IWJACM Chapter 4

Even without drinking that poison this instant, Elise had methods of dying to spare. None of it was hard. She had only to press the magic circle at her ankle and call for her brother, and she could vanish like dust.

Which meant she had no particular reason to choose self-execution right now.

More than two weeks still remained before they reached the Van Yela border.

She'd lain the night before wide awake. And she'd decided.

She would survive—to the very end, in whatever mire she landed in. Whatever it took. Whatever she had to endure.

Rezet Kyrstan was still, unbearably, composed.

"That is the whole of His Majesty's message."

"Must I choose now?"

"If you require time to think, I will give it to you."

"……"

"I will return tomorrow morning."

A full day remained until tomorrow morning.

The Grand Duke seemed prepared to say exactly that and nothing more before withdrawing. But Elise did not let her gaze leave his eyes—mineral-flat, as though sapphire had been set into them.

The strongest man in this camp. The highest-ranked, too.

She had heard that if this man so much as spoke, the emperor would fetch him the stars from the sky.

He held a position second only to Van Yela's imperial family itself.

Elise could not afford to disregard the rope dangling before her eyes just now. Rotten though it might be, she'd have to grab it and see.

One hope. Only one. This man was a savage stickler for principle.

He would keep whatever he had once spoken. Just as Andrei always had.

"Lord Kyrstan."

The Grand Duke, who had already offered her a bow and turned to leave without hesitation, stopped where he stood.

Elise closed the distance between them in long strides. From this near, she looked directly up at him.

She deliberately raised her voice, to hide the fine tremor running through it.

"If I do not take my own life here, will you deliver me to Van Yela?"

"That would be the course, yes. Self-execution, or public execution in the capital. There are only the two paths."

The Grand Duke answered in a voice neither hurried nor slow.

"Should Your Highness decline self-execution, I will escort you to Ophel, the capital of Van Yela."

"Unharmed, you mean."

The Grand Duke's gaze touched Elise, then moved to the letter bearing the imperial decree. A moment later, he confirmed it, dry and flat.

"Yes. Unharmed."

Every word spoken by a commander of the empire carries weight.

Even more so a word spoken while delivering the emperor's own message—it could never be lightly dismissed as an idle remark or a slip of the tongue.

Elise was to die in Van Yela as the princess of Argan.

If that was so, then along the road there, the Van Yela army would treat her as a princess.

'No, that alone won't be enough.'

Rezet Kyrstan had not once shown her his face across the past five days. He would go on this way for the whole of the remaining journey to Van Yela.

Elise's goal was not to arrive at Van Yela safely. Her goal was to draw this man to her side, by whatever means, before they arrived.

Whatever it took.

All Elise had left to use was this body of hers—flesh, nothing more.

Fortunately—quite apart from her life hanging now like a candle-flame in the wind. Her body, the body of Argan's princess, kept its worth at its highest, anywhere, anytime.

A ridiculous fact.

Elise finally opened her mouth.

"I will not take my own life. And I understand you're bound, in turn, to bring me to Van Yela's capital without so much as a fingertip harmed on me. You give me your word on this?"

The man's eyes remained just as still. He answered only with a bow.

But will you stay unmoved even at this? Elise bit down desperately on her trembling lip.

We'll just see about that.

Just before the Grand Duke turned fully away, she caught his arm.

"Why are you—"

And in the very moment he called out to her, puzzled, she reached for the dagger he had confiscated. She seized the hilt and pulled it hard toward her, and the blade slid free.

The draw was smooth to the point of horror.

Elise drove it deep into the meat of her left shoulder.

She pressed the blade down with all her strength; it tore through skin and buried itself nearly two knuckles deep.

A gasp tore out of her, breath snagging in her throat before she could stop it.

"……!"

For the first time, shock crossed the Grand Duke's deep-blue eyes. He shouted, savage.

"Your Highness!"

The voice that called her name finally carried urgency.

Only then did she smile, satisfied. Against that satisfaction, the pain of torn flesh was a drop of blood next to a river—nothing.

But her body could not keep pace with her will. She swayed—vision guttering, tilting sideways. The man reached out and caught her as she collapsed.

Elise spat the words out, broken, one gasp at a time.

"You promised… to deliver me… safely, to Van Yela."

"What is this—What is this you're doing!"

"You gave your word, quite clearly. Lord Kyrstan."

Agony like fire catching against raw flesh blurred her vision. Elise looked at the man holding her, urgently examining the wound, and smiled in relief.

This man would never again be able to leave her alone, not for the whole length of the road to Van Yela.

The princess had driven a dagger into her own shoulder. Rezet watched the appalling scene play out and lost his words entirely.

His two hands, having pressed to stop the bleeding at her shoulder, were soaked through with blood.

'You promised to deliver me safely to Van Yela, quite clearly.'

He had not once imagined she would interpret those words this way. Only now did Rezet grasp her intent with any clarity.

The princess hadn't so much as a fingernail's worth of intention to die an honorable death.

Not only did she have no wish to die—she meant, in fact, to win him over. With her body.

"With her body…"

The phrase fit with terrible precision.

For days after she cut herself, the princess kept at it, near convulsive, clawing fresh harm into her own body. So Rezet could not leave her alone for even a moment.

It had been the emperor's own order: should the princess refuse self-execution, drag her to the capital regardless. Attached to that order had been a condition—take care that her body is not seriously harmed.

He had no idea why such a condition should have been attached, given that she would only mount the scaffold once she reached the capital, but a knight had no need to question an imperial command. He had only to obey.

Even so, to share a single tent with the princess—it was, quite simply, appalling.

Argan. And her, of all people, a member of that very imperial house.

Across the continent of Grendel, the name Argan carried a weight far beyond that of a mere great power.

Rezet himself, for his part, held no personal grudge against the Argan imperial family.

If he had to sort his feelings on the matter at all, they leaned closer to something like fondness.

Rezet recalled the Argan he had visited a few years prior, leading a goodwill delegation. Compared to its golden age, its splendor was fading, but it had remained, even then, an empire of refined and elegant dignity.

Argan's reigning emperor at the time, Arzeika III, had been nineteen. He still remembered the first greeting the young emperor—only just past boyhood—had offered him with a welcoming smile.

'So you are Van Yela's hero. Welcome to Argan, Grand Duke Kyrstan.'

The boy-emperor had shown not the faintest flicker of fear at meeting a butcher the entire continent trembled before. And it wasn't as though he could have been ignorant of what sort of being Rezet Kyrstan was.

Hero. As if such a word were even possible.

Rezet also remembered the young emperor's twin sister, Princess Elizabetha.

He had seen her only from a distance across the banquet hall, but the memory had stayed vivid—not so much because he had paid her any particular attention, but because his memory was, by nature, exceptional.

Though in truth, no one who had once seen a beauty of that magnitude could easily have forgotten her.

The harmony of hair like flowing silver-white cascading past her waist and eyes of gold—the very emblem of the Argan imperial bloodline—had been beautiful enough to leave a man entranced.

The emperor, too, had been remarkably handsome, but he had not compared to his sister. She had not seemed like someone who breathed the same air as ordinary people at all. Wandering alone through some dreaming world, she had seemed almost sacred.

There could not be two women in this world capable of stirring something like religious devotion in anyone who saw her. So it was little wonder Rezet had recognized her true identity the moment he laid eyes on her.

The princess who had fled, as if for her very life, into his tent had remained just the same. Frail and slight as a butterfly with torn wings, and still, impossibly, beautiful past the point of seeming human.

Only the artless purity of her girlhood was nowhere to be found now. Across her entire face lay etched, deep, the particular despair and precariousness of someone who had come to feel, firsthand, the crushing weight of life.

And yet even that anguish remained, on her, noble. At that point, it's just what she was born with.

Rezet let out a sigh and looked down at the princess lying on the folding bed.

Her eyes were shut, but he knew she was not asleep. She kept every sense in her body on edge, all day long, for fear that he might leave her side even for a moment.

Then, the instant he stepped away even briefly, she'd tear loose the bandage at her shoulder and dig into the wound underneath. The unhealed injury had reached the point of festering, so naturally, he could no longer keep his distance from her.

Even so, Rezet went no further than that. He never spoke to the princess of his own accord.

But she spoke to him.

"My lord, are you always this quiet by nature?"

And Rezet had to answer whatever she asked him. He could hardly ignore a question from the princess.

"Yes."

But there was no particular need for his answer to run any longer than that.

The princess gave a laugh of pure exasperation and opened her eyes to look at him. Rezet did not meet the gold gaze turned toward him directly; he let his own eyes fall.

At that, Elizabetha's eyes went sharp, lifting to him.

"Would I need to carve another cut into my own body before you and I could have anything resembling a real conversation?"

"……"

The last princess of Argan was, in her own way, more formidable than he was.

Rezet was left with no choice but to speak.

"Your Highness ought to learn how to treat your own body with care."

"What use is treating it with care, when I'll be dead the moment I reach Van Yela? Might as well use it up while it's still mine to use."

The tone was sharp, cutting against the grain of her elegant voice. The princess planted a hand on the bed and pushed herself upright.

Her movements carried no caution whatsoever, as if she hadn't so much as a hair's-breadth of care left for her own body.

In the end, the bandage he had changed only an hour ago bloomed with fresh blood once more.

A crack split Rezet's brow.