SN Chapter 19

Rikardis lifted the teacup. Kylo and Rosaline both flinched. Their expressions said they would knock it from his hand at the first opportunity. Rikardis smiled and brought the cup close to his face—trying once more to gauge the nature of the black tea by its scent, though to everyone else it looked very much like a man preparing to drink. Before Kylo could interject in alarm, Rosaline moved. Wind-quick.

Thup.

"Dame Rosaline, what is the meaning of this rudeness—! Your Highness, the teacup first—! No, Dame Rosaline, your hand—!"

Rosaline's hand was covering Rikardis's mouth, firmly and entirely. She had remembered, clearly, that when she had grabbed his wrist earlier, Kylo had called it a grave impropriety. If grabbing the wrist was improper, she would need to use something else. An endearingly earnest line of reasoning, from which the situation had nonetheless deteriorated considerably. Kylo was one step from seizing the back of his own neck, and Rikardis was rolling his eyes up at her from beneath her palm with an expression of profound exasperation. His mouth remained covered.

She only released him once she had taken the teacup from his hand.

Rikardis wiped his mouth. The numb patch at the corner of his lips. The woman who had once been terrified to step on her own shadow in his presence, who had treated her very breathing as something that might give offense—not a trace of her remained. They said she had lost her memory, and indeed the results were incomparably more audacious than before the accident. Slightly presumptuous. He decided to overlook it, given what she had just earned.

"Hand it over."

"No."

"No, Your Highness!"

"It is not permitted, Your Highness!"

Rosaline, Kylo, and Itserion—Rikardis's head secretary—refuted him in sequence. Itserion had stood rigid as marble throughout Rosaline's handling of the assassin, snapping back to himself only when Rikardis made his move. He crossed the room in several strides.

"If you'd hand it to me, Dame Rosaline. I'll conduct the investigation."

"No. It's mine. Give it over quickly, knight."

"It is not permitted! You are twenty-five years old—what sort of willfulness is this, Your Highness! There is poison in it, they said! Give it to me, Dame Rosaline!"

Both sides of her were an absolute catastrophe. Her hearing being what it was made it twice as unpleasant. She was still working through who to hand it to when Rikardis's hand reached and caught her wrist—tck—and held. The face that had always run cold had gone several degrees colder. His blue eyes sat level and still.

"It's common knowledge—even to a three-year-old deaf child—that holy power heals, that poison cannot touch me. And despite that, they attempted to feed me something that may or may not have been poison. What do you suppose that means?"

"......It would mean they used some other method."

"If it's a poison that works even against me, how do you know it isn't something that blinds at a glance, that rots the brain from the scent alone? How, exactly, would you propose I simply let someone swallow it? Are you sleeping badly lately, Itserion? Has your thinking gone rigid?"

"That may be so—but for a person of your standing to attempt to identify a poison yourself. Entrust it to the temple. Let them examine it."

"Those incompetent grain-leeches, bleeding the treasury on the strength of their meager holy power?"

"Your Highness!"

While Itserion and Rikardis disputed, Rosaline observed the black tea in the teacup. The small movement when Rikardis caught her wrist—the ripple that motion had made—set the surface trembling. In the black tea moving as one body, something separated and stirred. Invisible to the eye. Rosaline alone noticed it. She knew this quality of energy. The nature of magic that constituted her own body. What was called magical power. But it was slightly different from the magical power she possessed. If pressed to compare—it more closely resembled the violent magical force that drifted from the bodies of demonic beasts.

Rosaline gazed quietly and blinked. Her eyes had gone dry from concentration. The quantity was so faint she wouldn't have sensed it without actively attending to it.

A new substance. Magical power combined with poison. Holy power and magical power do not interfere with each other. The attempt based on that principle had first appeared at the incident at the hunting competition, months ago. Before leaving Redwheel, she had received a great deal of information from Kallix.

Many knights had died at the hunting competition. Even those with very shallow wounds had all died, despite the presence of priests. The assassination unit Dark Moon was suspected of having created a new poison.

Kallix had brought several weapons recovered from the assassins. Rosaline had noticed that the hidden blades carried a faint trace of magical energy. More precisely, she had sensed it from the poison smeared on the weapons. She had relayed this to Kallix. He had considered it briefly, then let out a slow, quiet breath.

'I see. Since magical power and holy power cannot interfere with each other...... if the magical power had fully integrated with the poison, no matter how much one poured holy power in, it would have found nothing to grip. That's...... what it was. It seems they've created something very dangerous.'

And that poison's immunity to divine power had been verified at the hunting competition. Verified by the deaths of countless knights. Their rampaging assassination attempts might have grown bolder, emboldened by exactly that fact. Rosaline cut across the voices still arguing on both sides of her.

"It seems like the poison used at the hunting competition."

Rikardis and Itserion's gazes came to rest on her. Rikardis looked at her with a skeptical frown.

"How would you know that?"

Rosaline raised her eyes from the teacup and met his blue gaze. Kallix had believed the imperial side would discover the nature of the poison soon enough. Based on the imperial household's silence on the matter, he had assumed they were already researching a cure...... but the imperial household had exceeded his predictions by still failing to find even a small clue.

Though Kallix wouldn't have known either, without her. Only those who possessed magical power could sense magical power. Setting aside his sister—a creature composed of it—people who possessed it were truly rare.

And what was more: magical power was held to be the product of Kreyan Tithanion, and those who carried it were persecuted as ominous things. In villages where faith in Idelabheim ran deep, there was said to be a custom of burning mahin (Magusborn) at the stake. Demonic beasts harbored magical power in their bodies and had always been the natural enemies of humans. The reasoning followed that even if the vessel of that ominous power—the power that sharpened its claws toward humans—shifted from animals to humans, the thing itself was no different. Because of this, mahin were killed. Took their own lives. Hid. They had grown increasingly scarce, until now they were as rare to find as those born with strong divine power.

This was part of why no one had recognized the new poison from Balta. Without anyone possessing magical power, of course it would go unnoticed. So Kallix had also considered the possibility that the imperial household still hadn't identified the nature of the poison.

'Remember, Sister. If by any chance you encounter that poison again in the imperial palace, or find you need to tell someone—you only need to say one thing.'

Kallix's voice from the past and Rosaline's voice overlapped.

"Because magical power and holy power do not interfere with each other."

He had said that alone would be sufficient. Itserion's eyes went wide. Rikardis only twitched one eyebrow. The imperial household had conducted investigations into the poison from the hunting competition and found nothing of consequence. Colorless, tasteless, odorless. Beyond that it was a devastatingly lethal substance—nothing had been established. There had been talk that holy power was proving ineffective, but they had attributed it to the weakness of the attending priests.

Magical power and holy power do not interfere with each other. Common knowledge every child knew. No one had thought to recall it. As the proverb went: the lamp cannot illuminate directly beneath itself. Itserion spoke at full volume before he'd caught himself.

"Th-that's right. It's far more convincing to think holy power couldn't act from the start, rather than that they died because the disease had progressed too far before treatment could reach them. Why didn't anyone think of that! That's remarkable, Dame Rosaline! Verification will still be needed, but I believe that must be correct."

Rikardis made a short click of his tongue. He had understood the moment he heard it.

The new poison Dark Moon had made would certainly be connected to magical power. No. Was connected.

The Second Prince. Holy power that could save the dying, provided they weren't killed outright. Setting aside Dark Moon's meticulous intelligence work, his divine power was already spoken of across the entire continent. For a poison certain to work even against that Second Prince, there was no remaining path but to use the principle that magical power and holy power did not interfere. And they had always sought to drag down the authority that the name holy power carried...... A divine power that couldn't cure poison? There was nothing left to look at. The authority of Idelabheim would plummet to the ground. And that was precisely what Dark Moon had always wanted.

"Remarkable, indeed. They've actually made something like this. The domain of poison that holy power cannot cure—cannot so much as touch."

What utter shit.

When the poison investigation had been in full swing, Rikardis had also poured holy power into it. It had only separated smoothly, like water and oil.

The thought had occurred to him: could this be it? Could this poison, by any chance, be connected to magical power? But was mixing an invisible force with something as material as poison even possible? If it truly was...... wouldn't that be a domain not even he, not even Idelabheim, could touch. At the time, Rikardis had only buried that suspicion.

Neutralization of holy power. The fall of Idelabheim. These were the core elements Dark Moon had spent everything seeking. As much as it was the method they most desired, it was also the thing Illavénia most could not afford. So perhaps that was why he'd looked away. The verification was incomplete, but as of today, it was confirmed in his own mind. Dark Moon had made a new poison. One that might become a great trump card capable of moving the entire continent. Remarkable. Even to an enemy, he wanted to offer his applause.

Rikardis pressed his aching head and closed his eyes.

He had believed he'd never lived easily—that he'd always walked a road of rock and gravel. But the real mud was only beginning.