IWJACM Chapter 16

Just as the Grand Duke had said—knowing nothing, capable of nothing, no notion of how the world even turned, only living on like that. Stupid, powerless, nothing to her name but her own body. No one knew that better than Elise herself.

Then Rezet Kyrstan was right. This was exactly what happened when someone forced a life meant to end to go on scrabbling forward anyway. The heavy shackles named death still hung from both of Elise's wrists.

She had no strength left even to lift a hand and wipe her eyes, so for a while she simply let the sorrow and misery run out of her as tears.

And then she resolved, once again.

'If everything comes to light, I'll take my own life.'

When the imperial knights dragged her out and brought her before the scaffold. Then.

But the next day came, and the day after that, and still no one came to drag Elise to the execution ground.

Elise did not sleep for three days straight. Instead of drowsiness, every sense in her body sharpened past reason.

Naturally, she never took a single step outside the confined bedchamber. The lady's maid tending her was mute, so there was no one to press for what was happening beyond the walls. Despair gnawed her whole body away, more of it with each day.

She scrubbed and scrubbed at the brand carved into the back of her ankle, like she meant to rub the very color off it.

In the end her body, dragged to its limit, threw its fit—wouldn't hold out one second more. She lasted one more day like that, and then Elise could hold out no longer and fell asleep.

Not sleep. Call it blacking out, more like.

Somewhere in the drowning haze of sleep, she thought she heard a low sigh.

"What do you mean, something's wrong with her pulse?"

"It's—it hardly seems believable that it belongs to someone living, at all……"

"Her breathing's perfectly steady, but her pulse can barely be found?"

"Yes. We had to draw blood again yesterday because of it, but the results were……"

She caught, faintly, the sound of someone's low voice in conversation. But an irresistible drowsiness swallowed her consciousness again before she could hold onto it.

How long had passed by then?

When Elise woke again, she was lying somewhere unfamiliar.

She stared blankly for a moment at the elaborate, delicately painted ceiling fresco spread above her, then slowly pushed herself upright. A spinning dizziness swept through her and everything went black before her eyes.

"Careful, Your Highness."

Someone caught her fumbling fingertips gently.

"Wh—who…."

"I'm called Yvessa. I'll be Your Highness's personal maid going forward."

A maid? A maid, of all things?

It took another few minutes for her vision to return to normal. A black-haired maid with kind eyes was supporting her.

"I think it's from sitting up so suddenly. Your hands are quite cold—would you like help with a bath?"

"No…. Never mind the bath. Go and."

Before she even realized it, she'd started giving an order—and caught herself. The bedding felt so much like her own bed back at the imperial palace of Argan that she'd nearly forgotten herself for a moment. She could no longer order people about so naturally, the way she had as a princess.

As if she'd read Elise's thought, Yvessa spoke warmly.

"If there's anything you'd like to command, please don't hesitate to say so. His Grace ordered that whatever Her Highness wants should be prepared for her."

"Who…?"

"Why, His Grace the Grand Duke, of course. Your soon-to-be husband."

"What?"

Elise's eyes went wide. And the surprises did not stop there.

"His Grace requested an audience. Would you like to get ready and see him? He's waiting in the receiving room."

"Lord Kyrstan?"

"Yes. He actually arrived this morning, but Your Highness hadn't yet risen, so he said he'd wait……"

He had waited?

Elise leapt up and scurried toward the door. The moment she flung it open, she found herself face to face with Rezet, who had just been about to knock.

Rezet took in the state of her, then said, level, "If you are not yet ready, I will wait."

"No, it's fine."

Elise shook her head quickly. This was the man who had brought her fate to her doorstep. She'd rather hear whatever it was at once and be rid of this despair gnawing hollow through her insides.

But the Grand Duke snapped it down, cold.

"I am not fine with it. Nor is this a matter urgent enough to justify dragging a woman who's only just woken onto a sofa against her will. Get ready properly and come out."

"That… I'm sorry. I fell asleep for just a moment."

"Just a moment, you said?"

Rezet echoed it back at her, dumbfounded. Elise only blinked at him, and an unbelievable fact dropped into the silence.

"You've been lying there for three full days."

"I—what?"

"You've been gravely ill. I'll come back once you've bathed and finished a meal. Until then."

Rezet Kyrstan actually turned and left. Elise stared blankly after his broad back as it strode away down the corridor.

Six days since the execution, and she was still alive.

"What in the world happened…?"

Yvessa hurried over and draped a thick shawl over Elise's shoulders.

"What His Grace said is true, Your Highness. You were very gravely ill. His Majesty the Emperor was greatly concerned as well—in case it should harm the child in your womb."

The moment she heard it, everything came clear all at once.

Elise stood frozen in the middle of the room like a stone statue. Yvessa guided her gently back to the bed.

"So you must take absolute rest for the time being. First, you should eat. Please wait just a little, Your Highness."

Limp as a puppet, she was dragged along and laid back down under the covers. She stared blankly at the ceiling for a long while after, and then abruptly caught Yvessa's sleeve.

"Yvessa. Would you bring me a pen and paper?"

Within the half-day the Grand Duke had given her, Elise barely managed to finish a meal. Calling it a "meal" was generous—she vomited up everything she'd first forced down, and in the end only managed a few spoonfuls of thin porridge.

"Your stomach's weakened badly from having almost nothing while you were held in that cell. It won't taste like much, but you must eat regardless."

Elise started to say it likely hadn't been the imprisonment specifically, then thought better of it. Even back in Argan, clear stew or porridge had always been the food most familiar to her stomach.

Once she'd finished the meal as best she could, Elise calmly began laying out her plans for what came next.

Simply having her life spared for now didn't mean everything was resolved. She'd cleared one hurdle—the real beginning was only now.

The Grand Duke returned late in the afternoon. Elise was seated in the receiving room, pen moving across paper, when she saw him enter and rose hastily from her chair. He raked her over with flat, unreadable eyes.

"How's your health?"

"I'm fine, thank you."

The moment Rezet took the seat across from her, Elise broke the silence.

"My lord, that I'm still alive right now, does that mean—"

"It was true that a child was needed."

Rezet cut across her words, brusque. He, too, clearly had no intention of drawing this out through some tedious preamble.

"What Your Highness said was accurate. Being pressed for an heir is a rather tiresome, irritating business. If a single transaction could free me from His Majesty's leash, it costs me nothing in particular."

"…….."

"And perhaps you truly are my answer."

His tone was dry and administrative, the way one notifies another of a matter already decided.

"Your Highness is a direct descendant of Ghallian. Descended from the hero who subdued the dragon, while I am the half-breed carrying that same dragon's blood—so perhaps Your Highness may be able to suppress the nature in me that no one finds agreeable."

"…I think that's likely."

"Then there's no reason to take dozens of innocent women when a promising option stands right in front of me. What I need now is a single woman who can withstand me, and my bloodline."

"…….."

"Matters being what they are, I'll see an heir from you, and you'll have your life spared. That should settle it."

His voice carried the same tone it had when he'd mercilessly cast aside her pleading, that time. If anything, his register had dropped even lower.

The Grand Duke continued, indifferent, as though reciting someone else's affairs.

"I've told His Majesty that we've already consummated the marriage. I've bribed a physician, so from now on he'll be the one attending Your Highness. In Lothier as well."

"I see… I see."

"By custom the wedding ought to be held at once, but given the circumstances, I doubt we can proceed by the book."

Elise fidgeted with her fingertips, awkward. She'd known they would need to discuss what came next, but she hadn't expected it to lead so directly into marriage.

There was also something she needed to say before that.

Elise took the pause in his speech as her opening and parted her lips.

"My lord, thank you for accepting such an unreasonable proposal——"

"There's no need to thank me. Don't think of this as mercy given without a price."

"…….."

"It is only a marriage of contract. One where we use each other—by agreement."

The man's blue eyes swept over her rigid form. He let out a short, derisive laugh, like her sudden flustering struck him as absurd.

"Isn't that what Your Highness wanted, as well?"

"…That's right."

Elise drew a deep breath. The cold eyes, the tone stripped of any warmth, even the shift—subtle, but unmistakable—from what she'd known of him these past two months. All of it, she had brought upon herself.

'I braced myself for this. I'm fine.'

As she comforted herself so, a chilly voice fell over her bowed head.

"Half a year. Can you manage that?"

The Grand Duke's gaze remained fixed on her, unflinching, as though it might pierce straight through. Elise couldn't move a muscle, like a fish speared on a harpoon. A sharp, stinging jolt shot down her spine.

'Half a year. Until the harvest festival.'

She had already expected that would be roughly the limit, one way or another.

The Emperor was showing considerable interest in Rezet's heir. Even if he departed for the Lothier territory, he could hardly hope to fully evade the Emperor's watchful eye.

And if time passed with no sign her belly was rounding, of course it would arouse suspicion.

So she needed to conceive this man's child within, at the very least, half a year.