The young lady who had let Delmir’s name slip in the middle of her torrent of words finally stopped talking, covering her own mouth with her hand.

“No, I mean…”

“What is it that Delmir supposedly did?”

The young lady was trying to find some way to recover, but Elise, who had been listening quietly, asked about Delmir in a voice pulled very low.

“No, that’s not what I…”

“I have no intention of going around telling anyone what you said. Just answer what I ask. Is it really true that Delmir does things like that behind people’s backs?”

At Elise’s rather stern question, her friend the young lady gave a reluctant nod.

“I only heard about it recently. It seems my father’s education venture, which he started not long ago, rubbed House Balthar the wrong way. They fabricated things that never happened and spread them as rumors. When I looked into it afterward, just to be sure, two gossip sheets turned out to have ties to House Balthar.”

“Ha.”

Elise’s breathing grew quiet, and her eyes began to move quickly.

“The day after the engagement was broken off, an article appeared. It raised the suggestion that I might have some serious flaw.”

“Right. I remember. The article came out so fast that even then I thought it was strange… Oh… surely not… the person Coren married, could she possibly be…”

At her friend’s words, Elise gave a nod with extreme composure, her manner gone stiff.

“Three months later, he married the only daughter of Marquis Dulcon.”

“Marquis Dulcon is a collateral branch of House Balthar, isn’t he? And quite closely related, if I recall.”

Elise said nothing. She sat in silence, steadying her breath, seeming to organize her thoughts.

“A few weeks before the engagement was broken off…”

It seemed difficult to begin, because Elise let out a long breath and started speaking with her eyes creased tight.

“I had a falling-out with Delmir over a hairdresser. She looked absolutely mortified, like her pride had taken a serious blow, but right then and there she said she was grateful I had given her the chance to find a better one, since that designer was past their prime anyway. I knew it was sarcasm, of course. But.”

She seemed unable to bring herself to say: and over something so trivial, she ruined someone’s marriage? Elise cut herself off mid-sentence.

“Surely not. Even if Delmir does underhanded things behind people’s backs, would she really interfere in someone’s engagement? Would she really go that far…”

Even the young lady who had been criticizing Delmir until moments ago seemed to find Elise’s theory rather far-fetched, and shook her head in denial.

“Quite right. Even if Lady Delmir wanted to do such a thing, it wouldn’t be within her reach.”

I also spoke in Delmir’s defense and offered Elise a word of reassurance, so as not to leave the impression that I had planted the seed of suspicion.

“Yes. You’re probably right. I’ve been through so much that I’m letting my imagination run away with me.”

She said as much, but I could see Elise’s green eyes sinking slowly into a swamp of suspicion.

Her family’s history was not long, but their wealth was more than ample. In terms of financial power alone, they could likely rival House Iledn.

Elise was naturally denying, for now, the possibility that Delmir had been involved in her broken engagement, but she would not be able to shake the thought in the end.

She would investigate the sequence of events before long, and to restore her own honor, she would follow the very methods Delmir favored.

The tea ended on an awkward note. Nelia, who had been watching Elise’s mood sink entirely, chose a suitable moment to bring things to a close.

“The sun has moved quite far. It would be rude to stay much longer. Shall we take our leave?”

At Nelia’s suggestion, both Elise and the young lady who had come with her agreed without resistance and rose from their seats.

My purpose had been accomplished, but I felt thoroughly unsettled. It felt like handing off dirty work I should have done myself to someone else. My heart was heavy, but I hoped that this matter would at least ease some of Elise’s pain and restore a measure of her honor, and I drew her into a sincere embrace.

“Thank you for coming. It was good to have someone to speak openly with. If you ever need someone whose ears are wide open but whose lips are firmly shut, come by anytime.”

Understanding that I meant to keep today’s conversation in confidence, Elise managed a strained smile and gave a small nod.

Looking at that smile, the kind worn by a wound so long festering it had gone rotten and begun to smell, I felt a sudden sharp pain in a corner of my heart, like someone pressing a needle in.

That’s right. Wounds were always supposed to hurt.

Having been stabbed and cut and burned so many times, I no longer knew quite when I was supposed to feel the pain.

To be honest, if Delmir had only insulted me, I would have let this go. Being chewed over in gossip sheets or in someone’s mouth, with no regard for my actual intentions, was nothing unusual.

If it had not caused trouble for Heliones on my account, I would not have cared much that my soul was being ground down by the persistent rumors circling around me.

Wounds hurt. The t*rture my stepmother had particularly favored was drawing thin cuts across the body with a well-sharpened blade. At first I trembled every time I saw a blade, but later I received the t*rture in a state of near resignation.

But accepting that there was no escape did not mean it stopped hurting. The pain never grew familiar no matter how many times I endured it, and the hundredth cut hurt exactly the same as the first.

For a moment I genuinely wanted to cry. I thought it rather pathetic to become aware of one’s own wounds through the sight of someone else’s, so I forced the tears back, but it was a precarious moment to get through.

Had she read my pained expression? Elise looked at me with a warmth in her plain green eyes.

We had only spoken for the first time today, yet strangely, that look of hers moistened a corner of my heart that had long since dried out.

I hope you find peace.

Whether or not Delmir’s petty and devastating actions come to light, I hope your soul finds rest at last. With the thought that if things showed no sign of resolving properly, I would step forward myself to restore Elise’s honor, even at the cost of the disgrace of having eavesdropped on someone else’s conversation, I saw the three young ladies out.

* * *

The young Emperor, who had come to the throne with the blood of his own kin on his hands, had many enemies.

An Emperor who held supreme command of the military and wielded absolute power might appear at a glance to have no one who would dare oppose him, but the reality was somewhat different.

The nations destroyed by the previous king of Rodencia’s hobby of conquest wanted revenge. When Rodencia had been a common enemy, rallying them under the name of Frianc had not been difficult. The Rodencian royal family fell with pitiful ease under the combined *ssault, and with Rodencia becoming a jointly administered territory of the victorious nations, the war appeared to have drawn to a close.

But the international situation did not resolve so simply.

Even among the victorious allied nations, voices of discontent began to emerge over the rewards owed for their contributions, and within the Frianc Empire itself, an atmosphere of wariness toward the young, or rather, the very young Emperor who sought to monopolize power alone began to slowly take shape.

The same was true of House Balthar, a meritorious family of the Frianc Empire and the second most powerful house after the Emperor himself. Duke Balthar, who doted on his late-born youngest daughter and had always given her whatever she wanted, was not particularly pleased with Heliones’s conduct either, but since his youngest had set her heart on the man, he was enduring it with no other choice.

Even after the Frianc imperial family fell, House Balthar remained a powerful family with influence both at home and abroad.

Delmir could have married into a properly established ruling family rather than Heliones, a survivor of a defeated nation, but she had refused without budging. She had even insisted, despite the fact that he had a wife, that she would remain unmarried for life if it could not be Heliones.

And so Duke Balthar had made Heliones Emperor. He had also provoked the former Empress, who had despised her daughter-in-law to begin with, and had the divorce pushed through the moment Rodencia fell.

And yet this young fool, more than two years after the divorce, still paid Delmir no attention.

Duke Balthar had tried to understand, telling himself that Heliones had been too occupied eliminating political rivals at home and abroad to think of such things before ascending to the throne.

Fortunately, Heliones had shown no interest in any woman, Delmir included, so Duke Balthar had not applied political pressure.

But the very first thing this young Emperor did upon ascending the throne was bring his former wife to the capital.

‘What? To settle the divorce papers properly?’

A remarkably plausible excuse. Young Delmir did not fully understand Heliones’s true intentions, but Duke Balthar, who had maintained his power through more than a dozen wars and the elimination of scores of political rivals, read the young Emperor’s mind with perfect accuracy.

‘All that trouble, just to remarry that kind of woman?’

The princess of a fallen nation, and an enemy nation at that. Even becoming the Emperor’s official mistress would be enough to set public opinion in an uproar.

Of course, public opinion was something one could ignore if one chose to. A favored consort was ordinarily the imperial household’s official target for public resentment anyway. Public opinion would go after the princess of a fallen kingdom rather than the noble Emperor.

That must have been precisely what Delmir had in mind when she arranged for articles mentioning Lucian to appear in the gossip sheets.

Duke Balthar thought to himself that Delmir was a truly clever child, his own daughter, and smiled with satisfaction.