A terrible pain gripped her heart, like someone forcing a dull blade through her flesh. Staring at the gossip paper in her hand, Lucian felt a desperate urge to throw herself under the blazing sun and burn away, vanishing from this world entirely.

“Oh, why… when…”

Hanna spotted the gossip paper in Lucian’s hand and rushed over with a stricken look, snatching the coarse sheet away. She had clearly hidden it out of consideration for Lucian, but the misfortune was that today of all days, Lucian had run out of painting oil and gone rummaging through the storage room herself.

Her mother had passed away when Lucian had just turned four. What remained in her memory were a few scattered fragments and a desperate last testament she could still recall with painful clarity.

She had been told the cause of death was treason. She had grown up believing her mother, as queen of a nation, had leaked military secrets to a foreign country and been executed for it.

Not a single adult had ever told the cursed child anything detailed about her mother, and so Lucian had had no choice but to grow up believing whatever she had heard.

‘An affair with the crown prince of an enemy nation. A queen burned at the stake after leaking her own country’s military secrets.’

The crown prince of the enemy nation at that time would have been Heliones’s father. He had ascended to the throne just before the birth of Heliones, his illegitimate third child, which meant he had still held the title of crown prince when Lucian’s mother was executed.

There was no worse twist of fate than this. If everything printed in the gossip paper was true, then she and Heliones were two people who should never have been bound together, not even through a political marriage. Now, at last, she understood why her mother-in-law had held her in such contempt.

It was revolting. Her mother may have been troubled by giving birth to a daughter with no ability, but an affair? Seeing another man while she had a husband? And beyond that, leaking military secrets?

The memories that remained of her mother were of light. The soft, warm glow of an autumn morning wrapping gently around her. But now it felt like that same light would burn her whole body to ash. No. She almost wished it would.

The official records had noted only treason. Her father would have had no interest in protecting his daughter’s honor, so he had likely forbidden any mention of the affair to protect his own reputation.

“I don’t believe it! It’s all just rumors! It’s nothing but hearsay, one person saying they heard it from another! If it were true, why wouldn’t it have come out long ago! There’s no evidence left either! Someone is definitely spreading lies to slander Lucian!”

Lucian wished that were so. She wished everything written here were truly false.

But her father’s manner. No, that look in his eyes as he gazed down at her. That look was not one a man would give the daughter of a wife who had simply died for treason. Her father used to look down at her with a contempt and loathing that words could barely contain. As a child, she had thought it was simply the look one gave a cursed being from a prophecy, but thinking back on it now, she suspected he may have been projecting his hatred of her mother onto her.

Was that really it? Was everything in this article true? Had her mother betrayed her father?

She did not know what was real and what was false. She only wanted to go blank. She wanted to become a child again who knew nothing and had no need to sort truth from lies. No. She just wanted to disappear so she would not have to think at all.

A past far beyond her reach had been dredged up, and she found herself in another painful situation. And now Heliones, who had supported her all this time, was in an extremely difficult position as well.

All her will drained away. She had no appetite, no desire to paint. She only wanted to lie still and fall asleep.

Please, let her dream of nothing.

* * *

Rumble!

A sound like a thunderbolt crashing down filled the emperor’s study. Count Fonta, who happened to be attending to state affairs nearby, sprinted inside to check on his lord.

In Heliones’s hand was the gossip paper that Fonta had tried to keep from reaching him. He had known that since the incident with Lucian, Heliones maintained his own independent sources of information, but he had not anticipated the paper would fall into his lord’s hands before he had any chance to assess the situation.

The large handcrafted desk, built to last several hundred years without trouble, now lay in a ruinous state. Clearly, Heliones was furious.

‘Well, given what’s in it, that’s understandable enough.’

Count Fonta had no idea who had dared leak such an outrageous rumor to a printing house of all places, but he resolved that whoever it was, he would personally deal with them first once they were caught, and stepped forward to face Heliones.

“I have sent men to the printing house. They are conducting a search and seizure, so shortly…”

“Enough. Call it off.”

“Do you have any idea who is behind this?”

“I do. So release the printers. However, publishing articles on a ‘take it or leave it’ basis does seem to be a problem. We will need to draft legislation on the matter.”

“Yes. I will relay that to the relevant department.”

“And.”

Count Fonta composed his expression and waited for the order, expecting Heliones to name the person who had spread the false rumor.

“Bring Helena here. Now.”

“Pardon?”

“Now.”

Count Fonta found the sudden command to bring the princess puzzling, but Heliones’s expression was too resolute to question, and he obeyed without a word.

Helena arrived at the study shortly after.

“Good grief. What happened here. No matter how angry you are, was there any need to smash an expensive mahogany desk?”

Helena clicked her tongue, running her hand over the exposed grain where the desk had split down the middle, lamenting the waste.

“Have you been in contact with Mother recently?”

Heliones ignored her remark and went straight to the point.

“Do you think you’re the only one? I exchange letters with her often enough. Though her replies are never particularly warm.”

“Has she said anything to you?”

“I sent her a letter by messenger shortly after returning here, but I haven’t received a reply yet.”

By this point, Helena had arrived at the conclusion that the scandal in the gossip paper, the source of Heliones’s fury, was almost certainly, no, definitely connected to their mother.

She asked for help, but I never thought she would resort to something this extreme. Whether the rumor is true or not, this could permanently sever her from her brother. That’s just like her. I always knew she would stop at nothing to get what she wants.

Helena had carried a lifelong wound from never having had a normal mother, the kind who devoted herself to her children, but in this moment she felt something closer to relief at having been born to a woman so ruthlessly selfish and cold.

This was a woman who had slashed her own wrists in front of her children. A scandal was nothing.

Having raised a child of her own, Helena had come to understand even more acutely just how cruel her mother truly was. Even now, she would gladly die if it meant one more chance to see her daughter, and yet her mother had staged the act of dying in front of her own children. How hardened did a person have to be to do that?

The memory still made her shudder, but maternal love was only a hindrance in moments like this. What was needed now was not a mother, but a ruthless woman who would charge toward her goal without a second thought for whether her son’s spirit was broken or their bond severed entirely.

“All right. Understood.”

Helena had explained the situation to their mother and asked for her help, but she had known nothing about the scandal itself. She had only learned of it that morning, the same as everyone else, when she came across the gossip paper.

That was why she had been able to hold her head high. She gave a light smile at her brother’s resigned reply, as though to say it was hardly a big deal, and moved to leave the study.

But at that moment, the door to the study flew open without any announcement from the attendants, and Empress Dowager Isabela, the mother of the two siblings and the palace’s original mistress, swept in.

“There is no need to press Helena. I am the one who did all of it.”

Isabela had lived through a turbulent first half of life.

Until her late teens, she had lived without want as the daughter of the great House Gertil, but love, that wretched trap, had seized her in an instant and turned her life completely upside down.

She had not been at his side when the man she loved ascended to the throne. She had received no blessing when she bore his child, and her own family had barred her from setting foot in her childhood home for giving birth to an illegitimate child.

She had barely managed to become empress and grasp some measure of power when a hateful, mad king invaded, burned her husband alive before her eyes, and then her son went and married that mad king’s daughter.

When her son finally killed the mad king and separated his daughter from him, Isabela had believed that peace would at last come to her turbulent life, but this time her son cut ties with her.