IWJACM Chapter 24

Elise gazed up, dazed, at the surface of the water growing distant above her. She was sinking to the bottom of the lake along with the shattered wreckage of the carriage.

Thanks to the faint remnant of Andrei's barrier, no direct impact had reached her even as the carriage struck the lake and broke apart. Without the barrier, she would already be no longer among the living.

But that was the full extent of the luck fate had allotted her.

The light and air above the surface were being steadily swallowed by darkness. The oxygen trapped within the barrier was steadily dwindling.

Her breath was growing short.

None of it felt real, like something out of a dream.

'Is this the end of the fate God laid out for me?'

'—Came all the way to Van Yela, and for what—how did I even survive that….'

Her pride as a princess, her dignity as a human being—all of it, thrown away, just to grab hold of this worthless scrap of a life she called her own. A single line of tears ran down the corner of Elise's eye.

If it was going to end this pointlessly anyway—should've just died back then.

Beyond her guttering consciousness, a vision rose—the day she left Argan.

'There's no point in me going alone—I'll be caught in no time anyway. It's pointless!'

'No—you can do a great deal, Elise.'

'I won't leave without you!'

'There's no time to argue. Run, now. Don't ever give up. If you're alive, sister, then even if Argan's lost, it isn't truly fallen.'

'I'll stay. You go. You know that, Andrei—I'm just going to—'

'I have to die for you to live.'

'What...?'

In the memory, Andrei's head was bleeding. He stroked her cheek, grief-worn.

'You'll get healthy.'

'What does that mean….'

'So never give up on yourself, Elizabetha. Promise me. Promise you won't throw your life away again, the way you did before.'

Guilt washed over her toward her brother.

Andrei had traded his own life for hers. And even now, when the life he'd bought her was drifting as far away as that surface above, Elise couldn't summon the will to thrash, to fight for it at all.

Maybe, in truth, she had been slowly withering ever since the Argan palace.

Everyone had revered her as their precious princess—but almost no one knew that Elise had been teetering, precariously, on the border between life and death, quietly cursing herself the whole time.

The defensive barrier was gradually losing its light. Cold water pressed in through the cracks.

Her whole body went instantly soaked. Ice-cold lake water surged up to her throat in a moment, then swallowed her entirely.

Unable to withstand the pressure, the barrier shattered without mercy.

Water immediately began pouring into her nose and mouth. The agony was sharp enough to jolt her fully awake.

Only then did real, present terror seize hold of Elise.

"—!"

She began to thrash.

'No…!'

'I didn't drag myself all the way here just to drown, pointlessly, like this!'

'Promise me you won't give up, Elise. Please!'

At that instant, the water around Elise surged sharply outward.

The barrier—which she'd believed had shattered to pieces—was reconstituting itself. Something pushed hard against her back from behind.

The shimmering surface above was drawing closer. Then, suddenly, everything around her went dark.

Someone, blocking out the light, was swimming toward her.

Her hand and wrist were seized at once. Dragged by an iron grip, Elise was buried against a chest she knew. The surface began closing in even faster than before.

The pressure dragging her toward the lake bottom vanished, and at last Elise was able to break the surface. Air she'd desperately needed came rushing into her nose and mouth.

"Your Highness!"

The smell of water. Faintly, the smell of blood alongside it.

"Your Highness, are you all right?"

Elise couldn't answer, coughing violently. Her head spun, her vision narrowing sharply. The urgent voice grew distant, like a ringing in her ears.

"You mustn't lose—"

Through her blurring sight, a pair of eyes appeared, clearer even than the lake—a matching blue.

In those eyes, a storm was rising, the same one she'd already witnessed several times before.

'…Ah.'

Looking back, every time her life had continued, had stretched on further, the man had shaken like this. And so, once again, Elise understood.

I'm… alive.

I'm alive.

All the tension in her body drained away at once, and she went limp. The Grand Duke shouted something and pulled her tighter against his chest, arm around her back and waist.

That was the last scene Elise remembered.

The smell of medicinal herbs had soaked permanently into the princess's bedchamber in the Argan palace annex.

Past the age of twenty, Elizabetha Arzeika's entire world, past the age of twenty, had been that one annex—hers alone, hidden deepest within the palace.

Elise's condition had been at its worst from early childhood through the age of fifteen.

"It wouldn't be strange if she stopped breathing this very moment. I beg forgiveness, Your Highness, but I truly cannot say how it is you remain alive at all…."

Every physician who examined her said her pulse wasn't a living person's. That she carried none of the vital energy a living human ought to have. That whatever small amount gathered would, as if by some ghostly hand, slip away somewhere before long—they always said this with visible discomfort.

As a child, Elise spent most of her days envying her healthy brother.

"Andrei, why are you and I so different? We're twins."

"…Elise. Do you hate being sick?"

"I hate it. I hate it so much."

Above all, the biggest problem was that there was no specific diagnosis.

With no known cause, there was nothing to prevent, no way to predict how symptoms might turn. As though something had devoured her from within, her strength drained away entirely, leaving only an empty shell—helplessly breaking apart at even the smallest outside shock.

In fact, Elise hadn't been born with silver hair. She'd originally had the same soft brown hair as her twin, Andrei. They said that after she wandered the boundary of death from a violent fever as a child, the color had drained clean out of it, leaving her silver.

"Don't worry so much, sister. If you take your medicine faithfully, without fail, and don't push yourself, it'll get better bit by bit."

Andrei always comforted her with total sincerity. As the years passed, one after another, Elise gradually stopped indulging herself around him. Every time she whined or complained, Andrei's face twisted in pain.

Elise swallowed down her envy, and instead repeated, again and again, that she was fine.

"Don't worry about me, Andrei. I'm not a child anymore. It's not like this is anything new…. I'm fine."

But this time, it was her heart that began to rot instead.

With no one to confide her body's suffering to, her spirit crumbled. She could never bring herself to tell her brother, but Elise constantly wondered what the point of living like this even was.

A life where most days of the year, she couldn't even lift herself out of bed under her own strength.

A flower so achingly fragile its very stalk might snap in a stray gust of wind. A pitiable life, like a lily of the valley.

Even medicine said to be good for the body had to be measured with extreme care. It was a body—a mere hunk of flesh—where even a slight miscalculation in a remedy could send everything wrong in an instant.

The day she learned this, at fifteen, Elise chewed and swallowed a fistful of an herb known to turn to poison in her constitution if taken in excess. Then she crawled beneath her blankets, hoping never to wake again.

The attempt failed—because of Andrei. Sensing something was wrong, he'd abandoned even his morning council and come running.

He cried a great deal that day. Even a soul bound for the world of the dead, hearing that sorrowful weeping, would surely not have been able to turn away.

"It's because of me. Because of me, you—. Don't go, Elise. Don't leave me. I haven't done anything for you yet…."

As the price for that terrible thought, Elise spent a full six months confined to her bed. On the day she was finally able to walk on her own again, Andrei came to see her.

She remembered it as deep into the night.

"Sister, from now I'm going to inscribe a magic circle on your body. It might hurt a little—bear with it. I'll finish quickly."

"What kind of magic is it?"

"Magic to remove the cause of why you've become so sick."

"But the physicians said there's no cause in my constitution."

"There's no effect in the world without a cause, Elise."

The first spell Andrei left on Elise's body was inscribed at the center of her spine. It didn't hurt, but it burned. It also took quite a while.

By the time the inscription was finished, both Elise and Andrei were utterly spent. The siblings collapsed together onto the bed, sprawled however they landed.

Andrei turned over and pulled Elise into a tight embrace.

"There's nothing connecting us anymore, but you and I are still each other's other half. Aren't we?"

"Of course…."

"Good. That's all that matters."

Strangely enough, from that day forward, Elise's condition improved noticeably. She even managed a little horseback riding, some light running. It was, one could truly say, nothing short of a miracle.

What had the magic circle Andrei inscribed on her that day actually been?

She'd asked, a handful of times, but he never once gave her an answer.

Not even seven years later, when Argan was ground mercilessly beneath the barbarians' hooves.

Elise came back to herself at the light sway of her own body. She was being carried, cradled in someone's arms.

Consciousness had returned, but her eyelids were unbearably heavy. Elise trembled, furrowed her brow as deeply as she could, and only then finally managed to open her eyes.

The first thing she saw was a brooch pinned to someone's chest. Engraved on it was the golden double-headed eagle marking Van Yela's imperial house. Beneath it sat Lothier's crest, stamped with the horn of plenty.

"Do you have your senses back?"

Then, a voice she knew well reached her ears.