RAMHM Chapter 131

Nora had to get up from her seat almost at once—Doris's attendant maid had come for her.

Unlike before, she'd tried to dig in and stay rather than leave, and it took Marquess Winster herself, coaxing and promising to help her directly, before Nora was finally persuaded out the door.

"I'll need to put my own house in order, belatedly as it is—so you, go back to the capital for now. If Doris catches even a whiff that you're about to turn on her, she won't let it stand."

Nora gripped the shawl around her shoulders as if it were the only lifeline she had left, trembling, before she finally listened and rose.

Then, to Vincento and me, walking her out to the carriage in silence, she left these words.

"The reason the Grand Prelate is trying to make Doris Castagna a saint—that's because of me."

She went on, very quietly, her voice heavy with grief.

"I donated an enormous sum to the temple. My business funds."

That lip—bitten so hard the blood had barely seeped through—trembled, rapid and fine.

She shuddered all over, as if she couldn't stand the sight of herself—the stupid woman who'd walked right into it—and then she gently took my hand.

"It has to be that the Crown Princess asked him to deliver that oracle in exchange for the donation. And lately—Count Raelon, the very man behind repealing the levirate law, has been meeting with Doris often. She'll play the saint, pretend to step back without ambition, and the moment His Highness the Second Prince's opposing faction grows because they call him 'ill-omened'—she'll let herself be talked into marrying him, reluctant on the surface. It's obvious!"

Nora poured the words out like a storm breaking, her face lit with the look of someone who had just understood something.

She climbed into the carriage with angry steps, and the door closed.

Through the gap of the open window, Nora's face poked out.

"Burn the incense in front of the maids—every time, without exception—and then throw all of it away. Doris is a deeply suspicious woman. Don't let her start watching you."

"Don't worry, Lady Nora."

"My lady—" she stopped herself. "Lady Bliea."

She wrapped her hand around mine where it rested on the window frame. Her hand was still pale and cold, but her touch was very gentle.

"Thank you. Truly. For not letting me be a stupid woman who devotes herself to her mortal enemy."

Nora's bright brown eyes moved in complicated currents.

The years she'd spent shouldering her family's name because of her injured husband.

The years she'd spent being scorned, not even granted the dignity of her own name, by Doris.

Her eyes were turning all of it over.

"If it would let me kill Doris Castagna, I think I'd sell my soul to the devil now."

Tears spilled down her face again, streaming.

She wiped them away in a hurry and patted my hand once more, the last time.

"I'll be waiting for when I can come out."

Then she quietly shut the window. As the carriage slowly grew smaller, a grieving, bereft sob carried out from inside it.

I relayed what I'd learned about the Grand Prelate to the Marquess at once.

Canulla trembled for a long while—less from fury at Doris, it seemed, than from the sheer betrayal of it, at the Grand Prelate himself.

Vincento looked unhappy that I'd spoken so bluntly without considering Canulla's condition first, but given the circumstances, he held his face rigid and said nothing.

"If it was donations he wanted, I've already been giving more than enough—for that old man to dare—"

For Canulla, who had buried both her son—once heir to the Marquessate—and Empress Letina, and who had clung all the harder to prayer afterward, this was nothing short of sacrilege.

"Vincento. Summon the Grand Prelate here at once. Damn it all—the old man's gone greedy in his old age. He's clearly forgotten all his years of faith!"

"Summon His Eminence... here?"

Ronteaux wasn't a nation where religious authority overrode imperial authority, but the Grand Prelate was the chief representative of the gods, head of the entire temple—how could anyone simply order such a man to come and go?

Once again, Vincento said nothing more and went outside to find a messenger bird.

I was quietly watching Canulla, who seemed to be swallowing her fury, when raucous voices rose from beyond the door Vincento had just gone through.

It was the sound of Rhodness returning.

I stepped aside to leave the two of them to their reunion.

The moment Canulla saw Rhodness appear, drenched in monster blood, her face went stricken; Rhodness, too, looked startled by her sudden visit.

Just before I went up to the second floor, I heard Canulla, her voice thick with tears: "Rhoan. My proud grandson. I'm sorry." So it seemed Canulla had decided not to justify Bardenaldo's actions, but to throw her full support behind Rhodness instead.

It was a relief—though I found myself distracted, just then, by Doris's maids trailing after me.

Knowing he washed obsessively long, almost compulsively, every time he came back from cutting down monsters, I was watching the bathwater fill in the guest room when another commotion rose outside the bathing room.

Something dull and heavy came rolling across the floor, and then the maids' screams reached even the bath.

I startled and hurried out.

One of the maids had been clutching a box, following him around with it relentlessly—and now that box was rolling across the floor, its contents spilled out, dried herb-powder scattered across the floorboards.

And at the center of it stood Rhodness.

"You dare bring something unvetted into a room I occupy. You've lost your mind."

In front of him, Doris's maids stood shaking.

"Rhoan!"

"Stay back, my lady."

Rhodness ground the powder under his blood-caked boot, pointedly, making sure they saw. He'd clearly already heard from Canulla exactly what it was.

His red eyes, soaked in monster blood and unable to fully suppress his bloodlust, were pure terror to the maids.

"Your Highness! Her Highness the Crown Princess gave this to me herself—it's something precious, specially—!"

I stepped in front of the trembling maids and raised my voice, exaggerated.

"How could you just throw it on the ground like that? What does that make me look like?"

"My lady..."

The killing intent left his eyes all at once. For just a moment, something bereft passed through them.

I turned to the maids and gripped the hand of the one standing closest.

"I've seen you girls before, at the palace. Please—keep this between us and Her Highness? I'll gather up the incense myself somehow and burn it tonight. I don't want to fall out of favor with Her Highness. Do you understand what I mean?"

The maids stared up at my face the way you'd look at the one shaft of light in a pitch-black room, and nodded, vigorously.

Glancing past my shoulder at Rhodness now and again, they let out a small hik! and bolted from the room like something was chasing them.

Neil clicked his tongue and herded them out, and silence fell.

"...Rienne."

"Rhoan. I won't say this is all your fault—it's mine, for not explaining everything to the Marquess. But that was reckless. I knew this thing was dangerous, and I kept quiet about it anyway, to fool Doris."

While I was still talking, Rhodness stripped off his blood-stained cloak and armor and pulled my arm toward him.

"Rhoan!"

"How do you do that so easily."

Through the gap of his inner tunic, lightly stained with blood, his own clean scent spilled out—the scent of someone who washed himself obsessively, every time.

He pulled me in, his hand crushing the back of my head and my waist against him.

"Whoever runs whatever scheme. Just the thought of that dangerous thing being anywhere near you is enough to drive me out of my mind."

His low, sunken voice fell over the crown of my head.

"I don't care what that woman thinks. You don't have to go to that kind of trouble—I'll protect you. So all you have to do is come to the place I've already made safe."

I finally pulled back from his chest just enough to look up at him.

In his damp red eyes, pressed down tight, an aching light seeped through. Anything even faintly connected to my death, and he reacted like this—instantly.

"Tomorrow. I'm leaving for the capital."

He said it low, trying to pull me in again. I held myself back from being held.

"Tomorrow? We were on our way to Ellaconia."

"The real purpose was never to see the Ellaconian king—it was to see the Grand Mage. Prince Viktor's agreed to deliver the message in my place. They might be a little annoyed on their end, but he said they'd understand well enough once I explain I turned the procession back to the capital to become the new heir."

It seemed he and Canulla had already settled the matter.

"You stay here. The knights who came with my grandmother will guard this place—so this once, don't go anywhere near anything dangerous. Once everyone standing in our path is dealt with, come back then."

Rhodness stroked my back slowly, murmuring.

"I'll go to the capital too. I'll help you."

"When the safest place in the world is beside me. Then come."

"Rhoan..."

"You, safe and at peace in my arms. That's what helps me."

His face, tilting toward me with easy naturalness, drew suddenly close.

Even as he spoke of our brief parting, the reluctance to let go was plain on his face—and his long lashes, shining gold, fell and cast a shadow beneath his eyes.

When I went still for a moment, Rhodness, too, froze, close enough now that our noses nearly brushed.

He seemed to come abruptly back to himself and pulled away.

"Ah—sorry."

In all the days we'd been here, he hadn't held me at all—the exact opposite of how he'd clung to me the whole way here.

I could guess the reason well enough.

However exhausting the work he'd done, he still sat for hours in the bath every time, scrubbing away the smell of blood, before he'd come to where I lay in bed and offer a short goodnight kiss in place of what he couldn't give.

However much I told him it was fine, his face always said he hated even a single drop of monster blood touching me.

"The thought of Doris Castagna giving you that pathetic thing made me see red, and I forgot myself for a second. I'll go wash up. I'll have a servant clear this incense away, so you—"

He dragged a hand down his face, talking in circles, and I closed the distance he'd just put between us.

"Rhoan. Let's go to the bathhouse."

"All right—wait, what?"

He'd agreed easily at first, then looked down at me as if he'd just been struck on the head.

I went ahead and boldly undid the knot of his blood-stained shirt.

"Wait, Adrienne. What are you doing right now?"

"I had the bath drawn. You said you're leaving first thing tomorrow morning, didn't you? We barely have any time left together—I'm not wasting a moment of it on you bathing alone."

It was true, every word of it. I couldn't just let him go on hovering around me, unable to come close because of the monster's blood.

"Rienne?"

The shirt-tie, its knot undone, slid loose into my hand completely.

"Tonight, I'll personally see to your bath."

"...What?"

From his collarbone, sharply visible through the open gap of his shirt, all the way to his hard cheeks, cold from the outside air—both went scarlet, all at once.

It was a dramatic shift.

I let the shirt-tie I was holding drop to the floor.

Rhodness's gaze, which had followed the slowly falling string for a moment, came straight back up to my lips.

I smiled, gently, and pressed the point home.

"No?"

What rose sharply in answer to my voice wasn't only the collarbone showing through the gap of his shirt.