“Why are you laughing? Was I being too presumptuous?”

“No, it’s not that. It’s just that you seem so much more at ease now.”

When I first met her, Elise had been a reserved young lady who chose her words with great care. The kind of person who might think something like what she had just said but would never let it past her lips. She had even tried to stay as silent as possible about what had been done to her, so there was nothing to be said about how she would handle other people’s affairs.

“This isn’t really my usual self. It’s just that my manner changed so suddenly overnight….”

“I know very well what a good person you are. I’ll admit I’m a little sad too. We went from four to two.”

It was only for a brief moment, but it had been good. The experience of being part of a group and sharing ordinary conversation.

“I can do the work of three people! Once I start talking, I really can’t stop myself!”

It felt too soon to go straight back to the carriage, so Elise and I walked for a while in the central garden connected to the main hall. White roses and briar roses glowed softly in the moonlight and lantern light.

A different scene from the red tide I had seen the night before, and a higher, gentler voice.

I hadn’t achieved my goal, but I was glad I had come. This scene is precious too. I leaned in a little closer to hear Elise better and nodded from time to time.

* * *

“When… did it happen?”

He had been rather rough pulling his sister out of the ballroom, but now that they were alone, Heliones crumpled before her like a thin, limp sheet of paper and asked in a weary voice.

“This spring. About four months ago?”

“So suddenly. She wasn’t even sick.”

“It wasn’t sudden. I wrote to you in late winter saying she had come down with a fever.”

Late winter would have been just before his accession to the throne, the period when he had been throwing everything he had into searching for Lucian in desperate urgency. To keep himself from resenting his sister, he had been avoiding her letters, which devoted page after page to nothing but curses directed at Lucian.

“I can more or less guess what happened. You didn’t want to read any more letters full of insults about the woman you love. And around that time you would have been busy planning to bring her to the capital the moment you took the throne.”

Helena’s words were accurate. Which was exactly why Heliones could find nothing to say in his defense.

“I… was wrong.”

“I wrote to Mother too, and it seems you really have cut off all contact with her. Are you so besotted with that woman that you’ve thrown away your mother, your sister, and your nephew all at once? I genuinely envy her. To have your ex-husband obsessed with you even after your own father burned his father-in-law alive. Now that’s the love story of the century.”

For all her childlike qualities, Helena was still Heliones’s sister. She was just as sharp as her brother and just as quick to read a situation.

Her sarcastic tone grated on him, but she hadn’t said a single thing that was wrong, so Heliones had no reply and simply covered his face with his hands.

There was no better time to use the phrase “I have no face to show you.”

“What on earth did you say to Mother? She was bedridden for over two weeks, apparently. You must have found quite a weakness to exploit. To make a woman who was desperate to play Empress Dowager go into seclusion like that.”

Perhaps her brother’s silence as he sat and took her reproaches had eased her anger somewhat, because Helena’s voice softened slightly and she tucked his arm into hers.

“Brother, you know.”

“…….”

“I really do want you to be happy.”

“…….”

“I know she hasn’t done anything that wrong.”

“?”

“But the two of you are fundamentally incompatible. Do you think the resentment from our parents’ generation will just disappear? Do you think it won’t surface even once over a lifetime together?”

Heliones tapped his sister’s hand where it wrapped around his arm a couple of times, then gently extracted his arm and rose from his seat.

“I was thoughtless. I am truly sorry.”

“You should be.”

“You can say whatever you like to me until you feel better. But don’t go near Lucian.”

“Ha. You’ve really lost your mind, haven’t you? I wonder what it feels like to receive a man’s unconditional love. I’m genuinely curious. But does she even like you? From what I saw earlier, she didn’t seem to care in the least whether you were dancing with another woman or not.”

Helena’s precise observation cast a faint shadow over Heliones’s composed expression. Sharp as ever, Helena seized on the moment and pressed into exactly the thing her brother cared about most.

“She does seem to have some sense of shame, at least. Her father destroyed the Frianc Empire once, and now her brother is preparing for another war, so she apparently wants to stop it however she can. It would have been so much easier to dislike her if she had just been brazenly shameless.”

Helena took her brother’s hand as he looked away from her, and wore the playful smile of a younger sibling angling for something.

“Do your best. I’ll do my best for the brother I love, in my own way.”

Helena expected Heliones to pull his hand away at once and leave the sitting room, but he didn’t let go. Instead, he wrapped his hand around hers.

“You matter to me too. I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you when you needed me. If you want to talk about Bel, come to me anytime. I’ll listen for as many hours as it takes.”

Heliones gave his sister’s hand one firm, tight squeeze, then released it and left the imperial princess’s sitting room.

Helena sat exactly where she was, motionless for a long while, like someone who had died in their seat.

Her mother had been a woman starved of affection and attention. Born into a good family, she had become a concubine for love, and in exchange found herself barred from ever setting foot near the Empress.

The late Emperor, her father, had taken a concubine but was not the kind of man to disregard his Empress, so the imperial couple attended every occasion together, which meant the concubine and her illegitimate children were left unable to attend even the Emperor’s own birthday banquet.

Her mother, whose hysteria had reached its peak, drank wine on the nights the Emperor did not come to her. On the nights the drink took hold beyond her control, she took out her anguish on her children.

Her brother, only two years older than his sister, wrapped his body around Helena to protect her.

To Helena, Heliones was her only family, her protector, and her salvation.

Time passed. The Empress died, and the concubine finally rose to the position she had so desperately wanted. But she was not happy. And so she took to threatening her children with words, now that physical violence no longer worked on them, and constantly wielded the threat of taking her own life. The Emperor, their father, had loved his docile, flower-like wife at least in the moments they were together, but that alone was not enough to undo the years of accumulated sorrow.

Love?

That sort of thing has no bearing on a person’s happiness whatsoever. She was certain of it: her mother would have lived a more comfortable and happy life had she married according to practical terms, even if it meant never becoming Empress.

Bel. She said the name quietly to herself. Likely the first time she had spoken it aloud since the child died.

She could not honestly say she and her husband, fourteen years her senior, had been on good terms, but after Isabel was born they had grown considerably closer. Of course, since the bond between them had been built entirely around the child, the marriage had fallen apart within four months of the child’s death, but the happiness the two of them had shared as a couple while the child was alive was something no words in the world could adequately describe.

And yet, not only a princess from an enemy nation, but barren on top of that?

Absolutely not. Heliones needed to find a partner who could give him perfect, beautiful children, and live the kind of stable happiness that could guarantee him power, honor, and yes, that paltry thing called love.

She would tear that woman away from Heliones’s side no matter what. Even if it meant cutting off her own arm and swinging it to do so.

Helena wiped away her tears with a determined hand, rose from her seat, and stretched out broadly. Her expression returned to its usual lightness, and she sat down at the writing desk and began composing a letter to someone.

* * *

A fresh morning. A clean breeze carrying a faint trace of salt blew in from the direction of the sea and swept past a head of vivid red hair.

Lewian, his hangover from the night before not yet fully lifted, knitted his brow and gulped down the water sitting beside his bed.

“Did you call out? I’ve brought your washing water.”

A maid’s voice came right on cue, and Lewian answered in a hoarse, rough voice. Two maids who still had the look of girls about them quietly wheeled in a cart and stole sideways glances at Lewian, who was stretching out with a wide yawn.

They startled. Lewian was bare, with only a thin blanket barely covering his lower half. The flustered maids immediately averted their eyes, gave a polite bow, and left the room.

“Tch.”

Lewian would have preferred to stay in bed, but his schedule today was packed. He had to receive, from early morning, those who had traveled all the way to this remote island to seek an audience with the last royal of Rodencia.

The cold water he splashed over himself snapped him wide awake.

‘She published an article? The conclusion of the prophecy? Go ahead and thrash about all you like. What can a worthless non-ability user possibly do.’

The anger he had barely managed to drown in drink the night before surged back up without warning. The nerve of her, a pitiful creature who didn’t even deserve to be called a royal, let alone a human being, groveling at the feet of the enemy who killed their father.