IYTTEPAAK Chapter 22

"Ah!"

"Careful, Your Highness."

Shumel, the youngest, nearly stepped wrong and tripped on her own dress while making her flustered entrance.

Luckily, the apricot-blond-haired boy knight escorting her caught her firmly, and there was no accident.

Shumel always wore her hair in twin tails, but tonight it hung loose and full, dyed a rich caramel. She must have run short on time to prepare—even her chamber maid had trailed after her into the ballroom itself, still working to gather her hair into place.

A banquet, and she's primping. Unheard of. I swallowed a sigh at the youngest one's heedlessness. Shumel drifted toward me. It so happened I was standing closest to her.

"S—Sasha! Sister!"

"You made it, Shushu."

"Yeah."

Rolling her green eyes wide, Shumel began, loud enough for everyone nearby to hear, offering excuses.

"I'm a little late. It's just—Shushu's been so busy lately with schoolwork. Especially the imperial-statecraft class Shushu's taking—it's such difficult material for an ordinary person to follow——"

"Every princess takes that class."

"......."

Shumel floundered, flustered.

I hadn't meant to embarrass her further, but another sister had decided this was the perfect opportunity to correct our youngest sibling's self-centered thinking.

"Oh my, statecraft is difficult? Is our little Shushu slow to learn?"

"Eek."

Nanaën arrived trailing a whole crowd of admirers. From the look of her, she wasn't a deer from the meadow at all—she was a lioness.

Smiling with feigned sweetness, Nanaën went straight for the sore spot.

"It's fine. Everyone only ever expects a cute pair of rabbit-ear pigtails out of you anyway, not a clever head. Though—how late did you sleep in, that you couldn't even manage the one hairstyle properly?"

"Ung——"

"Should've just woken up earlier, then. Oversleeping on the one night you're supposed to look your best. It's embarrassing next to the rest of us. Hm?"

"Shu— Shushu is——!"

Shumel flared up. The maid still working on her hair jumped, startled, and dropped the ribbon.

"Shushu is cute and pretty, so a little effort is plenty!"

"Oh my. Bragging about your looks right in front of me?"

"Before long, Shushu's beauty is going to overtake Nana's! Because—because Shushu's mother was famous across the Kingdom of Shervyn as a legendary beauty!"

Nanaën smiled as if she found this adorable, and offered exactly one line.

"Whose wasn't?"

"...Huh?"

While Shumel's green eyes blinked, uncomprehending, snorts of laughter drifted up from all over the ballroom.

Her maid, unable to bear it any longer, leaned in and whispered to her mistress.

"Your Highness...... there isn't a single princess here whose mother wasn't a legendary beauty......"

"......."

The only women admitted into the harem were the most beautiful of the beautiful, plundered from every nation the Mad Emperor had conquered. Every princess here was born of that beauty and had survived to remain here.

Shumel's face went red as she grasped it.

"Y—Your Highness! The drinks over there look delicious. Let's go try some!"

The boy knight, breaking into a sweat, whisked Shumel away, eagerly offering her drink after fruit-colored drink to soothe her. Watching him work so hard to comfort her was almost touching.

"That one really needs to grow up a bit."

"So do you, Nana."

"What did I do?"

I saw Nanaën off with a sigh as she flounced away, sulking.

I found myself wanting something sweet. On the table, I spotted small bite-sized cube cakes.

Layers of chocolate and raspberry jam stacked between the sponge, with a bird-shaped white chocolate garnish perched daintily on top.

I let it roll across my tongue, savoring it. The bittersweet chocolate was good.

I meant to offer one to Regen too, but he was watching Shumel.

Having had her spirits soothed by her personal knight's coaxing, Shumel had drifted off some distance away and begun mingling with the nobles.

"So that's the eighth...... That makes every one of the empire's princesses accounted for, then."

The low murmur sounded like it was meant only for himself.

The whole time I watched, Regen's gaze never once left Shumel.

The taste of chocolate lingering on my tongue began to turn bitter.

Was he interested in Shumel? Was he watching a bit too closely? Why? Because she was cute? Did he have a taste for someone younger?

My thoughts tangled themselves, and my throat went dry with a needless restlessness.

By the time I'd emptied two glasses of juice, I found myself blurting out, out loud, something I'd already turned over in my head about ten times.

"Shumel—she's eighteen."

"......."

It was only once I met his gold eyes, fixed steadily on me, that I realized what I'd done.

Wasn't that a little too blunt a way of saying she was too young to look at as a woman? I wanted to hide somewhere, mortified.

That was when he gently plucked the third glass out of my hand and said—

"This is alcohol. This one."

"......."

"Your cheeks are red already. Stop drinking."

"Oh."

"Drink this instead."

So the drink I'd assumed was juice must have actually been wine. He swapped it for something without alcohol in it, then went on with what he'd been about to say before.

"Eighteen. Then it isn't her. She'd have to be over twenty by now, more or less."

"......."

My heart began to pound.

"Who...... are you looking for?"

"Some time ago, I met one of the empire's princesses."

"......."

He remembers.

I knew perfectly well, in my head, that I needed to hide the fact that there was any connection between us at all. But my heart, in flat contradiction, wanted him to remember me.

"What kind of princess was she?"

"Hmm......"

He fell into thought. I took a sip of my drink and, privately, waited for his answer.

I hoped, as much as I could, that he'd remember me favorably. If he said she'd been young but elegant, and strong of spirit, I couldn't have asked for more.

If that wasn't possible, precocious and plucky would do. Or—failing even that—leaving him with the impression of someone small and pretty—even that would be enough, I thought......

"She was a grubby little chick of a princess."

"......."

What.

What did he say.

"G—grubby——?"

He took the empty glass from my hand. Confirmed the kill, once more.

"Yes."

"......."

It was a shock.

A word like "grubby"—I'd never once heard it, not since I was born.

I...... whatever I might look like, I am a princess of the empire...... and my mother was a legendary beauty.......

Realizing I was thinking exactly the way Shumel had, I was shocked all over again.

I took a breath deep enough to fill my whole chest.

Calm down. It's a ruined first love anyway.

What difference did it make if my first love remembered me as a grubby little chick——

What, difference, does it—......

"Your Highness?"

"......."

"Sasha?"

Something in me broke loose.

"There's no such princess."

"......."

"In the Magnalorde imperial family, anyone who isn't beautiful dies. Every princess who's still alive past the age of ten is beautiful."

"......."

"Regen must have seen wrong. Or it was someone posing as a princess."

I turned sharply on my heel and put a piece of dessert in my mouth.

Part of me wanted to hide under the tablecloth for having acted so unlike myself, and part of me was, simply, hurt.

Grubby, she hated now. Chick, she hated. Chicken, too—hated all of it.

'Why is the princess angry?'

Had he said something to upset her?

As far as Regen could tell, Sasha was a princess who'd surely been perfect and beautiful since the day she was born.

He couldn't understand why someone like that would react as if she'd been mocked, over being called a grubby little chick.

A possibility suddenly crossed his mind.

"Sasha, could it be that the princess I met was——"

She cut him off.

"I was teased with the exact same thing once, as a child. It's a bad memory, so I flared up for a moment there. I apologize."

The suspicion was cleanly denied before it ever left Regen's mouth. Whether he'd been hoping for something, a small disappointment lingered somewhere in his chest before fading away.

In any case, her reaction made sense to him. The Mad Emperor was a man obsessed with beauty; it stood to reason the princess would have carried an anxiety about her appearance since childhood.

Even a solid adult carries the wounds of childhood with them, so a moment like this could well have brushed against something like trauma.

Regen wanted to comfort her.

"Sasha?"