Sometimes the truth becomes the greatest way through. That was the answer Blair had prepared.

The sound of tea being poured rang quietly through the tea room.

“It has been a while since we sat across from each other like this, Blair.”

Queen Rhea handed her a cup herself, her expression somewhere between a smile and something else entirely. It was their first private meeting since the official gathering on the day Blair returned from Valia.

“I should have come to see you first…… I am sorry, Your Majesty.”

Blair bowed her head with full courtesy.

“I know well that you must have been overwhelmed from the moment you returned. The matter of Lady Vivian, among other things.”

Though she hadn’t shown it, Queen Rhea also seemed to have been deeply shaken by Vivian’s situation.

“But I do not have the patience to put this off any longer.”

An undeniable chill seeped through her voice.

“I imagine you already know what I’m going to ask.”

Blair swallowed and looked at her.

“I will not waste time with unnecessary preamble. Is the contract marriage story true.”

Blair’s mouth went dry at the Queen’s blunt question. The fact that she was asking this even after the official denial had been issued meant she had already formed some suspicion.

“It pains me to say it, but it is true, Your Majesty.”

“My…… true, you say……?”

Queen Rhea let out a breath and set her teacup down with a sharp click.

“You truly insulted the royal family and deceived His Majesty, me, and everyone else? Blair, how could you dare—!”

Her voice trembled finely with the shock of it.

“Everything I have seen of the two of you all this time was nothing but a performance? I cannot believe it. How could you both be so shameless?”

The fury that poured out was razor-sharp. Blair’s spine went rigid at a side of the Queen she had never seen before.

“Your Majesty, might you give me the chance to explain myself.”

Blair said it, working to conceal the tension inside her.

“Very well. You must have come prepared with an explanation or two. Let me hear it.”

Queen Rhea’s gaze as she said it was utterly unyielding.

“At the beginning, it was nothing more than a contract. His Highness proposed it, and I accepted. It was a contract marriage entered into by mutual agreement.”

“You speak as though that is no longer the case.”

“Now…… we are sincere with each other. Both His Highness and I.”

The serious expression made Queen Rhea’s eyes waver slightly.

“……What on earth happened between the two of you?”

Blair calmly drew out the words she had prepared in her mind.

“I beg your pardon, Your Majesty. I despised the thought of becoming a frons more than anything.”

The unexpected confession brought a flash of surprise to Queen Rhea’s face.

“Because my parents pushed me into the palace against my will, wanting to raise my value on the marriage market.”

Blair slowly opened up about her own story.

Parents for whom the only thing that mattered was connecting their child to a family of higher standing, the wretched death of an older sister who had lived through an unhappy marriage because of them, and even the life of a first love lost as the price of a youthful rebellion.

“Even after all of that, my parents spent more than half of everything they had to push me forward as a frons. Because even if I wasn’t chosen as princess consort, I would carry the distinction of having been one.”

“……I had some sense of the Mervishes’ character. I didn’t realize it ran quite that deep.”

Shock and sympathy had spread across Queen Rhea’s face without her noticing.

“There is nothing more painful than being sold into marriage by a parent’s greed. They say all marriages are like that, but…… I’m not so sure.”

The wound of having been separated from a beloved and forced to become the queen of a foreign country came through without a word.

“Yes. You despised the thought of becoming a frons more than life itself, and yet somehow you ended up in a contract marriage. How did that come about?”

Queen Rhea had recovered her composure quickly, but the initial fury had largely drained from her voice.

“I spent my time thinking about how I might leave the palace. And in doing so, I learned of a place. The west annex…… the place commonly known as the Withered Garden.”

“The Withered Garden?”

The Queen’s brow furrowed slightly at the unexpected subject.

“If a frons who was not chosen remained in the palace there……”

She stopped mid-sentence and looked at Blair with the expression of someone who had just understood something.

“Blair, don’t tell me……”

“Yes. Your instinct is correct. I intended to go to the Withered Garden. There, I would have no need to return to the marriage market, and no interference from my parents. Miss Anais was going to become princess consort anyway.”

“……That is true, of course. Though there are cases where a princess consort later becomes a concubine, if she fails to produce an heir or for other reasons.”

“As long as Anais Brienne was princess consort, the likelihood of that happening was extremely low.”

Duke Brienne was not the sort of man who would ever allow things to go that way. Though Anais’s death had rendered that assumption moot.

“And then something unexpected happened to Miss Anais.”

Queen Rhea had narrowed her eyes and was studying Blair carefully.

“Ha. I knew you were quick-witted, but to think you had a plan like that.”

Her gaze was sharp as she murmured in disbelief.

“Even after what happened to Miss Anais, my plan hadn’t changed. The chances of me being chosen as princess consort over Olivia or the other frons were nearly nonexistent. I intended to stay quiet and out of sight until I could go to the Withered Garden. But then……”

“The prince began to take notice of you. It was right around that time.”

The Queen touched her lips as though recalling the past.

“Yes. He found out that I was planning to go to the Withered Garden.”

“And he used that to propose a contract marriage to you?”

Blair nodded.

“What I ultimately wanted was to live freely, free from my parents’ interference. His Highness said he would make that happen. If I would simply remain as princess consort for two years.”

“So for those two years, the two of you agreed to act like devoted lovers. And somewhere along the way, the feelings became real?”

At the pointed, half-incredulous question, Blair said nothing and only nodded.

The Queen stared at her for a long moment, then asked something else.

“And the prince…… what was Kalintz’s purpose in all of this.”

Blair hesitated briefly before answering with half the truth.

“To drive out Duke Brienne.”

That was as far as she could go. That was the limit of the truth she could speak. She could not reveal Kalintz’s real intention, to abandon his identity by staging his own death.

“Duke Brienne. So that was it.”

Queen Rhea murmured with a deepening look of concern.

“And you agreed to help him from the side, Blair. And as it happened, you became a target of Duke Brienne yourself and were accused of poisoning Miss Anais.”

It wasn’t wrong, so Blair simply nodded quietly.

Queen Rhea propped her head in her hand and said nothing for a long while, sorting through her thoughts. Then she let out a long sigh and spoke.

“I truly don’t know what to say. How could the two of you do something so audacious.”

“I am deeply sorry, Your Majesty.”

Her grey-blue eyes turned toward Blair. But they were no longer as cold and heavy as they had been at the start.

“So. What do the two of you plan to do going forward?”

It was a question that held a great deal within it. But at its core, it was asking what they intended to do now that a relationship begun as a contract had become something genuine.

Blair thought for a moment, then spoke.

“For now, I intend to deal with the enemy standing right in front of us. We cannot simply let Duke Brienne have his way.”

What would come after that, she couldn’t say with certainty even to herself. She had come to understand by now that no matter how much she thought it through, she would always end up following her heart when it came to Kalintz.

“……Yes. Willer Brienne. Driving him out is the most urgent matter.”

A cold frost returned to Queen Rhea’s voice as she said the Duke’s name.

“As it happens, there was someone I had been meaning to introduce you to, for that very reason. I hesitated because of the unexpected scandal.”

“Someone to introduce me to?”

Blair asked with a puzzled look. The Queen called for Lady Camille and said,

“Bring the boy.”

A short while later, a brown-haired boy with a still-young face entered the tea room. From his clothing, he appeared to be a stable apprentice.

“……Who is this?”

“I’m surprised. I thought you’d recognize him right away.”