half the fun."

You filthy pervert—Elise's eyes snapped up at him, blazing with hate. But the more she resisted, the more it only stoked his sadism.

The man rose to his feet.

"Tonight, bring this thing to my quarters."

With that single word, her fate seemed all but decided. Just one more, among the countless Argan women sold off as slaves to Van Yela.

Night fell in an instant. Elise, shoved and hauled about by rough hands, was flung into the tent.

'Just a few seconds—even a moment, if only I can move my arms…!'

That one second—just to press the circle inscribed on her forearm. If only she could buy even that much!

But the knight had removed neither her gag nor the restraints on her hands and feet. Worse still—as if that weren't enough—the hands bound behind her back were hauled up over her head and fixed to something she couldn't see. The blindfold, too, had somehow been fastened back over her eyes again before she even knew it.

"A whole month starving, and now a kill this rich falls right in my lap. What luck."

"Mm—ugh—!"

"'Looks like yours—even that block of wood and stone, Kyrstan, would be hard-pressed not to stir for it. In more ways than one, it's my good fortune you caught my eye first."

The helplessness of being able to do nothing turned to terror and ground Elise's thoughts to pulp. The hands moving over her body made her stomach crawl.

Andrei. Andrei. Foolish Elise repeated only her twin brother's name, already dead as he surely was, over and over, like coughing up blood.

'Save me. Help me—anyone, I don't care who…!'

It was the very moment the man seized her cloak and tore it off her. Something inside her body burst and came gushing outward all at once.

"Ghk—"

The man made a sound like he was being strangled.

She still could not see. The blindfold held. She had no idea what was happening.

Some strange, viscous fluid came gushing suddenly down over her shoulder.

"Guh... guh…" A raw, fishy stench. Blood.

The knot binding her arms cut itself free.

Elise scrambled upright and tore the blindfold away first. And then she saw it—the front of the man who'd been about to pounce on her, sliced clean open in the shape of a half-moon.

His massive body collapsed on top of her. He met his end without even managing to let out a death-scream.

Elise gritted her teeth hard. She hadn't even triggered the circle inscribed on her body—she had no idea what had just happened.

But there was no more room left to think.

'Have to run.'

Elise barely managed to shove the dead man's weight aside and rolled her way out from under the bed. The man had cleared the area of other soldiers when he brought her in, and so the approach to the tent was unguarded.

"Hhh..."

A sob, animal and raw, rose up from somewhere deep in her throat. Elise wiped her tears away with blood-soaked hands and bolted.

'Get a grip.'

She had to be out before any of the soldiers saw her. This was Van Yela's enemy camp—the encampment of Ughel's brother nation, come to tear out even the last remaining root of Argan, completely.

But she did not get far.

"Alert! Aler—!"

Someone must have found the dead knight's body. That fast?!

She heard the sound of soldiers moving, perfectly disciplined, without a trace of confusion. Far in the distance, torchlight reeled and scattered wildly.

In the end, Elise took shelter in the nearest tent she could find. It was the only one, as it happened, that had no guards posted.

The moment she pushed through the tent flap and stepped inside, her legs gave out under her.

"Ugh—ugh—"

The reek of blood rising off her own body was enough to make her head spin. Elise fumbled, groping blindly, at the skin of her forearm.

The spells Andrei had inscribed onto her body were simple—a basic warding circuit and a basic attack circuit. He'd told her that something like a long-range teleportation circle was too complex a formula, too hard to inscribe.

'I should have begged him to carve the teleportation spell across my whole back, even if it was too much to ask.'

She rubbed at the circle inscribed inside her forearm, listening to the soldiers dashing past outside the tent. Tears kept coming, over and over, whether she willed them or not. Andrei.

"Your Highness the Grand Duke!"

Someone shouted loudly, right outside the tent. The thread of her thoughts snapped clean off.

A presence stirred somewhere inside the tent. Elise went rigid, forgetting even to breathe.

The space she'd thought was empty—wasn't, after all.

In a corner of the tent, two deep blue eyes were staring straight at her.