IWJACM Chapter 9

The half-lifted cloth dropped back down. Elise was plunged back into darkness.

"What d'you think you're doing?"

Yanok Sihat's voice rose, sharp with displeasure. Elise crawled forward on her knees and gripped the cart's bars. Beyond the cloth, that same flat voice spoke again.

"Has the prince forgotten the covenant of the Grendel Northern Alliance?"

"The hell's that nonsense?"

"When war is declared in the Alliance's name, a defeated nation's prisoners belong to whichever nation took them."

Most of the Alliance's member states were small kingdoms that had, for the most part, kept themselves alive on economies built on plunder. Van Yela itself had been little more than a small, unremarkable state, a few hundred years back.

Nations used to taking, and being taken from—it made sense such an unwritten rule would stand among them.

The Grand Duke went on, flat and dry.

"To hand a prisoner taken on the battlefield over to Ughel needs the sanction of His Majesty, Emperor of Van Yela. Until His Majesty grants it, the prisoner stays the property of Van Yela—of myself, to be exact."

"So you won't hand her over, that it?"

"In the north, no one gives up what's his without cause."

Elise felt, somehow, that the Grand Duke had leaned quiet weight into those words.

"A pity, then. Well."

Armor clinked. The Grand Duke was heading back to his place. At his command, the knights moved swift and disciplined. Yanok Sihat, scoffing in disgust, was shoved back and away by Van Yela's own knights.

"We move out."

The Grand Duke's voice, already some way off, gave the order.

The cart's wheels began to turn. Only then did Elise's grip on the bars finally loosen.

'Once more…'

Death had stepped back, one pace.

The scent of blood still seemed to hang at the edge of her nose. Argan's last day—flames climbing toward the sky—flickered before her eyes like a mirage.

Elise squeezed her eyes shut.

The continent of Grendel split, broadly, into north and south.

The south of Grendel, with the Argan Empire as its face, lay covered in open plain—warm and rich. The north, by contrast—Ughel, Van Yela, and the other nations of that region—was made up mostly of barren waste and harsh, rugged mountain.

The small kingdoms of the north, born out of this harsh environment, mostly came to see one another as brother nations and banded together. That banding-together became the Grendel Northern Alliance, and Van Yela had led it two hundred years and more as its ruling power.

The barbarian kingdom of Ughel was the last to join the Alliance. Nomads who'd wandered the central desert for centuries at last banded together to found the nation.

Even before founding their kingdom, they were a people locked in long conflict with Argan to the south. Once Ughel stood as a nation, it was only natural that rivalry sharpened into open contest.

The savages had long coveted the rich southern lands where milk and honey ran—Argan, above all.

The empire where the continent's only sorcerers lived.

In truth, what the people of Ughel wanted most from Argan was neither land nor treasure—but magic itself.

And so: Elizabetha Arzeika. Twin sister of Argan's last emperor, Arzeika the Third—now the sole surviving member of Argan's imperial line. Her fate had already been decided, a month and a half back.

Rezet stepped into the audience hall, and the Emperor welcomed him warm.

"Welcome back, Duke. All that way, and you went yourself—good work."

"Yes."

Rezet answered the Emperor's welcome in a single word. Familiar enough by now that the Emperor didn't press it, and simply moved the talk along.

"How was the princess. Much fight in her?"

"Ordinary enough."

"Thought a proud Argan royal would've taken her own life by now. Coming all this way instead, unbending—makes a man wonder if she's got some other design in mind…"

Was that it? Rezet listened to the Emperor with half an ear, his mind gone elsewhere.

Something had seemed off, certainly. He'd stayed close at her side, watching her, near two months running—and yet, beyond leaning on him more than she ought, the princess had shown nothing else suspicious at all.

"The Ughel side's demanding she be handed to them. Means to take her head himself, they say. Honestly, their demands are hard to just wave off, more often than not."

"Her head, Your Majesty?"

"That's right. Says he'll have it mounted, kept as a piece."

The princess's head. Mounted like a trophy. Rezet's brow twitched.

He'd expected, at most, poison, or a clean hanging that would leave the body unmarked.

But the prince meant to take her head with his own two hands? Mount it, keep it like some trophy? Distaste rose thick in him at conduct so single-mindedly bent on degrading Argan.

"They are savages…"

"What was that?"

"Nothing."

The Emperor's eyes narrowed. Rezet Kyrstan wasn't a man who brushed things off with some empty "nothing."

"So you gave it to him?"

"Even so, she's the last of Argan's blood. Couldn't well let her head drop under a savage's blade. Struck a bargain—hanged in the square, the body handed over after."

Whether that could rightly be called a bargain was another matter.

"…When's the execution set for?"

"Five days out."

Five days. Longer a reprieve than he'd looked for. Rezet thought back on the princess—how she'd gone stiff, plain to see, in his arms the moment they crossed into Van Yela.

The Emperor clicked his tongue.

"The mighty Argan, brought down in just two years… Tsk, tsk. If that fool of a young emperor hadn't clung to such pointless pride, they might've held out another generation, two. Riled up Ughel over nothing but wounded pride. I'd have just buttered them up and calmed them down, myself."

"……"

"The princess. Argan's princess… In the end, the one who came through that whole storm alone, the last of the blood. Ever since Arzeika the First they've doted on her, made sure the whole continent knew her name. What age is she this year?"

"Twenty-two, they tell me."

"Twenty-two. Not so young, to die."

Rezet didn't know Elizabetha's exact age. He only knew the boy-emperor had been nineteen, three years back, which made her—his twin—nineteen then as well, and twenty-two now, by his own count.

Twenty-two. Was twenty-two truly not such a young age to die—for a princess Grendel bowed to, and Argan loved?

Rezet was still turning the thought over when the Emperor's call to him slipped past unheard.

Noyre, sharp-eyed master of Van Yela, caught the gap at once, uncanny as always.

"Rezet. Why d'you keep drifting off in front of me?"

"Wasn't thinking of anything."

"My brother's an honest one. That's exactly why it shows so plain, the rare time he does lie. Didn't know that about yourself, did you?"

"I did not."

"Something happen with the princess, on the road here?"

"Nothing did."

Rezet caught his breath at a flicker of afterimage surfacing, unbidden.

Beneath a curtain of falling water, a woman's skin gleaming like pearl in the moonlight. Golden eyes trembling faint, staring at him without a shred of reserve, and silver-white hair sliding slow down pale skin.

And a dizzying curve he'd never once thought to find hidden under that thin frame. White, and full to bursting—

'…Enough.'

Rezet cut the thought off, clean.

"Nothing happened."

He knew well enough a lie showed on him. But he knew, too, how not to let it show. Caught every time he lied, he wouldn't still be standing in this seat now.

Noyre's eyes, sweeping over his half brother, narrowed.

But this time he caught not the slightest tremor in Rezet to take hold of.

"…Well, either way. Go back and rest up. Near a full year, roaming foreign parts—even a yon'gyn needs a bit of rest now and then."

"Yes. I'll take my leave."

"And that stack of names piled up on your desk—try actually reading through it this time, will you. You're in your thirties now. Should've made an heir five times over by now. How much longer d'you mean to keep me waiting?"

A flicker of weariness crossed Rezet's face.

There it was, again. That damned marriage talk. That damned business of heirs.

"D'you know why I put you where you are now, Rezet?"

"……"

"You know why I raised you to a new house, gave you a title. Why I handed you Lothier—prime land, that."

Of course he knew, better than anyone. Even his own name had been the Emperor's to give. Noyre wanted the Kyrstan name to carry on, through Rezet and past him.

In other words, he meant to build a whole line of nothing but yon'gyn.

And not just any yon'gyn—yon'gyn with power beyond human limits, the way Rezet himself was.

A yon'gyn, by nature, belonged wholly to neither dragon nor human. Born as twisted half-breeds of both, most came saddled with dim wits and a native strain of madness.

Not to be tamed by human hands, they were, as a rule, killed on sight the moment found. Or else fitted with restraints and worked as gladiator-slaves.

But among yon'gyn, in vanishingly rare cases, some were born with a beauty that outstripped any ordinary human's by far, and wits to match.

Such beings weren't some crude mash of two natures thrown carelessly together—they came close to something half-divine.

A dragon carrying something human in it.

Rezet was exactly such a case.

Which made Rezet Kyrstan, to put it plain, a stud of exceptional bloodline. And a rare one, at that—one that turned up only once every few centuries. His blood had to carry on, unbroken.

But if it were as simple as that, why would yon'gyn like Rezet still be so few, even now, that you could count them on one hand?