Heliones had been so obsessed with power in order to ensure that no one, regardless of who he chose as his Empress, could interfere with that choice.

He didn’t know exactly what had passed between mother and son, but Heliones had even stripped his own mother of her standing. After a long conversation with her son, the Empress Dowager, who had maintained the beauty of her youth even as her nation crumbled around her, aged all at once in a way that made that feat seem meaningless, and she had remained in seclusion from that point to the present.

Count Fonta could not deny it. What Heliones had wanted so desperately was not the throne, but Lucian, the cursed princess and former wife that no one else wanted.

Thinking of it that way, he could understand why his lord was impatient. Every obstacle that had stood between the two of them, tangled and layered as they were, had finally been cleared away.

Two years as husband and wife, two years after the divorce. Four years of unrequited longing, and now that every last barrier had at least outwardly disappeared, his lord’s only desire must be to exchange vows again without a moment’s delay.

But because he had driven himself forward with such desperation, Heliones had not prepared himself for the possibility that his former wife’s heart might not be his. Even if some part of him had anticipated it, he likely could not have accepted it willingly.

“Your Majesty.”

Count Fonta approached Heliones and quietly knelt at his side.

“I am of no help here. I can assist with strategy and legislation, but I do not understand a woman’s heart. I pretended otherwise in front of Your Majesty, but the truth is I do not.”

“……”

“When I married, I was nothing more than the second son of a count’s family from a fallen empire, and my wife was the only daughter of a marquis from another country. She seemed like a tree I had no business trying to climb.”

“……”

Heliones gave no reaction even as Count Fonta continued, the story coming somewhat out of nowhere.

“I suppose I let it go to my head a little, being chosen by a woman like her. To think that someone as clueless as me would dare offer Your Majesty advice on love. But thinking about it now, there is one thing I believe I understand.”

“?”

Heliones’s ash-gray eyes, frozen solid until that moment, slid slowly toward Count Fonta.

“Whenever I stood before my wife, I was so nervous I could barely think straight. I couldn’t hold on to reason or anything else. So I ended up being honest without meaning to, and every time, she didn’t blame me for it. She just smiled.”

“And?”

“I fully understand Your Majesty’s frustration. But a woman’s heart is not a military strategy or an administrative procedure, is it? You simply have to meet it with sincerity.”

“Sincerity?”

“Yes. Be honest with her. In my case, that seemed to work. Within the bounds of not frightening her, of course!!”

Whether Heliones heard that last piece of advice or not, he suddenly sharpened his gaze and rose to his feet.

“Right. Honesty is the best policy!”

“No, the part about not frightening her…”

“I’ll be straightforward with her!!”

Watching Heliones’s reaction, it was clear he had absorbed everything except that final warning. Count Fonta blamed his own loose tongue, wondering whether he had made the same mistake as before. He began to seriously consider whether he ought to assign someone to quietly monitor the Emperor’s words and actions.

* * *

What am I going to do with this? Should I send it back right away?

Unwanted gift or not, the other party was a princess of a foreign nation, and I was a commoner. With that great a gap in standing, the reality was that I couldn’t refuse carelessly.

I stared at the large painting propped at an angle in the entryway and sank into troubled thought. Nelia’s reason for sending the painting was obvious enough.

‘His Majesty the Emperor is just so breathtaking! When I first saw him, I thought a person had stepped right out of a great painting!’

‘And his voice! When I hear that calm, clear voice with that low, resonant quality, my heart races!’

Nelia, who had cast herself as a pure girl in love and told me she had just turned nineteen this year, had spent the entire time with me gazing at nothing with a dreamy, faraway look in her eyes and singing Heliones’s praises. And yet she had shown no obvious sign of asking for my cooperation, so I had thought keeping a little distance would be enough. I hadn’t expected her to make a move like this.

Judging by the size of the painting and the fame of the artist, it must be worth quite a sum. And she had gone this far just for a chance to exchange a few words with Heliones. I thought I had understood the frenzy of the marriage market that Elren had described to some degree, but this wasn’t a fever. This was closer to madness.

My first impression of her had not been wrong. She really is sharp. I couldn’t refuse the painting outright, and even if she brought it up in conversation, I wouldn’t be able to excuse myself. What made it worse was that she hadn’t approached me unpleasantly like Delmir. She had come with nothing but goodwill, so avoiding her would make me the rude one.

She may be nineteen, but she is a princess all the same. The polish of someone seasoned in society showed clearly.

Right. For now, the best course would be to accept the painting and give Heliones a heads-up about Nelia in advance.

“What shall we do with it?”

At Elren’s question, I gave an awkward smile and gestured limply toward one side of the drawing room.

It was an uncomfortable gift, but wasn’t it a magnificent painting? A landscape with brilliant sunlight pouring through a rectangular window, the volume of the quiet interior cast in shadow on the other side of the wall, the contrast so pronounced it carried an almost decadent beauty. Temporary lodgings or not, putting something like this in a storage room would be a crime. An absolute crime.

And the painting, with its blend of gray and soft lavender and the pale blue beyond the window, suited the drawing room so well it seemed painted with this very room in mind.

It was a beautiful painting, and yet I couldn’t simply be happy about it. That was what made it so frustrating and sad.

After the tea party, I kept to myself as much as possible. Invitations to social gatherings from young ladies whose names I barely knew arrived at the lodgings day after day, but the routine of inventing polite excuses to decline continued without end.

This is why I dislike the capital. So many people packed into such a small place means rumors travel fast and conducting anything in private is difficult. But today I had no choice. I had to go out. I needed to buy a gift for Heliones without him knowing.

I was a little worried about shaking off Elren, who would try to pay for whatever I purchased the moment I picked it up, but I could probably buy myself a little time.

Hanna and I obtained permission to go out under the pretext of going to the cathedral to pray.

Rodencia had never worshipped gods to begin with, only divine beasts, so the religion itself was different, but Elren called for the carriage without a word of objection.

The inside of the cathedral was dim and quiet. Only a handful of women at prayer were visible here and there.

Hanna and I slipped out quietly through the cathedral’s back door. I didn’t want to worry Elren, so I planned to buy only the fountain pen I had already looked into and return to the cathedral right away.

The stationery shop was fortunately close to the cathedral. The shopkeeper was efficient, and the moment I named the brand, he laid out every model arranged by price. I chose the second most expensive.

I wanted to express my gratitude to Heliones, who had been taking care of my daily needs even though I was essentially being held in the capital against my will.

And I hoped it might also help smooth things over with Heliones, who had barely set foot in the lodgings since our conversation a few days ago, for reasons I still couldn’t quite understand. Then again, his visiting every day up until then had been the strange thing.

He was the Emperor of a nation that had collapsed and been rebuilt from the ground up. He must be busy enough to need several bodies. He couldn’t keep dropping by his ex-wife’s lodgings every day for no reason.

Whatever the reason, I bought the fountain pen and asked the shop to wrap it carefully in violet velvet. I tucked it close to my chest and quickened my steps to return to the cathedral.

But a sudden hand over my mouth delayed my return by a little.

“Mmph.”

“It has been a while.”

“!!”

With my mouth covered by that sudden hand, I was pulled into a nearby alley, and the moment I heard that familiar, neat, composed voice, a wave of goosebumps swept from behind my ears all the way down my spine.

Surely not. Please, not him. I turned my head slowly, dreading what I would find, and beneath the brim of a pressed silk hat, a pair of vivid red eyes stared at me, filled with a terrible madness.

Mysterious silver hair, the red eyes of the Rodencian royal family, a face that belonged less to a human being than to a god or a nymph. This man was Roned, a distant relative of mine and self-proclaimed devotee.

Tremble, tremble, tremble, tremble. My hands began to shake on their own. Why are you here?

Roned carried royal blood, but he had not fought in the war, and his maternal family was a ducal house of the Frianc Empire, so his presence here was not strange in itself.

The problem was that he had an excessive fixation on the divine beast bloodline that ran through the Rodencian royal family, and he had a habit of following me, the only non-ability user in the royal line, with relentless persistence, spouting nonsense about how he worshipped me.