IWJACM Chapter 15

"What in the world did you tell His Majesty?"

"I only reported what I saw and heard, exactly as it happened—"

"So—what, exactly?"

"For nearly a month out of the month and a half, the two of you spent almost all your time alone together… day and night, without distinction. Th-that's the truth, isn't it! Please don't glare at me like that…!"

Ruben's eyes carried an unspoken protest he hadn't finished voicing. Rezet felt an overwhelming wave of exhaustion.

"A-and, and there was also the time by the lakeside…."

"Enough. Stop there."

The memory of what had happened at the lake that day surfaced at last. He had briefly forgotten that, whatever had or hadn't actually occurred there, it would hardly have looked that way to anyone watching from outside.

Noyre cried out triumphantly, as if to say there, see?

"And you still claim there's nothing between you? Don't lie to me. Do you dare speak falsehoods before your Emperor?"

"I told you it was a misunderstanding, Your Majesty."

"Then what business did you have at the dungeon two nights ago?"

"I did not go there."

Rezet answered immediately, without so much as a blink.

'Was there someone who saw?'

He was certain he'd confirmed there was no tail on him.

Noyre, at the absolute end of his patience, raised his voice.

"Yanok Sihat, the fourth prince of Ughel—his face was one big bruise. He asked for the imperial physician, so I sent one over. Word is a few of his back teeth got snapped clean out in a single kick—what kind of stomping does it take to leave a man's face looking like that?"

"That has nothing to do with me."

"Then is there anyone else in this Van Yela who'd dare rough up an imperial guest to that state—besides you?"

"Find the culprit and question him yourself."

"And it's simply coincidence, I suppose, that you happened to be absent from the feast at exactly that moment?"

"Yes."

"Speak sense, Rezet Kyrstan. Do you find an imperial command something to trifle with?"

"…….."

"Why did you go to the dungeon yesterday? To check on how the woman carrying your child is faring? Well?"

"I told you I did not go…. If Your Majesty is so certain of that already, why did you summon me here at all?"

"The answer was already settled the moment you came tearing in here like your tail was on fire and flung that door wide open."

Noyre nodded, wearing the look of a man who'd just figured it all out.

"Even a block of wood like you couldn't hold out against that kind of face. I suppose it makes sense—it'd take a beauty like that to get anything moving in you at all…. I had it wrong this whole time. Should've rounded up every beauty on the continent and shipped them your way—not just women built sturdy enough to breed."

"Your Majesty."

Rezet couldn't hold his tongue any longer and cut the Emperor off, rude as that was. Left unchecked, Noyre's wrongheaded guessing was about to run somewhere there'd be no dragging it back from.

But of course, Noyre didn't so much as pretend to have heard him.

"For now, I've sent a physician to see the Princess. Whether she's really carrying a child, we'll know once the court physician gives his word. But here's the thing—"

Noyre gave him an odd, needling look.

"Suppose it is true—can you even be sure that child is yours, Rezet?"

"What are you implying?"

"She might have been carrying it before you ever touched her."

Rezet's thick eyebrows twitched, almost imperceptibly. Noyre, missing nothing of that fine shift in his half-brother's expression, went on slowly, probing.

"There's no way for the physician to determine whose seed it is, is there. Her word alone hardly suffices. What do you think? Was there any man she knew, besides you?"

Rezet held his silence—closer, really, to a man who'd simply run out of words. Noyre pressed him again, testy now, needling.

"She claims she seduced you herself. Suspicious, isn't it—a woman who spent her whole life shut up in the palace under her brother's protection, somehow knowing how to set a man alight."

"…….."

"I am asking whether Elizabetha Arzeika had ever known a man before, Rezet. I need that much certainty at least, before I'll consider personally reining in our savage brother nation."

Noyre tilted his head toward the audience chamber door. Yanok Sihat, at the head of the Ughel delegation, was approaching with loud, clattering footsteps. Servants swiftly shut the chamber doors.

"Was she a virgin? Answer me, Rezet."

The conversation had drifted somewhere beyond recovery. Rezet felt, for once in a long while, real anger simmering. He couldn't fathom why he was standing here, agonizing over some answer to a question this pointless. He ground his teeth and forced the words out.

"I don't know."

"You can't very well not know. There's a rumor, thoroughly circulated through Argan, that the twins were something more than mere siblings, you know. Perhaps before the Emperor died, he and his sister—"

"Your Majesty."

Rezet's voice carried real fury now. That was, by any measure, a grossly disrespectful thing to say. Even if no one else were present to hear it, this had gone too far.

Whatever tangled trouble she'd created, that was a separate matter—but that woman was, at the very least, not someone deserving of a baseless insult like this.

"Are you aware that you're disgracing the Princess of Argan right now?"

"If the Princess has told a lie, or if the child she carries is not of your blood, then she'll have no grounds to complain, even if she hears far worse than this."

But Noyre only scoffed.

"To have spurned the mercy I extended, letting her choose an honorable death, and on top of that to dare deceive me to my face? Then I will not let that woman die here in Van Yela. I will hand her over, alive, whole and intact, into the hands of the Ughel prince."

"…….."

"For the crime of making a fool of the Emperor of Van Yela, I will ensure she never dies in comfort. And then the twins can walk the same road together, happily, side by side."

Rezet had already heard how the Emperor of Argan had met his end, captured by Ughel's warriors. In the end, he answered, reluctantly.

"Her Highness has never taken another man to her bed."

"Did you confirm this yourself?"

"…….."

"Given how certain you sound, I take it you saw it with your own eyes, then?"

"…I can't claim to know how Her Highness lived back in Argan, but by my own judgment, she's not the sort of woman who'd go in for loose, self-indulgent nonsense. And that takes a body up to it in the first place—in her wretched state of health, just getting through an ordinary day would have taken everything she had."

"You know a remarkably fine level of detail. No wonder you kept postponing your arrival date, day after day."

This time, Rezet chose silence outright. With every word he added, he was crossing further into a river with no way back.

Noyre studied his half-brother's set jaw and judged there was nothing further to extract. The harvest had been rich enough that he had no complaints.

"First, we'll need to confirm whether she is even carrying a child at all. We can discuss what comes after, once that's settled."

Rezet bowed his head in place of a farewell.

He left the audience chamber without a backward glance, then caught the arm of a servant who had recognized him and bowed.

"Where is the Princess of Argan being held?"

"The West Tower, my lord."

The West Tower was where nobles who had committed crimes were confined. With a single lie, she had risen from the dungeon below ground to the tower above it.

How many more lies would he have to layer on top before she could slip free of the blade hanging over her neck?

It was not a fact he particularly wanted to know.

And yet the image of her back kept rising unbidden in his mind—the woman who hadn't even been able to support herself, hands braced flat against the floor, kneeling there. An unwanted afterimage lingered in his head.

The tears that had slid endlessly down her bloodless cheeks traced an irritating ripple through his thoughts.

The handkerchief Rezet had wound around her slender wrists had already worn thin and torn, chafed raw by the iron shackles. Beneath the raw, coppery reek of iron and blood, the faint scent of a living flower had drifted up.

Golden eyes, spilling tears without pause, held him fast. In them, a fragile, helpless plea had lived.

Help me, just this once.

Rezet stopped where he stood and rubbed at his weary eyes.

A woman who had once sat higher than anyone else in the world. One who had seemed like the very symbol of dazzling nobility.

A woman he himself had once vaguely, secretly coveted—thinking, just once, if only he could hold her in his hands—had now, with that same blind, pleading gaze, shaken him to his roots.

'I won't have regrets. There's no path left for me but you.'

"…Damn it."

'In the end, this is exactly what she wants from me, isn't it.'

Rezet finally swallowed the curse rising in his throat and changed direction. It was the path leading to the West Tower. There, he caught the court physician just as he was stepping out.

3. Contract and Obligation

A physician from the Van Yela imperial household had come and gone. The physician who had taken Elise's pulse tilted his head slightly.

"I have never encountered a pulse this faint before."

"Is that so."

She answered as though hearing it for the first time, though she already knew. It had been the same in Argan—the physicians there had always struggled with this exact same problem when examining her.

"I beg your pardon, but this is the kind of pulse one would expect to find only in patients who are not long for this world…."

This was something she had heard since the earliest days she could remember.

Not long for this world, and yet she'd lived twenty-two years anyway. Wouldn't she just keep on living, precarious as a candle guttering in the wind, for that much longer still? Elise finally drew her hand back from the physician.

"That is simply my constitution. It causes no difficulty in daily life, so please proceed with your diagnosis regardless."

"Yes… but this makes it difficult to reach a firm confirmation."

The physician, unable to hold back his sighs as he examined her from every angle, drew a small amount of blood from her fingertip before withdrawing.

Only then did Elise collapse sideways onto the bed. The instant the tension snapped loose, the whole world tilted and spun.

The sun had already sunk fully toward the west. By now, under ordinary circumstances, the execution would have concluded. The severed head would already be hanging in the square, and the crowd that had come to watch would have scattered.

Ah—no, that wasn't right. Before she could be dragged to the execution platform, she would have triggered the magic circle behind her ankle. Either way, whatever being called Elise would no longer remain in the world.

Tears traced down the corner of her eye.

'I bought myself a day.'

Given the gravity of the matter, a result would likely come as soon as tomorrow.

Elise recalled the last thing she'd seen—Rezet Kyrstan's cold, disdainful face.

"You won't help me, will you?"

She murmured the words to herself, and still the tears would not stop.

'If it were me, I would have staked everything I had and petitioned His Majesty directly.'

'I have no interest in bedding a woman staggering about, unable to carry her own weight.'

She'd braced for the coldness, known exactly what his answer would be. It still hurt.

Really, it hurt.