IWJACM Chapter 10

Rezet suppressed his irritation.

"I have told you repeatedly that even if I were to marry, producing an heir would be difficult."

"I'll provide as many women as necessary."

"I wonder whether any human woman exists who could carry a yon'gyn's seed. Even if a conception were achieved, she would die before her belly grew full."

"At least make the attempt. I'll select women of suitable constitution and send them your way. If you return them all again this time, I will not simply stand aside."

Noyre would not bend. Rezet suppressed the sneer that rose in him.

This man was his liege. The exalted Emperor of Van Yela, a half-blooded brother, and a benefactor.

And also a man of profound greed.

"Our mother managed it, did she not."

"……"

"My own mother bore you, Rezet. Does that not prove, at the very least, that carrying a yon'gyn's child is not impossible?"

"By rape."

The contempt Rezet could not fully contain surfaced on his face at last. Emellia. What their mother—the concubine of Van Yela's late emperor—had endured during the year after she disappeared overnight, and the end she had met: both brothers knew it well.

Noyre's mouth snapped shut. Rezet lifted one shoulder in a slight shrug.

"If you want it so badly, I'll make the attempt. Only do not lay the blame at my feet when the results disappoint."

Rezet bowed to the Emperor with impeccable courtesy and walked out of the audience chamber. Noyre glared at that unyielding back, then raised his voice.

"Tonight begins the celebratory banquet for the Northern Alliance's victory. Whatever else you miss, you must attend that, Rezet!"

But the Grand Duke had already vanished through the door before the words were finished. Noyre slammed his fist against the throne.

"If marriage is so repugnant, then grow old and die alone! Damn it all—why must he be so impossible to manage!"

Rezet could not quite contain a dry laugh as he moved through the imperial palace corridors. The sound of the Emperor venting his temper on some hapless attendant carried clearly through the walls behind him.

The Emperor's absurd demands were tiresome every time he heard them.

Rezet felt almost nothing in the way of trivial emotion, yet Noyre's fixation had begun to grate on him in a way that approached genuine irritation.

Produce an heir before another day passed. As if such things bent to his will.

Rezet knew the gruesome end that awaited a woman who carried a yon'gyn's seed and bore the child to term. The story was not some distant account. It was his own.

Their mother—his and Noyre's—Emellia, had been an ordinary human.

That woman, formerly the late emperor's concubine, had disappeared after giving birth to Noyre. Only Rezet knew what her end had looked like.

She had died in a terrible way.

Rezet remembered every moment of the instant he was born—not a single fragment lost to him. Because his mother, despite prolonged labor, could not push him from her body, he had torn apart the womb that confined him and entered the world by his own hand.

That was how all yon'gyn born to human wombs entered the world.

That was how all women who conceived a yon'gyn died.

Rezet clicked his tongue briefly. However hardened he was, it was not something he wished to witness—or cause—again, much less repeatedly.

And so Van Yela, in this generation, would have only the one yon'gyn it could ever possess.

He was turning to leave the imperial palace when a face surfaced suddenly in his mind, and he stopped.

'The underground prison…'

Should he look in, just once?

The princess had been surrounded by imperial knights the moment she set foot in the capital and taken from his hands.

Rezet stood still and took a moment to order his thoughts.

In the time he stood there, the gazes of nobles entering and leaving the palace attached themselves to him—countless, relentless. Most were fear. Disgust and contempt threaded through as well.

The gaze reserved for the lowborn.

It was partly the standard treatment of yon'gyn across the continent, partly owed to his origins as a man of no lineage. Did he need another reason why, having nearly doubled Van Yela's territory, he was called a war demon rather than a war hero?

These reactions were so familiar that Rezet didn't grant them even a flicker of attention. He was turning over the memory of when Argan's princess had taken to her bed with violent fever.

More precisely—the words she had whispered to him then, clutching at him in desperation.

'When we reach the capital. Your Grace.'

'Please don't be too… displeased.'

'Think of it as a last struggle.'

'You may think me mad…'

That voice—fraying at the edges, barely holding together—kept leaving unnecessary residue in his mind.

Rezet deliberated a few seconds longer, then made his decision.

Seeing her face once more would change nothing.

His head rendered its judgment, and he moved in the direction his reason commanded.

It took less than an hour for the supreme commander's horse and the knights who followed him to clear the main palace entirely.

Three days had passed since Elise was confined to the underground prison of Van Yela's imperial palace.

Through the narrow slit of a window that opened somewhere above, the sounds of raucous celebration invaded her cell without pause. She surmised that with the armies dispatched south returned bearing the Northern Alliance's victory, some kind of triumph banquet was underway.

Elise wrapped her arms around her knees and rested her head against the stone wall. The prison was cold and damp.

Three days prior, the Van Yela forces led by Grand Duke Kyrstan had transferred her to the imperial knights. Without so much as a glimpse of the Emperor's face, she had been hauled down into the underground prison. Van Yela's emperor, it seemed, had no intention of extending her the courtesy the Grand Duke had.

From somewhere came the sound of rats gnawing at iron bars. Scritch, scritch. The cell she occupied was relatively clean as such places went, but from beyond the bars, the stench of sewage rose steadily upward.

Elise had never so much as set foot near conditions like these in her life. The contrast made her sharply, precisely aware of just how sheltered she had been—protected, though the word sat strangely—during the past month and a half under the Grand Duke.

She spent her days pressed against the bars, stealing pieces of the guards' conversations. She had learned a great deal this way.

'They say there'll be an execution after the festival ends.'

The execution platform, she had learned, stood in the square at the heart of the capital.

The moment the last royal of Argan's neck met the rope, Argan's era would be extinguished entirely. It would be an execution to mark the end of an age.

'Three days gone. Two remaining.'

That was the time left before Elise was dragged to the scaffold.

Footsteps echoed through the cold, heatless corridor. A servant was entering, arms loaded with bundled parcels. Elise dragged her unwilling body toward the iron bars with the concentrated effort of someone reclaiming a body that had stopped belonging to her.

Two men met nearby and spoke in low voices.

"Here—the head chef said to distribute the leftover food to the staff. Brought your share as well."

"Ha, nothing like a victory banquet after all."

"It was something. Eyes pleased, mouth pleased, ears pricked wide open."

"What were the nobles chattering about this time?"

"What else. The Argan princess the Grand Duke brought back this campaign. The one locked up in there."

Elise pulled her hood lower and held her breath.

"That barbarian prince was quietly pressing His Majesty, apparently. Said he'd confine her in the Ughel camp until the execution. 'Camp' is a generous word for it—the Ughel delegation is staying in the detached palace, isn't it? What else would a man get up to alone in a room with a woman there?"

"Transparent enough."

The guard mimed gagging with undisguised contempt. The color drained slowly from Elise's face.

The servant cast a glance toward the cell and let something slip in a lower voice.

"…But is she really that beautiful? The princess."

"No idea. She's had that hood pulled all the way down since they brought her in. Never once taken it off. I only caught a glimpse of her hair. The poor princess hasn't been able to wash properly—must have had a terrible time of it—but her hair still looked soft as silver thread."

The guard clicked his tongue with poorly concealed frustration.

"I'm dying to know, but I can hardly demand she take the hood off…"

"Why not? She's a princess? She's going to die soon anyway—what does it matter?"

"Not that. The Grand Duke left strict orders before he departed. No one is to lay a hand on the prisoner."

Elise had reached up to grip the edge of her hood and stopped, startled.

'He gave that order, too…?'

Heavy iron chains hung from her wrists.

Grand Duke Kyrstan had personally fitted the manacles before handing her to the imperial knights.

Because the manacles were far too large for her slender wrists, he had drawn out a handkerchief and bound both the manacle and her wrist together with a quiet exhale. Then he had passed the long chain trailing from the manacles to a knight.

Elise looked down at her bound wrists. Each time she moved, the crude iron struck her wrist bones and they ached.

But not unbearably.

The handkerchief, from the outside, appeared merely to connect the manacle to her wrist—but in truth it had wound twice around the bare skin of her wrist and the back of her hand. That was why, despite everything, there was no raw skin or torn flesh. She was this intact.

Had he done it deliberately?

She couldn't say. He was a man whose face gave nothing away.

Elise turned the knot against her fingers, feeling its shape. Because of him, she had also been spared the indignity of becoming something for the guards to ogle.

'That explains why no one's said anything about my keeping my face covered…'

Was that simply his nature, the Grand Duke? Elise found herself genuinely curious.

What did he actually think of her? Did he know that the careless kindness he cast out from behind that expressionless face kept breathing hope back into her, quietly, whether he intended it or not?

If she stood before his liege and told an outright lie—

Would he forgive her?