IWJACM Chapter 5

Watching wounds accumulate on a body that ought not bear a single mark was, to put it plainly, unpleasant. It was a shift in feeling he hadn't experienced in some time.

"I'll help you up."

The princess blinked up at him. Rezet felt something close to exasperation.

Had she not engineered precisely this? And yet she looked at him as though she hadn't expected it.

With a heavy exhale, he slid one arm beneath her knees and the other around her waist and gathered her up. She was thin as paper. Lighter than a feather.

He set her upright on the bed and withdrew his hands immediately.

"Thank you," she murmured.

But her golden gaze never left him. That measuring look—taking stock of something, probing—he could read the intent clearly enough. What she was actually thinking was another matter entirely. The inscrutability of it brought a faint edge of frustration.

After a long silence, she said something entirely unexpected.

"We've met before, haven't we, Your Grace?"

"......"

"Is that why you recognized me so readily?"

The frustration shifted into something sharper. Rezet found the situation—sitting across from this impossibly beautiful woman and exchanging words—deeply surreal, and yet he couldn't bring himself to ignore her question.

"I was dispatched to Argan as an envoy. Once."

"Yes." She said it almost to herself. "Our eyes met at the banquet hall."

Then, casually, as though tossing out a passing thought:

"Are you married, Your Grace?"

"I am not."

"You must have had no shortage of fine proposals from across the continent. If I may ask—why?"

Her voice was steady, or nearly so. The very end of it trembled. Rezet answered without resistance.

"You may or may not be aware—there are stories about me. Spread across the continent."

"Ah."

"I find it doubtful that any father would give his precious daughter to a man who is not entirely human."

A faint tremor moved through the princess's cheek.

She would know the stories. They had reached the southernmost edges of the continent—there was no reason Argan would have been spared them.

In those stories, he was a murderous creature beyond comparison to any demon. Cold-blooded. Merciless. When he killed, he did so in multiples of ten. The whispers insisted he was not a man at all—something else entirely.

Everyone who knew him personally understood that most of it was not rumor.

Rezet Kyrstan was the offspring of a dragon and a human.

Neither dragon nor human. Incomplete. Unstable.

A cursed bloodline that had inherited not the power of dragons but only their madness—those who could quiet the frenzy boiling in their blood only through periodic killing.

Most were born half-human, half-beast—reptilian heads on human bodies, or the reverse; limbs that had taken draconic form. Of diminished intelligence. With lethal physical defects.

History had called such creatures yon'gyn.

Rezet Kyrstan was one of them. He had simply been born into a form that leaned closer to human.

The princess hesitated before speaking.

"Rumors tend to be... exaggerated."

"Very little of what circulates about me is false. I suspect the parts that haven't yet surfaced are, if anything, more numerous."

"I see. But I've heard that Van Yela's Emperor is pursuing a marriage for you—pressing you for an heir..."

"Ah."

For the first time, Rezet's expression visibly darkened. The irritation and displeasure moved across his face undisguised. An heir. A successor. Marriage. The tiresome triad that had plagued him for years.

The sharp words escaped before he could catch them.

"I have no interest in killing women for the sake of an heir."

"......"

"I have no particular wish to spill blood in bed, of all places."

The bluntness of it made the princess visibly tense.

Rezet catalogued her reaction with cold precision, a faint contempt curling at the corner of his mouth. Frightened, then. For all that.

And yet this hand of hers simply wouldn't let go.

"For an ordinary woman," she managed, barely, "that would certainly be the case."

Rezet's gaze dropped briefly to the hand that held his, then lifted away.

The fingers that had gently tapped the back of his hand while she asked about marriage—slender, pale—were now threading themselves between the rough knuckles of his. He had given her warning enough. And still.

What did she intend?

She called to him in something close to a whisper.

"Your Grace."

"...Yes, Your Highness."

"Did you know that Argan's founding ancestor was a dragon's disciple?"

Rezet held his silence for a long moment. The founding legend of Argan was well-known across the continent.

An old legend—more than seven hundred years old.

In the age when the frenzy of the great dragon Semesitha swept across the continent, five mages who had served the dragon turned against their master and chose to protect humanity instead. Their leader, the hero Ghallian, had been Argan's founding ancestor. The one who had known dragons better than any other—taught by the dragon itself—the first human to learn how to defend himself against them.

With that power, the hero and his line had protected the human world—Grendel. The nation they built was Argan. It was why, even now, centuries later, the entire continent loved and revered Argan's imperial family.

But as time passed, the mage's power flowing through the Argan imperial line had gradually thinned. In this age, a mage appeared in the bloodline perhaps once every three generations—and barely, at that.

And Argan's last mage had died only weeks ago. The princess before him now had been that man's twin.

Rezet asked directly.

"Are you a mage, Your Highness?"

"Yes and no."

An ambiguous answer. But it didn't read as caution—not as someone carefully guarding her hand.

She was raising the only shield she had, with everything she had left.

"The Argan imperial house has countless myths about dragons, Your Grace. Did you know?"

The reason she was reaching for musty old myths was plain enough.

Dragons. A dragon's disciple. And a yon'gyn.

Was this woman trying to construct common ground between them by any means available? Did she believe she could purchase his sympathy—his mercy—with it? A thin contempt flickered at the corner of Rezet's mouth and was gone.

"I don't know them. Nor do I wish to."

Even to his own ears, his voice was cold.

A woman whose last thin thread of hope had been severed would collapse—or else quietly weep.

He was wrong. His cold reply hadn't shattered her—not visibly. She only offered a faint, tired smile, as though she had expected nothing else.

"What a pity. I may be of some value after all—but you won't even listen."

The melancholy that lay across her exquisite face made him feel, for one unguarded instant, like a man who had done something wrong. That merely lowering her gaze could provoke that response in him—he was appalled at himself.

Her fingers were still entwined with his. Slender and fragile—like tangled thread, deceptively difficult to free—and the texture of them, softer than anything he had ever touched, pressed deeper into his skin with every moment that passed.

Then her hand tightened around his.

Rezet felt it instantly: she had not given up.

In the eyes looking back at him, the hunger for life burned.

He understood it again, clearly: this woman had no intention of meeting the beautiful death she was due.

It had not featured in any of his calculations. Which left him, helplessly, at a loss.

The imperial family was expected to live and die by honor. To choose death before suffering humiliation at an enemy's hands—that was their pride. Their obligation. No one regarded imperial blood as ordinary. They embodied a nation. Fallen though it was, Argan was still Argan.

Elizabetha Arzeika should have died cleanly, without a single mark upon her. With dignity. That had been the Emperor of Van Yela's order: guide her to a death befitting her station.

So why was she choosing the harder road?

Her inner workings remained, to him, entirely opaque. So he abandoned the attempt to understand.

She had already refused Van Yela's consideration of her own accord. Which meant she would be sent to the scaffold the moment they arrived.

She seemed to see him as a lifeline—but Rezet had no intention of becoming her salvation. The princess of Argan was destined to vanish into the margins of history alongside her homeland. His emperor had decreed it so.

Rezet was not a man who let private feeling contaminate duty. His emotions had never influenced his actions. The princess's beauty did not constitute grounds for mercy.

"I will not help you, Your Highness."

He felt the need now to make his position plain.

"Nor do I intend to. I am a knight sworn in loyalty to His Imperial Majesty the Emperor of Van Yela—my liege and my brother."

"......"

"Van Yela is the leader of the Northern Alliance of Grendel. And at the same time, a brother kingdom to Ughel."

"And so, as a subject of Van Yela, you cannot aid the princess of Argan—enemy to your brother kingdom."

"Correct."

For a moment she simply looked at him, her eyes steady on his.

"Even if I were to kneel before you?"

On this bare ground. The very thought was horrifying.

"That would be entirely out of the question."

"What if I wept and pleaded and begged? None of that would reach you?"

"It would only make me more uncomfortable than I already am. In your position, I wouldn't expend energy on something pointless."

"So kneeling before you is entirely out of the question—yet taking poison and killing myself is perfectly acceptable."

What a contradiction you are. Her eyes said it plainly.