IWJACM Chapter 5

Watching wounds accumulate, again and again, on a body that ought never to have taken so much as a single scratch—it was not, by any measure, a pleasant feeling. It had been a long while since he had last felt this particular shift in mood.

"I will help you sit up."

The princess blinked, looking up at him. At that, Rezet was dumbfounded.

Had she not done this precisely so that he would behave this way? And yet there she was, looking at him like it was somehow a surprise?

Rezet let out a heavy breath, slid his hands beneath her waist and the backs of her knees, and lifted her. To him, her body was as thin as paper and lighter than a feather.

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

"Thank you."

The princess murmured it quietly. But the golden gaze fixed on him, boring through him, remained unchanged.

Eyes as though weighing something. He understood that she was taking his measure, but he could not read what she was thinking. At that, Rezet felt a faint stirring of frustration.

After a while of silence, the princess offered something out of nowhere.

"We have met before, haven't we, my lord."

"……"

"That is why you recognized me at once, is it not?"

The frustration of a moment ago had already turned to something closer to discomfort.

Rezet found the whole situation of facing this excessively beautiful woman and exchanging words with her deeply unreal, and yet he could not bring himself to ignore her question.

"I was dispatched to Argan once, as an envoy."

"Yes. It was at that reception hall—our eyes met, then."

The princess murmured it as though to herself. Then, offhand, as if it meant nothing at all, she tossed out—

"My lord—are you married?"

"I am unwed."

"Surely good offers have come to you from every corner of the continent. If it isn't rude to ask—why is that?"

She feigned composure, but the end of her voice trembled. Rezet answered without resistance.

"I don't know whether you are already aware, but there is no shortage of talk about me across the continent."

"Ah…."

"I hardly think there exists a father willing to marry his precious daughter off to a man who is not even human."

He saw the princess's cheek twitch, faintly.

She, too, no doubt knew well enough the countless horror-tales tangled up in the name Rezet Kyrstan. Stories that had spread even to the continent's southernmost reaches would surely have reached Argan as well.

In those rumors, he was a murder-fiend crueler than any monster could be.

Merciless and without pity, and the count of the men he killed was reckoned, without exception, in the tens. Word went round, too, that he wasn't human at all—that he was a monster.

And every person who had ever crossed paths with him knew that most of it was not idle rumor at all.

Rezet Kyrstan was the offspring of dragon and human.

Neither dragon nor man—an incomplete, unstable existence.

Instead of a dragon's power, he had inherited only its madness, a cursed breed that could only master the frenzy boiling in its blood by killing, again and again.

Most of their kind were born half-beast. Some carried a reptilian head atop a human body, or the reverse; others bore the dragon's shape in only a portion of their limbs. They were, as a rule, of low intelligence, their bodies riddled with fatal flaws.

History had come to call such beings yon'gyn.

Rezet Kyrstan was exactly this. Only, he was a yon'gyn who had taken a form closer to human than most.

The princess spoke, hesitant.

"Rumors… tend to be exaggerated."

"There is little that is exaggerated among what circulates about me. If anything, I would say a great deal more remains hidden than what has surfaced."

"I… see. But I had heard that the Emperor of Van Yela is pressing for your marriage. That he is urging you toward an heir…."

"Ah."

For the first time, Rezet's face twisted into a visible scowl. His whole face betrayed, plainly, an embarrassment and irritation he could not hide. An heir, a successor, marriage—these were always the matters that gave him a headache.

A blade-sharp edge shot into his voice before he could stop it.

"Killing women to get myself an heir isn't a taste of mine."

"……"

"I'd rather not see blood in the marriage bed too, if I can help it."

At the bluntness of it, the princess visibly tensed.

Rezet drank in every trace of her reaction and gave a scornful curl of the lips. Scared like that anyway—

And what the hell was she doing, not letting go of his hand at all—

"An ordinary… woman would, no doubt, react this way."

The princess managed, with some difficulty, to murmur it. Rezet's eyes touched briefly on the hand that had caught his, then moved away.

The fingers that had lightly tapped the back of his hand while asking if he was married had been slender and pale. And now, though she had, by her own words, given him clear enough warning, those same delicate fingers were working their way deeper between his rough, coarse knuckles.

Her hand still lay atop his, unmoving.

What did that mean.

The princess called to him, in a whisper.

"My lord."

"…Yes, Your Highness."

"Are you aware that Argan's founder was once a dragon's disciple?"

Rezet was silent for a long moment. Argan's founding legend was a tale known widely across the continent.

A legend more than seven hundred years old.

In the age when the wrath of the great dragon Semesitha swept across the continent, five mages who had once served him chose instead to betray their master and protect humankind. The one who had stood, foremost among them, as their leader was the hero Ghallian—the founder of Argan.

The one who had known the dragon better than any other. The one the dragon himself had taught. The very first human ever to learn how to protect himself from a dragon.

With that power, he had defended the world of men—Grendel itself. He and his line had founded the nation that became Argan. And that, even now, hundreds of years later, remained the reason the entire continent still loved and revered the Argan imperial line.

Yet as the centuries passed, the mages' blood running through the Argan imperial house had gradually thinned. By now, a true mage was born only once every third generation, if that.

And Argan's last mage had passed from this world only weeks ago. The princess before Rezet's eyes at this very moment was that man's twin sibling.

Rezet asked, direct.

"Is Your Highness a mage?"

"Both—and neither, in a sense."

The princess answered with deliberate ambiguity. It did not look like the caution of someone unwilling to reveal her hand too soon.

She was, rather, barely managing to raise a fragile shield with whatever strength she had left.

"Countless myths of the dragon are passed down within the Argan imperial house, my lord. Did you know that?"

Why she'd dug up that musty old legend, of all things, was plain enough.

The dragon. The dragon's disciple. And the yon'gyn.

Was this woman trying, by any means available to her, to find some point of common ground with him?

Did she believe that through it, she might purchase his sympathy, his mercy? For a fleeting moment, scorn touched the corner of Rezet's mouth.

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

Even to his own ears, the voice sounded merciless.

A woman whose one thread of hope had just been cut would, he thought, soon collapse entirely. Or else weep, quietly, in silence.

But he was wrong. Even against that cold rebuff, the princess showed no great disappointment. She only offered a weak, faint smile, as if she had expected as much all along.

"A pity. Perhaps it might have been worth something to me, too. But you won't even hear it out."

The sorrow that fell, for one instant, over that entrancing face made him feel, somehow, like the sinner.

That she could make him feel this way through nothing more than a mournful lowering of her eyes—it was, frankly, maddening.

Her fingers still lay tangled with his. Slender and fragile, yet not so easily unwound as a knotted thread; a softness beyond anything he had ever touched in his life pressed itself, by degrees, deeper into his skin.

And in the very moment the princess tightened her grip, Rezet understood, with certainty, that she had not given up.

The eyes turned on him burned with a hunger for life.

He grasped it once more. This woman had no intention of meeting the most beautiful death that should have been hers to claim.

It was nothing he had anticipated, and so he found himself, helplessly, at a loss.

Royalty were meant to live and die by honor. To take one's own life rather than be defiled by an enemy nation was their pride, and their duty.

No one looked upon royalty as merely another human being. They were the representatives of an entire nation. Fallen though it had been, Argan remained Argan.

Elizabetha Arzeika ought to die cleanly, nobly, her body unmarred anywhere.

That she be guided to a death befitting a princess—that was the order Van Yela's emperor had given Rezet.

So why, then, take the harder road—

Rezet still could not begin to guess at what lay behind her.

And so he abandoned the attempt to understand her altogether.

The princess had already kicked away Van Yela's mercy with her own foot. Which meant that the moment she arrived in Van Yela, she would be sent straight to the scaffold.

The princess seemed to regard him as her lifeline, but Rezet had no intention of becoming her salvation.

Argan's princess was fated to vanish into history alongside her homeland. His emperor had decreed it so.

Rezet was not a man who let personal sentiment govern matters of duty. Emotion had never, not once, influenced any action he took. The princess's beauty could not become a motive for him to show her mercy.

"I am no help to Your Highness."

Rezet felt, now, the need to state his position to her directly.

"Nor do I intend to become one. I am a knight who has sworn loyalty to my brother and liege, His Majesty the Emperor of Van Yela."

"……"

"And Van Yela stands as the head of Grendel's Northern Alliance, while at the same time it is a brother nation to the Kingdom of Ughel."

"And so you, my lord, bound to Van Yela, cannot help the princess of Argan—the enemy of your brother nation."

"Yes."

The princess held his gaze in silence for a moment.

"Even if I knelt before you?"

To kneel, here, on this bare ground—it was enough to make a man's breath catch.

"That is out of the question."

"Even if I wept and begged, it would move nothing in you at all?"

"It would only put me in a more difficult position than I am already in. Were I in your place, I would not waste my strength on something so meaningless."

"So it is out of the question that I should kneel—and yet it is perfectly acceptable that I take poison and end my own life."

A contradictory man. Her eyes seemed, precisely, to be reproaching him for exactly that.