SBTMK Chapter 7

'Pain——'

Flora surfaced and remembered: an engagement with Cenkan's knights. Injuries sustained. Lost consciousness.

'Then this is Meryn Castle.'

The thought alone was enough. What Ayden would do when she opened her eyes was entirely predictable. Some procedure dressed as an experiment—open her up somewhere inconvenient, perhaps. Throw her into a monster enclosure. Or——

The full inventory of available tortures arrived before she could stop it. Her body had started shaking before she'd made a decision to be afraid.

'If it really is that place—— please don't let me open my eyes.'

She addressed the gods with sincerity. Gods who had a record of ignoring prayers precisely when they mattered—but humans kept asking, every time, with the same expectation. Flora was the same. She wanted this time to be different.

Then, from somewhere, a cool draft arrived. Carried on it, faintly: flowers.

'This isn't Meryn Castle——?'

Perhaps the prayer had worked. Whatever the air in this place was made of, it was not what she'd breathed in those walls. The quality was different from the first intake.

She opened her eyes. And exhaled.

Not the old ceiling she'd faced every day like a sentence. Above her, a pink silk canopy—the kind trimmed with lace—hung from the bedposts of a room that was comfortable, well-appointed, and entirely unlike anywhere she had ever been kept.

'Where is this.'

She hadn't known pink lace could look like that.

The question of location went briefly unaddressed while she simply looked at it. She'd seen this sort of thing in noble households during assignment work. Never stayed.

'For now—— not being in Meryn Castle is enough.'

The thought was a small affirmative. The muscles that had been locked began, gradually, to release.

"You're awake?"

Close. A voice from nearby.

Flora was upright before she'd decided to be, facing the direction of the sound, every nerve she possessed preparing to act against whoever was there.

The pain of it—her entire body trying to separate at the joints—she noted and set aside.

What her eyes found was a threat of a different category entirely.

Morning light coming through the window, falling directly onto a man sitting at the sill. Black hair, immaculate. White skin. And the orange pupils—luminous, unreasonable.

Flora's gaze did something without her permission.

"……Simen?"

"You remember the name. Good."

He closed the book he'd been reading and set it on the table, then crossed toward her.

'Why is Simen here.'

He looked nothing like he had in the forest. In the forest he'd been blood-spattered and disheveled and still managed to be entirely unreasonable to look at. Now, in a black uniform with gold trim that fit him as though it had been constructed specifically to be worn in this particular quality of morning light—the thought arrived, briefly, that this might in fact be heaven.

'I didn't have an interest in men—— I just had unreasonably high standards.'

"Something on my face?"

Flora realized she had been looking. She produced a small cough and reassembled her expression.

This was not the time for that.

"……Where is this?"

"My house."

His house. The Emperor of Haenkan's house was, by definition, a palace.

"Why am I—— here?"

"You seemed to be in difficulty. I helped."

"……Pardon?"

"Was there a plan to get yourself captured on purpose? Because if so——"

'Helped.'

Something knocked against the inside of her chest. She noted it. Kept her face where it was.

This stone heart—apparently it could do this.

It made no sense. From the beginning, Simen had been trying to help her. The first time, she'd allowed herself to think it was because he'd mistaken her for an ordinary person in danger. But he'd kept going after he knew—after he knew she was a foreign fugitive who'd entered his empire without permission. He'd brought her to the palace. He was treating her wounds.

She could not make it add up.

"Why?"

"What do you mean, why?"

He looked back at her as though she were the one asking something that didn't fit.

"I mean: why would you help someone who has nothing to do with Haenkan. I'm a fugitive. My identity is unverifiable."

"You helped me too. I return things. It's a habit."

She had tried to keep him safe. But that was different.

He was an emperor. Haenkan's emperor. The decline of Haenkan was a goal Cenkan had worked toward for years. The current Emperor's death wouldn't collapse the empire—but a sitting Emperor with no clear successor created vulnerabilities of various kinds. She had not wanted to hand anyone that. So she had acted. That was all.

"How are you feeling? You won't be able to move properly for a while—lie down."

"……I'm fine."

She wasn't. Sitting on this bed produced a pain that moved through her like a current. But lying flat in front of an emperor she was not yet certain she trusted was not something she was going to do.

Simen studied her with something careful in his expression and continued.

"I don't know what happened to you. But once you leave the palace, you'll be running again."

"……"

"Even when you've fully recovered—a few days, and you'll be back in the same position."

He knew her circumstances with some accuracy. She hadn't needed reminding. The bleakness of it caught in her throat.

"So I'd like to make a proposal—— would you hear it?"

"A proposal?"

Unexpected. From an emperor. Flora looked at him steadily.

"I won't ask why you're being chased, not until you tell me yourself. So—what do you think about staying here?"

"……Pardon?"

"You don't have anywhere to go."

She stared at him.

'Live in the palace.'

Saying it that way meant: I'll give you a new life.

'Why.'

She had been taught that kindness without reason did not exist. Living had confirmed this more consistently than almost anything else.

He'd kept her alive—that she could allow. But he hadn't imprisoned her, which would have been justified. He'd treated her injuries. He wasn't asking why she was running. He was offering to hide her.

All of it was kindness without stated reason. The gratitude this should have produced kept getting interrupted by the question of what he actually wanted.

"We met, and it's something. Why not become a citizen of my empire?"

Serving a ruler with a face like that was perhaps the most comfortable employment available anywhere on the continent—but that was not a reason to accept. Not a real one.

Flora looked down.

"I'm grateful for saving my life—— but I'll decline the proposal. Kindness without reason makes me uncomfortable."

"I thought so."

He looked briefly as though he hadn't expected the refusal. Then, as though he'd known it would be so, he nodded.

"What if there's a reason?"

"……Pardon?"

He hadn't let it go. He'd immediately asked again. Flora raised her eyes.

Simen had bent toward her—he was close, closer than she'd registered him moving—and was looking at her with a small, warm expression.

The distance between them was one problem. His eyes were another.

'There is definitely sorcery in those eyes……'

"I don't want to waste your ability. Be a strength to this empire."

"……"

"I don't suppose you enjoy being chased as a lifestyle choice."

The question surfaced something she'd been keeping under.

'When we meet again—— I'll kill you. I will.'

She'd declared it. At the cliff, to Ayden's face. Since then: nothing. She had done nothing but run. When she had barely survived the fall from the cliff, she had planned ambitious revenge. But there had been absolutely no method to realize it.

"……I don't."

She had wanted, at points, to stop running and simply live among people. Something ordinary, something that wasn't this. But what had happened to that: every ordinary person who'd shown her uncalculated kindness had been killed for it afterward. For the fact of having helped her, and nothing else.

She could not protect them. She had not been able to protect Rene, or Rene's child.

The mountain had been a result of that. Living alone in the mountain had been the only thing that didn't cost anyone else.

The days she had spent despairing, one by one, flashed through her like a lantern turning.

"Then my proposal should be appealing. Flora."

She had entered Haenkan partly out of stubbornness. Cenkan had never assigned her anything touching this empire—some reason she'd never been given, and the curiosity of that had sat in her for years. She'd wanted to know what kind of country it was. Why Cenkan had been so focused on pursuing it. She'd had a thread of hope, too, that she might find an ally here somehow.

That hope had gone quiet before she'd needed it to. The accumulated exhaustion had settled it.

She hadn't expected the opportunity to arrive like this.

"Do you trust me?" she asked.

"No. We've barely met. I'm not that easy."

"Then why make this offer. What if I'm a spy. I could kill you."

Simen narrowed his eyes slightly. He appeared to give it consideration.

"If you'd had any intention of killing me, there were opportunities. We were alone together for quite a while. We're alone right now."

The way he said alone had a quality to it she couldn't account for. The memory of him pinning her to the bed in the cave arrived without invitation.

'Why is that coming up now——!'

Heat moved through her face without her permission. She closed her eyes.

Simen's brow pulled in slightly. "Your face is flushed. Is the room warm?"

She shook her head instead of answering.

"——What if I was given orders to extract imperial secrets?"

A different question, deployed quickly. Simen, who had been looking toward the window to check whether it was open, turned back to her.

"To get anywhere near imperial secrets, you'd need to be among my closest advisors. Do you think you could reach that position? Flora."

His voice had come down slightly. Flora opened her eyes.

It sounded like a provocation.