IWJACM Chapter 6

But the princess soon laughed, clear and bright.

"I understand your meaning well enough, my lord. You've turned me away before I could even finish speaking—how embarrassing for me."

"My apologies."

A faint discomfort rose in him once more. In truth, ever since the moment he had realized that the princess—whom he had expected to choose an honorable death—meant instead to seek a way to live, discomfort had been settling into Rezet's chest like soot, clinging and unwilling to lift.

The princess swallowed back a sigh and murmured, quietly.

"Even so, stay by my side for now, Lord Kyrstan. Do not leave, not even for a moment."

"If that is a command."

"It is a request."

"……"

"I'm sorry to trouble you with it. But even so."

Rezet only barely managed to swallow down a groan. The princess had drawn his hand toward her and pressed her lips to his rough, coarse knuckles. As a knight might do for his lady. As a servant might do for his master.

"By your own reckoning, my lord, I'm a woman who could die any day now—so this much—"

"……"

"This much, at least, you can allow me, can't you?"

Their gazes met in midair like a flash of light.

A blind, faith-struck look, believing he alone was her salvation, shot at him like an arrow.

Even an arrow gone astray could not help but stir pity in him. It was hope that would never be repaid.

"I am glad Your Highness understands so well. Please, treat your body with the care it deserves."

Rezet turned his face from those dimming golden eyes and pulled his captured hand free without mercy. There was nothing more he could say to the princess.

But exactly one week later, the seed sprouted in the sediment of discomfort that had settled, dregs-like, at the bottom of him all this while.

The princess, who had behaved as though she would die on the spot without him near her, suddenly collapsed with a raging fever.

Elise had already sensed, however faintly, the discomfort that Grand Duke Kyrstan carried toward her without quite showing it. And yet she felt no great disappointment over it.

In truth, she had never once intended to persuade him from the start.

A wall like that man's could not be brought down all at once, by any single stroke. Some things could be taken. Some couldn't.

Against a man of ice-cold reason and rigid principle, there was no more foolish card to play than an appeal to feeling. Even a clumsy seduction would fail to land.

To begin with, it was doubtful he even saw her as a woman at all.

The journey toward Van Yela crept forward slowly. Even riding at full speed, the distance would ordinarily take well over two weeks—but dragging a growth like her along, there was no chance of any real speed.

Nearly three weeks had already passed since Elise had been taken by Van Yela's imperial army.

And across that entire span of time, apart from the first five days, there had scarcely been a single moment when Grand Duke Kyrstan had left her side.

Day. Night. Dawn. Morning. Elise never once let him leave her alone.

There had been one occasion when the Grand Duke tried to assign another knight to attend her instead. Naturally, the moment he saw Elise silently reach for the dagger, he withdrew the man at once.

But once a further two weeks had passed, Elise no longer needed to cling to him quite so deliberately.

Before the wound at her shoulder had even fully closed, a savage fever settled over her.

The man laid a hand against Elise's forehead and let out a low, quiet sigh.

"The fever isn't breaking."

"……"

"Is it usually…."

He swallowed the rest of the sentence. She could guess well enough what would have followed.

Is your body usually this frail, even without this?—that was surely what he meant to ask.

Elise forced her hazy eyes open and murmured.

"It's usually like this."

"……"

"Sometimes the fevers hit hard when I catch cold, and this is likely one of those times, probab—"

A cough cut her off before she could finish.

Elise had never, by constitution, been a healthy person.

That was the very reason Andrei had coddled and shielded her so fiercely from earliest childhood. Not only was her stamina weak—even her immune constitution fell far below what was ordinary for most people.

Her recovery, too, was extraordinarily slow. If she so much as tripped while walking on level ground, she would bruise across an area the size of two palms, and her bones broke easily as well. It came as no surprise, then, that her wounds refused to heal quickly. A cold that most people would shrug off within days could keep Elise coughing for weeks before it finally passed.

None of her organs was, in itself, damaged or malfunctioning—and yet, every season without fail, she fell seriously ill. It was simply how she had been born.

She heard the man let out a shallow breath as he silently checked the heat of her forehead once more.

"With you this close to me, you'll catch it yourself, at this rate…."

"In my entire life, I have no history of ever catching a cold."

He said it like a man who'd just heard the strangest thing in his life. Elise laughed weakly, without strength behind it. Must be nice, being that sturdy.

Her body ached, but there was one small mercy in it. Had she not fallen ill, she would never have had the chance to observe this man from so close, for so long.

Watching him over these nearly three weeks now, she had come to notice something. Grand Duke Kyrstan—Rezet Kyrstan—never once refused her commands.

He had told her, plainly, in his own words, that he had no intention of helping her. And yet he never once failed to show her proper courtesy. He might draw a careful line and step back behind it, but when she reached out to him, he never simply ignored her.

Or perhaps—he was unable to ignore her.

Well, it was hardly strange. She was, in every practical sense, under his protection now. Though he would send her straight to the scaffold the very instant they reached the capital.

The absurdity of that gap struck her as funny enough that she laughed, and his eyes narrowed slightly at the sound. But as always, he did not ask her why. It wasn't easy for a person to be this taciturn—in some sense, it was almost impressive.

In any case, Rezet Kyrstan stayed at her side.

It was near dawn.

Elise, woken by a chill running through her, reached out of habit toward the head of the bed. And a hand caught hers at once.

"What do you need? Your Highness."

It was not a voice that could have belonged to someone just roused from sleep. Elise lifted her eyes, dazed, and looked at the man.

Was this a dream? Or was it only that the surroundings had sunk into darkness? The man's black hair seemed, for a moment, to blur and overlap with Andrei's brown.

Elise abruptly reached out with the hand he hadn't caught. Soft hair wound around her fingers.

"Andrei."

The eyes reflecting her own face were blue as the sea. But she wanted, willfully, to believe they were gold anyway.

Andrei. Andrei.

My emperor. My beloved other half. My whole world.

The good brother, born only ten-odd minutes after her, who had faithfully called her big sister all his life regardless.

"Andrei."

"…Your Highness."

"If you could come back to me, your sister would do anything at all…."

I still can't believe you're not in this world anymore.

Elise's stricken murmur scattered emptily into the air.

"I should have been the one to become emperor."

"……"

"I should have become emperor, and I should have been the one who died…."

Then you would have lived. Even if Argan had fallen, you would have raised it back up again.

Because you're someone who could do anything, effortlessly.

From somewhere, faintly, she heard her brother's voice answer.

"You are, too, sister."

No.

"You're a far greater, far finer person than you think you are—a princess worthy of Argan and everyone's devotion, more than anyone else could ever be."

No, Andrei.

"I would be nothing without you. This is the truth, Elizabetha."

If you knew what plans I'm even now scheming, you might despise me for it.

Even so, it made no difference. From the moment she had driven a dagger into her own shoulder, Elise had given up any claim to being a flawless royal.

Elise combed her fingers idly through Andrei's hair and murmured, slow and drifting.

"This big sister of yours will—she'll go, she'll build your gravestone, surely she will…."

Her consciousness cut out.

Rezet gazed for a long while at the face of the princess, who had dropped into sleep as though she had fainted.

Her body was a ball of fire. He had already heard, by rumor, that the princess of Argan was frail—but he had not expected it would reach quite this degree.

And yet it was true, too—this long a journey was a brutal thing for a wounded body to bear. The conditions surrounding her, on top of that, were wretched.

He wondered whether Argan's treasured princess had ever, in her life, slept in a tent this crude and shabby before now.

Which meant the princess was stupider than she looked. Wasn't this exactly the mess she'd landed in—wounding a body that precious just to keep him near?

Rezet carefully drew his hand free from where the princess had caught it. The instant the warmth left her, she curled her body in tighter.

"Andrei…."

The voice calling out to a man already dead was frail beyond anything.

A truly frail, fragile kind of beauty. It was beginning to make some sense to him now, why Argan's emperor had cherished his sister as though she might shatter at a touch, or be carried off on the wind. He suspected he might have done the same, in that man's place.

Though that wasn't only because the princess's looks were entrancing, or her body so frail. There was something about her that could not be fully explained in words.

Some quality set apart from ordinary humankind—a different order of being entirely, if that's the word for it. The princess had been born to command, born to reign, born with the world already laid beneath her feet.

She truly had lived, in every way, in a world different from his own.

Born of the basest blood, having crawled through the mire just to claw his way to any height at all—and she, a princess whose life's whole orbit ran nothing like his.

Precisely for that reason, Rezet had never once doubted that she would keep her spine straight, composed to the very end, even with death hanging at her throat.

And yet, of all things, he had not imagined she would cling to him like this, as if he were her lifeline.

It was, he had to admit, a strangely novel experience. That much, at least, Rezet allowed.

He could not let just anyone—least of all another man—near the princess, and so it had fallen, always, to him to remain at her side. In this vast tent, the two of them alone occupied the whole of it, all day long.

Wrapped in a thin blanket, her body shook—hard, uncontrollable shivers.

"Cold…."

No one was watching.

The realization came, and with it, an impulse reared its head—snake-like.